Education Commons^™

Translating Transformative Human Rights Education Through Visual Languages & Informal Spaces, Jazzmin Chizu Gota

Master's Projects and Capstones

This project examines methods, theories, and practices of translating human rights education through multiple vernaculars. Developed as a workshop in sociocultural syntax deconstruction and an educational human rights education website focused on the domestic population of the US, the project focuses on localizing human rights concepts to the public vernacular of the country. Human rights education (HRE) and media and information literacy (MIL) are expanded and redefined as social literacy, or the ability to navigate and decode the present, complex realities that both HRE and MIL were developed to address. Reframing media and visual arts as an archive of past …

The Digital Incunabula: Rock • Paper • Pixels, Patrick Aievoli

Zea E-Books Collection

“The Digital Incunabula is Patrick Aievoli’s personal sonnet through media, interaction and communication design. He carefully crafts each evolutionary step into ripples that are supported by his own storied professional and academic experiences. It’s full of facts, terms and historical information which makes it perfect for anyone looking to flat out learn!” ● James Pannafino, Professor, Millersville University & Interaction Design

“This is a serious work that will find a broad community of readers. The depth and breadth of Aievoli’s experience in the publication industry give his voice and ideas credibility in the extreme. This book will inspire deep reflection.” …

Ciis Today, Fall 2015 Issue, California Institute Of Integral Studies

CIIS Today

This volume is the Fall 2015 issue of CIIS Today, the Magazine of the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Grids And Gestures: A Comics Making Exercise, Nick Sousanis

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Grids and Gestures is an exercise intended to offer participants insight into a comics maker’s decision-making process for composing the entire page through the hands-on activity of making an abstract comic. It requires no prior drawing experience and serves to help reexamine what it means to draw. In addition to a description of how to proceed with the exercise, this piece also includes conceptual grounding in the form of a brief theoretical discussion of the ways comics convey meaning as well as personal notes on the development of the exercise and how it has been used.

Visualizing Abolition: Two Graphic Novels And A Critical Approach To Mass Incarceration For The Composition Classroom, Michael Sutcliffe

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This article outlines two graphic novels and an accompanying activity designed to unpack complicated intersections between racism, poverty, and (d)evolving criminal-legal policy. Over 2 million adults are held in U.S. prison facilities, and several million more are under custodial supervision, and it has become clearly unsustainable. In the last decade, there has been a shift in media conversations about criminality, yet only a few suggest decreasing our reliance upon incarceration. In meaningfully different ways, the two novels trace the development of incarceration from its roots in slavery to its contemporary anti-democratic iteration and offer an underpublicized alternative.

Critical and community …

Revision In The Multiversity: What Composition Can Learn From The Superhero, David Hyman

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Constant and ongoing revision is the compositional tactic through which many contemporary superhero narratives negotiate the powerful struggle between reiteration of the genre’s past, and creative expression of its future. Instead of a gradual succession of improved renditions of a text, each one effacing and superseding the imperfections of its predecessors, revision is revealed as the production of multiple versions whose differences and diversities are “capable of being in uncertainties”, as Keats describes the creative attitude which he terms Negative Capability: ontologically equal textual variations that wear their inconsistencies openly, and reject the pressure to resolve their multiplicities into the …

Pim Pedagogy: Toward A Loosely Unified Model For Teaching And Studying Comics And Graphic Novels, James B. Carter

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

The article debuts and explains "PIM" pedagogy, a construct for teaching comics at the secondary- and post-secondary levels and for deep reading/studying comics. The PIM model for considering comics is actually based in major precepts of education studies, namely constructivist foundations of learning, and loosely unifies constructs inherent therein with other available frames and frameworks for studying comics. As such, the article fills a dire need in the scholarly literature on comics pedagogy and paves a way for those who seek to teach comics courses in the future but who need direction and for those who seek to study/read comics …

Engaging Many Minds: Nurturing Collaboration In A Steam Context, Mark Dzula

The STEAM Journal

This field note describes a recent interdisciplinary project facilitated by Jeremy Gercke, an art teacher at the Bishop's School in La Jolla, California. The project creates ceramic tile markers for flora around the Bishop's School campus. The markers feature QR codes linking to websites populated with student content, including: drawings, information, and oral histories. In this project, Mr. Gercke synthesizes his interests as an artist; maximizes his social connections to mentors, peers and students; and bridges disciplines to create opportunities for interdisciplinary (STEAM) inquiry.

Navigating The Interim, Joseph E. Saphire Jr

Masters Theses

Navigating the Interim attempts to build a framework for the ways in which visual art, media studies, and forms of social practice might intermingle within a career in the arts, as well as within a thorough art education curriculum. From broad theoretical analysis to the specificity of technical exercises and prompts, this paper serves as a roadmap for the ways in which production, teaching, and organizing might begin to merge into a single holistic practice. The author’s projects provide an anchor from which to analyze the various conceptual trajectories of art that have stemmed from modernism throughout the 20th century, …

The Leadership Hub, Michelle E. Healey

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

The Leadership Hub Senior Honors Creative Thesis comprises a website and creative design book. It organizes and designs leadership within the JMU community within four key areas.

