How does it feel to be creative? Such a question, when approached from a phenomenological perspective, reveals new understandings about the embodied experience of creativity, and how it feels as it is being lived. This investigation begins with a provocative contrast of two environments where creativity is thought to manifest itself: school art classrooms, where creativity is often legislated from an authority figure, and New Orleans Second Line parades, where creativity is organically and kinetically expressed. A thorough review of the literature on creativity focuses on education, arts education, creative economies, psychology, and critical theorists, collectively revealing a cognitive bias and striking lack of consideration for community, freedom, and the lived experience of being creative. Further discussions in the literature also neglect sites of creativity, and the impact that place (such as a school classroom) can have upon creativity. The phenomenological perspectives of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Bachelard, and Trigg support a methodological lens to grasp embodied knowledge, perceptions of placedness on creativity, and the interdependent frictions between freedom, authenticity, movement and belonging. The research method includes investigations in New Orleans in archives, examination of visual and material culture, participation in cultural practice, and formal and informal interviews. Further, the phenomena of …

Text component of a doctoral dissertation, which references the full dissertation content in a multi-media web-based format. It includes a background statement, acknowledgements section, printed navigation guide and site map for the website, and a full list of references.

This research examines the personal narratives of two contemporary non-native artists living and working on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. Issues related to narratives, power structures, artistic processes, insider/outsider dynamics, Hawaiian culture, island life, surfing, and the researcher's own experiences are woven together to formulate realizations surrounding alternative knowledge systems and the power of multiple or hidden narratives to the practice of art education.

This narrative study explores how two Taiwanese college art teachers’ lives and teaching experiences illustrate the ways they cultivate resilience and motivation to sustain professional commitments amidst challenges in their teaching careers. I use the life story interview as my methodology and a three-dimensional space approach to code and analyze my data to retell their stories about how resilience and motivation have guided them as they negotiated dilemmas in teaching. The participants’ stories demonstrate that in order to be motivated, teachers must satisfy their basic needs, which, in the language of Maslow’s need theory, include secure income, safety, love and belonging, respect, and personal accomplishment. To be resilient, art teachers need to facilitate self-efficacy as an essential belief to face challenges, and they also must gain support from family members, students, school administrators, and fellow members of professional organizations as external support resources. This study also illuminates the significance of international educational exchanges, the teaching knowledge constructed through layers of life and professional experience, and the importance of creating dialogue to address teachers’ challenges. Recommendations for future study include exploring further the relationship between motivation and resilience, specifying how gender difference affects the ways participants tell their stories, investigating how …

This study examined two art museum and school partnerships in order to learn how partnerships enable an integration of goals, participants' beliefs and values, and learning objectives. This study examined the partnerships through a social constructivist lens and used narrative analysis as way to interpret participants' stories about collaboration. The research found three major themes among participants' stories. Participants: a) valued good communication to establish relationships between partners, b) believed partnership offered students experiences that educated the whole person, and c) felt that students making meaning by interacting in the museum environment was an indicator of success. The study closes with discussion of the researchers' own constructions as they developed throughout the study.

Building on Fredric Jameson's critical theory, this dissertation examines how the aesthetics of cognitive mapping were used to uncover overlooked political, economic, social and cultural dimensions behind my artistic engagement with Islamic patterns. Using a critically informed variant of arts-based research (ABR), I explored the complexity of the interconnected economic, social, political and aesthetic realities informing my positionality as a Muslim Saudi female artist/research completing her dissertation in a Western country. Particularly, my work revealed how certain global forces (including capitalist relations between Saudi Arabia and the USA, as well as global postmodern cultural influences) shape the processes of appropriation and re-signification of patterning appropriated from Islamic aesthetics. This research culminated in a body of artwork for a solo exhibition at Paul Voertman's Gallery at the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas located in Denton, Texas. I conclude the study with recommendations for a regional ABR to be developed by educators for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The study also suggests that this model of cognitive mapping as a critical art making methodology would be a great pedagogical tool for museums and art education curriculum to implement in Saudi Arabia.

The purpose of this paper is to compare a group of adolescents with the learning disorder of dyslexia and a group of adolescents without dyslexia in regard to their ability to make realistic drawings. Subjects selected for the study were from a suburban junior high school in which a random sample was taken of both dyslexic and non-dyslexic students. Each was given three standardized drawing tasks, including a still-life drawing, a contour drawing, and a perspective drawing. The drawings were judged by five evaluators on a continuum of realistic to non-realistic. The ratings were then analyzed by the application of the Mann-Whitney U-Test, which indicated that there are no significant differences in the abilities of the two groups to render drawings realistically.

