abstract: ABSTRACT Stress and burnout in the educational field primarily in teaching is not a new phenomenon. A great deal of research and analysis to the contributing factors of causation to teacher burnout has been executed and analyzed. The struggle of the artist/teacher, hybrid professionals that maintain two concurrent roles, offers a perspective to burn out that has gone unnoticed. The conflict of roles for the artist/teacher does not infer that the teacher role is incapable of reconciling with the artist role but because of this unique scenario the stories of art teachers and burnout often go unheard. Today's public educator is contending with established stress factors as well as emerging and evolving stress factors. How does this phenomenon impact the artist/teacher's ability or inability to be creative? What are the implications of burnout and its impact on artist/teachers personal and professional work? This qualitative study was conducted using Narrative/Autoethnograpy, Narrative/Ethnography and A/r/tography. The stories of four artist/teachers provides in-depth accounts of their experiences as teachers and how that profession has affected their art making process and well being. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Curriculum and Instruction 2012

Detta masterarbete är en artist/researcher/teacher, eller a/r/tography studie av lärande och utveckling. Arbetet antar ett posthumanistiskt perspektiv, som medger ett rhizomatiskt förhållningssätt till det empiriska materialet som består av minnesberättelser och en konstnärlig process och metod. Diffraktion används som övergripande metod tillsammans med a/r/toraphy; artist/researcher/teacher, för att öka möjlighetrana att - utforska det vi redan vet om lärande för att synliggöra det vi ännu inte vet. Det rhizomatiska förhållningssättet präglar och genomsyrar hela arbetet både i analysen av teori, metod, emperi, liksom viss disposition av text och bild. Det empiriska materialet består av korta minnesberättelser som handlar om spatiala intryck jag upplevt under mitt liv, samt en konstnärlig process vilket är en del av masterarbetet, den konstnärliga processen resulterade i en skulptur på Konstfacks vårutställning 2017.

The purpose of this dissertation is to enact and poetically story the nonlinear emergence of an a/r/tographic practice called gathering—a situated art practice of storying, doing, and making as researching and thinking—in multiple contexts, including early childhood teacher education and imperial and settler colonialism in Canada. Over two years, I sustained a ritual of gathering where I (re)read texts (e.g., Indigenous theories, Chicana feminisms, antiracist theories, postcolonial theories, and subaltern theories) and (re)walked the neighbourhood of my apartment on the stolen territories of the Lkwungen people, who are one of the Coast Salish peoples, on southern Vancouver Island, British Columbia. While I walked and as I read, I attended to how other artists, animals, and I gathered objects and ideas, the effects of the environment and weather, and the theoretical orientations and contexts of the ideas and objects. The poetic stories in this dissertation entangle bits of the ideas and objects I gathered during my walks and readings. I also story how my personal artistic process of gathering unfolded into teaching an inclusive practice course in the Early Childhood Care and Education Department at Capilano University. I and my class of preservice early childhood educators gathered on and around the Capilano campus, located on the traditional territories of Coast Salish peoples, including the Tsleil-Watuth, Skwxwú7mesh, shíshálh, Lil’Wat, and Musqueam Nations. With this a/r/tographic research, I offer a pedagogical and aesthetic way with which to attune to the process, conditions, and situations of engaging multiple theories. I inquire into different ways of relating with and taking responsibility for others and into what kinds of partial, incomplete, and imperfect regenerations, possibilities, and futures present themselves through gathering within a context of imperial and settler colonialism in Canada. / Graduate

The most recent Finnish national curriculum for basic education was implemented starting from 2016. The curriculum calls for the development of learners’ transversal competences, which are built on the broader discourse on 21st century skills and challenges. Phenomenon-based learning, as a multidisciplinary approach, was formulated to address the new Finnish curriculum, in order to help regular subject teaching to tackle the transversal competences. As an artist, art educator and researcher, my interest was directed towards the understanding of phenomenon-based learning from an art-educational perspective. Therefore, this study brings insights from art education to phenomenon-based learning, in order to open a discussion on the following questions: where do art education and phenomenon-based learning meet? And following, how could teachers and learners benefit from this encounter? A post-structuralist view on art education forms the researcher’s perspective within the study. Methodologically, a post-structural positioning was also taken, relying on the a/r/tographical approach. A/r/tography is a performative arts-based research methodology that recognizes the complexity of situations and articulates in-between them. An arts-based workshop worked as a platform for exploration. Framed within a phenomenon-based project, the workshop was conducted in collaboration with a class of 6th graders and their teacher, in the City of Espoo, Finland. The a/r/tographical toolkit, built on visual and performative ethnography, worked alongside workshopping as methods of data collection and being with the material. The collected data include: visual and written field notes, video recordings, audio recordings, a written questionnaire and a semi-structured interview. Performing the material through theory revealed that art education and phenomenon-based learning meet in the concepts of multidisciplinarity and engagement, through different entanglements. The study suggests that the encounter between art education and phenomenon-based learning could benefit teachers and learners in different ways. In addition, the situation experienced in this study holds some interesting challenges that leave space for further developments.

