This qualitative study draws on the traditions of narrative inquiry and arts-based research to explore the intricate puzzle of the experience of writing in a grade nine English Language Arts classroom, with a particular group of participants engaged in a creative autobiographical writing project. This case study of a small rural classroom, where 10 of 12 students participated as writers in the research, explores both the teachers and the students experiences. As a participant-researcher, I designed a three-cycle writing project spanning nine weeks, where all participants engaged in conversations about writing. One specific feature of the classroom setting was that both the teacher and the researcher were themselves active writers and deliberately and systematically offered stories of their own writing practice as part of the teaching about writing process, while undertaking the same writing tasks as the students. The data collected and analyzed in this dissertation includes students group conversations in class time, participants drafts and final writing, entry and exit drawings of how students saw themselves as writers, and individual reflective private conversations. From this data, I created portraits of the participants as writers and of the instructional moments. The drawings which were shaped by a participants historical relationship with writing, their broader personal, social and educational context, and the study provided insight into the individuals relationship to and with writing, providing access to a participants knowledge and experience at times unavailable through more traditional forms of data. Two main themes that emerged were resistance to writing and students complex relationship with revision. Their resistance manifested itself in a variety of forms, including one instance of plagiarism and a total absence of writing with another. An exploration of revision practices revealed a tangled process that often failed to improve the quality of students writing, where revision became, for example, a matter of excision with the delete key or serial first drafting. This study complicates the common school use of autobiographical writing prompts, by documenting the many forms of participant resistance and task subversion. Further, the interpretation of autobiographical as necessarily entailing only the true proved an area of tension.

The purpose of this dissertation was to examine how I can facilitate experiences with art that promote "productive ambiguity," or the ability to transform tensions that disrupt our current understandings into opportunities for personal growth. Ambiguity becomes productive when our encounters with difference stimulate curiosity, imagination, and consideration of new possibilities and perspectives. While employing a multi-methods practitioner inquiry that combined elements of action research, autoethnography and arts based research, I addressed the following questions with a voluntary group of fifth grade research participants: How can I facilitate experiences with art that promote productive ambiguity? How do my students interact with the various visual content and instructional strategies that I develop and implement? How might these interactions inform my future teaching practice, and how does my own reflective visual journaling process inform my research? In addition to employing reflective sketching to document and analyze data, I also presented research findings in the form of a visual research narrative. My analysis of research findings produced the following teaching strategies for facilitating meaningful experiences with art that promote productive ambiguity: (a) Use an inquiry approach to instruction as much as possible in order to position students to actively navigate the space between the known and unknown while seeking fresh understandings rather than passively accepting new information. (b) Explore how new concepts or themes relate to students' lives in order to situate unknowns in relation to their present knowns. (c) Aim to balance structure, flexibility and accountability while developing and implementing curricula. This promotes productive ambiguity as both teachers and students negotiate their pre-conceived ideas or plans and push themselves to respond to challenges encountered within their immediate environment. (d) In order to avoid unnecessary confusion, explicitly state that students should takes risks while generating new ideas rather than identifying a pre-existing solution. (e) Finally, ask students to identify why skills and knowledge generated during these activities are valuable in order to promote meta-cognition of how this ambiguous space can become more productive. In addition to these practical findings, research participants agreed that sharing their interpretations of visual phenomena with one another enabled them to understand each other better. I also discovered the ways in which productive ambiguity emerged in the spaces in between my teacher/researcher/artist roles when I perceived challenges as prospects for personal transformation. As a whole, this dissertation exhibited how relational aesthetics and arts based research theories translated into my elementary art classroom practice while simultaneously integrating these concepts into the research study design and presentation.

