This dissertation is an a/r/tographic inquiry (Irwin & Springgay, 2008) that explores postmodern picturebooks and writing theory. Postmodern picturebooks have been described as texts that blur traditional literary boundaries and text-image relationships, while employing devices like metafiction and playfulness (Goldstone, 2002; Sipe, 2008). As meaning becomes more ambiguous, readers are positioned as co-constructors of meaning (Serafini, 2005). Research has shown students enjoy reading postmodern picturebooks and constructing meaningful transactions despite the complex nature of these texts (McGuire, Belfatti, & Ghiso, 2008; Pantaleo, 2004, 2007, 2008), but few have begun to explore how these texts are written. Therefore, I used a/r/tography (Irwin & Springgay, 2008) to theorize about the relationship between these texts and what it means to write. As a method of inquiry, a/r/tography is an arts-based approach to research that is interested in how artistic practices produce meaning and a/r/tographers use art to “construct the very ‘thing’ [they] are attempting to make sense of” (Springgay, 2008, p. 159). In this study, I wrote and illustrated a postmodern picturebook and interpreted how this experience generated understandings about what it means to write. In response to the process model of writing (Flower & Hayes, 1981), the data led to representations that offer new perspectives on contemporary writing theory, in particular, the interpretive, public, and situated nature of writing (Kent, 1999). As a result, I use theories of metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980/2003; Lakoff & Turner, 1989) to critique writing process theory (Elbow, 1973, 1981; Flower & Hayes, 1981) and propose that a/r/tographic inquiry creates openings for new possibilities within the post-process movement (Kent, 1999) by demonstrating how a writer’s evolving questions (Irwin & Springgay, 2008) relate to writing pedagogy.

abstract: The present study is a narrative representation of two individuals - one, a prison abolitionist living in the Phoenix area and, the other, myself as a writer and scholar - and their development of, negotiations with, desires for, and problematic performances of critical dispositions within the contemporary social order. In initiating this research, I framed my process as an exploration of the ways in which people who commit themselves to organized counter-hegemonic movements have developed critical dispositions despite their immersion in the normative discourse of American public schools and the relentless public pedagogies of neoliberal subjectivity and psyche. In essence, I wondered how people had gained both the capacity to perceive - however fleetingly - an outside to doxic structuration and, more difficult yet, to sacrifice the psychic comfort these structures promise for the risky work of creating a more just social order. Via psychoanalytic understandings of identity and desire, these stories explore and represent the primordial learning, experiences, and traumas that guided my informants to resist or reject dominant ontological narratives and normative cultural scripts in order to explore and maintain space - albeit exilic - for their own axiological and ethical development and, ultimately, to take up positions of active, educative resistance. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Curriculum and Instruction 2012

abstract: Jazz continues, into its second century, as one of the most important musics taught in public middle and high schools. Even so, research related to how students learn, especially in their earliest interactions with jazz culture, is limited. Weaving together interviews and observations of junior and senior high school jazz players and teachers, private studio instructors, current university students majoring in jazz, and university and college jazz faculty, I developed a composite sketch of a secondary school student learning to play jazz. Using arts-based educational research methods, including the use of narrative inquiry and literary non-fiction, the status of current jazz education and the experiences by novice jazz learners is explored. What emerges is a complex story of students and teachers negotiating the landscape of jazz in and out of early twenty-first century public schools. Suggestions for enhancing jazz experiences for all stakeholders follow, focusing on access and the preparation of future jazz teachers. / Dissertation/Thesis / D.M.A. Music Education 2013

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This arts-based, qualitative investigation focused on high school English teachers of students with learning dis/abilities (Baglieri & Knopf, 2004) who used visual arts integration (Eisner, 2002) to find out how teachers experience using visual arts in English and what their experiences mean (Zoss & White, 2011) in order to understand why certain experiences stood out for the teachers as being important. I framed the study theoretically with complexity theories of teaching and learning (Davis, Sumara, & Luce-Kapler, 2008), while combining aspects of sociocultural theory (Smagorinsky, 2001; Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1991), cognitive pluralism (John-Steiner, 1997) and Dewey’s notion of experience (1934/1980). The teacher participants were three high school English teachers employed at an independent school for students with learning dis/abilities. A/r/tography (Irwin & Springgay, 2008; Springgay, Irwin, & Kind, 2005, 2008) influenced my methodology in that I created visual art to theorize the data and my experiences conducting the study. I collected data during spring and summer 2011. Data sources included participant observation and field notes (Dewalt & Dewalt, 2002), photography (Coover, 2004; Harper 2000, 2002), teachers’ visual texts (La Jevic & Springgay, 2008), artifacts (Prior, 2003), and interviews (Smagorinsky, 2008; Smagorinsky & Coppock, 1994). I used qualitative methods of coding analysis (Charmaz, 2006; Ezzy, 2002; Saldaña, 2009) and visual analysis (Riessman, 2008; Rose, 2001), as well as arts-based methods for educational research (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2008). This study fills a gap in empirical research in both English education and special education by examining English teachers integrating art in classes for students with dis/abilities. Furthermore, understanding how teachers experience visual arts integration can inform methods courses for teaching secondary English educators.

