Doctoral Student in Arts Administration, Education and Policy

            I was drawn to the doctoral program at OSU largely as an opportunity to study community based art education. I completed my master's degree in art education at Florida State University, where I co-edited the anthology Art Education for Social Justice. I received my BA in Art with a Minor in Education from Earlham College, which helped inspire a belief in nonviolent action and the power of community. I have taught in a variety of settings including public and independent schools, museums, community centers, and gardens. I moved to Yellow Springs, Ohio from Denver, Colorado where I taught elementary art in an International Baccalaureate School. During my time managing a small community pottery and working as a visiting artist in Yellow Springs, I took Dr. Hutzel's Action Research Course as a non-degree seeking student. This was an excellent course and an opportunity to explore the program at OSU before I was accepted as a graduate student. My research and teaching interests include community partnerships and collaborative artmaking, socially-engaged art, participatory action research, memory work as arts-based narrative inquiry, place-based education, culturally relevant pedagogy, and educating for citizenship and global consciousness. My teaching philosophy is grounded in an Art for Life model that emphasizes art as communication about what counts across cultures and time and embraces art as a tool for cultivating a sense of self, place, and community.

            The Department of Arts Administration, Education, and Policy at OSU provides the opportunity to study with and get to know colleagues and professors with diverse interests in the field. I appreciate the opportunity to share research interests and learn with and from one another. One of the most meaningful opportunities to grow as an art educator in higher education while maintaining my investment in community arts has been the opportunity as a GTA to facilitate the Digital Artmaking & Service-Learning Course offered to undergraduate students as a GE Visual & Performing Arts Course. This course engages students in arts-based service-learning, collaborative artmaking and the social turn in contemporary artmaking through introductory study and production of films and comics with middle school community partners. The ultimate goal is to highlight local voices through the use of the computer to create collaborative art.

            My recent research evolved from my role as a visiting artist at an elementary school in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Together as co-facilitators and artists, I worked with fellow art educator and administrator Deborah Housh on a school wide arts project titled, Project Peace: Confronting Bullying through Art. Mills Lawn students, grades K-6 participated in a school-wide community art project celebrating heroes and peacemakers. Students also worked with the school counselor and their classroom teachers to understand bullying behavior and build strategies for showing integrity and empathy at school, home, and in their community. Students developed ideas for standing up for others and speaking out against bullying as upstanders rather than bystanders through messages of peace included in the artwork. The resulting Hero Peacemaker Triptych is hanging in the library at Mills Lawn. A further stage of Project Peace became an after school media club, in which I taught basic film and stop-motion animation and further explored the idea of peacemaking through digital artmaking with students. This informal arts setting became a space to further research social inclusion and peacemaking through arts based narrative inquiry and participatory action research.

I have also been invested in memory work as form of arts based narrative research. I challenge myself as a teacher researcher to connect my own artmaking to lived experience in 

order to authentically engage my teaching philosophy and praxis. In a series of recent artworks created as part of memory work, I both honor and deconstruct family relationships. I see this process as contributing to the sustainability of personal and professional roles and something that informs my teaching. Mapping experiences of my mother and grandmother further locates my senses of self and place, grounding my teaching philosophy as I continue to motivate my students to tell their own and their community’s stories as an essential part of artmaking . Retelling stories of independence and perseverance through a series of artworks layering family photographs, letters, silhouettes and personal voice, enables me to celebrate and examine my relationships with the women who have informed my personal pursuit of place in the world. Through this memory work, I continue to practice the core of my teaching philosophy – artmaking grounded in identity, a tenacity of spirit, and an understanding of the complexities of one's place in the world.

            During my time as a graduate student at OSU, I have continued to grow my own identity as a teacher and researcher through dialogue with professors and colleagues, academic investigation of literature and research in the field, and personal reflection in connection to academic and intellectual challenges. I had the opportunity to study abroad in Jamaica last summer as well, which was a valuable experience witnessing arts education in the context of another culture in a country that continues to capitalize on the arts as part of its national identity. The warmth, welcome, and depth of creative expression in connection to race, identity, power as issues of social justice and the commitment to continue to support both the arts and education in the arts was inspiring. Studying abroad in Jamaica as part of the program at OSU was an important opportunity to practice my own teaching philosophy that utilizes the arts to support global consciousness.