List of publications related to a/r/tography from the year 2015: Journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, and theses Please note that these works mention or use a/r/tography and not all of them focus on a/r/tography explicitly. LU: JUN 25, 2023
Barbara, A., & Bickel, B. A. (2008). Living the divine spiritually and politically: Art ritual and performative/pedagogy in women’s multi-faith leadership [Doctoral dissertation, The University of British Columbia]. https://doi.org/10.14288/1.0054657
Abstract
In a world of increasing religious/political tensions and conflicts this study asks, what is the transformative significance of an arts and ritual-based approach to developing and encouraging women’s spiritual and multi-faith leadership? To counter destructive worldviews and practices that have divided people historically, politically, personally and sacredly, the study reinforces the political and spiritual value of women spiritual and multi-faith leaders creating and holding sacred space for truth making and world making. An a/r/tographic and mindful inquiry was engaged to assist self and group reflection within a group of women committed to multi-faith education and leadership in their communities. The objectives of the study were: 1) to explore through collaboration, ritual and art making processes the women’s experience of knowing and not knowing, 2) to articulate a curriculum for multi-faith consciousness raising, and 3) to develop a pedagogy and methodology that can serve as a catalyst for individual and societal change and transformation. The co-participants/co-inquirers (including the lead researcher as a member of the group) are fourteen women, who practice within eleven different religions and/or spiritual backgrounds, and who are part of a volunteer planning team that organizes an annual women’s multi-faith conference (Women’s Spirituality Celebration) in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The aesthetic/ritual structure of the labyrinth served as a cross-cultural multi-faith symbol in guiding the dissertation, which includes three art installations and four documentary DVDs of the process and art. New understandings found in the study include: 1) the ethical sanctuary that a/r/tography as ritual enables for personal and collective change to take place within, 2) the addition of synecdoche to the renderings of a/r/tography, assisting a multi-dimensional spiral movement towards a whole a/r/tographic practice, 3) a lived and radically relational curriculum of philetics within loving community that drew forth the women’s erotic life force energy and enhanced the women’s ability to remember the power of the feminine aspect of the Divine, and 4) the decolonization of the Divine, art and education, which took place as a pedagogy of wholeness unfolded, requiring a dialectic relationship between restorative and transformative learning.
Gouzouasis, P., Henrey, J., & Belliveau, G. (2008). Turning points: A transitional story of grade seven music students’ participation in high school band programmes. Music Education Research, 10(1), 75–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/14613800701871397
Abstract
As a framework for our study, a broad set of themes related to the retention of students in music programmes are presented to enhance our understanding of how to retain band students. Data were collected from grade seven students comprising four focus groups. We used ethnodrama, an arts-based educational research approach, to represent results as a research script. We found that assumptions made in previous research have little in common with what grade seven and eight students feel. Life experiences may strongly impact their decisions, band students like music and find it ‘fun’, and peers define band students as smart, successful, and strong individuals. The impact of the band teacher is minimal. Finally, students who choose not to continue in band often made the choice to avoid music rather than a choice to take other options.
Minge, J. M. (2008). Cob building: Movements and moments of survival [Doctoral dissertation, University of South Florida]. https://www.proquest.com/docview/304459789?accountid=14656&pq-origsite=summon
Abstract
Cob, as an arts-based research process, creates movements and moments of survival. Survival is an ideological construction and an actual, local practice. Survival is also about desiring and fulfilling arts-based desires to work with the land through academic and material scavenging. Cob creates strategies for surviving, for working with our respective environments wisely. Cob building teaches people how to negotiate the natural economy and their relationships to labor and each other through an artistic and intimate practice. From a feminist poststructural lens, survival happens on the local level, between and with people. Cob building creates knowledge through creative, kinesthetic, and collaborative engagement. As a feminist poststructuralist, arts-based research allows me to examine local action and interaction among people, positionalities, and competing differences. Rather than appeasing the modern impulse to objectify and rationalize an end-point or an object-oriented view of the production of art, feminist poststructural theory works to problematize the end-point. Through cob building, a rich, arts-based process, I call into question the modern impulse to find Truth and ask that we be aware of developing new oppressions when working toward equity and justice. Cob building teaches people how to engage together within the form of artistic creation. Cob is an arts-based research process that includes the land as an integral part of its canvas. In order to articulate, uncover, and engage the claim that, as an arts-based process, cob creates movements and moments of survival, I use the arts-based process, a/r/tography. This a/r/tographical text does not offer an end point but works to recreate moments and movements of cob building as an arts-based research project. A/r/tography helps to layer the movements of arts-based survival within cob building and this text. Throughout this work, the arts-based process of cob building is the overlying metaphor for the construction of the structure of this text. As the chapters move forward, the structure builds up.
