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

Storytelling has been used by many cultures to record events, research genealogy, and to teach moral lessons. Some cultures passed on their histories and important events through oral narration, papyrus, or cathedral stained glass windows. More modern cultures write personal histories, and use modern technology to communicate with each other. This study is an arts based project based on writing a storybook. It is an exploration of why storytelling is important from a cultural point of view using my experiences to write a storybook based on a true event from my family history.

Current research literature reveals that there are numerous benefits such as personal growth, academic success and exposure to multiple perspectives surrounding arts-based learning (Brice Heath, 2001; Cole, 2011; Cote, 2010). According to McMahon, Klopper, & Power (2015) it is important for students to "see themselves as decision makers and understand that they can influence their own learning experiences" (p. 19). Additionally, these same researchers emphasize that teachers need to "focus on the learning experience of the students and understand that the greater value of engaging in the arts resides in the students' art making process" (p. 19). Current research has concentrated predominantly on studies of student experiences at the time that they are enrolled in arts-based programs. My study is unique as I engaged participants retrospectively on their former experiences of learning in an arts-based program. More specifically, my research question asked "what are the effects of attending an arts-based secondary school program on the subsequent lives of six former students, including myself, who graduated two decades ago?" To answer this question, I used narrative inquiry and arts-based methods supported by a social constructivist theoretical framework. More specifically, I analyzed my research through the use of an online whiteboard entitled Miro, and then expressed my findings in the form of a "factional" story (Kallio, 2015) co-narrated by myself and my participants. This 'factional' story is told through fictional characters based on my research analysis, and also includes fictional elements. Though participant stories varied, key themes emerged as they grew as people through the experience, carrying with them lingering memories that continue to influence their lives today.

Doctor of Philosophy / Curriculum and Instruction Programs / Frederick Burrack / This study is an intertwined critical autoethnography through which my experiences, my stories, are woven together with memories of family, students, and teaching career. Together, the telling of these stories will explore how I negotiated my identity development throughout my middle and high school experiences at a time when I could have been labeled as an at-risk student. The development into my professional career and personal life all influenced strongly by my participation in music education. Filtering these stories and memories through the lens of critical whiteness theory, this study interrogates the social assumptions that may be placed on at-risk students, exploring how these assumptions function within the context of access within our current music education structures, and investigates the ways in which social support systems allow opportunities for access of white male students and privilege in music education. An overarching question guiding this research is: How does the interrogation of such white privileges inform how one develops their identity as a music educator, a researcher, an academic, a husband, a father, a human, as well as, the curricular structures in place guiding access within music education?

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In this thesis I explore writers and their writing practices as embodied, contingent, and affected by aesthetic environments and contemplative practices. I discuss contemplative practices as techniques for recognizing the co-dependent origination of the self/world, and as tools for disrupting the trifurcation of body, mind and word. I explore the written word’s role in the continuous production of new meaning, and as part of the continuous production of new “selves” for writers, and readers. I use narrative auto-ethnography to situate myself as a researcher, sensory ethnography and interviews to profile four practicing writers, and arts-informed Research-creation to document my own writing and contemplative practices. I also consider whether a post-pedagogy view of educational research might produce/allow space for more creative approaches to educational theorizing.

ABSTRACT The use of the arts as a tool for conflict transformation, or what has been called arts based peacebuilding, is a new and emerging field. Yet, there is sparse empirical evidence on its outcomes. The Nile Project, a musical collaborative from East Africa that brings together musicians from all of the countries that border the Nile River, is aimed at finding a solution to the dire water conflict and crisis in the region. This study aims to explore how their collaborative process of creating and performing music despite their linguistic, cultural, musical, and political differences, can illuminate how music can be used to address conflict. Using a combination of collaborative qualitative and arts-informed research methodologies, original members of the collective as well as the co-founder were interviewed. Observations were also done of the musicians' rehearsals, performances, and classroom visits at a New England University and during a musical residency in Aswan, Egypt. Findings suggest that an outcome of the Nile Project's work is the development of relationships, deeper learning, particularly about other Africans, and that the process of making music with those from diverse musical traditions can act as a way to practice peacebuilding skills: creating unity, while honoring diversity. This study seeks to add to a limited amount of research documenting the arts in peacebuilding suggesting that music might be an effective tool for transforming conflict.

