There is an increase of White settler Child and Youth Care (CYC) practitioners who are questioning how to be useful in their attempts at solidarity and justice-doing amidst precarious ethics and tensions. Meanwhile, Indigenous women, girls, trans and two-spirit people are being murdered and taken (MMIWGT2S+) at genocidal rates with little action from Canadian government and RCMP. Drawing from critical race theory, intersectional feminism, and anti-oppressive praxis, this research traces my own path to justice-doing and solidarity exploring the concept of witnessing as a White settler. With a critical examination of self, Whiteness, and White supremacy, I attempt to answer the research questions: In what ways can witnessing function as a useful practice framework for White settler solidarity? Secondarily, how can art act as witness or co-conspirator? Using an arts-based critical autoethnography, this study combines personal narratives with arts-based reflections on researcher’s experience as White settler facilitator of the program Youth for Dignity on unceded Kaska territory in Watson Lake, Yukon. The research focuses on the creation of a collaborative art piece on MMIWGT2S+ to explore witnessing as one pathway for White settlers committed to social change. Building on the work of Vikki Reynolds (2010a, 2010b, 2012) and other literature on solidarity and witnessing, seven witnessing intentions that inform my White Settler Emerging Solidarity Practice surfaced from this research: (a) critical examination of self; (b) reciprocal and respectful relationships; (c) intersectionality; (d) embodied listening; (e) honouring resistance; (f) action; and (g) accountability. This research has the potential to provide a possible pathway for other CYC practitioners to engage with the complexities and tensions of White settler solidarity practice. / Graduate

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.

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The Division of Dementia Studies at the University of Bradford has a 3-stage strategy to involve service users with dementia in practitioner education. This year¿s conference will be a perfect opportunity for us to show how the involvement of people with dementia in our Dementia Studies courses has moved from rhetoric to reality over the past three years. We now have people with dementia involved in the management, delivery and assessment of our degree programmes. A participatory video outreach project carried out in a day centre for people with dementia in 2009 produced a variety of audio-visual material including voice recordings, photographs, and film which people with dementia were directly involved in making, and which are now used as learning resources for students. In a parallel project, former carers contributed to a DVD that was developed as part of a dedicated training programme for Bupa care staff. Students on the MSc Dementia Studies (Training in Dementia Care) pathway are now also beginning to include people with dementia in the training they provide in order to complete their award. A further project to pilot methods of involving service users in long-term care, including those with severe dementia is to begin in March 2011, and early findings from this will also be presented. The presenters include an academic course lead, a MSc student, a researcher, a service user/campaigner, and current and former family carers. We will present using a variety of formats including small case studies, film, audio, photographs and service user narratives. We will also be open to questions and comments about the practical, ethical and educational challenges arising from this ongoing work.

Internet Memes transverse and sometimes transcend cyberspace on the back of impossibly cute LOLcats speaking mangled English and the snarky remarks of Image Macro characters always on the lookout for someone to undermine. No longer the abstract notion of a cultural gene that Dawkins (2006) introduced in the late 1970s, memes have now become synonymous with a particular brand of vernacular language that internet users engage by posting, sharing and remixing digital content as they communicate jokes, emotions and opinions. For the purpose of this research the language of Internet Memes is understood as visual, succinct and capable of inviting active engagement by users who encounter digital content online that exhibits said characteristics. Internet Memes were explored through an Arts-Based Educational Research framework by first identifying the conventions that shape them and then interrogating these conventions during two distinct research phases. In the first phase the researcher, as a doctoral student in art and visual culture education, engaged class readings and assignments by generating digital content that not only responded to the academic topics at hand but did so through forms associated with Internet Memes like Image Macros and Animated GIFs. In the second phase the researcher became a meme literacy facilitator as learners in three different age-groups were led in the reading, writing and remixing of memes during a month-long summer art camp where they were also exposed to other art-making processes such as illustration, acting and sculpture. Each group of learners engaged age-appropriate meme types: 1) the youngest group, 6 and 7 year-olds, wrote Emoji Stories and Separated at Birth memes; 2) the middle group, 8-10 year-olds, worked with Image Macros and Perception memes, 3) while the oldest group, 11-13 year-olds, generated Image Macros and Animated GIFs. The digital content emerging from both research phases was collected as data and analyzed through a hybrid of Memetics, Actor-Network Theory, Object Oriented Ontology, Remix Theory and Glitch Studies as the researcher shifted shapes yet again and became a Research Jockey sampling freely from each field of study. A case is made for Internet Memes to be understood as an actor-network where meme collectives, individual cybernauts, software and source material are all actants interrelating and making each other enact collective agencies through shared authorships. Additionally specific educational contexts are identified where the language of Internet Memes can serve to incorporate technology, storytelling, visual thinking and remix practices into art and visual culture education. Finally, the document reporting on the research expands on the hermeneutics of Internet Memes and the phenomenological experiences they elicit that are otherwise absent from traditional scholarly prose. Chapter by chapter the dissertation was crafted as a journey from the academic to the whimsical, from the lecture hall to the image board (where Internet Memes were born), from the written word to the remixed image as a visual language that is equal parts form and content that emerges and culminates in a concluding chapter composed almost entirely of popular Internet Meme types. An online component can be found at http://memeducation.org/