Internet Memes transverse and sometimes transcend cyberspace on the back of impossibly cute LOLcats speaking mangled English and the snarky remarks of Image Macro characters always on the lookout for someone to undermine. No longer the abstract notion of a cultural gene that Dawkins (2006) introduced in the late 1970s, memes have now become synonymous with a particular brand of vernacular language that internet users engage by posting, sharing and remixing digital content as they communicate jokes, emotions and opinions. For the purpose of this research the language of Internet Memes is understood as visual, succinct and capable of inviting active engagement by users who encounter digital content online that exhibits said characteristics. Internet Memes were explored through an Arts-Based Educational Research framework by first identifying the conventions that shape them and then interrogating these conventions during two distinct research phases. In the first phase the researcher, as a doctoral student in art and visual culture education, engaged class readings and assignments by generating digital content that not only responded to the academic topics at hand but did so through forms associated with Internet Memes like Image Macros and Animated GIFs. In the second phase the researcher became a meme literacy facilitator as learners in three different age-groups were led in the reading, writing and remixing of memes during a month-long summer art camp where they were also exposed to other art-making processes such as illustration, acting and sculpture. Each group of learners engaged age-appropriate meme types: 1) the youngest group, 6 and 7 year-olds, wrote Emoji Stories and Separated at Birth memes; 2) the middle group, 8-10 year-olds, worked with Image Macros and Perception memes, 3) while the oldest group, 11-13 year-olds, generated Image Macros and Animated GIFs. The digital content emerging from both research phases was collected as data and analyzed through a hybrid of Memetics, Actor-Network Theory, Object Oriented Ontology, Remix Theory and Glitch Studies as the researcher shifted shapes yet again and became a Research Jockey sampling freely from each field of study. A case is made for Internet Memes to be understood as an actor-network where meme collectives, individual cybernauts, software and source material are all actants interrelating and making each other enact collective agencies through shared authorships. Additionally specific educational contexts are identified where the language of Internet Memes can serve to incorporate technology, storytelling, visual thinking and remix practices into art and visual culture education. Finally, the document reporting on the research expands on the hermeneutics of Internet Memes and the phenomenological experiences they elicit that are otherwise absent from traditional scholarly prose. Chapter by chapter the dissertation was crafted as a journey from the academic to the whimsical, from the lecture hall to the image board (where Internet Memes were born), from the written word to the remixed image as a visual language that is equal parts form and content that emerges and culminates in a concluding chapter composed almost entirely of popular Internet Meme types. An online component can be found at http://memeducation.org/

This study was an exploration of the professional identities of secondary school mid-career art educators through arts-based educational research [ABER]. The aim of this research was to gain understandings of mid-career art educators’ perceptions of their professional identities. Inspired by my personal experiences as an art educator, this study engaged other art educators to visualise their professional identities, as secondary mid-career art educators in England, and contribute new perspectives to the research community. Theoretically, this study is aligned with the writings of Dewey (1934, 1944), Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 1994). Deleuze and Guattari’s post-structural concept of the rhizome formed the basis for the development of the ideas associated with identity. As an assemblage, the rhizome is a complex system based on non-linear, reactionary growth patterns. The non-linear growth of the rhizome is facilitated by the activation of the in-between. As such, the rhizome connects to a view of identity as an unstable, flexible and fragmented entity that is in a constant state of becoming (Bauman, 2000). Dewey’s pragmatism was connected with Deleuzian post-structural theory through the writings of Semetsky (2006). Dewey (1944) and Greene’s (1973, 2003) writings associated with democratic education and artistic development connected these theoretical considerations with constructivism, the arts and education. Sachs’ (2003) writing on progressive and bureaucratic education provided a framework for the discussion of professionalism and professional identities. As a contribution to ABER this study was based on a/r/tography (Springgay et al., 2008) as a methodology and actively integrated image and text to the data collection and data analysis. Collage was used as the main arts-based method to develop responses from the participants and to visualise the participant data. This research asked mid-career art educators with busy lives and demanding occupations to consider who they are and express their views through art. These images of identities reflected the complex in-between-ness of professionalism in education.

This musical, arts-based educational research describes the lived experiences of four K-12 New Orleans educators who believe that end-of-year standardized tests hinder their ability to teach in ways they believe are best. Using songwriting as a form of data elicitation and narrative restorying, this study documents the lived experiences of teachers who have experienced test-related cognitive dissonance. While curricular narrowing and other test-related practices have been studied in many contexts, the perspectives of New Orleans teachers are barely documented. Thus, this study fills a content gap in the testing literature. Musically restorying the data contributes to the accountability literature in three main ways. First, restorying the data as song renders the findings evocatively — that is, in ways that capture the emotion with which the data was originally imbued. Second, because this study is performative (the results were sung live in the community), the opportunity exists to ignite a local conversation aimed at helping teachers navigate testing/teaching conundrums. Finally, as music is one of the least utilized forms of art-based research, this study fills a methodological gap in the arts-based research repository.