The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate self-efficacy as a potential mediator in the relationship between the amount of time students spent during high school participating in the arts and their current science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) motivation levels. The study participants (N = 68) were between the ages of…

How might teacher educators build a reflective and supportive community of practice with pre-service teachers? How might a visual (intermedia) journaling practice support critical and reflective thinking? How might an arts-based intermedia approach to analysis inform teacher educator pedagogical methods? These questions evolved and emerged…

Amid a long period of deskilling in art school curricula, craft has been denigrated as inferior to art and confining for artists, but can craft liberate imagination? The purpose of this study was to understand the relationship between an adult learner's self-perceived capacity for imaginative expression in representational drawing and the…

This arts-based educational research dissertation is grounded in my emergent practices of photography and understandings about its material medium of photobook through visual reading and small book making. With the four chapters and one separate and accompanying handmade photobook titled "Missing Mountain," I seek to trace, sort out,…

Esports has been adopted by high schools across the country and around the world as a school-based opportunity for students to engage in competitive video gaming. Growth of esports in secondary schools has been informed independently by student and industry interests, leaving school administrators little understanding surrounding the motives and…

High-stakes statewide testing, low levels of knowledge surrounding the benefits of arts integration, and fiscal challenges have led to schools cutting arts programs in servitude toward higher test scores. This phenomenon has affected the existence and level of arts integration present in non-arts courses. The purpose of this dissertation was to…

This phenomenological study examined how students at a large, urban community college experienced being an artist, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also investigated the ways these students made meaning of their arts experiences. The research design was based upon the model outlined in "Interpretative Phenomenological…

Art Appreciation is often a course that undergraduate students take to meet their general education requirements. However, many students have little interest or value of art due to a lack of previous art experiences and often choose the course because they feel it will be relatively easy. This qualitative, naturalistic inquiry focused on students'…

Arts entrepreneurship educational efforts within U.S. university music departments vary between institutions. Music history and theory course sequences and content remain relatively unchanged over the decades. Set against this, arts entrepreneurship is still in its conceptual phase as administrators and educators navigate elusive definitions and…

This year long project was designed to provide children in the foster care and juvenile justice systems with a way to express themselves through art created under the constraints of institutional boundaries. Youth in a Central Texas residential treatment center (RTC) were provided with opportunities and materials to express themselves through…

This study is a mixed-methods, neopragmatist examination of the systems currently being practiced in creative professional companies and the consequential changes in Higher Education Media Arts curricula, supporting a kind of meta-disciplinary pedagogy emerging from the pressures of content and device convergence in industry. The research…

This qualitative exploratory single case study was written to explore teachers', principals', therapists', counselors', behaviorists', and parents' perceptions/understanding of the influence of experiential expressive creative art on special education student behaviors. Thus this study will advance scientific knowledge related to stakeholders'…

This dissertation, using a heuristic self-search inquiry (HSSI), provides a research vehicle for creative personal exploration seeking insight into the process of self-transformation with the intention of ultimately targeting the catalyst for life transformation. The study seeks to answer the research question: How does the use of drawings in an…

The problem was that it was also not known how extracurricular activities, such as athletics-based, art-based, and academic-based activities correspond to specific educational benefits for high school students with mild and moderate disabilities attending a single public school in the United States. To address the problem, the researcher used a…

The purpose of the study was to investigate how student affairs graduate students make meaning of their prior significant experiences or professional development activities related to diversity, social justice, and inclusion (DSJI). The study examined how participants describe a significant experience related to DSJI; how participants believe that…