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From Boys To Non-Toxic Men: An Intervention Using Expressive Arts Therapy To Foster Healthy Masculinity In Adult Men, Jennifer Liff

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

“Toxic masculinity” is a rigid form of masculine expression in the United States and other Western countries that espouses traditional norms of expression such as stoicism, power over others, control, aggression, and subjugation of women. Research has shown that it is detrimental to men’s mental health, and strict adherence to it is associated with higher rates of loneliness, depression, suicidal ideation, and violence. Earlier theories that have addressed toxic masculinity, such as the gender role strain paradigm, have taken a more pathological lens. However, the positive psychology/positive masculinity theory and relational cultural theory—contemporary theoretical frameworks that focus on healthy masculinity—show …

Reimagining Disability: Expressive Arts Therapy As An Empowerment Tool, Isla Goldstein

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

A quarter of the U.S. adult population is disabled. Current expressive therapies’ approaches are rooted in a medical-interventionist model of disability over a social model of disability. In utilizing the connection between disability arts and creative arts therapies, this capstone thesis explores the tools found within the field – such as photovoice – to examine the impact of hierarchy in therapeutic spaces. Mental health practices are also often rooted in individualistic models of self-care, over community care. Through examining the practices of disabled art, music, and drama therapists, this literature review seeks to imagine new therapeutic spaces and realities for …

“Staged Combat”: A Literature Review On The Potential Advantages Of Drama Therapy Over Traditional Talk Therapy With Veterans, Christopher Mcneill

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

There is an ongoing disconnect between military veterans and mental health with a vast majority of veterans either unable or unwilling to seek therapy. This may be a result of traditional talk therapy being ineffective with the veteran population; drama therapy may be a recourse that can better bridge the gap between veterans and therapy. Veterans experience trauma not just through means of combat overseas, but via training and transitioning out of the military as well, all culminating in a psychological regression. With the given population, emerging adulthood would be the period that veterans regress to as it is when …

Grieving Artists: Influences Of Loss And Bereavement On Visual Artmaking, Rebecca Arnold

Expressive Therapies Dissertations

This phenomenological survey explored how professional artists navigated personal loss experiences that were a result of the death of a loved one. Although artists have worked within themes of death throughout history, most studies on art and bereavement to date have focused on psychological or therapeutically-oriented investigations. Exploring how bereaved artists experience their own art-making through contemporary practices may serve to understand how fine art processes and grief could be interrelated. The guiding questions were explored through semi-structured interviews with eight exhibiting artists. The participants all self-identified regarding age and gender, and ranged in subject matter, media choices, and artistic …

Student Agency And Collective Bootstrapping In Integrated Career And Technical Education: A Photovoice Project, Panagiota Athinelis

Educational Studies Dissertations

Secondary Career and Technical Education (CTE) provides students with a full education in academic areas as well as a career area of interest, allowing students to apply their school-based learning in the real world through work-based learning. At the same time, urban CTE adolescents have historically been marginalized and placed in a deficit model. The purpose of this qualitative study was to uncover the ways in which student agency is co-created in an urban, transdisciplinary CTE high school program, as well as to identify the institutional systems and structures that support or hinder the development of student agency.

Eight students …

The Meaning In The Music: Music And The Prose Of Chopin, Joyce, Baldwin And Egan, Colin Perry

Senior Theses

Kate Chopin, James Joyce, James Baldwin, and Jennifer Egan are collectively gifted in the art of prose, yet each author also experiments with music in their literary works. An analysis of Chopin's The Awakening, Joyce's "The Dead," Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," and Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad reveals a trend of authors utilizing music to enrich their texts and convey major themes.

Thalassic: Women, Gender, And The Sublime In Relation To Marine Art, Kelsy Patnaude

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

The sea may be regarded as a source of tranquility as well as one of unsettling trepidation, ambiguous even in its representation. Those who are called to it must be relentless in the face of uncertainty; what awaits them is the immeasurable sublime. Defined in art as a reference to greatness beyond all possibility of control, the sublime invokes an urge to pursue pleasurable terror in the unmanageable. On heavily trafficked and dangerous seas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the strict gender hierarchy of authority on board ships in seafaring industries was solidified. Thus, the dominance of the male …

An Identity Healing: Socialization And African-Centered Practices With At-Risk Youth, Jessica Shabazz

