My dissertation is a selection of essays that reflect upon human potential, particularly but not exclusively, within educational environments. I offer theory and practices that suggest that under the right conditions educators and students will move towards the far reaches of their own creative capacities. I offer my own experience and practice as an exemplar of possibilities. I make proposals about educators and education of educators that represent a paradigm shift from centralizing curriculum and content to focusing on care, nurturance, subjective and inter-subjective understanding, and development of educators. The reader is invited to see educators as central, and is encouraged towards the possibility that educators must be supported, encouraged, and cared for in order to support emergence of their vitality, first for themselves and subsequently for students. I outline an approach that puts human beings in educational environments first in practical and specific ways. Integration of personal experience and curriculum material is explicated. The importance of personal inner work for educators is highlighted. Inner Work is characterized as a personal and spiritual process. The claim that educators need to have group facilitation skills is made and evidence offered. Philosophical and theoretical background from education, eastern and western philosophy, humanistic and transpersonal psychology, process-oriented methods, and counselling psychology are drawn upon. The approach is holistic and systemic. The human is viewed as important but not separate from other living beings or the environment. The values of presence, care, and deep democracy underlie the ideas. The importance of relationality and I-Thou connection are explicated. The writing and research draws on a variety of qualitative approaches, including, living inquiry, autobiography, and self-study, as well as conceptual, narrative, poetic, auto-ethnographic, heuristic, and analytic methods. The material, personal, and ephemeral are investigated as integrated parts of the Dao-Field of education and life.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES; 2016), contingent faculty comprise nearly half of the higher education teaching workforce. I was a contingent faculty member working in a music teacher preparation program at a small college in the Northeast U.S. Using Wenger’s communities of practice (1998) and Lave and Wenger’s legitimate peripheral participation (1991) as a theoretical lens, I conducted a self-study to understand: (a) how our group of two full-time and two part-time contingent faculty negotiated our work, and (b) how my contingent faculty identity was shaped through participating in the group. I analyzed transcriptions of group meetings, email messages sent among the group members, and brief interviews to establish that our community of practice (CoP) was positioned relative to broader enterprises, such as accrediting bodies and the state department of education that regulated teacher licensure. We negotiated our practices in response to their standards and regulations, and we often felt that our practices were constrained. I learned that the members of our CoP had rich histories of membership in other CoPs, and knowledge and identity from those CoPs were constantly reconciled with new understandings and identity. I learned that multimembership can be a hindrance for some, yet it can also be a benefit that helps propel the work of a CoP forward. My identity was shaped through dialogue with other members of the community. I learned that it is common for contingent faculty to feel as I did: autonomous and competent in my teaching practices, yet detached from the department (Kezar & Sam, 2010; Levin & Hernandez, 2014; Shaker, 2008). Learning some of the history of the joint enterprise helped me feel more connected and empowered, and as my dialogue with the full-time tenure-track faculty continued, I was given additional responsibility for developing and subsequently teaching two new courses. Very little research has been conducted from the perspective of contingent faculty in higher education. This self-study was therefore a timely addition to the literature, and it should be replicated, extended to other teacher education faculty, and also to collaborative self-studies between full-time and contingent faculty.

abstract: The purpose of the study is to examine how professional growth is sustained over time through exploring a teacher’s narrative of personal and professional growth. The central question of this dissertation is: What creates sustainable and continuous positive professional change and growth in a teacher’s professional life? In this study, I discuss my journey towards understanding my practice while teaching a collegiate course and the implications of my journey for continual professional and personal growth. I used self-study methods to interrogate the personal, professional, and contextual experiences that shaped my thinking about teaching, learning, and my practice. The process of reflection was prompted by various data sources, including journal entries, storytelling, memory work, an experience matrix, concept-mapping, and education-related life histories. This self-study also includes action research projects that I conducted while teaching a college course over seven semesters. Data for action research projects included student reflective writing, observations of their learning, video recordings of group project meetings, and student value-creation stories. Through reflection on how my personal, professional, and contextual knowledge of teaching developed, I examine how the values I held, the inquiries I undertook, and the communities in which I engaged affected my learning about teaching and shaped both my continuing professional development and who I am becoming as a teacher. Values that emerged in my teaching practice included: creating a student-friendly learning atmosphere, building a learning community, and being a reflective learner. Change agency functioned as a teacher lens and impacted student learning. I also analyzed patterns between my instructional plans, actions, and learning experiences in multiple professional communities. Professional and personal development relied not only on formal learning but was also promoted by informal learning opportunities and a personal learning process. Findings suggest that teachers’ attempts to engage with external resources and awareness of their personal orientations as internal resources appear essential for sustainable change in teaching practice. Teacher professional growth requires exercising positive personal qualities, such as confidence, compassion, and courage, as well as resilience as an educator and a lifelong learner. Teacher reflection and self-study play a pivotal role in enabling teachers to sustain professional growth. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Music Education 2020

