abstract: The present study is a narrative representation of two individuals - one, a prison abolitionist living in the Phoenix area and, the other, myself as a writer and scholar - and their development of, negotiations with, desires for, and problematic performances of critical dispositions within the contemporary social order. In initiating this research, I framed my process as an exploration of the ways in which people who commit themselves to organized counter-hegemonic movements have developed critical dispositions despite their immersion in the normative discourse of American public schools and the relentless public pedagogies of neoliberal subjectivity and psyche. In essence, I wondered how people had gained both the capacity to perceive - however fleetingly - an outside to doxic structuration and, more difficult yet, to sacrifice the psychic comfort these structures promise for the risky work of creating a more just social order. Via psychoanalytic understandings of identity and desire, these stories explore and represent the primordial learning, experiences, and traumas that guided my informants to resist or reject dominant ontological narratives and normative cultural scripts in order to explore and maintain space - albeit exilic - for their own axiological and ethical development and, ultimately, to take up positions of active, educative resistance. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Curriculum and Instruction 2012

While the criminological literature has devoted great attention towards examining prison programs and interventions, the research has largely overlooked arts-based initiatives within prison. To gain an understanding of the impact that prison theatre has on the lives of criminalized individuals, this thesis represents a case study on Canada’s only inmate-run prison theatre, William Head on Stage (WHoS). Through qualitative interviews with 15 incarcerated WHoS participants and 6 former WHoS participants, this study explores the experiences of individuals with this long-standing theatre initiative. By implementing an integrative conceptual framework that captures the prison backdrop to which prison theatre operates, this study draws on Goffman’s (1961) total institutions as well as conceptual understandings around the prison culture (Ricciardelli, 2015; 2014b). Through the analysis of the participants’ experiences, the emerging themes in this study collectively reveal how the impacts of WHoS stem from the contrasting nature of prison theatre to both the structural and social systems of prison. While this research study helps substantiate the significance of arts-based initiatives like WHoS, it also helps bridge the gap within the literature between the arts and criminology.

abstract: This study was designed to introduce specific activities/lessons to students in an online university gender and communication course. It was also designed to determine how participants made meaning of and felt about learning about intersectionality of gender and cultural identities, using arts-based data collection. Previous research on the symbolic nature of language, ground-breaking work on intersectionality, and work on arts-based research were instrumental frameworks in guiding this study. Participants were asked to create poems in response to their readings of class materials and vignettes about cultural identity issues that were provided to them. The researcher was able to determine how individuals from disparate cultural backgrounds made meaning of what they read and then how they articulated their feelings relative to learning about intersectionality, their experiences with arts-based data collection, and their perceptions of their futures application of the lessons learned. The poetic expression about those experiences provides a valuable initial base for future research with regard to more narrowly focused studies of gender intersected with identities associated with socioeconomic status, age, ableism, religious affiliation, and other cultural identities. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Communication 2017

abstract: Jazz continues, into its second century, as one of the most important musics taught in public middle and high schools. Even so, research related to how students learn, especially in their earliest interactions with jazz culture, is limited. Weaving together interviews and observations of junior and senior high school jazz players and teachers, private studio instructors, current university students majoring in jazz, and university and college jazz faculty, I developed a composite sketch of a secondary school student learning to play jazz. Using arts-based educational research methods, including the use of narrative inquiry and literary non-fiction, the status of current jazz education and the experiences by novice jazz learners is explored. What emerges is a complex story of students and teachers negotiating the landscape of jazz in and out of early twenty-first century public schools. Suggestions for enhancing jazz experiences for all stakeholders follow, focusing on access and the preparation of future jazz teachers. / Dissertation/Thesis / D.M.A. Music Education 2013

