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The purpose of this study was to understand the significance of emotions and the body in the lived creative experience in dance. Using a phenomenological approach, I was interested in gaining a deepened understanding of the creative experiences of members of Canada’s contemporary dance community. Currently, dance is taught in multiple contexts of education including K-12 arts education and physical education, recreational studios, university settings such as in faculties of education, kinesiology, and fine arts, and in conservatory-style pre-professional training programs. As a result, there appears to be little evidence of a holistic pedagogical approach. Coming from a predominantly ballet-oriented dance training background, I wanted to learn what it’s like to create dance; specifically how contemporary dancers use their bodies and emotions as part of their creative process. I had the pleasure of being an invited guest, writer, speaker, and researcher at the 2008 Canada Dance Festival (CDF), a biennial dance festival that takes place in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Results shed light on rarely discussed facets of the creative experience in dance. This study explores the way dancers optimally want to feel, how they prepare to feel the way they want to feel, what obstacles they encounter, and what strategies allow them to revisit their optimal feel within their creative experience in dance. Doing so, the role of the body and the emotions in dance are better understood. A description of the 2008 Canada Dance Festival as a transactional space also surfaced. There, the CDF is understood as a place where the art of dance’s perceived meaning and values are discussed, and ultimately negotiated. Finally, results also contributed to an enriched understanding of artistic identity in dance as an ongoing process of becoming. With an enhanced pedagogical understanding of dance education, a final discussion unearths implications of this work and shines a spotlight on future research in dance scholarship.

This qualitative inquiry focuses on exploring youth subjectivities in relation to a curriculum focused on diversity issues. This curriculum is housed within a community camp called Youth Combating Intolerance. Using a unique methodology called pedagartistry, the youth visually narrated their experiences being young activists and the challenges that run alongside. Drawing on ideas of becoming, multiplicity and reflexivity, the youth described a spectrum of experiences relevant to youth, educators and those invested in practicing from an anti-oppressive praxis. / Graduate

This study explored female international graduate students’ experiences in the Graduate Students’ Society (GSS) at the University of Victoria. The overall question that guided this study was: How does female international graduate students’ involvement with the Graduate Students’ Society shape their learning experiences? I used an arts-based methodology, and collected data through collage and photography and discussion in a series of three focus groups. Findings showed that GSS was in invaluable space of learning for women about culture, about organisations, about diversity and also, a place to acquire organisational skills. Learning, however, was almost all done ‘individually’ and there are challenges around exclusion, and sexism. Understanding the issues of sex and race needs to be addressed and collective learning environments needs to be created within the organization. / Graduate / 0745 / 0453

Doctor of Education / Department of Educational Leadership / Kakali Bhattacharya / David C. Thompson / The model for professional learning communities began in the business sector as professional learning organizations. While there have been many different structures referred to as professional learning communities, the model referenced in this study was created by Rick DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, and Robert Eaker. In their model, collaborative teams work together to answer four guiding questions: What do we want students to learn? How will we know when they have learned it? What will we do for students who already know it? What will we do for students who did not learn it? The DuFour model has been noted in research to be one of the most powerful and impactful educational reform efforts. This study examines the role of the implementation process on the overall effectiveness of the professional learning community. The purpose of this interview study was to explore the experiences of five certified teachers. This qualitative study was informed by purposeful sampling intersected with criterion-based sampling. Participants selected needed to be a certified teacher who taught at the chosen site during the implementation process. Symbolic interpretivism grounded this study to elicit experiences during the professional learning community implementation that impacted the participant’s professional responsibilities. Findings of this study indicated that the implementation process was not the determining influence on how teachers and teacher leaders navigated their professional responsibilities and, in turn, the overall success of the professional learning community implementation. Instead, success was tied to the dispositions of each teacher and the anatomy of interactions based on those dispositions. Four specific personality dispositions were found in this study: Leading with Heart, Leading with Brain, Leading with Courage, and Leading with Leadership. The combinations of these dispositions effected how each participant navigated their professional responsibilities as well as their reciprocal relationships with their colleagues. This study raised implications about how combinations of different personality dispositions can be used to create teams of educators who will naturally accomplish the tasks of a professional learning community instead of being in conflict and tension with each other. Another implication was the notion that creating effective teams of teachers and teacher leaders could be based on personality dispositions and their consequent interactions versus the knowledge of one’s pedagogy. Lastly, this study raised implications regarding the ways in which professional learning communities could be better implemented in schools nationwide by creating more awareness amongst educational leaders and policy makers about building harmonizing professional learning communities.

As a hauntological artist, I deconstruct my silenced First Nation Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) ancestry as I look towards the intergenerational narratives of my grandmother, mother, and I. As I employ the methodology of a/r/tography, the intersection of autobiography and art-making, I utilize diverse art forms to find that g(hosts) reside amongst spaces of liminality. Supported by the methodology of a/r/tography, as I draw on works which blur the boundary between past and present, self and other, I deconstruct the silencing of my First Nation lineage by creating three art(works). These art(works) are placed within an exhibition catalogue and inquire into 1) the specters that loom between the evocative objects of our narratives, 2) how script-writing and the script’s performance can reveal g(hosts) in spaces of liminality, and 3) how sculptures facilitate spectral movement. Each individual art(work) plays a role in breaking the silence. A(wake), specters arise.

