Junior High, Intermediate, Middle School Education and Teaching Commons^™

A Place Of Yes? Experiences Of Educators Participating In Site-Based Teacher-Led Reform, Elizabeth Hind

Education (PhD) Dissertations

This study examined the experiences of four teachers who participated as mentors in a teacher-designed and -implemented creative community at a middle school in southern California. Using the arts-based research methodologies of poetic inquiry, narrative inquiry, and painting, the researcher explored how teachers experience teaching and learning when they deconstruct structures that perpetuate standardization and choose to approach education as a place of yes, freed from the parameters of mandated curriculum, the idea of education as product, and high- stakes accountability measures. The study revealed that the qualities of the creative community had a humanizing effect on its participants, allowing …