Date of Award

4-8-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Selected Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) in Educational Leadership for Diverse Learning Communities

Department

Education

School

School of Education and Human Services

Abstract

Using autoethnographic, arts-based, and embodied methods, this postformal dissertation study establishes the first of a two-part research-as-community-building template designed with racially and socioeconomically diverse school communities in mind. Imagined as a double helix in an echo of human DNA, it describes an arts-based, embodied self-study (Helix 1) as a prerequisite for later study of community (Helix 2, not yet complete) typified by mindful engagement across socially constructed lines of difference and attention to the potential building blocks of collaborative leadership across those same lines. As a prerequisite to community work, I explored my lifetime encounters with others of difference (Chang, 2008) by creating, analyzing, and interpreting 74 individual crayon/watercolor/salt artworks representing my memories of key historical encounters and relationships. The collective artwork (Glyph Spiral) and the stories it contains form a model classroom for the practice of critical pedagogy as ontoepistemology (Kress & Lake, 2018). Lessons have surfaced about seeing and being seen, sharing, slowing down, structural awareness, feelings and healing, and working with memory, history, and time. Each finding is relevant to the future community work, to the experience of researchcreation (Springgay & Truman, 2017), and to arts-based research (ABR) in general. This methodological experiment is my first step in exploring how creative, embodied research-ascommunity- building might work as Family Community Collaboration (FCC) (Ishimaru et al., 2019) and support a movement toward beloved community (Kipton, 2016) in the context of diverse schools.

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