Palpable Pedagogy: Expressive Arts, Leadership, and Change in Social Justice Teacher Education (An Ethnographic/Auto-Ethnographic Study of the Classroom Culture of an Arts-Based Teacher Education Course)

Authors

Lucy Elizabeth Barbera, Antioch University - PhD Program in Leadership and Change

Images

Dr. Lucy Barbera is a graduate of the PhD Program in Leadership & Change at Antioch University

Outstanding ETD Scholarship Award, Ohio Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Association, March, 2010

Grandmother / Self-Portrait - artwork from this dissertation, which also includes video and audio file - see links below.

Keywords

Art education; Education; Higher education; Multicultural education; Teacher education; Teaching

Document Type

Dissertation

Publication Date

2009

Abstract

Palpable Pedagogy: Expressive Arts, Leadership, and Change in Social Justice TeacherEducation is an arts-informed ethnographic study of the pedagogy and culture engendered when the expressive arts are employed in social justice teacher education. Palpable Pedagogy is a qualitative study that examines the power of the expressive arts to identify, explore, and address issues of inequity in the context of a social justice teacher education course that I taught over three consecutive years. The literature in the field outlines the essential components for effective social justice teacher education (identity, reflection, and dialogue) and neatly explores them. However, with the exception of Art teacher education, where national learning standards require that cultural diversity be explored through the arts, little has been written about the utilization and power of the arts as a pedagogical tool in general teacher education for social justice. My objective in Palpable Pedagogy is to reveal the layers of felt meaning, transformational learning, and release of the imagination (Greene, 1995) for leadership and change that my students experienced in my social justice teacher education course, “Expressive Arts, Leadership, and Change.” The arts themselves provide a splendid methodological match for research of this kind. McNiff (1998) proposes that there is no better way to study the effects of the arts than through the arts themselves. Using an aesthetic approach in my ethnographic study, I employ participant observation, field notes, photography, videography, interviews, and student art process, and product as my data, creating a text/context of the phenomenologically understood life worlds of my students. A bricolage results, with the inclusion of my justice educator/artist self-study, situating me both emicly and eticly in the life world of my students and classroom. Readers will aesthetically experience data presented in the forms of student and researcher poetry, performance, painting, mask making, sculpture, and narrative, as a way of understanding and knowing. This study reveals the inherent potential of the expressive arts as a pedagogical tool to reclaim art as a necessary human behavior/ birthright (Dissanayake, 1992) to make meaning, galvanize learning, catalyze leadership, and inspire action—thus, creating a unique and palpable pedagogyfor social justice teacher education. This dissertation contains embedded images in jpg format. It also includes nine associated video files in avi format and two associated audio files in mp3 format. The electronic version of this dissertation is available in the open-access OhioLink ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/.

Recommended Citation

Barbera, L. E. (2009). Palpable Pedagogy: Expressive Arts, Leadership, and Change in Social Justice Teacher Education (An Ethnographic/Auto-Ethnographic Study of the Classroom Culture of an Arts-Based Teacher Education Course). https://aura.antioch.edu/etds/12