abstract: ABSTRACT This qualitative study examines how high school art teachers conceive of being a good art teacher. Motivated by my own experiences as an art teacher, I designed this study to add teachers' voices to the conversation surrounding quality in education. My research design included a narrative strand and an arts-based strand. In the narrative strand, I interviewed and observed 12 high school art educators from a major city in the southwest. I conducted an autoethnographic reflection exploring my connection to the research topic and research process. In the arts-based strand I used fiber-arts to further understand my topic. I wrote this dissertation using a narrative approach, blending the traditional research format, voices of participants, and my autoethnographic reflection. I included the results of my arts-based approach in the final chapter. Findings suggest that the teachers in this study conceptualize being a good art teacher as a process of identity construction. Each of the teachers understood what it meant to be a good art teacher in unique ways, connected to their personal experiences and backgrounds. As the teachers engaged in identity work to become the kind of art teacher they wanted to be, they engaged in a process of identity construction that consisted of four steps. I propose a model of identity construction in which the teachers chose teaching practices, evaluated those practices, identified challenges to their identities, and selected strategies to confirm, assert, or defend their desired identities. The findings have implications for teachers to become reflective practitioners; for teacher educators to prepare teachers to engage in reflective practices; and for administrators and policy makers to take into account the cyclical and personal nature of identity construction. This study also has implications for further research including the need to examine the dispositions of art teachers, teachers' evolving conceptions of what it means to be a good art teacher, and the effect labeling teachers' quality has on their identity construction. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Curriculum and Instruction 2014

Through this research study my aim was to critically examine the ways in which multimodal, autoethnographic art can enhance and expand educational experiences in general education art classrooms. The study investigates how participants’ perceptions of self and others within culture transform over a semester-long qualitative arts-based study. The study’s goal was to uncover teaching and learning strategies that help to disrupt traditional academic boundaries using autoethnography to create an engaged, cooperative university classroom environment. The participants for this study included 77 students in a general education art and culture course and myself as the co-teacher and researcher. Autoethnographic data were collected throughout the course in the forms of art research journals, pre-and post course questionnaires, researcher field notes, recorded class discussions, on-line discussion boards, notes from one-on-one student/researcher communications and field notes from participants’ final multimodal, autoethnographic art pieces and presentations. The methods used for the study were a modified version of arts-based and grounded theoretical research models. A heavy emphasis was placed on the participants art-making and sharing their work with others in the study. The findings from the study indicated most of, many of participants experienced advancement in their understanding of self within culture and developments of new insights into the experiences and perceptions of others in the study. Results from the study confirm a steady growth in participant engagement and development of cooperative class environment throughout the semester. This study contributes to existing scholarship on the generation of new knowledge from arts-based research models, multimodal autoethnograpy as method, teacher/student relationships in academia, and risk-taking in teacher professional development. The findings from the study might provide support and encouragement for meaningful discussions about the significance of exploring self through art making and art sharing in academic settings. By highlighting the achievements of the use of autoethnography as a method of inquiry, this study will add to the larger discussion of teacher and student identity in art education classrooms.

Doctor of Education / Department of Special Education, Counseling and Student Affairs / Warren J. White / The purpose of this case study was to explore how two people with language-based learning disabilities, who have graduated from Masters of Fine Arts Master’s (MFA) programs describe their coping mechanisms, career aspirations, and identity development as a result of being involved in the creative arts. This qualitative study was conducted with purposeful and criterion-based sampling. The participants must have graduated from a MFA program with a focus on a studio art and have a language-based learning disability. Arts-based narrative inquiry research was used to explore the manner in which each participant negotiated their path through multiple educational settings from K-12 to a terminal master’s degree. The participants’ narratives were articulated using a Bildungsroman format to share their coming of age story as their identities developed. Findings indicate the participants with language-based learning disabilities used multiple coping mechanisms to negotiate their path through the education settings they encountered as they grew into adults and completed terminal MFA degrees. They relied on extra time, isolation, help from others, and their creativity in an attempt to hide their language-based learning disabilities. The study raised implications about the amount of support students with learning disabilities have at each level of education. It also raised questions about what help students with disabilities need for long term success as they transition from one level of education to the next, this includes mental health support.

This thesis explores to role of theatre in the lives of criminalized women. It seeks to better understand the ways in which theatre initiatives can be used as a tool for participants through various means, such as potentially being a form of self-expression, or a way to gain voice. This exploration was facilitated by conducting a case study of the Clean Break Theatre Company, a theatre company for criminalized women in London, England. Data was collected through performance and course observations and interviews with twelve women. The final themes shape the exploration as participants identify the importance of self expression through theatre, and its ability to aid in personal transformation or growth. Theatre initiatives are important because they create a unique lens into the experiences of these women, as well as being used as a tool for change in their lives.