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This dissertation documents an arts-based peace education doctoral study that employed narrative métissage as both a pedagogical and a research tool. The research question asks: Does practicing narrative métissage in an intra-conflict society foster empathy and understanding of self/other? This question is explored with a total of seven Arabic and Kurdish students representing both male and female genders and Muslim and Christian faiths. All the participants were in their second year of study in a two-year English preparatory program at the University of Kurdistan-Hawler, (UKH) in Erbil, Kurdistan, Iraq. The students wrote autobiographical narratives around the theme of “Boundaries,” then participated in workshop forums sharing and weaving their individual narratives together into a longer text—the métissage—and afterwards performed their métissage. The researcher has also woven her own personal narrative of living, teaching, and carrying out research at UKH in Kurdistan, Northern Iraq into the fabric of the dissertation. The participants’ and the researcher’s experiences and insights are documented through autobiographical and story-telling genres in the data representation. The key contributions of this research are practical, theoretical, and methodological. Practically, this research contributes to peace education initiatives in intractable conflict societies, which is an under- researched and under-reported area within peace education studies. Narrative métissage has obvious application as a peace education initiative and as a curricular vehicle for teaching, discussing, and healing around social justice issues in the classroom, however it has not been explored as such. This research contributes to the dialogue of social justice pedagogy. Theoretically, this research contributes to the area of arts-based learning and the power that writing and sharing autobiographical stories has in awakening to self/other, stimulating collective knowledge construction and empowering individual and collective change. The research employs narrative métissage both as a pedagogical tool and a research tool and by doing so lays new ground in terms of methodology. / Graduate

Using collage as a methodological and conceptual framework for re-conceptualizing knowledge in HIV/AIDS education, this thesis attends to young women’s understandings of HIV/AIDS and sexuality. Through engaging in the process of making collages, what stories do young women tell about HIV/AIDS? What discourses are produced when collage and narrative are used as methodological tools to address participants’ understandings of HIV/AIDS? By responding to their own collage texts, as well as the collage texts of others, how are issues of representation addressed? Using narrative and post-structural discourse analysis, this study explores how participants’ complex and contradictory understandings of HIV/AIDS diverge from the content and form of current school-based HIV/AIDS curriculum. Whereas the curriculum presupposes a rational and linear subject, participants’ reflexive understandings of HIV/AIDS shift throughout the study, varying as a result of roles performed, the context of the collage or image being discussed, and the dynamic interchange between participants.

Using collage as a methodological and conceptual framework for re-conceptualizing knowledge in HIV/AIDS education, this thesis attends to young women’s understandings of HIV/AIDS and sexuality. Through engaging in the process of making collages, what stories do young women tell about HIV/AIDS? What discourses are produced when collage and narrative are used as methodological tools to address participants’ understandings of HIV/AIDS? By responding to their own collage texts, as well as the collage texts of others, how are issues of representation addressed? Using narrative and post-structural discourse analysis, this study explores how participants’ complex and contradictory understandings of HIV/AIDS diverge from the content and form of current school-based HIV/AIDS curriculum. Whereas the curriculum presupposes a rational and linear subject, participants’ reflexive understandings of HIV/AIDS shift throughout the study, varying as a result of roles performed, the context of the collage or image being discussed, and the dynamic interchange between participants.

In this thesis I explore writers and their writing practices as embodied, contingent, and affected by aesthetic environments and contemplative practices. I discuss contemplative practices as techniques for recognizing the co-dependent origination of the self/world, and as tools for disrupting the trifurcation of body, mind and word. I explore the written word’s role in the continuous production of new meaning, and as part of the continuous production of new “selves” for writers, and readers. I use narrative auto-ethnography to situate myself as a researcher, sensory ethnography and interviews to profile four practicing writers, and arts-informed Research-creation to document my own writing and contemplative practices. I also consider whether a post-pedagogy view of educational research might produce/allow space for more creative approaches to educational theorizing.

Through this research study my aim was to critically examine the ways in which multimodal, autoethnographic art can enhance and expand educational experiences in general education art classrooms. The study investigates how participants’ perceptions of self and others within culture transform over a semester-long qualitative arts-based study. The study’s goal was to uncover teaching and learning strategies that help to disrupt traditional academic boundaries using autoethnography to create an engaged, cooperative university classroom environment. The participants for this study included 77 students in a general education art and culture course and myself as the co-teacher and researcher. Autoethnographic data were collected throughout the course in the forms of art research journals, pre-and post course questionnaires, researcher field notes, recorded class discussions, on-line discussion boards, notes from one-on-one student/researcher communications and field notes from participants’ final multimodal, autoethnographic art pieces and presentations. The methods used for the study were a modified version of arts-based and grounded theoretical research models. A heavy emphasis was placed on the participants art-making and sharing their work with others in the study. The findings from the study indicated most of, many of participants experienced advancement in their understanding of self within culture and developments of new insights into the experiences and perceptions of others in the study. Results from the study confirm a steady growth in participant engagement and development of cooperative class environment throughout the semester. This study contributes to existing scholarship on the generation of new knowledge from arts-based research models, multimodal autoethnograpy as method, teacher/student relationships in academia, and risk-taking in teacher professional development. The findings from the study might provide support and encouragement for meaningful discussions about the significance of exploring self through art making and art sharing in academic settings. By highlighting the achievements of the use of autoethnography as a method of inquiry, this study will add to the larger discussion of teacher and student identity in art education classrooms.

