In this study, I illustrate an arts-based service-learning curriculum that utilizes an asset-based, student-centered, critical pedagogy. It is written for use with high school students in a classroom environment, but could be adapted for use with any age group or setting. It utilizes current service-learning research and practices, and community based art education models and adapts them into a practical and concrete curriculum. I use case study and ethnographic methodologies to examine what a community-based art and literacy organization (VOICES), a community-based artist (Lily Yeh and the Barefoot Artists organization), and a service-learning magnet high school can teach about implementing a service-learning program. Through a series of project-based lessons, group activities, and research, students will determine a community organization to partner with in the creation of a collaborative artwork. Youth and community voice are given utmost importance throughout the process to create relevant, reciprocal, authentic partnerships and a cumulative project.

This study explored adult women’s lived experiences with body dissatisfaction. Using a multi-methods qualitative approach incorporating in-depth semi-structured interviews and arts-based projects, women between the ages of 20-39 engaged in a critical exploration of their body experiences in order to deepen understanding of the psychological construct of body dissatisfaction and its ongoing influence in their lives. Ten women from diverse social and ethnocultural backgrounds took part in the study, completing 1-2 interviews, an in-session drawing exercise, and a creative project. Interview transcripts, drawings, and creative projects were analyzed for themes using an hermeneutic phenomenological approach. Four core categories emerged from the data. The first category contained the women’s understanding of the experience and meaning of body dissatisfaction. The second category captured the external reinforcement of body dissatisfaction and related body beliefs. The third emergent category delineated the impact of body dissatisfaction on daily life, including body-self relationships and interpersonal relationships. The final category captured the difficulties the women encountered as they attempted to overcome their feelings of body dissatisfaction and their negative body beliefs. This research highlighted the complex and multidimensional meaning of body dissatisfaction in adult women’s lives.

This study explored adult women’s lived experiences with body dissatisfaction. Using a multi-methods qualitative approach incorporating in-depth semi-structured interviews and arts-based projects, women between the ages of 20-39 engaged in a critical exploration of their body experiences in order to deepen understanding of the psychological construct of body dissatisfaction and its ongoing influence in their lives. Ten women from diverse social and ethnocultural backgrounds took part in the study, completing 1-2 interviews, an in-session drawing exercise, and a creative project. Interview transcripts, drawings, and creative projects were analyzed for themes using an hermeneutic phenomenological approach. Four core categories emerged from the data. The first category contained the women’s understanding of the experience and meaning of body dissatisfaction. The second category captured the external reinforcement of body dissatisfaction and related body beliefs. The third emergent category delineated the impact of body dissatisfaction on daily life, including body-self relationships and interpersonal relationships. The final category captured the difficulties the women encountered as they attempted to overcome their feelings of body dissatisfaction and their negative body beliefs. This research highlighted the complex and multidimensional meaning of body dissatisfaction in adult women’s lives.

No description available.

Community arts are potentially valuable tools in building community and regenerating distressed neighbourhoods. Community-based art organizations exist in most major cities across North America and abroad. These groups are concerned with social and environmental community issues (e.g., youth poverty, sustainability, racism) and use art as a medium for social change through community empowerment and personal development. Many of these organizations operate on limited funding and are required to complete program evaluations to demonstrate the merit of their programs. While some program evaluation literature touches on the role of arts-based research methods, very little focuses specifically on using these methods with community-based art organizations—particularly organizations with programming intended for children and youth. This Major Degree Project seeks to address this gap and explore the role of creative, arts-based evaluation methods for community-based art organizations’ program evaluation.

There is an emerging body of literature about older women and play, often focused on social groupings (e.g., Red Hats Society, Raging Grannies). This study aimed to contribute to this body of literature by exploring the meaning, experience, and place of play and playfulness in the day-to-day lives of older women. Interpreting older women’s play as a phenomenologist informed by the feminist gerontology literature, I explored, described, and interpreted play using the voices, words, lived experiences, and artful reflections of four focus groups comprised of nineteen women between the ages of 63 to 95 years. Play emerged to be a wonderful, complex, and paradoxical phenomenon for older women that interconnected in three ways: as a doing, a feeling, and a being. Within and across the women, play was characterized by these paradoxes: time flies by and time slows down, productive and unproductive, social and solitary, and serious and silly. Play was infused into the everyday lives of these older women. Arts-based methods served to invigorate and engage the women and me, and transformed the research environment into a comfortable, open space to play and be playful, and to share, gather, and build knowledge. Thus this research contributes to the growing body of literature about the lives and experiences of older women, from their perspective, adds insight into older women’s play, and grows our knowledge about collecting data through arts-based methods with older women.