Many health professions are exploring the unique qualities of humanities for insights about humanistic practices, however humanities-based pedagogy has particular relevance to occupational therapy. Given the pressures to standardize and rely on quantitative evidence in occupational therapy practice, it is particularly important to provide students with a strong foundation in humanistic principles that are at the core of the profession. This doctoral project used the pedagogy of John Dewey and evidence in health humanities to develop a humanities-informed course in occupational therapy titled, Perspectives on Disability and Health and Older Adults. The course design integrates physical and biological sciences, social sciences and humanities to offer multi-focal insights into the perspectives of others, and to foster self-awareness and reflexivity. Students will engage with interdisciplinary faculty and older adults in experiences with visual art, performance, and literature to explore human experiences relating to occupation. The course aims for students to advance their understanding of the artistry of practice, to foster client-centered practice, and to advance critical thinking. An evaluation using both formative and summative methods will be used to improve the course and assess its impact on students. The project provides an example for other faculty who are inspired to use humanities to teach client centeredness, artistry of practice and critical thinking. Deweyan informed humanities based learning may contribute to wise occupational therapy practices and growth of the profession.

L’apprendimento della leadership invoca un’attenzione pedagogica perché implica un insieme complesso di attività di formazione, sviluppo ed educazione del leader che necessitano di essere adeguatamente problematizzate, validate e integrate mediante le categorie pedagogiche dell’intenzionalità, della progettualità, della riflessività, della relazionalità e dell'esperienza personale. La curvatura umanistica delle recenti teorie della leadership e le analogie esistenti tra l’agire del leader e l’agire educativo pongono l’interrogativo su una possibile pedagogia della leadership e ispirano l’impiego delle arti nella formazione del leader. Formare la leadership si riduce spesso all’apprendimento strumentale di competenze comportamentali ritenute funzionali al ruolo, indipendentemente dal contesto organizzativo e dalle dimensioni personali del leader. Seppure comportamenti, capacità e tratti personali di leader efficaci possano essere facilmente identificati, gli individui non possono assimilarli senza cambiare disposizioni soggettive e visioni del mondo. La formazione arts-based facilita il leader nei processi di conoscenza e sviluppo delle dimensioni identitarie (fini, valori, credenze, emozioni, concetti di sé, intelligenze e sensibilità) che sottendono ai suoi comportamenti, integrandone efficacemente gli aspetti cognitivi, affettivi e motivazionali. Sebbene le arti possano contribuire in vario modo all’apprendimento della leadership, le questioni di pertinenza, validità ed affidabilità degli interventi arts-based richiedono un urgente processo di inquadramento epistemologico e metodologico. / Leadership learning requires a pedagogical care because it implies a set of complex instructional, developmental and educative activities, which need to be opportunely problematized, validated, integrated by pedagogical categories of personal intentionality, projectuality, reflexivity, relationality, and subjective experience. The humanistic curvature of recent leadership theories and existing analogies between leader’s action and educative action put a question mark over a possible pedagogy of leadership, inspiring the deployment of the arts in leader development process. Developing leadership often is reduced to the instrumental learning of behavioral competencies assumed to be functional to role interpretation and field-independent, prescinding from organizational context and leader’s personal characteristics. Though behaviours, skills and personal traits of effective leaders can be easily identified, they cannot be learned without changing individual dispositions and world vision. Arts-based learning facilitates leaders in the process of self-knowing and development of identity (ends, values, assumptions, emotions, self-concepts, intelligences, sensitivities) underlying their behaviours and helping them integrate cognitive, affective and motivational aspects. Even though arts can contribute differently to leadership learning, questions of pertinence, validity, and reliability affect arts-based interventions and demand an urgent process of epistemological and methodological frameworking.

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?