Reflecting on my musical past, my annual participation in competition music festivals in solo and ensemble categories at the local and provincial levels shaped my music education as well as my development as a music educator. I inquire into how re/visiting moments of tension in my lived experiences as a participant in competition music festivals can facilitate my current praxis as artist, researcher and teacher. My inquiry is informed by understandings of a/r/tography as an arts-based educational research methodology. I inquire into these sites of music-making drawing on a theoretical framework of a soundscape, a concept originally proposed by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, to generate rhizomatic pathways with/in my research. Through this framework I consider how musical form informs the processes and structures of my thesis. Emphasizing a/r/tography as process-oriented inquiry, understandings emerge through music-making, arts-based journaling and autoethnographic renderings. Rhizomatic soundscapes evoke new understandings and questions contributing to literature on student perspectives participating in competition music festivals and teaching and learning in one-to-one music instruction.

The purpose of this study was to understand the significance of emotions and the body in the lived creative experience in dance. Using a phenomenological approach, I was interested in gaining a deepened understanding of the creative experiences of members of Canada’s contemporary dance community. Currently, dance is taught in multiple contexts of education including K-12 arts education and physical education, recreational studios, university settings such as in faculties of education, kinesiology, and fine arts, and in conservatory-style pre-professional training programs. As a result, there appears to be little evidence of a holistic pedagogical approach. Coming from a predominantly ballet-oriented dance training background, I wanted to learn what it’s like to create dance; specifically how contemporary dancers use their bodies and emotions as part of their creative process. I had the pleasure of being an invited guest, writer, speaker, and researcher at the 2008 Canada Dance Festival (CDF), a biennial dance festival that takes place in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Results shed light on rarely discussed facets of the creative experience in dance. This study explores the way dancers optimally want to feel, how they prepare to feel the way they want to feel, what obstacles they encounter, and what strategies allow them to revisit their optimal feel within their creative experience in dance. Doing so, the role of the body and the emotions in dance are better understood. A description of the 2008 Canada Dance Festival as a transactional space also surfaced. There, the CDF is understood as a place where the art of dance’s perceived meaning and values are discussed, and ultimately negotiated. Finally, results also contributed to an enriched understanding of artistic identity in dance as an ongoing process of becoming. With an enhanced pedagogical understanding of dance education, a final discussion unearths implications of this work and shines a spotlight on future research in dance scholarship.

abstract: In this multi-media dissertation, water is used metaphorically to equate the process of learning with embracing change. Paradigm shifts needed for sustainability require transformative learning where one is open to being shaped by new knowledge and experience. Properties of water – such as molecular bonding and phase changes – uncover lessons for humans’ adaptability. Given that human bodies are comprised mostly of water – what implications exist for human capacity to similarly undergo continuous change? An arts- based research methodology is practiced to produce a four-chapter project. Artistic methods of data collection and communication retain subjective complexity of lived experiences central to learning processes. Each chapter is prepared for a target audience and addresses widening scales of creative learning for sustainability. Chapter one is a narrative ethnography that focuses on a personal creative process for sustainability learning. Chapter two is a co- authored journal that covers creative learning tools and design principles for sustainable classrooms. Chapter three is an open-access and adaptive, online toolkit that shares creative methods to cultivate curiosity and critical contemplation. Chapter four is an interactive showcase event that explores how water can inform and inspire individual and collective learning for sustainability. This four-chapter project addresses the power of creative learning for sustainability at the personal, familial, formal classroom, informal online learning community, and public scales. Arts-based methods harness aesthetic power, welcome subjective complexity, and allow multiple meanings to be interpreted from research results. This multi- media project stretches the conventional structure of sustainability dissertations. The bridge between the arts and sciences is strengthened as this project shows synergies between these two ways of knowing. This research invites what can be learned from the wisdom of water – to both change and be changed by circumstances. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Sustainability 2020

Adolescent literacy learning centered in processes of imagination is marginalized and neglected within the saturated climate of standardized assessment. This arts-based qualitative study uncovers imagination as an active presence central to making meaning in a middle school language arts class involved in a writing experience inspired by the history of jazz. Learning filtered through the creative processes of writing reveals imagination as an interiorized action in adolescent literacy development. I ground this research in sociocultural perspectives of literacy (Vygotsky, 1978, 1986) engaged in aesthetic paradigms of learning. From this perspective, I investigate how middle school student writers participating in individual and collaborative activities internalize the experience to create new understandings of the world in which they live. Through the lens of theory, I explore the imagination as a higher psychological and cultural function involved in the mediated development of language. This study describes the powerful ways in which students craft writing and concurrently develop strong, critical and creative thinking capacities. I discard false perspectives that assume the inefficacy of learning in expressive modes and endorse pedagogies that place imagination at the center of processes of literacy teaching and learning.