The issue of alternative certification teacher training has greatly affected art education over three decades. As a result of training through alternative certification, many art educators enter the profession unprepared and unable to cope with the realities of teaching. This study attempts to understand and represent the experiences and struggles of four alternatively certified art teachers, including myself. By reading these stories, others within the education community can empathize with and provide support for struggling novice teachers. This creative thesis uses a graphic novel format to represent participants' stories. By combining text and imagery, the graphic novel format provides different meanings, interpretations, and insights into the teachers' lives. This medium offered a unique and rich perspective on the stories of what it is like being an alternatively certified art teacher.

As a doctoral student, I was asked to teach a course based on emerging technologies and postmodern methods of inquiry in the field of art education. The course was titled Issues and Applications of Technology in Art Education and I developed a method of inquiry called animated autoethnography for pre-service art educators while teaching this course. Through this dissertation, I describe, analyze, interrogate, value, contextualize, reflect on, and artistically react to the autoethnographic animated processes of five pre-service art educators who were enrolled in the course. I interviewed the five participants before and after the creation of their animated autoethnographies and incorporated actor-network theory within the theoretical analysis to study how the insights of my students’ autoethnographies related to my own animations and life narratives. The study also examines animated autoethnography as a method of inquiry that may develop or enhance future teaching practices and encourage empathic connections through researching the self. These selected students created animations that accessed significant life moments, personal struggles, and triumphs, and they exhibited unique representations of self. Pre-service art educators can use self-research to create narrative-based short animations and also use socio-emotional learning to encourage the development of empathy within the classroom. I show …

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.

This research explores the relationship between narrative, empathy and anxiety in art museum education. The study begins from my personal experience with anxiety and is methodologically rooted in narrative inquiry and friendship as method. In this study, I propose a creative method of narrative postcard writing called (fe)mail – rooted in a feminist ethic of care that seeks to understand and empathize with the experience of others through correspondence. This research asks relevant questions about the future of art museum programming for mental illness and the act of writing (fe)mail as a reflective practice for academics and educators in the field of social science. In my narrative analysis of the program and the data, I also problematizes my role as researcher, educator and friend throughout the study by considering my own biases, expectations and personal educator agenda. The study is divided into two parts. The first comprises correspondence and analysis of (fe)mail between myself and my best friend/co-participant, Atleigh. In Part I, I conduct a narrative analysis of the (fe)mail data produced between us in order to answer the following questions: What qualities of (fe)mail will appear in the exchange? Can (fe)mail be used as a tool for self-care during …

Historical dress as a museum theater and research process encompasses material, technological, and cultural experiences from the past in the present. This research examines how intimate experiences with heritage materials, processes, and environments may impact development of educator pedagogy. Historical attractions in the US draw visitors due in part to providing guests with context for the objects and built environments displayed. New Materialist theory offers insights into how inanimate objects and environments "teach" human and non-human entities in their own right. Using a New Materialist lens, I observed, interviewed, and conducted participant observations through a novel research methodology, intra-active narrative inquiry, with costumed museum educators to better discern how relations between humans and historical materials intra-act as embodied experiences of object knowledge in museum pedagogy.

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.

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 …