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Situated within the current landscape of loneliness and isolation facing today's youth, this research describes a place-based and crafts-based arts curriculum for elementary students in the Salt Lake area. It uses curriculum as an investigative tool to explore the relationships between crafts, place, making, community and belonging. The curriculum itself incorporates place-based activities including hikes, urban walks, and plein air making while looking at the lives and works of local Salt Lake maker-artists Pilar Pobil, Jann Haworth, and Ben Behunin. It also delves into a wide array of craft arts and making including: decorative frame painting, embroidery, quilting, pottery, rubbings, reupholstery, monoprinting, dry felting, tile-making, wheat-pasting, staged photography, and mural-making. Implementation of the curriculum and further study of how these topics may relate to fostering community and belonging are recommended.

This qualitative inquiry explored how art educators might broaden their views of place through critical encounters with art, local visual culture, and working with older artists. I combined place-based (PB) education and intergenerational (IG) learning as the focus of an art education curriculum writing initiative with in-service art educators within a museum setting to produce PBIG art education. This study engaged art educators in cooperative action research using a multi-modal approach, including identifying and interviewing local artists to construct new understandings about local place and art to share with students and community. I used critical reflection in our cooperative action research by troubling paradoxes in local visual culture, which formed views of place including Indigenous cultures. Using Deleuze's Logic of Sense (LOS) theories of sense and event, enabled concept development through embracing the paradoxes of this research as sense producing. LOS theory of duration complements IG learning by clarifying the contributions of place and time to memory and experience. Duration suggests that place locates the virtual past, which is actualized through memories--one of the shared experiences of IG learning. Rethinking IG relationships as a sharing of experience and memory while positioning place as a commonality, dismantles ageist notions by offering alternatives to binary thinking about old and young. By triangulating participant data based on the extended epistemology of cooperative action research and Deleuze's pure event, I assess the credibility of participant learning. Critical reflection in cooperative action research combined with LOS theory is significant because the reflective aspect of action research aligns with Deleuze's pure event. Vital curricula and teacher praxes resulted when participants integrated localized experiences of place through older artists' memories and art.

The world is becoming progressively interconnected through technology, politics, culture, economics, and education. As educators we strive to provide instruction that prepares students to become active members of both their local and global communities. This dissertation presents one possible avenue for engaging students with art and multifaceted ideas about culture, community, and politics as it explores the possibilities for creating a community-based, art education curriculum that seeks a merger of global and local, or "glocal" thinking. Through curriculum action research, I explored the process of writing site-specific curriculum that focuses on publicly available, local works of art and encourages a connection between global experiences and local application. I have completed this research for two communities, one in Ohio and one in Texas, and investigated the similarities and differences that exist in the process and resulting curriculum for each location. Through textual analysis, interviews, curriculum writing, and personal reflections, I identified five essential components of a community-based, glocal art education curriculum: flexibility, authenticity, connectedness, glocal understandings, and publicly available art. Additionally, I developed a template for writing glocally focused, community-based art education curriculum and produced completed curricular units for each of the communities. Finally, I have made suggestions for the future study and development of glocally focused, art education curriculum.

The social and environmental challenges of the coming decades will require that individuals possess environmental literacy: the understanding of natural systems combined with a sense of care for the earth, and the confidence and competency to act on its behalf. At the same time, disengaged youth need education environments that foster belonging and promote affective outcomes. The youth conservation corps model provides a natural context for engaging academically at-risk youth in environmental science education, while fostering connection to nature and student self-efficacy in ways that are experiential, relevant, and relationship-based. The focus of this study was a conservation corps program that integrates habitat restoration fieldwork and environmental science curriculum. The participants of this study were eight high school seniors who participated in the program for credit toward their high school diplomas. Data were collected through both quantitative and qualitative measures. Students completed a pre-test to assess their understanding and application of conceptual knowledge in ecosystem relationships and biodiversity. Upon completion of a six-week curriculum, they completed a post-test assessing knowledge in the same areas, two retrospective pre-post surveys measuring connection to nature and self-efficacy, and a post-evaluation measuring affective outcomes. Individual interviews were conducted in order to provide further insights and to identify elements of the program that contributed to positive outcomes. Results showed statistically significant increases in all outcome areas as well as positive student evaluation of affective outcomes. The outdoor and experiential components of the program were found to contribute most significantly to the positive outcomes.

The Countried experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples of (Australia), ground a resilience and strength in sovereign thinking through the Stories we share laterally with family and inter-ancestrally through our connections to the Dreaming. The stories we share develop a sense of inalienability we have that is connected to the Countries of origin we share and identify with across the continental scape of Land, Water and Sky Country. As a formative philosophical assumption, the Countried existence that this dissertation develops, illuminates the significance of this research thinking to contribute to the continued development of Indigenous education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students attending secondary high schools across (Australia). By attending to the ways Elders as significant Indigenous leaders describe and develop their storied lives through lived experience, this Countried philosophy emerges through the Storied knowing of Country. By examining the approaches to learning Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students adopt, further evidence can be contributed to the research surrounding Indigenous thinking and cognitive approaches to thinking through education learning tasks. By examining the perceptions and beliefs of non-indigenous teachers, this dissertation aims to contribute evidence to Indigenous pedagogies that teachers can deploy in the delivery of meaningful Indigenous Knowledge curricula content. Summatively, this thesis found that when deep engagements are made into the notion of inalienability of Countried experience, salient avenues of thinking and learning and teaching emerge surrounding the ways education can continue to elaborate and relate meaningfully to the First Peoples of Australia.

UNESCO established Sustainability Education as a top priority when it declared 2005 - 2014 to be the global decade for sustainability. Sustainability education can be implemented in outdoor programs such as nature summer camps in order to build environmental stewardship and ecological literacy in counselors and campers. This study sought to determine the extent to which an ecology and leadership training given to assistant counselors at Tryon Creek State Natural Area day camp achieved the goals of sustainability education--for the assistant counselors to learn about ecology, develop stewardship attitudes and behaviors toward the environment, and become positive role models for the campers in their care. Knowledge and environmental stewardship attitudes and behaviors of the counselors were assessed using surveys, interviews, and training journals. A statistically significant difference was found between pre and posttest scores on a survey measuring knowledge of Pacific Northwest ecology, but no significant difference was found between the pre and posttest scores on an environmental attitudes survey, possibly due to a ceiling effect. Interviews revealed that participants learned about invasive species, Oregon flora and fauna, and stream ecology over the summer. Despite the results on the attitudes survey, interviewees reported greater environmental awareness at the end of the summer as well as a greater sense of place in nature and a desire to continue working with children in an outdoor setting.

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No description available.