Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Arts Administration, Education and Policy

As a neurodiverse artist working in dialogue with Kurt Cobain's and Lee Lozano's journals, my dissertation uses critical disability studies to imagine neurologically queer or “neuroqueer” bodies as rhetorical sites of knowledge production, coping and responding to negative social discourses and creating new narratives. Unintended for public consumption, journaling is a private activity, and a unique window on artistic process through encounters with the everyday, narrative reflection, story, poetry, sketches, grocery lists and rants that seep and leak into thoughtful reflections about the world and one's relationship to it. Occurring outside of neurotypical expectations of sociality, journaling creates space to dismantle oppressive social requirements, assisting those who engage differently to feel agential in their learning and being in the world. Neurological differences such as AD(H)D impact all aspects of lived experience. Those living with neurological “queerness” are often diminished as rhetors, through misunderstood social performances, undesirable behaviors, and applied narratives reenforced by negative medical model messaging. Journaling and artmaking reinstate rhetorical power through positioning the neuroqueer as an active subject. Strange impulses and repetitive obsessions, hypersensitivities, and non-normative social performances contain rich information which informs methodological approaches to research. More concerned with what can be learned through AD(H)D bodies as they engage in the process of artmaking, the focus of this research is not to define AD(H)D as an outcome, but instead as a rich method of investigation. Engaging in critical conversations surrounding the disruption of normal, the relationship between environment and disAbility, neurological queerness, and neuroqueer communication, this research aims to reshape perceptions of neuroqueer students, expanding access for all students in art classrooms. As we consider art spaces to increa (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: JT Eisenhauer Richardson (Advisor); Jack Richardson (Committee Member); Richard Fletcher (Committee Member); Shari Savage (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Education; Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Arts Administration, Education and Policy

Matter and materiality are integral to the artmaking process, but research into materiality in this realm has been largely unexplored. Instead, discussions and explorations of artmaking practice are articulated with the assumption that the artist is the primary active agent. This dissertation interrogates how artmaking and philosophical inquiry can expand current understandings of the concepts of matter, material, and materiality in artmaking. This study looks to the philosophies of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and their reaction to the pervasiveness of Cartesian dualism in Western and their contributions to notions of subjectivity, Being, being-in-the-world, embodiment, and perception, and these ideas form the basis from which this study develops. New materialist thought offers a significant contribution to the discussion of materiality and artmaking practice enacted through this study. This dissertation is expanded through an engagement with the new materialist theories of the feminist philosopher and theoretical physicist Karen Barad. Particularly, Barad's concept of entanglements as they pertain to her theory of agential realism and her notion of onto-epistemology, or knowing in being, inform the research process in this dissertation. Moving away from merely reflexive accounts that privilege the artist and researcher as the prime subject in artmaking, this study instead embraces a diffractive methodology. This methodological direction is inspired by Donna Haraway and developed by Karen Barad and entails reading insights through one another to generate and attend to the differences and interferences enabled. By diffracting the theories that undergird this research through artmaking practice and philosophical inquiry, differences and new understandings are generated. In this study, artmaking practice and philosophical inquiry serve as methods through which insights on the role of matter, material, and materiality in artmaking practice develop. Attending to the insi (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jennifer Richardson (Advisor) Subjects: Art Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, Art Education

This dissertation is a study and philosophical investigation of new materialist notions of agency, being, and becoming in young children's playful artmaking. Traditional representative epistemologies of play and artmaking are considered and critiqued in order address the removal of art making from education, art education, and early childhood education. New materialist understandings of relational, intra-active knowing and being are addressed in order to reclaim artmaking's pedagogical possibility. In this study I utilize a new materialist and ontological framework in order to examine and compare the philosophical work of Martin Heidegger and feminist theory of Karen Barad. Here, notions of subjectivity, agency, and relational being and becoming are examined in order to situate the material in play and artmaking. These new materialist notions are discussed in relation to the notion of play, as understood by selected western continental philosophers and theorists, and artmaking, as understood within the fields of art education and early childhood education. Finally, this study positions material, situated ethnographic and video data against reading theory in order to create a space where post-qualitative data methods align to address theoretical concerns of the new materialist turn. Multiple data collection methods and diffractive approaches of analysis, such as reading the data through other data and through theory, were used in order to complicate humanist, interpretivist methods.

Committee: Sydney Walker (Advisor) Subjects: Art Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Art Education

This study was designed with a desire to learn what happens when student artists step away from the traditional practice of self-expression and become facilitators of communication and catalysts of change in communities. How does such an experience influence their civic learning and what new pedagogical insights can be gained for fostering engaged citizen artists? This arts-based action research study was conducted through the vehicle of a newly designed community engaged arts course called the Citizen Artist Dine and Dialogue Initiative at Ohio State University. The course involved an intensive partnership between undergraduate students in the arts and youth artists from a local community arts organization called Transit Arts. Our process involved hosting a community breakfast dialogue series where the insights gained allowed us to create a culminating site-specific final project that was responsive to community concerns. All of this was driven by an interest in exploring the intersecting practices of arts and dialogue in civic engagement efforts. The conceptual framework for this study was informed by critical dialogue scholars Mikhail Bakhtin and Paulo Freire, as well as art historian Grant Kester who conceived the dialogical aesthetic. It also relied upon feminist scholars Nel Noddings, Carol Gilligan, and Megan Boler, who assert the ethic of care, a theoretical concept often cited in the growing body of civic engagement and civic learning scholarship that this study also references. In part, this study was a response to the numerous university arts educators and scholars in the broader field of education who have been calling for changes in arts education. There is a growing demand for students to be given a broader vision for a life in the arts so that they may be properly armed to take on the role of bridge builders and catalysts of change in communities. Findings from this study revealed that the lack of prior civic learning that is common for many st (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Karen Hutzel (Advisor); Sydney Walker (Committee Member); Valerie Kinloch (Committee Member); Patty Bode (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2012, Art Education