Ortiz, C. (2008). A self-exploration of the relationship between art teaching and artistic practice [Doctoral dissertation, University of Houston]. https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/self-exploration-relationship-between-art/docview/304624558/se-2?accountid=14656
Abstract
Through the introduction of the researcher’s lived experiences as a high school art teacher, some issues became visible: self-questioning of her ability as an effective art teacher; teaching topics with little or no knowledge; limited opportunities to gain knowledge; and lacking of energy or time to create personal art works. Uncovering these issues prompted the researcher to look back on her experiences and reflect on the changes that occurred. This qualitative study employs self-study to examine the researcher’s professional practices as a teacher and an artist and how these experiences affect her actions as a high school art teacher. The related topics that are explored include teacher knowledge (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999), art making as knowledge (Eisner, 2002, 2004), teacher practice (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999; Eisner, 2004), the impact of professional development (Hutchens & Pankratz, 2000), on teacher identity (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999; Beijaard et al., 2004; Cohen-Evron, 2002) and artist identity. The qualitative research method, narrative inquiry (Connelly & Clandinin, 2000; Elbaz-Luwisch, 2005) and arts-based research methodology, a/r/tography (Irwin, 2005) are used to conduct this self-study. Narrative inquiry is used as a method to weave together the researcher’s professional and personal stories while a/r/tography highlights experiences she encountered through creating artworks. A/r/tography is utilized as a means of bringing to light the identities of artist, teacher and researcher in their ongoing, contiguous relations. By using critical reflective practices, this allows the researcher to have an in-depth understanding of her reactions to experiences that occurred throughout her practice as a teacher. This study allows the researcher to understand her dual identity in the art education profession and supports her to continue to critically reflect (LaBoskey, 2004) upon her practice as a teacher and an artist. This study also provides a scholarly account for other art educators as they examine the relationship between their teacher and artist identities, a matter of critical importance to the art education enterprise.
Pente, P. V. (2008). Being at the edge of landscape: Sense of place and pedagogy [Doctoral dissertation, The University of British Columbia]. https://doi.org/10.14288/1.0055232
Abstract
This study is an experiment in landscape art where artists put large pieces of fabric in personally significant places to be marked by the land. Landscape art is a site of power that can challenge embedded assumptions regarding national identity within tensions among local, national, and global scales. This research ruptures the Canadian myth of wilderness nation through the creation of an alternative landscape art that is informed by a theoretical discourse on the threshold as a site of difference and of learning. Inspired by the creative processes of the participating artists, Peter von Tiesenhausen, Pat Beaton, and Robert Dmytruk, I consider pedagogical implications for art education when pedagogy is structured on the powerful premise that learning is an uncertain, relational, and continual process. Using my understanding of the methodology of a/r/tography, I create and poetically analyze art that offers opportunities for personal reflection into the nature of transformative educational practices. This form of arts-based research is influenced by the notion of assemblage, as presented by Deleuze and Guattari (1984), as well as practices of narrative, action research, and autoethnography, all of which echo the research method of currere (Pinar & Grumet, 1976). Within a/r/tography, image and text are creatively juxtaposed to inspire new understandings about the pedagogical thresholds among my roles of artist, researcher, and teacher. Arguing that social change must begin from a personal awareness of one’s tacit values, I posit that a/r/tography can be an educational opening into reflection of such values due to the embodied, personal nature of art-making. Through a philosophical discussion of subjectivity and community following the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacque Derrida, I take the participants’ and my local, significant places as sites from which to reverse the binary of landscape and artist, following an artistic version of deconstruction. From this a/r/tographical inquiry into elements of the land that serve as structural and heuristic supports, I critique the neoliberal subject position within nationalism, education, and landscape art. I draw on understandings of identity as theorized and performed from the premise that it, like learning, is an unpredictable, relational activity of emergence that is alway slocated on the threshold of difference between one person and another. Thus, I examine the educational, ontological, and social importance of what it means to exist within community in the land. In doing so, I raise questions regarding the normative structures of our educational institutions and suggest that social transformation could begin through art practices as a creative form of pedagogy.