This study encompasses my attempt to understand the lived experience of students in a higher education art appreciation course when a traditional textbook was replaced by a computer game. The methodology uses a mixture of phenomenological interviews and games as well as game machines to interpret these lived experiences. The process of allowing the research to dictate the direction I would take in my research is central to my research process. The initial research idea evolved into three research games and three versions of those games by using the data from student interviews as a generative data. The implications from this study focus upon creating new pedagogical interventions in the form of a studious labyrinthian pedagogy rather than a finite maze-like approach to art education. This dissertation examines how art education can benefit from more freedom and exploration for students to navigate their own learning.

Suiting the Modern Woman documented the evolution of women's power dressing in the 20th century by featuring four major components: thirteen period suit silhouettes, the power suits of twenty-eight influential and successful high profile Texas women, a look at the career and creations of Dallas designer, Richard Brooks, who created the professional wardrobe for former Texas Governor Ann Richards, and a media room which showcased images of working women in television and movie clips, advertisements, cartoons, and fashion guidebooks. The exhibition served as an application for contemporary museum education theory. Acting as both the exhibition coordinator and educator provided an opportunity to develop interpretative strategies and create a meaningful visitor experience.

By engaging in collaborative arts-based and arts-informed narrative inquiry with my six-year-old daughter, we explored self-guided materials in art museums in the North Texas area. Though the field of art museum education is becoming increasingly participatory, most academic research related to self-guided materials has fallen short of exploring visitors' experiences with these materials. Furthermore, the perspectives of children have been long overlooked in academic and, at times, institutional research about family experiences in museums. Over the course of nine months, my daughter and I visited art museums and engaged with their self-guided materials, ranging from audio tours to interactive galleries. During this time we created collaborative works of art based on our experiences, which acted as both data collection and analysis in preparation for writing narratives. Our narrative explorations allowed us each to better understand our collective experiences. Though this research specifically targets self-guided materials in art museums, any educator interested in intergenerational or collaborative family learning may find both our methodologies and our conclusions to be helpful in better understanding how narratives are essential to this type of learning.

This research seeks to explore how the metal arts are taught to women in Kuwait in an undergraduate setting, making the call for the use of feminist pedagogy when teaching the metal arts to women in Kuwait. This research is achieved using the qualitative methodology of analytic autoethnography. The theoretical framework is a feminist lens bridging the social construction of gender with the gendering of objects and feminist standpoint theory. The data comes from the experiences of creating three of my own pieces of artwork as well as the pieces themselves in tandem with historical, political, and cultural contexts. The analysis from this research is then bridged with feminist pedagogy in order to begin to develop an inclusive metal arts curriculum for women in Kuwait.

This dissertation is about new materialism as it relates to art education. It is a speculative inquiry that seeks to illuminate the interconnectivity of things by considering the ways in which things participate in generative practices of perceiving and making. To do so, the dissertation pioneers an arts-based methodology that allows for broad considerations about who and what can be considered an agent in the process of art making. In this inquiry, the researcher is an artist-participant with other more-than-human and human participants to construct an (im)material autohistoria-teoría, a revisionist interdisciplinary artwork inspired by the work of Anzaldúa. The term w/e is developed and discussed as new language for expanding upon Braidotti's posthumanist subjectivity. New theories called thing(k)ing (including found poetry) and (im)materiality are discussed as movements towards better understanding the contributions of the more-than-human in artmaking practices.

This study is concerned with the roles and relationships between artists-in-residence, community audiences, and program coordinators/art educators as they engage together in community arts programs. This study takes place at Project Row Houses (PRH), a community arts organization located in Houston, Texas and focuses on the artist-in-residence program, which commissions a group of national and international artists for a 6-month period to create art installations in relation to the community and its African-American heritage. This ethnographic case study is based on the activities and events surrounding the 2008 PRH exhibition, Round 29, Thunderbolt Special: The Great Electric Show and Dance, after Sam Lightnin’ Hopkins and employed qualitative data gathering methods of participant-observation, conducting semi-structured, open-ended, in-depth interviews, and through document collection, and contextual information. Observations were recorded through field notes, photographs, and video. Interviews were conducted with 3 artists-in-residence, 3 community audience members, and 3 program coordinators or staff members involved with the program, regarding their experiences at the site and experiences with each other. My analysis presents the roles of artist, community audience, and program coordinator/art educator through three sections on cultural work. Within these sections I discuss topics related to the power of voice, situatedness, and creativity, as …

