Curriculum and Social Inquiry Commons^™

Book Review: The History And Politics Of Star Wars: Death Stars And Democracy, Petra Hendrickson

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Book Review: The History and Politics of Star Wars: Death Stars and Democracy

Remixing Dialogue: A Case Study On Perceptions Of Hip Hop Pedagogy In A Professional Learning Course, Kelly J. Thelen

Dissertations, Theses, and Projects

This qualitative case study examines how teachers’ decision-making and professional autonomy shift while participating in a Hip Hop Pedagogy Professional Learning course supported by structured FIXIT (Lo & Wachter, 2023a, 2023b, 2023c, 2023d; Wachter & Lo, 2024) game-facilitated dialogue in a rural, culturally and linguistically diverse Midwest community. Grounded in Freire’s (1970) Critical Pedagogy, Ladson-Billings’ (1995) Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (Paris and Alim, 2017), and Adult Learning Theory (Knowles et al., 2005), the study explores the reclamation of agency by teachers in a time of constrained creativity and educator autonomy shaped by strict policy environments, an emphasis on …

Contradiction And Critical Consciousness: Engaging Canadian University Students In Racial Dialogue On Anti-Chinese Racism, Dan Cui

Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education

This study examines how Canadian university students perceived and engaged with anti-Chinese racism during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on grounded theory and interviews and written reflections from 28 undergraduates at a predominantly White university, the study analyzes students’ contradictory understandings of racism shaped by media, national narratives, and prior educational experiences. Informed by Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, it conceptualizes these tensions as a contradictory racialized habitus, in which awareness and denial, empathy and distancing, coexist. Three themes emerged: contradictory orientations toward anti-Chinese racism, the transnational influence of U.S. political discourse, and the limited transformative impact of a social justice course. …

Violencia Docente En La Educación Musical Universitaria: Una Exploración En Contexto Mexicano, Karla M. Reynoso Vargas, Basilio Fernández-Morante

Visions of Research in Music Education

Este artículo presenta los resultados de una investigación fenomenológica exploratoria cuyo objetivo fue identificar expresiones de violencia docente en entornos de formación musical universitaria en el contexto mexicano. Se analizan 53 relatos de estudiantes, profesionales y desertores de carreras musicales que cursaron estudios en universidades o conservatorios de nueve estados de la República Mexicana, quienes compartieron voluntariamente sus testimonios a través de la Asociación Mexicana de Psicología de la Música (AMEPSIM). El estudio aborda supuestos sociológicos sobre las dinámicas de la violencia, el peso socioeducativo de la tradición del conservatorio y su posible vínculo con la limitada aplicación de principios …

Review Of Supernatural: A History Of Television’S Unearthly Road Trip By Erin Giannini, Duane Ebesu

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

No abstract (book review)

The Question Is A Node: Online Quizzes As Interactive Non-Fiction, Michael Merriam

ELO (un)supervised 2026

The quiz is the most widely deployed form of interactive text in education. Even when it is not digitally administered, it presents a prompt, receives a response, and contains within it a formula determining the consequences of that response. A wrong answer is taken as a failure of learning (not mere recall) and, by virtue of their quasi-digital objectivity, a batch of low quiz scores might warn of difficulty in reaching benchmarks. Ergo, quizzes embody the automation of the supervisory function of the instructor, and the supervision of curricula. 

Quiz questions have something in common with nodes in digital interactive …

Access Intimacy In The Feminist Classroom: Co-Creating Course Policies, Expectations, And Access Measures As Feminist Disability Praxis, Krystal Cleary

Feminist Pedagogy

In this essay, I outline an activity to foster access intimacy (Mingus, 2011) in the feminist classroom through students’ co-creation of course policies, expectations, and additional access measures. This activity transforms the classroom into a praxis laboratory wherein students analyze the normative structures that shape their hyperlocal classroom context and practice building environments characterized by interdependent solidarity rather than atomized competition. As feminist disability praxis, this activity centers the knowledge of disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent scholars and students; in doing so, it customizes the classroom to a diversity of learners and builds adaptability for responding to unforeseen challenges into …

Liberation Landscapes: Writing Freedom In A Black Geographies Classroom, Cornel Grey, Muna-Udbi A. Ali

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Drawing As Continuance: What Insists On Being Heard, Darlene St. Georges

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This article extends She-Hero through an inquiry into drawing as a creation-centred practice of continuance. Five drawings are engaged as aesthetic encounters through which relational and perceptual shifts become perceptible, allowing inner authority to emerge as a cultivated capacity to remain responsive to what is unfolding. Drawing is approached as a site of metramorphic reconfiguration where imagination, memory, and embodied sensing participate in the decolonizing of perceptual habits and the restoration of relational ways of knowing.