Doctor of Education / Department of Special Education, Counseling and Student Affairs / Warren J. White / The purpose of this case study was to explore how two people with language-based learning disabilities, who have graduated from Masters of Fine Arts Master’s (MFA) programs describe their coping mechanisms, career aspirations, and identity development as a result of being involved in the creative arts. This qualitative study was conducted with purposeful and criterion-based sampling. The participants must have graduated from a MFA program with a focus on a studio art and have a language-based learning disability. Arts-based narrative inquiry research was used to explore the manner in which each participant negotiated their path through multiple educational settings from K-12 to a terminal master’s degree. The participants’ narratives were articulated using a Bildungsroman format to share their coming of age story as their identities developed. Findings indicate the participants with language-based learning disabilities used multiple coping mechanisms to negotiate their path through the education settings they encountered as they grew into adults and completed terminal MFA degrees. They relied on extra time, isolation, help from others, and their creativity in an attempt to hide their language-based learning disabilities. The study raised implications about the amount of support students with learning disabilities have at each level of education. It also raised questions about what help students with disabilities need for long term success as they transition from one level of education to the next, this includes mental health support.

Previous research, mostly on HIV-positive Aboriginal women (PAW) instead of with them, has focused primarily on their HIV-illness experience and the gaps and needs that arise from living with HIV. This has, arguably, allowed us to develop policies and programs to meet these needs; however, it has also contributed to dominant and disempowering representations of Aboriginal women living with HIV as troubled, vulnerable and in need of outside assistance. To counter-balance these negative representations and to co-create new strengths-based, culturally-relevant and gender-specific knowledge that can inform policies, programs and services for PAW, I partnered with PAW and Aboriginal community partners to develop a project that would provide PAW with an opportunity to tell a different kind of story about themselves than has previously been told by others. Using an Indigenist Intersectional Population Health framework that was underpinned by a strengths-based, arts-informed, culturally-grounded and decolonizing community-based participatory approach to research, we engaged 13 PAW across three sites (Toronto = 5; Montreal = 4; ‘Virtual’ group = 4) in individualized group research processes to better understand PAW’s perceptions of health instead of illness and the intersecting roles that culture and gender can play in supporting the self-defined health of PAW. We also engaged in innovative, culturally-relevant and participatory knowledge translation and exchange (KTE) and developed policy and practice recommendations from our research. Findings from Visioning Health suggest that PAW have a holistic and relational view of health that is grounded in their individual and collective identity as HIV-positive Aboriginal women. Health for PAW co-researchers has physical, mental, emotional and spiritual dimensions, and is fundamentally about ‘connecting’ and ‘feeling connected’ at multiple levels including self, others, community, culture, environment and Creator. Each of these levels is interrelated and each is grounded in Aboriginal cultures and ways of knowing that see all elements of the world as interconnected. This is consistent with previously published health concepts for Aboriginal peoples; however, this is the first articulation of PAW’s perspectives on health in the literature. PAW co-researchers also identified health-enabling strategies that they use to support their self-defined health, including understanding and resisting the broader context of colonization, reclaiming their voice and identity, creating safe spaces for themselves and their peers, and (re)connecting to Spirit. Given that the vast majority of policies and programs for PAW are based on Western concepts of health as predominantly physical, findings from this study can be used to inform strengths-based, culturally-relevant and gender-specific policies and practices that better fit the needs of PAW. One of the most significant and unexpected findings of our study, however, is that the process of participating in our research was, in itself, health enabling. Consistent with their perspectives on health, PAW co-researchers reported that participating in Visioning Health helped them feel connected to themselves, to others, to their communities, and to their cultures. PAW co-researchers also referred to their participation in Visioning Health as ‘a healing journey’ and ‘damn good medicine’. While we did not design our project as an ‘intervention’, it is clear that Visioning Health worked as a holistic and integrated action for social change on several levels that are mutually reinforcing. Policy and practice recommendations that flow from this research include: privileging PAW’s perspectives, grounding policy and practice in local Indigenous knowledges, highlighting PAW’s strengths instead of weaknesses, and incorporating a colonial analysis.