This qualitative inquiry explores a community-based art partnership called the semester programs that took place between Artpace San Antonio and Louis W. Fox Academic and Technical High School from 2004 until 2006. This narrative inquiry used interviews with artists and former Fox Tech art students involved in our program, along with my teacher/ researcher reflections, to make meaning from the data. The artists involved in the semester programs were Gary Sweeney, Daniel Guerrero, David Jurist, and Ethel Shipton. Former students interviewed include Eloy McGarity, Rosa Leija, John Contreras, and Jennelle Gomez, while I, Maria Leake represent the voice of the art teacher. Our stories of experience were analyzed and connections between situated learning theory, creativity theories, community-based art education, and memory research were all recognized as being exhibited during our community partnership programs. There were seven patterns and themes that were noted as occurring within each semester program, as well as notable distinctions. The patterns and themes from the data analysis suggest that our community partnership reflected the following: learning and creative expression went beyond the individual; networks of support and communication were available to all participants; challenges were acknowledged; empathy between participants was an unintentional outcome; working together as …

This qualitative inquiry explored how art educators might broaden their views of place through critical encounters with art, local visual culture, and working with older artists. I combined place-based (PB) education and intergenerational (IG) learning as the focus of an art education curriculum writing initiative with in-service art educators within a museum setting to produce PBIG art education. This study engaged art educators in cooperative action research using a multi-modal approach, including identifying and interviewing local artists to construct new understandings about local place and art to share with students and community. I used critical reflection in our cooperative action research by troubling paradoxes in local visual culture, which formed views of place including Indigenous cultures. Using Deleuze's Logic of Sense (LOS) theories of sense and event, enabled concept development through embracing the paradoxes of this research as sense producing. LOS theory of duration complements IG learning by clarifying the contributions of place and time to memory and experience. Duration suggests that place locates the virtual past, which is actualized through memories--one of the shared experiences of IG learning. Rethinking IG relationships as a sharing of experience and memory while positioning place as a commonality, dismantles ageist notions by offering …

This two-part study included a content analysis of an AP art history text and a survey together with interviews with AP art history teachers that embraced both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies. The first phase of the study examined one of the more popular art history survey texts in the AP art history program, Gardner’s Art through the Ages, in terms of how inclusive it is in addressing issues of sexual orientation and, particularly, same-sex perspectives. In addition, the text was examined for evidence of sexual orientation ignored – particularly same-sex perspectives ignored and for heteronormative hegemonies. The second phase investigated the understandings and opinions of AP art history teachers toward the inclusion of sexual orientation and same-sex perspectives in their curriculums and classrooms. Recent recognition of gay, lesbian, and same-sex perspectives in the study of art history has challenged art educators and art historians to begin to consider opening up their curriculums and writings to include these perspectives. These ignored perspectives produce important understandings that enrich and deepen the discourse of art history. The inclusion of gay and lesbian content and same-sex perspectives to the study of AP art history, not only effectively serves the needs of AP art …

While literature in areas of constructivism learning theory, use of computer technology in education, and the implementation of project-based learning in the classroom have received widespread attention, there is no reported research that specifically examines the effectiveness of using a project-based learning model for computer technology instruction for pre-service teachers' programs in general, and in art education in particular. Thus, the research problem was to examine through pre- and post-test control-group experimental research design whether two different teaching methods, constructivism teaching approach (project-based learning) and traditional (step-by-step) teaching approach, result in significant differences in learning computer usage, the application of computer technical skills, design projects, and attitudes toward using of technology. The research was conducted at University of North Texas during the fall semester of 2004. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to collect the data. The quantitative data, collected from a pre-post test and pre and post questionnaire, was analyzed using a t-test. No significant difference was found between the groups as it relates to computer usage, one aspect of the application of computer technical skills (Photoshop usage), and attitudes towards technology. There was, however, a statistical difference between the groups in the use of the other aspect …

This collective case study explores the confluence of educational policy and professional praxis by examining the ways art teachers in one public school district make decisions about creating and implementing curricula. Through various interpretations of one district's formal and informal expectations of art teachers, some of the complexities of standards, instruction, and assessment policies in public schools are described. The research shares how art teachers are influenced by local policy expectations by examining how five K-12 art teacher participants negotiate their ideological beliefs and practical knowledge within the professional context of their local setting, and presents an art teacher decision-making framework to conceptualize the influences for praxis and to organize analysis. Case study data include in-depth interview sessions, teaching observations, and district policy artifacts. Themes emerge in the findings through coding processes and constructivist grounded theory analysis methods. The research describes how participants interpret and negotiate expectations, finding curricular freedom and participation in public exhibition as central policy factors. Contributing the perspectives of art teachers to the literature of policy implementation and fine arts education, the study finds that balancing autonomy and mandates are primary sites for negotiating praxis and that informal expectations for student exhibition contribute to a culture …

