Artist, art-educator and reflective inquiry : a phenomenological research that investigates creative and pedagogical experiences

This thesis is based on the assumption that there are significant relationships between my art making process and my art teaching practice. While I am able to implicitly incorporate my feelings and intuition as subjective experiences within my holistic sense of my "self", I am using the systematic and disciplined process of reflective inquiry to make the relationships explicit--that is, to document them, describe them, and make them consciously available for communication and analysis by me and by readers of the thesis. Through self-reflection, I explore how my inner, private meanings are manifested in my outer, public practices as an artist and as a teacher, and see how they can be a resource for other art educators. In presenting my research I adopted David Kolb's model of experiential learning as a frame that I applied to my experiences as an artist and as a teacher. Through description of my art-making practices and reflective introspection, I integrated practical and theoretical orientations within myself as an artist. In the art classroom, I adopted participant observation and action research strategies for my research. The data from the studio was in the form of a journal/diary, along with the actual art products. I have included photographs to show to the reader some of the images I produced. My data from the classroom was in the form of audio tapes, a video tape, log/reflection/diary, and photographs of student's art-work. I then used methods of qualitative research to analyse the data and to discern the relationships that emerged from both collections of data. For me teaching is a life-long process of learning, just as in the creative process there must be a constant evolution. In order for the art-educator to evolve, he/she has to practice creative activity. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)