Previous research, mostly on HIV-positive Aboriginal women (PAW) instead of with them, has focused primarily on their HIV-illness experience and the gaps and needs that arise from living with HIV. This has, arguably, allowed us to develop policies and programs to meet these needs; however, it has also contributed to dominant and disempowering representations of Aboriginal women living with HIV as troubled, vulnerable and in need of outside assistance. To counter-balance these negative representations and to co-create new strengths-based, culturally-relevant and gender-specific knowledge that can inform policies, programs and services for PAW, I partnered with PAW and Aboriginal community partners to develop a project that would provide PAW with an opportunity to tell a different kind of story about themselves than has previously been told by others. Using an Indigenist Intersectional Population Health framework that was underpinned by a strengths-based, arts-informed, culturally-grounded and decolonizing community-based participatory approach to research, we engaged 13 PAW across three sites (Toronto = 5; Montreal = 4; ‘Virtual’ group = 4) in individualized group research processes to better understand PAW’s perceptions of health instead of illness and the intersecting roles that culture and gender can play in supporting the self-defined health of PAW. We also engaged in innovative, culturally-relevant and participatory knowledge translation and exchange (KTE) and developed policy and practice recommendations from our research. Findings from Visioning Health suggest that PAW have a holistic and relational view of health that is grounded in their individual and collective identity as HIV-positive Aboriginal women. Health for PAW co-researchers has physical, mental, emotional and spiritual dimensions, and is fundamentally about ‘connecting’ and ‘feeling connected’ at multiple levels including self, others, community, culture, environment and Creator. Each of these levels is interrelated and each is grounded in Aboriginal cultures and ways of knowing that see all elements of the world as interconnected. This is consistent with previously published health concepts for Aboriginal peoples; however, this is the first articulation of PAW’s perspectives on health in the literature. PAW co-researchers also identified health-enabling strategies that they use to support their self-defined health, including understanding and resisting the broader context of colonization, reclaiming their voice and identity, creating safe spaces for themselves and their peers, and (re)connecting to Spirit. Given that the vast majority of policies and programs for PAW are based on Western concepts of health as predominantly physical, findings from this study can be used to inform strengths-based, culturally-relevant and gender-specific policies and practices that better fit the needs of PAW. One of the most significant and unexpected findings of our study, however, is that the process of participating in our research was, in itself, health enabling. Consistent with their perspectives on health, PAW co-researchers reported that participating in Visioning Health helped them feel connected to themselves, to others, to their communities, and to their cultures. PAW co-researchers also referred to their participation in Visioning Health as ‘a healing journey’ and ‘damn good medicine’. While we did not design our project as an ‘intervention’, it is clear that Visioning Health worked as a holistic and integrated action for social change on several levels that are mutually reinforcing. Policy and practice recommendations that flow from this research include: privileging PAW’s perspectives, grounding policy and practice in local Indigenous knowledges, highlighting PAW’s strengths instead of weaknesses, and incorporating a colonial analysis.

Compared to other kinds of caregivers, caregivers of persons living with dementia (PwD) are at higher risk of experiencing social isolation, emotional distress, and depressive symptoms which can adversely affect their psychosocial well-being. This study uses longitudinal data and multilevel modeling to explore trajectories of change over the course of a choir intervention in affect, social engagement, and caregiver distress. A multilevel coupled model of change was employed to examine two time-varying associations within-person and between-persons: (1) the association between social activities and affect, and (2) the association between caregiver distress and affect. The social activities coupling model (between-persons) found that increasing engagement in social activities was significantly associated with an increase in positive affect. The caregiver distress coupling model (within-person) found that higher levels of caregiver distress were significantly associated with decreases in positive affect. The caregiver distress coupling model (between-persons) found that higher levels of caregiver distress were significantly associated with increases in negative affect. The choir intervention may have a positive impact on caregiver psychosocial well-being but there are many factors to consider (i.e., dementia trajectory) that influence psychosocial well-being. This study advances our understanding of the impact of an arts-based intervention (i.e., community-based choir) as a source of support for caregivers of PwD. Findings can inform efforts to develop community art-based programs to support family caregivers. / Graduate / 2021-12-10