Enduring Peripheries, Anna Yeroshenko

MFA in Photography and Integrated Media Theses

In the 80s when Russian state-sanctioned architectural production consisted of standardized buildings that deplored any unnecessary ornament or decoration, an architect functioned only as an interpreter of numerous limiting factors. As an act of protest against the stagnation in architecture, a group of young architects began to create projects that existed only on paper. For them ‘Paper Architecture‘ became a way of bypassing restrictions and dissenting, a way to critique the dehumanizing nature of the architectural style that prevailed at that time. Spatial compositions, which were hard to comprehend visually, elements of inverse perspective, and impractical, idealistic environments depicted a …

Tales From The Fells, Anne Elder

MFA in Photography and Integrated Media Theses

Our relationship with the natural world is complicated and under scrutiny as we make irrevocable changes to the earth. We enter the woods to get lost, and to find ourselves. We walk there to find thrills, peace, inspiration; to hear ourselves think, to be surprised, to make profit. Our childish fears may have changed from bears, monsters and getting lost, replaced by adult fears (bears, unsavory humans, getting lost). The woods may frighten us or be a place of comfort, but it is rarely a neutral experience. When we lose access to these spaces, it affects our ability to find …

Littlefield Gallery Visiting Artist Series - Andreas Von Huene: Figurative Sculpture, The University Of Maine

Cultural Affairs Distinguished Lecture Series

Andreas Von Huene will give a lecture on interpretive figural sculpture and the next day he will give figurative sculpture demonstrations in the sculpture studios.

Bailamos Juntos: Salsa En Los E.E.U.U. Y El Mundo, Betty Tran

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

This composition traces the history of Cuban-American cultural identity formation through the lens of music and dance. As the author explains, Cuban immigrants cultivated a rich music and dance culture in New York City by creating a series of Latin and Afro-Cuban music genres and dances that brought diverse groups of people together. As a Vietnamese-American woman, Tran sees several connections between her family’s Vietnamese heritage and the cultural histories of Cubans who came to the United States as refugees seeking asylum from political oppression. As a first-generation college student, Tran believes it is important to share this composition as …

A Tres Pasos De La Muerte, Samuel Temblador

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

"A Tres Pasos de la Muerte" tells the story of a son of Mexican immigrants and his search for his roots. Here, Temblador attempts to communicate a bicultural experience through the frame of border literature (Literatura Fronteriza) born out of the intersection between Mexican and American culture.

Applications For Dummies, Carla M. Sanchez

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

This poem discusses the overwhelming pressure that is put on students to justify their right to be admitted into universities or to receive scholarships based on their extracurricular activities. Many working-class, first-generation college students are unable to participate in organizations and programs that offer students a more well-rounded college experience. This can lead first-gen students, like the author, to feel isolated, inadequate, or illegitimate. "Applications for Dummies" expresses Sanchez's incessant fear that she will never be able to compete with other students who were given the opportunity to build more worldly resumes, despite her strong academic commitment and intellectual potential.

It's Not Just A Leave, Genesis L. Montalvo

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

In this piece, the author sets out to explore the first-generation college identity through a gothic lens. In the early stages of this project, Montalvo had considered doing research on narratives from other first-gen college students as a way to trace the uncanny and the abject in their experiences. However, as she began reflecting on her own personal history, she realized that in a matter of only two years she had already experienced moments of distance, uncanniness, and confusion, which are recorded here. In presenting these installments in non-chronological order, Montalvo intends to insert a gothic element of disorder, which …

Flashlight, Min-Jung Kim

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

This poem illustrates the struggle of an undergraduate first-generation college student who knew little about the first-gen identity or the experiences she would encounter until she became a First To Go Scholar at Loyola Marymount University. The poet represents the First To Go Program as a flashlight that has helped her to navigate a once dark and unfamiliar environment.

Tarl_41ce19_424-21, Robert Z. Selden Jr.

CRHR: Archaeology

Three-dimensional (3D) model of a Caddo burial vessel (TARL_41CE19_424-21) from Caddo Mounds SHS (41CE19) curated at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory.

Tarl_41ce19_2006-4-84, Robert Z. Selden Jr.

CRHR: Archaeology

Three-dimensional (3D) model of a Caddo burial vessel (TARL_41CE19_2006-4-84) from Caddo Mounds SHS (41CE19) curated at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory.

Scribblescholar Was Here: Confessional Notes Of A Vandal Academic, Clay Shields

Theses and Dissertations--English

As a (former) vandal-punk in the academy, I often fear succumbing to Ivory Tower Stockholm syndrome. The identities I perform, vandal-punk and scholar, ideologically clash to the point that they often feel irreconcilable. By codemeshing the high-low discourses associated with these adopted cultures, I attempt to disrupt any hierarchal privileging of either, instead searching for a way to live with and harness both.