This is an enterpretivist cultural study on how the lively idea of assessment is enacted by the art teachers, students and administrators in Denton school art education, North Texas, the United States. This ethnographic research aims to extend understanding on assessment as vivid cultural and social dynamics that both reflects and enlivens varied and interconnected values promoted and shared among the people involved. Through a perspective of the culture of assessment, this study is expected to facilitate insights on art education as lived, purposeful experience bearing suggestions on a certain social environment and historical implications. Such insights as sought further illuminate specific understandings on art education in different cultural societies, such as China. From a Chinese native viewpoint, the researcher broadens her horizons on connection and independence important for informative performance of art education in the discourses of modern nation and schooling, as well as globalization. It is hoped that this study will interest other art educators, teachers, and researchers to make multiple and continuous efforts in further exploring the culture of assessment with cultural and historical consciousness and knowledge.

At least half of the art objects in the public trust are currently in need of conservation today. In consideration of this crisis, a posthuman version of art conservation curriculum is proposed to transgress current limitations of the field. Through applying Michel Foucault's genealogy and archaeology to art conservation and its education, Anthropocentric motivations undergirding conservation are revealed. Foucault's death meditation inspires my narrativization of a fire event that incites a re-visioning of my over 25 years of conservation and teaching experience. By re-contextualizing theorist Ted Aoki's works, art conservation curriculum becomes a reflective and affective site for reciprocal healing of self and other, incorporating the lives of conservation students and art objects. Reconsidering art conservation curriculum in light of Aokian notions of curriculum as plan and curriculum as lived, provokes the curricular potentialities of new materialism, along with quantum physics' entanglement, intra-agency and intra-activity for the field. Art conservation and its curriculum are radically reimagined as indwelling between humanist priorities of the Anthropocene and posthumanist possibilities towards more caring, ethical and sustainable futures for both human and nonhumans' coexistence on this planet.

This descriptive study uses a qualitative, content analysis to examine the middle school visual arts and core Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) to determine the potential common learning activities that can be aligned between the two. By performing an alignment of the potential common learning activities present in the middle school visual art TEKS and the middle school core TEKS, I demonstrate that there is a foundation for curriculum integration in the Texas middle school visual arts classroom.

This qualitative case study research examined how constructivist problem-based learning facilitated higher level thinking, increased interest in art, and affected attitude toward on-line courses in an undergraduate philosophical aesthetics and interpretation of art criticism course. The research conducted for this study suggests that constructivist problem-based learning does facilitate higher level thinking and increases student interest in art and in on-line classes. Active learning assignments, along with the constructivist collaborative class atmosphere, encouraged students to think more deeply about their personal values concerning art and to consider alternative views. Problem-based learning in this class acted as a scaffold to aid in understanding the material and then in applying the material to unique and real-life situations. Each subject came to the course with certain thinking skills and left with increased knowledge about art but also with increased critical thinking skills for critically examining and discussing art. Participants completed the course with more confidence in their critical thinking ability and in dealing with visual art images. Data was gathered from seven study participants in the form of highly-structured interviews, an early and final critical writing analysis, a major problem assignment and its reflection journal, a beginning survey, and two final surveys. The final …

One can argue that embracing technological models may produce students who are illiterate in the "proper" methods of communication. With rapid technological change, some fear traditions in their "original" form may be lost. Practices such as trying to recapture the artist's intent should be abandoned as a way of opening up literacy discourse to multiple narratives. Failing to critically explore the possibilities of emerging models of thinking, teaching, and learning in a technological culture can produce a loss equal to the loss of tradition. An a/r/tographer works toward a fluid practice between the domains of artist, researcher, and teacher in order to negotiate emerging forms of visual/tactile/auditory communication which include the body as a networked organism situated recursively within the larger structure of society. This study occurred during two separate semesters of an art education course for pre-service elementary teachers. Through interaction with hypermedia, social networking, installation art, and mash-ups, the teacher and students became artists, researchers, and teachers in a community of practice. A new form of teaching practice was envisioned that opens the possibility for both collective and individual understandings in the formation of curricula. A set of guiding principles was invented through practice as a way of …

In this investigation, a content analysis was made with eleven lexicographical sources and three basal reading series to determine if art and art-related words were present. The analysis was made with the use of two charts, in which each was divided into eight categories of word context. The Composite Chart contained 6,576 words found in six lexicons, five word lists and forty-two readers, and the Reader Chart contained 407 words found only in the readers. The analysis revealed: dominant categories and percentages, word and cumulative word frequencies, high and low frequency words, and the percentage of words found in the basal readers as compared to the lexicographical sources.