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.

Traditional knowledges and ways of living in harmony with the Earth and among species have been disregarded, discarded, and destroyed as industrialisation, capitalism, and globalisation have pervaded, all maintained in part by the Cartesian split which dissociates body from mind, heaven from Earth, nature from culture. These hegemonic layers of control have served to bind the fate of the Earth’s eco-systems, including human life, to the global capital economy which thrives on growth and development at any and all costs. This feminist, arts-informed inquiry brought an embodied lens to the stories of eco-activism and inquired as to the role of embodied ways of knowing and their role in eco-activism and the toll of activism upon women eco-activist bodies. This research inquiry interviewed thirteen women eco-activists, conducted four art-making focus groups, and used embodied reflexivity as part of the analysis process in order to find new understandings and knowledge to add to the limited literature on embodiment, embodied ways of knowing, and women’s eco-activism. Furthermore, this research sought to identify and articulate the ways in which activism practice can be more sustainable for activists and intended to add to the growing awareness body/mind connection and unity consciousness for activists, educators, and others working towards social change. The key findings of this research indicate that embodied knowledges counter fragmented ways of living, foster sustainable practices, and offer guidance and direction to live more harmoniously with, and on, the Earth and to practice activism. It also expands our understanding of women’s embodied ways of knowing and illuminates our understandings of how bodies can guide and show alternate ways of living, and practising activism, that are sustainable. This inquiry further added to the growing awareness of body/mind connection and unity consciousness with a focus on activists, educators, and others interested in finding ways to live with, rather than on, the Earth. / Graduate / 0329 / 0453 / lisa@lisamortimore.com

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The focus of this qualitative, arts-based inquiry was to understand how disabling illness might be transformed through art. A/r/tography -- art/research/teaching and writing, was the method used to explore and understand the meaning(s) held within the art: Border Crossings -- a conceptual, figurative, sculptural installation. The installation embodied the experience of disabling illness, symbolically depicting power relationships, identities, subjectivities and the multi-dimensional nature of being, of one coming up against the institution, the illness and the self. Guided by the work of Heidegger (Hermeneutic Circle), Deleuze and Guatarri (Rhizome and The body without Organs) and Foucault (Power Relationships), the A/r/tographer examined the installation through the lens of the poststructural feminist writers Grosz, Davis, Gatens, Weedon, Moss and Dyck with a focus on the body/subjective to explore notions central to understanding being in a body. A further analysis through art theorists Eisner, Allen and A/r/tographers Irwin and Springgay’s aesthetic perspectives, explicated the nuance of how art transformed the ill researcher and larger community. The results of the inquiry revealed a multi-dimensional, generative process of opening multiple thresholds of complexity, understanding and transformation of the experience of disabling illness for inquirer, and the art participant/observers/larger community. The research illuminates the value of A/r/tography as a potent means of inquiry into lived experience and how art enhances the understandings and possibilities for the transformation of the experience of disabling illness/lived experience. / Graduate

This study examines ways in which African and Afro-Caribbean refugee girls and young women negotiate and perform identity in varied social contexts. Designed as youth-centered participatory action research, the study draws from three years of engagement with a group of refugee girls, ages 11-23, from Somalia, Liberia, Haiti, Burundi, and Sudan. The research occurred in the broader context of The Imani Nailah Project, a program I initiated for refugee middle and high school girls in May 2008. Through in-depth interviews, youth-led focus groups, and arts-based research, Imani researchers (study participants) and I explored experiences and expressions of gender, race/ethnicity, nationality, age, religion and citizenship status, as well as the intersections among these multiply-located identities. This study spans a wide range of identity negotiations and performances, from micro-level interactions to macro-level impacts of dominant culture. Three interrelated chapters focus on programmatic, methodological, and theoretical components of the dissertation research: (a) how refugee girls and university volunteers pursue mutual learning within a service context; (b) how girl-centered participatory action research can serve as a vehicle towards relational activism, and (c) how broader discourses of othering shape the salience of refugee and citizen identities in the lives of refugee girls. Combined, these articles expand our understanding of how refugee girls narrate self as they participate in and contribute to multiple social worlds. / Ph. D.

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