Worldwide, the collection, separation, and sales of recyclable materials is a survival strategy for many unemployed and impoverished families, especially in urban landscapes. They are called recyclers, and their work is often associated with social exclusion objectively manifested through discrimination by the public, which negatively impacts recyclers’ perceptions of their own self–worth. Discrimination places the recyclers within a marginalized social space and perpetuates poverty and social inequity. Such discrimination is best evidenced by the lack of open dialogue between recyclers and the public. The present research was designed to open spaces for these dialogues to occur, with the ultimate goal of decreasing discrimination suffered by the recyclers from the greater metropolitan region of São Paulo, Brazil. Working collaboratively with recyclers that are affiliated with the Brazilian National Recycling Social Movement (MNCR), and using arts–based research interwoven with theories of social movement, environmental adult education and transformation, I explore the learning that goes along when we use visual arts to bridge the gab between the recyclers and public. During seven months (March–September, 2012), 50 recyclers participated in three different arts–based workshops (abstract painting, impressionism painting, and mosaic) and seven art exhibits in different cities in Brazil. These art workshops and exhibits were video and audio recorded and represent the primary data source in this research project. Discourse analysis combined with a cognitive developmental approach to understand peoples’ free conversation was used as an analytical tool to explore the recorded materials. The artworks produced in this research illustrate recyclers’ stories of poverty, social exclusion, and their victories toward a better future for themselves. The process of creating and exhibiting their paintings mediated the construction of their visual thought, and in this way, they were able to (re)imagine a different reality for themselves. This empowered recyclers because it added value to their work as environmental agents, increasing their sense of self–worth. Additionally, through the art-making process, it was possible to identify moments of realization in one’s life (i.e., epiphanies). By mapping out epiphanies throughout the lifespan of an individual, we can explore their moments of transformation, which is critical in environmental adult education processes. Finally, my findings suggest that community art exhibits are dialogical spaces, where knowledge is co–constructed and mobilized. These exhibits are also alternative sources for income generation for the recyclers and are in fact, environmental adult education practices. / Graduate

Doctor of Philosophy / Curriculum and Instruction / Thomas Vontz / This phenomenological study hermeneutically explores law professors’ felt experiences within online existential lifeworld spheres. Prose, poetry, color images, and virtual journeying provide descriptive and interpretive text suggesting expansion of Gadamer’s fusion of horizonal understanding. Law professors who teach asynchronously online selected five color images from pixabay.com corresponding with the five universal existential themes: body, space, time, relationships and material things/technology (van Manen, 2014) as catalysts to conversationally explore what it feels like to transition from classroom to online instruction. Multiple phenomenological, artistic, and scientific theories prismatically amplify and explain the study’s design: Gadamer’s hermeneutical circle of understanding (1960/2006), Termes six-point spherical perspective (2016), Einstein’s closed yet unbounded universe (Egdall, 2014), and Seamon’s concept of “at homeness” (2012). Dialogical understanding of Self and Other(s) through Gadamer’s call for festival and serious play (1960/2006) is activated: The reader is invited to interact with the study text through visual and auditory web experiences. Researcher’s hermeneutic and existential retelling of the professors’ conversations begins to unfold metaphorically around a table within a virtual forest. When researcher’s previously bracketed-away prejudice for incorporating synchronous modalities into online learning erupts, professors’ longing felt for classroom home actualizes and ultimately emerges as a sixth existential dimension proposed by the researcher. A culminating journey through virtual desert in search of online home continues the retelling and metaphorically incorporates all six existential themes. Dramatic changes in researcher’s lifeworld view, ways of knowing and being, self view, self action and pedagogical development as a result of conducting the study are summarized. Future research is implicated including exploration of professors’ existentially felt experiences while teaching synchronously online and deep-mining professorial empathy toward students. Factors that impinge on all law professors’ transitioning to online instruction contextually anchor the study: 1) Legal pedagogy’s evolution from 18th Century professional skills training through the late 19th Century intrusion of legal doctrine instruction, and 20th Century paralegal skills training; 2) The American Bar Association’s 21st century mandates for graduating students with both legal skills and legal doctrine training; 3) 21st Century pedagogical Immutables (teaching online, teaching legal job skills, teaching legal doctrine, teaching to standardized tests); and 4) 21st Century Protean Challenges (institution and student demand for technology-based instruction, the Global Legal Services Industry’s hierarchical control over legal education and practice, enrollment and tuition crises, multi-cultural limitations, and the pedagogical conundrum of choosing among multiple online design and delivery modalities).

Cob, as an arts-based research process, creates movements and moments of survival. Survival is an ideological construction and an actual, local practice. Survival is also about desiring and fulfilling arts-based desires to work with the land through academic and material scavenging. Cob creates strategies for surviving, for working with our respective environments wisely. Cob building teaches people how to negotiate the natural economy and their relationships to labor and each other through an artistic and intimate practice. From a feminist poststructural lens, survival happens on the local level, between and with people. Cob building creates knowledge through creative, kinesthetic, and collaborative engagement. As a feminist poststructuralist, arts-based research allows me to examine local action and interaction among people, positionalities, and competing differences. Rather than appeasing the modern impulse to objectify and rationalize an end-point or an object- oriented view of the production of art, feminist poststructural theory works to problematize the end-point. Through cob building, a rich, arts-based process, I call into question the modern impulse to find Truth and ask that we be aware of developing new oppressions when working toward equity and justice. Cob building teaches people how to engage together within the form of artistic creation. Cob is an arts-based research process that includes the land as an integral part of its canvas. In order to articulate, uncover, and engage the claim that, as an arts-based process, cob creates movements and moments of survival, I use the arts-based process, a/r/tography. This a/r/tographical text does not offer an end point but works to recreate moments and movements of cob building as an arts-based research project. A/r/tography helps to layer the movements of arts-based survival within cob building and this text. Throughout this work, the arts-based process of cob building is the overlying metaphor for the construction of the structure of this text. As the chapters move forward, the structure builds up.