Wiebe, P. S. (2008). What I meant to say about love : A poetic inquiry of un/authorized autobiography [Doctoral dissertation, The University of British Columbia]. https://doi.org/10.14288/1.0066429
Abstract
What I Meant to Say about Love is an ever-differing interstitial text which has left open spaces for artists, researchers, and teachers, called a/r/tographers, to contest the curriculum and pedagogy of reduction and pragmatic means-ends orientations that monopolize schools. This text wanders, meanders, and digresses to places where, through poetic inquiry, the notion that there is no pedagogy without love can be explored. In a broad understanding of midrash, as it is performed poetically, three years of an English teacher’s life are recorded fictionally. James, the main character, discovers that love is a physically potent force that structures and deconstructs, just as it connects and disconnects. His story considers how the professional emphasis in education compartmentalizes and separates the inner life from the outer life. In love with life, with learning, and with others, the James of this story writes poetry to acknowledge love’s power, and to restore its credibility in the classroom—that the lovers’ discourse might be trusted again. This un/authorized autobiography ruptures the predictable stories of what it means to be a successful teacher by considering one teacher’s journey as a limit case, examining phenomenologically how he connects his life of love and poetry to his classroom practice and how his students respond to his poetically charged way of being. My hope is that it might be possible to offer here, in this place, one poet’s understanding and celebration of difference in the world. Recognizing the relationship between what is original and what is shifting, I hope to keep complexity and diversity alive, to resist answers, to continue to converse and traverse and transgress. Thus, with careful attention to poetry as a way of knowing and unknowing, and by attending to the paradox, humour, and irony in one poet’s lived experiences, both public professings and inner confessings, as they are understood in relations of difference, or as they are understood in relations of decomposition and fertility, it is possible to consider how powerful emotive experiences, oftentimes relegated to the personal and therefore insignificant, can and do have profound transformational effects on praxis.
Yusef, D. F. (2008). The Body as a universal gateway : Embodied spirituality [Doctoral dissertation, The University of Manchester]. https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/body-as-universal-gateway-embodied-spirituality/docview/1774213738/se-2?accountid=14656
Abstract
The main aims of the research examine the journey of spiritual embodiment, tracking the body’s phenomenon, outlined in the brain, emotions, visions, histories, illness, experiences of alternate realities and connections between the self and other. Methodologies used encompass the vision of the bricoleur, where an intense gaze concentrates at personal lived experience, conversations with nine body-oriented practitioners and a writing-collaboration. The resulting bricolage is a pentimento (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005) of these experiences seen as gateways of: autoethnography, heuristic inquiry, transpersonal methodologies and the creative exploration of A/r/tography. Findings become Illuminations, drawn from the Conversations in great part and partly from the My Story and Collaboration. The ‘findings’ are illuminations bringing to the surface, even if ambiguously, lights of understanding, lightening darkness and making visible the invisible. The Conclusions are further Illuminations, distilling into four major realities of experience socially, personally, physically and spiritually, showing the connection between them and the problems of disconnection. They are the Macrocosm and the Global, looking at the universal principle, which brings the therapeutic relationship within the global community; the Individual and Relationship, looking at the connectivity between human beings underpinned by aeons of history and infinite memory in quantum mechanics (Schwartz, 2000); Research and Psychotherapy, reflecting on our struggle to evolve and be ‘the person of tomorrow’ as Rogers (1987) predicted; the Microcosm and The Personal Journey, a personal pilgrimage exploring connections between lived experiences, ancestral histories and connections within the body’s tissues, speaking through illness and alternate realities. This translates into the psychotherapist who appreciates the ethical, connectivity and transpersonal aspects of living and reflecting that, in the body at a cellular level.