Many Roma children from the EU coming to Canada as refugees have been denied a consistent education and many suffer gaps in their learning or have not had the opportunity to receive any education at all. These circumstances are mainly due to discriminating and oppressive behaviours that have historically prevailed and exist in contemporary society. In considering the difficulty that Roma children have with education, when they arrive as refugees into Canadian schools, it is imperative that Roma children be given an opportunity to access and complete an education in an environment that is supportive, free of discrimination and sensitive to their needs as learners. My research examines the role of visual art as part of an arts-based education program as a means through which Roma children are more likely to experience success with school by participating in an educational model that is engaging and supportive of their cultural ways of knowing. This paper is a case study, grounded in critical theory, into “best practices” in education that engage marginalized Roma children with learning. The study is framed around three research questions: What is distinctly problematic for Roma children in traditional school settings? How can the arts, and art education in particular engage marginalized Roma children with learning? How can Romani arts and culture be integrated into a curriculum that works to dispel discrimination and oppression of marginalized Roma children? The study is informed by interviews with a teacher working within a Canadian educational program for refugee children, families and board members of the Toronto Roma Community Centre, as well as my own personal observations and experiences. While I have determined that arts-based education is engaging for Roma children, the bigger question that has emerged is, “How can we use arts-based education to enhance the curricular lives and school success of the Roma, a culture of exclusion?” The answer lies in acknowledging that factors such as trust, personal connection with the teacher, parental involvement, First language acquisition, refugee status, cultural preservation, and integration, play a critical role in the educational success of Roma children. / Graduate / 0515 / 0273 / 0727 / kfhall@uvic.ca

This work is a collectivist engagement between researcher and participants in a knowledge quest for self-hood through engaged bodily awareness and sense. The world of the teen girl is explored from a philosophical, social, and political perspective that emphasizes expression of self through embodied knowing and being. The process is performative where yoga is used as an arts-based method to explore the self through bodily awareness. The body is reclaimed as a way to know oneself. Yoga is the expression of the living, being, and knowing body. The asana practice, the still of meditation, and the flow of the breath are emancipatory discourse where each of us moves, changes, and grows; and ultimately becomes. This becoming is a consciousness raising experience that finds and grows voice. The transformative process engages a physical expression where participants’ and researcher’s individual sense of self is connected with their universal sense of self hereby replacing current patterns of harmful thinking with new consciousness that is reflective of self awareness and realization. Found poetry is used to explore the experience of the participants. The poetic representation brings the reader into the world of the teen girl. Voices that have been secret and silenced are celebrated. The body is the instrument through which power and ownership of the moment and the self are expressed through emotion and experience. The participants and researcher move collectively and intuitively from passive objects to self-knowing subjects; subjects who are thoroughly engaged in the world and aware of their highest potential as liberated selves. The findings of this collectivist and activist research approach indicate that embodied engagements elicit the space where flesh speaks and external and internal become unified as one. Yoga is an artful, embodied expression that is about experiencing the world without being enslaved by the world. This is not a passive engagement but an activist engagement that challenges hegemonic ideas of girls in the world and in the world of a girl. This further embraces the idea of the unity of whole-self and mind-body interconnectedness where we are not passive observers of the body with awareness of self located in the head watching over the body as object. Subject and object as separate dissolve and mindfulness is the present. The end result is one where we become; we become fully engaged in a creative and fluid self-hood enabling self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and self-love. / Graduate / 0727 / 0525 / 0273 / kyte_d@yahoo.ca

Community arts are potentially valuable tools in building community and regenerating distressed neighbourhoods. Community-based art organizations exist in most major cities across North America and abroad. These groups are concerned with social and environmental community issues (e.g., youth poverty, sustainability, racism) and use art as a medium for social change through community empowerment and personal development. Many of these organizations operate on limited funding and are required to complete program evaluations to demonstrate the merit of their programs. While some program evaluation literature touches on the role of arts-based research methods, very little focuses specifically on using these methods with community-based art organizations—particularly organizations with programming intended for children and youth. This Major Degree Project seeks to address this gap and explore the role of creative, arts-based evaluation methods for community-based art organizations’ program evaluation.

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