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An art teacher at an alternative high school examines how self-study and narrative influence art making in the classroom. This teacher-researcher-artist uses a/r/tography to study more deeply her role in creating curriculum that deals with students' stories as a meaning-making device. The a/r/tographer identifies herself as a type of teacher-curator of student narratives and explores the nuances of her particular research site. As the researcher more closely examined her own identity as artist, teacher, and researcher, she came to understand that this research was largely a study of self. Specifically, she more closely scrutinized her struggle with the role of artist through art production that aligned with the studies she was engaging with in the classroom. Even as student understandings shifted as a result of the curricular focus on narrative, so did that of the researcher.

The purpose of this study was to examine what I encountered as I moved from the role of a classroom teacher into the role of a mentor teacher of student teachers. As I traveled down the path of becoming a mentor, I learned about mentoring roles, discovered my vulnerabilities, and found a community of support. The improvements and understanding I gained through engaging in this study demonstrate that self-study can be beneficial for both mentor teachers and teacher educators to inform and increase knowledge in the field of mentoring.

This self-study explores my experience as a beginning reading teacher over a span of more than 30 years. It includes a brief look at theoretical models of reading and philosophical movements that impacted my experience as a classroom teacher and then lays my classroom experience and practice against the literature and historical background related to beginning reading instruction. The question studied is "How did the district-mandated curriculum in each era shape me as a literacy teacher and literacy instruction in my school context?" The purpose of the study is to unearth the impact of educational policies on my classroom practice. The methodology of self-study was employed to explore the tensions brought about as changes occurred. The study focuses on seven areas of educational change that influenced my practice in beginning reading instruction over three eras, the first being the late 1970s, the second the late 1990s, and the third beginning about 2008. The areas discussed include embedded beliefs about student achievement, mechanisms driving instruction, instructional approaches employed, reading program characteristics, assessment, professional development, and collaboration. All three eras contained experiences of personal and professional growth. In the first era, autonomy was a characteristic of almost every theme. The second era was characterized by the purposeful focus on professional development and support of student growth. The third era featured an increase in assessment and oversight of the mandated program implementation. Teacher capacity built in the second era enhanced my use of the commercial reading program mandated in the third era. While my current context seems similar to the first era, because of the richness of my experience, I am not right back where I started.

This inquiry used an ecojustice education framework and the transformative inquiry methodology to better understand the cultural and linguistic roots of global socioecological crises and to distinguish where ecologically unsustainable root metaphors show up in curricular and educator discourse. I first examined the British Columbia K–7 Science and Social Studies curriculum-as-plan[ned] to identify iterations of three ecologically unsustainable root metaphors of Western industrial culture—anthropocentrism, individualism, and reductionism. Then, 11 inquiry partners responded to written interview questions about how these metaphors appear in their teaching practices; three educators participated in follow-up semistructured interviews. In addition to these contributions, self-study reflections provide another layer to the connections I made among the literature, curriculum, and educator responses. The curriculum made no links between Western culture-language-thought patterns and socioecological crises. Several inquiry partners, however, did identify a relationship between these root metaphors and how the Western world treats the “environment.” Finally, the self-study portion revealed that despite understanding the power of root metaphors to shape our thinking and a deep desire to change, these taken-for-granted assumptions still arise in my teaching. Weaving together these findings, I recommend that future curriculum and teacher education include (a) the teaching of different worldviews to counteract the hegemony of Western industrial culture, (b) the power of language to shape thinking and actions, and (c) strategies to undertake the inner work needed to shift away from these culture-language-thought processes. / Graduate

I denna studie har jag undersökt hur min egen övningsmotivation fungerar på mitt huvudinstrument. Jag har forskat i ämnet genom att använda mig av olika övningsmetoder samt dokumenterat mitt material med hjälp av en loggbok. Jag har därefter analyserat mitt material utifrån den tematiska analysen för att belysa några faktorer som jag anser vara relevanta och viktiga att titta på för att få en bild över hur min övningsmotivation fungerar. I studien presenterar jag litteratur och forskning som är relevant för temat övningsmotivation och diskuterar denna litteratur tillsammans med mitt resultat utifrån ett fenomenologiskt perspektiv. / In this study I have explored how my motivation works when practising on my main instrument. In my research I have used different methods for practising and documented my material in a logbook. I have then analyzed my material trough the thematic analysis to be able to shine a light on some of the factors that I think are relevant och important to notice to be able to get a picture of how my motivation works. In the study I present literature and research that is relevant for the theme motivation and discuss this literature with my results from a phenomenological perspective.