The primary question that framed this study was “How can social consciousness and the development of social responsibility grow through the meaning-making processes of collaboration and artmaking?” This source of inquiry was investigated through the practices of arts-based service-learning and participatory action research and was grounded in social interdependence theory. As an artist, teacher and researcher, the author set out to better understand how the processes of collaboration and artmaking could aid in the growth of social consciousness and the development of social responsibility. Working in cooperative learning groups, students from The Ohio State University and Graham Expeditionary Middle School collaboratively created digital art in a joined community space. Through investigations of the big ideas of community and identity, participants worked cooperatively to create meaning in the processes of artmaking and reflection. The results of this study provide a discourse that uncovers many important issues relevant to social consciousness and social responsibility, the practices of service-learning and participatory action research and the theory of social interdependence. It also raises several questions that will inspire numerous new inquiries that continue this reflexive spiral of meaning-making.

Committee: Karen Hutzel PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Christine Ballengee-Morris PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Vesta Daniel PhD (Committee Member); Sydney Walker PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2010, Art Education

The purpose of this dissertation study is to conduct an art-based, community action research study as a means (1) to support the recovery process of domestic violence survivors; (2) to produce social capital among members of the community to initiate civic discussions on the consequences of domestic violence; and (3) to investigate its implications for cultural policy as the outcomes of this study highlight the unique role of the arts in making a difference in people's lives and communities. The art works produced by the workshop participants of this study (i.e., domestic violence survivors) were exhibited in a professional gallery as a form of visual narrative that speaks for their wounded past and difficult journeys. The collected data strongly indicates that art can be an exceptionally powerful tool for communication and healing, when words and discussions fall short. Overall, this research investigates the instrumental functions of the arts as a means to produce social capital for personal well-being, social support, and social justice. The study was framed within action research methodology and the triangulation model in data sources, research methods, and theoretical lenses, while both quantitative and qualitative techniques were employed. The collected data were analyzed at three different levels: (1) Personal level (i.e., the art workshop participants: n=16), (2) Organizational level (i.e., the staff of the transitional housing facility and the gallery: n=6), and (3) Community level (i.e., the general audience who came to the exhibit: n=74).

Committee: Margaret Wyszomirski (Advisor); Karen Hutzel (Committee Co-Chair); Patricia Stuhr (Committee Member); Mo-Yee Lee (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Education

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2010, Art Education

Teachers in any subject must sift through an enormous amount of material, deciding what content is the most important for their limited amount of instructional time. As an art education student I was able to observe the practices of numerous art teachers and the choices they made concerning the content of their curriculum. I found that art teachers often placed differing values on the teaching of artistic skills, techniques and knowledge of media (object-making), and the teaching of meaningful exploration of ideas through artmaking and interpretation (meaning-making). A systematic review of the literature from the last ten years of Art Education, Visual Arts Research, and Studies in Art Education revealed this divide as prevalent in art education theory, with much greater value placed on meaning-making. I believe dichotomous thinking such as this reflects a wider philosophical divide in Western thought: that of body versus mind. However, an understanding of the mind as inherently embodied offers art educators a relatively unexplored theoretical paradigm for better understanding the relationship between object-making and meaning-making. Furthermore, an understanding of how the embodied mind develops an underlying tacit knowledge as it interacts with the world could have immense implications for the manner in which we teach art. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to establish a theoretical framework for the future research of K-12 art curricula. From this newly conceptualized paradigm, art education theorists can begin developing a stronger understanding of the intrinsically intertwined nature of the physical and the conceptual in art, and how this synthesis can be incorporated in art education pedagogy.

Committee: Candace J. Stout PhD (Advisor); Clayton B. Funk PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, Art Education

This study unmasks Chinese Dixi mask makers, who have been masked in Chinese history for centuries. Instead of writing their history, this study tells their mental stories. Instead of understanding them through interview, this study assumes an apprentice's role to learn a mask maker's way of thinking and his community's worldview. This apprenticeship (situated learning) is adopted as an alternative research method to the individual-centered and lab-environed methodology commonly found in the science laboratory. Thus, it sheds new light on the understanding of artistic cognition. Mask maker's cognition is considered as imaginative cognition that materializes divine images socially constructed by the mask ritual community. While divine images belong to the immaterial realm, but mask making is material production, how do mask makers translate these mental images into concrete masks? Where do they obtain mask symbols? And, how can this mental representation be taught and acquired? Answers to these questions might help art educators to bestow students with cognitive tools to foster their imagination and creativity. The apprenticeship in mask making is further accentuated by the analysis of acquiring mask-making tools. What mask making tools are to the mask ritual community, technology is to modern society. Vygotsky's theory of psychological tools and neo-Vygotskians' situated cognition and situated learning theories are incorporated into the construction of tool acquisition theory, which attempts to develop a psychological approach to technology education. The electronic version of this dissertation is utilized to demonstrate how technology can be integrated into learning and research. It is also essential to this study's theoretical framework, as tools and media facilitate, and situate, cognition. It is through the electronic version of this dissertation that the Dixi mask performance can be globally distributed. Such a global presentation has been the mask performers' (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Arthur Efland (Advisor) Subjects: Education, Art