Faculty of Education - Theses

Permanent URI for this collection

http://hdl.handle.net/11343/162

Filters

2017 2
1 1
Reset filters

Settings
Statistics
Citations
Start date: 2017 × End date: 2017 × Type: PhD thesis × Subject: art education ×

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Contained art experiences for young people, staff and an a/r/tographer in Nicaragua: implications for art education and wellbeing
    Nixon, Margaret ( 2017)
    Contained Art Experiences (CAE) was developed as an art practice in response to my work with Si a La Vida (SALV), a small Non-Governmental Organisation that supports young people and families who have experienced trauma through poverty, violence and neglect in Nicaragua, Central America. Within this cultural setting, I explored CAE as a new quality art practice with the aim of enriching participants’ capacities of awareness of self and other, to assist them in strengthening relationships that contribute to resilience and wellbeing and in responding more positively to their cultural reality. CAE was developed through my prior experience, blending three constructs: attachment theory and attuned relationships; art making and wellbeing; and culture, art practice and recovery from trauma. CAE invited participants to consider and express their experiences and feelings through their art making within an environment where they were valued and where they sensed the presence of an attuned relationship. My exploration of CAE was a qualitative investigation, guided by a/r/tography and case study methodologies that interacted together to create and inform a trans-methodological frame for the study. This frame allowed me to gather data through observations, artefacts and interviews resulting from the participation of 40 young people and two staff in CAE over a five-week period at SALV. Data gathered from reflection and artefacts during my time in Nicaragua recognised my participation in CAE as a/r/tographer. I analysed the data through a process of sifting and sorting that allowed a deeper and refined analysis, and brought a greater clarity to the emerging themes of participation, expression and new thinking. Weaving text and the creative work, The Altar, I responded to these themes. The Altar is an installation consisting of four elements set in a scene of a Catholic altar, with my choice of materials, techniques, and subjects informed by my interaction with the cultural context of Nicaragua. This text/creative response identified that participation in CAE allowed individual expression of experiences and feelings, and contributed to changed thinking and behaviour in young people, staff and a/r/tographer. Further, CAE contributed to their sense of value and the development of pro-social behaviours for young people. CAE informed teacher professional practice and their relationship with students, and provided a reflective practice for me, as a/r/tographer, that informed my relationship with participants and contributed to the process of implementing CAE. This is a small-scale study, however, I suggest that participation in CAE has implications for art and wellbeing as a new addition to quality art practices in a broader setting in education. CAE may provide a model of teacher professional learning and teacher reflective practice, and offer a relationship-centred student wellbeing approach that may support students who have experienced trauma.
  • Item
    No Preview Available
    An A/R/Tist in Wonderland: exploring identity, creativity and digital portfolios as A/R/Tographer
    Coleman, Kathryn Sara ( 2017)
    I seek to understand the role that personalised and rhizomatic learning plays in the development of artist identity and creative practice in secondary art education as a/r/tographer. Informed by theorists in critical, social and visual cultures in art education, I explore how learning in and through a personalised portfolio as both process and product, affects creativity and identity as artist through learning to see and notice the common threads in practice over time. I examine this through the lenses of a/r/tography, critical auto-ethnography and ethnographic video in a storied pedagogy, here on site. Situated within a/r/tographic inquiry and embodied research, this study addresses rhizomatic learning in art education and in arts based educational research and literature, specifically how important an understanding of creativity and creative practice are for students as art makers and responders to art, as makers, historians, theorists and critics. While art and art education are commonly discussed as creative, promoted as important aspects of cultural thinking, values collaboration, creativity and problem solving in schools, few studies have designed a personalised learning space to inform these practices and explore them from the artist-researcher-teacher viewpoint. I am an artist-researcher-teacher, I adopt this relational approach to this study, informed by a/r/tography, digital pedagogy, critical auto-ethnography and arts based educational research. This rhizomatic, reflective and relational methodology includes the researcher as participant, performing the research and designing learning through a personalised narrative. To include the artist voice as authoritative, digital ethnographic interviews are included as a/r/tefacts in the study design. As a/r/tographer art making, narrative and learning design are an important component of the meaning making process for pedagogy. Created as a bricolage of creativity, this study is rendered in the excess of art, research and teaching in the digital. It is a woven and intertwined personalised learning design, curated as a digital currere to invite creative affect through engagement with relational and rhizomatic learning and construct a new narrative for art education: A narrative of practice based pedagogies through a turn toward embodied praxis, a turn toward portfolio pedagogies, a turn toward a storied personalised curriculum and a turn to the digital for self discovery and creativity.