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

African-Centered practices are being regarded as valuable therapeutic healing methods within the African-diaspora. However, there is limited research that examines the propitious advantages and psychotherapeutic use of Afrocentric movement of two very distinctive, yet possible complementary systems, the Katherine Dunham technique and Kemetic Yoga. The research available on these African-based movement practices recognizes them as holistic and encompassing a mind/body/soul connection. Ritualistic practices in counseling remains a growing interest to mental health practitioners of all cultures, to ensure that clients are provided with an experience of client-centered psychotherapy. Therapeutic African-centered practices align with Carl Rogers’ person-centered approach and the psychotherapeutic …

Middle-Class / White / Woman: The Unexamined Center In Expressive Therapies Education, Kelly J. Reed

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Counseling psychology and the expressive therapies are majority-white, majority-female professions, and whiteness is the unnamed, normative center of expressive therapies and drama therapy education. As a middle-class white woman, I posit that by failing to examine this center we risk perpetuating the same systems that exacerbate our own and our clients' suffering. I review the available literature and investigate the socio-historical, cultural, and political significance of whiteness and the historical role of white women in maintaining oppressive systems. I then explore the identity reconstruction process for white people seeking to divest from whiteness, specifically looking at the key emotions of …

Commonthought (2017), Commonthought Staff

Commonthought

This issue features works created by Lesley University students and covers a broad range of topics. The work itself crosses many disciplines from creative writing to visual arts.

Familial Dialects, Amanda King

MFA in Photography and Integrated Media Theses

Using the framework of scientific investigation, ‘Familial Dialects’ explores the languages – systems of signs and codification of those signs - of individual members of my family, and the metaphors that arise from their interaction with pieces of the natural world. Each of the pieces combine an inherent form and an organizing action as a means of representing an individual’s form of expression. These familial dialects are created and translated using the methodologies of a naturalist - collection, dissection, observation, and classification. The pieces draw meaning from the connotative associations built from familial connections as well as from broader cultural …

Canonical Heroes Redefined For Postmodern Readership, Catey Bayse

Senior Theses

"The 'hero' has figured as an important archetypal construction throughout literary history that has evolved over centuries. Instead of tracing the evolution of the hero chronologically, this essay will present a postmodern reading of the hero in John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Homer’s Iliad by rereading those texts through James Joyce’s Ulysses. Through this retrospective reading, heroic construction comes to mean something different than it does to classicists or Romanticists. In his construction of Leopold Bloom as the everyman, modern hero, Joyce is unconcerned with physical strength, youth, honor, virtue, lineage, or glory. Rather, Joyce constructs Bloom as a hero …

Spiritual Maturation: A Developmental Resource For Resilience, Well-Being, And Peace, Jared D. Kass

Journal of Pedagogy, Pluralism, and Practice

No abstract provided.

Oasis From Learn-To-Earn: Adult, Working-Class, Liberal Arts Graduates Make Meaning Of Their Learning Careers At Harvard, Suzanne C. Spreadbury

Educational Studies Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to learn from 18 adult students, all of whom grew-up working class and many of whom were living working-class lives as adults, the meaning of returning to school and earning a liberal arts degree from an open-enrollment program. Harvard Extension School (HES), which is part of a selective, elite institution: Harvard University. The educational research in the US is sparse on adult, working-class, liberal arts, students. Indeed, these students' experiences go mostly undocumented due to the agreed upon conclusion that adult students, in general, and working-class students, in particular, are more interested in job …

Commonthought Vol.14 (2003), Commonthought Staff

Commonthought

This issue features works created by Lesley University students and covers a broad range of topics. The work itself crosses many disciplines from creative writing to visual arts.

Commonthought Vol. 11 (2000), Commonthought Staff

Commonthought

This issue features works created by Lesley University students and covers a broad range of topics. The work itself crosses many disciplines from creative writing to visual arts.

Commonthought Vol.7 (1996), Commonthought Staff

Commonthought

This issue features works created by Lesley University students and covers a broad range of topics. The work itself crosses many disciplines from creative writing to visual arts.

Womanthought Vol. Iii, No. I (Spring 1992), Womanthought Staff

Commonthought

No abstract provided.

Lesley Review (Spring 1968), Lesley College

Lesley Review

No abstract provided.

Pendulum (1967), Pendulum Staff

Pendulum

Pendulum, founded by the Friends of the Livingston Stebbins Library, is published once a year, and contains prose, verse, and graphic art by undergraduates and alumnae of Lesley College.

Pendulum (1962), Pendulum Staff

Pendulum

Pendulum, founded by the Friends of the Livingston Stebbins Library, is published once a year, and contains prose, verse, and graphic art by undergraduates and alumnae of Lesley College.

Lesleyan, 1953, Lesley College

Lesley College and Lesley University - Yearbooks

Yearbook published by the Lesley College Class of 1953. Original volume available for browsing in the Lesley University Archives.