PAST PRESENTATIONS

PRESENTATION ABSTRACTS

Unraveling Expressive Arts for Healing: A Teaching Artist’s Autoethnography

Gabriela Acosta (VAPAE Teaching Artist; Ethnomusicology major, VAPAE minor)

This project is based on Gabriela’s experience assisting an expressive arts group for Veterans living unhoused; with mental health difficulties such as PTSD, anxiety, depression; and/or experiencing stigma. Gabriela approached this research through the frame of autoethnography, analyzing their own positionality and experiences. This project unravels the meaning of “expressive arts,” considers why it is not art therapy, contextualizes their experience as a teaching artist, and analyzes the role of teaching artistry in art healing spaces.

Relational Learning as a Path Towards Social Justice in Arts Education

Lindsay E. Lindberg (VAPAE Graduate Teaching Associate; PhD candidate, School of Education & Information Studies)

Countering traditional models of schooling that enforce static learning and bodily compliance, this talk presents ways that dance educators design for relational practices that support students to perceive and engage with the world in critical and creative ways. Using dance as an analytic lens, Choreographic Interviews provide a space to imagine a schooling system in which movement is central to building more just learning environments for students and teachers.

Onto-epistemic Development of Culturally Sustaining Teaching Artists in a Multigenerational Learning Community

Kevin M. Kane (VAPAE Director) & Lindsey T. Kunisaki (VAPAE Research & Evaluation Specialist)

With many teaching artists (i.e. artists who teach) working with learners in marginalized communities, cultural competence is a professional responsibility for those entering the field. This qualitative case study investigates how teaching in a multigenerational, culturally sustaining setting informs early-career teaching artists’ onto-epistemic beliefs about teaching, learning, and community engagement. Findings show that onto-epistemic beliefs in these areas emerged dynamically as critical-constructivist, pluralist, and dialectical critical realist stances. Implications for practice and research on the preparation of culturally sustaining teaching artists are offered.