This a/r/tographic dissertation offers opportunities to interrogate curator identity and curator ways of being in both public and private spaces. Instead of an authoritative or prescriptive look at the curatorial, this dissertation as catalogue allows for uncertainty, for messiness, for vulnerable spaces where readers are invited into an exhibition of disorderly living. Stitched throughout the study are stories of mothering and the difficulties that accompanied the extremely early birth of my daughter. Becoming a mother provoked my curating in unexpected ways and allowed me to reconsider the reasons I collect, display, and perform as a curator. It was through the actual curating of familial material artifacts in the exhibition Dress Stories, I was able to map the journey of my curatorial turns. My engagement with clothing in the inquiry was informed by the work of Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell, where dress as a methodology allows for spaces to consider autobiography, identity, and practice. It was not until the exhibition was over, I was able to discover new ways to thread caring, collecting, and cataloging ourselves as curators, artists, researchers, teachers, and mothers. It prompts curators and teachers to consider possibilities for failure, releasing excess, and uncaring as a way to care for self, objects, and others.

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.

This research study explored the role of the elementary art educator in facilitating individualized learning experiences for students in contrast to a standardized culture of education. The methodology of a/r/tography was used to investigate the role of the teacher, as well as artist and researcher, within an inquiry-based art curriculum for a fifth grade class. Inspired by contemporary art practices, students used inquiry to investigate, research and experiment with their ideas around an integrated topic of compare and contrast as found within the fifth grade science and language arts standards. Students created a work of art as a means to inquire or in reaction to an inquiry. This study hopes to persuade educators, specifically elementary art educators, to guide students toward personal and meaningful learning.

A high school visual art educator, along with 20 students enrolled in this teacher/researcher's Advanced Placement (AP) studio course, investigated the processes involved in creating artwork. Understanding artistic processes beyond skills and techniques is significant for curriculum development, but it is also key in conceptualizing art as a way of knowing. The arts based research strategy utilized in this study was a/r/tography, which focuses on the interconnectedness between artist, researcher, and teacher/learner. This highly reflective form of action research allowed the researcher and students to uncover new understandings of what it means to be an artist-researcher through a combination of knowing, doing, and making. Student-researchers learned several arts based forms of inquiry by analyzing the processes of contemporary artists. They were invited to record and reflect upon their own processes in a research journal as they generated artworks. The teacher-researcher also kept an intensive reflective journal concerning artmaking, but also included pedagogical concerns, questions, observations, and insights. At the conclusion of the semester, students were taught to analyze their own artistic process via their sketchbook entries by creating two visualizations: a mind map and an artwork as a data visualization of their process. Several important understandings are drawn from this study that transform this educator's practice as an artist-educator. These include the following concepts: not knowing as an artist, researcher, student and teacher; anxiety may be a necessary factor in artistic creation and pedagogy; and pretending is a strategy that allows one to productively move through uncertainty, ambiguity, and anxiety.

No description available.

This research was simultaneously collective and individual. In this dissertation, my team and I inquired into what it means to undertake playbuilding as qualitative research and be a practitioner, specifically focusing on the roles of artist, researcher, and educator from an applied theatre graduate student perspective. I drew upon the methodological and theoretical frameworks of playbuilding as qualitative research and a/r/tography. Playbuilding as qualitative research offers creative methods for un/re/covering collective and affective ways of knowing. A/r/tography offers the opportunity to explore self and roles through art-making and reflexivity. For me, both are manifestations of the same creative impulse to make meaning and generate new understandings expressed through different perspectives and processes. This research consisted of a cohort of applied theatre graduate students who collectively explored and devised a play on what it means to be an artist/researcher/educator. The play, To Spin a Red Yarn: Enacting Artist/Researcher/Teacher stands as an artefact to the collectives’ generation, interpretation, and performance of research. In addition, I wrote an exegesis that spins my individual story within our collective. The exegesis, Behind the Curtain, extends the world of the play into the text by taking the reader on a dramatic journey through soliloquizing as dialogue. As a result of this study, I theorized a translated a/r/tographical framework into theatre- based language for the use by practitioners that is rooted in theatre practitioner praxis (theory and practice). This praxis-based study was intended to provide knowledge for artist-researchers, educators, and theatre-makers. This research offers artists/researchers/educators access to more stories, insights, and ideas about what it means to be a theatre-based artist/researcher/educator undertaking playbuilding as qualitative research. This research opens up rich possibilities that are commonplace to theatre-makers and performing artists on how different theatrical conventions could be used in playbuilding as qualitative research. For theatre-makers who are interested in combining theatre with academic research, it offers another paradigm to consider, expand, and interconnect the work that they do. Likewise, for a/r/tographers who are theatre-based, this research offers a way to conceive the work they do rooted in theatre-based language. / Graduate / 0465 / 0516 / 0727 / bishopk@uvic.ca