Showing It! Art Matters. But Why? How?, Holly Edwards

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This article addresses the agency of art with reference to an exhibition entitled “The Nature of Spirit”.  That show appeared in the local public library, resonating strongly with notions of “heartwork”.  My first Artizein publication was written in response to 9/11, and this one maintains comparable urgency, seeking solace in art precisely when the world seems to be sliding into lunacy. The prose explores the powers of art in traumatizing times with words, while the images offer the reader insight and support energetically.

Text/Ures, Kathy Mantas

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

By entwining the voices of other co-creators, text and images, I share a brief site-specific photo-reverie of my life-long allure to trees—in this instance, by attending to the trees near my home. This offering is rooted in peripatetic aesthetic practices that embrace a slower creative approach and more spellbinding ways of living, learning and knowing. In essence, this is an invitation to have an artful encounter with text/ures of trees.

Attending The Way Of The Crane: Centring Our Lives Through Creative-Centred Work, Alexandra Fidyk

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

A dreamscape using pastiche is used for reflecting upon the value of creative-centred practice and research. Attending to the image through reflection and circumambulation offers entry to a centring practice. In holding both, a new image emerged. The dreamscape—an unexpected scene of cranes in joyous dance—unfolds as actual dream and offers a metaphor for understanding an arc within the dreamer’s life. In this condensed yet nuanced rumination, personal and professional, poetic and haptic, participating and witnessing blur. This practice, the way of the Crane, is timely because it introduces relational pedagogy and testimonial teaching for our times—while touching the pulse …

The Verge, Reconsidered: Love, Salt, Seed, Time, Origin, Interweave––Triptychs In Conversation Across Time, Marna Hauk

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Sparked particularly by the poetic and the emergent data conversation analysis from an earlier Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal article (Hauk & Kippen, 2020) piece, which discussed data from 2016, the author creates a contemporary “conversation” from visual and poetic material, in 2026, and imagines forward a further 10 years to 2036. The three-plated visual-poetic artworkings speak also back and forth across the verges of spacetimemattering, riding the dip and wave, tide and weave, of deeper time and meaning sensing, with visual and poetic material. The original article proposed collaborative workings with other researchers. This work imagines the artworkings and …

Mapping The Legacy Of Cinnabar Mining In California's Santa Ynez River, Lorrie Blair

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This essay is a reflection of an artist residency focused on the environmental legacy of California’s cinnabar mining. The mineral cinnabar is a primary source of mercury that was used to mine gold in California in the 1800s, and is still used globally. For this residency, I asked, “How can I creatively map the emotional and sensory landscapes of Cinnabar mining sites?” “How can art making serve to expose elements of an ecological crisis?” To answer these questions, I created cyanotypes made in and with the Santa Ynez River, which flowed through two abandoned cinnabar mines. Cyanotypes are made by …

Teaching The Eye To Slow Down: Attentive Noticing As Ecological Practice, Sara Ko

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This visual essay unfolds through acts of careful noticing. Drawing from materials encountered through repeated walks across forested landscapes on Vancouver Island, it translates moss, soil, plant matter, and animal traces into immersive digital environments. Working through atmosphere, texture, and shifting forms rather than fixed representation, the project explores how perception is shaped by time spent with what is often overlooked. Digital processes are used not to stabilize or explain, but to hold uncertainty, fragility, and partial presence. The work invites readers to slow their looking and consider how learning, relation, and meaning can emerge through sustained attention.

Red Thread Projects For Placentary Peace, Nané Jordan

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Red Thread Projects are aesthetic expressions of my placental, eco-birthing philosophies as an artisteducator- scholar with lifelong roots reclaiming midwifery, and compassionate mother-centred birth care. Uplifting “birth” within embodied, feminist epistemologies, I aim to re-vision with the Mother, writ large and small. Since 1997, I have been creating textile artworks with red thread, activating these through performances in nature, where artwork, body, and place become interwoven texts, gifting gratitude to and with Mother Earth. My arts-centred research contributes to community education that empowers birth-givers, while advocating for the embodied, love-infused potentials of birth for human thriving.

Moving Forward: The Pulse Of Arts-Centred Research [Editorial], Darlene St. Georges

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Editorial

Artizein Editorial Team: Movements And Transitions, Barbara Bickel

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Editorial overview of movements and transitions taking place with the Artizein editorial team.

About The Cover Art: Pulsing Renewal, Darlene St. Georges

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

“Pulsing Renewal,” featured on the cover of this issue, is part of River’s Invocations, a creation-centred inquiry exploring River's ecologies, relationality, and creation. The painting was chosen for its close affinity with the issue theme, The Pulse of Arts-Centred Research. The visual language of Pulsing Renewal—its movement, rhythm, and emergence—echoes the vitality, responsiveness, and ongoing renewal evident across the articles, artworks, and conversations assembled in this volume. The work is presented here as a thematic point of entry into the diverse inquiries that follow.

Full Issue_Artizein Arts And Teaching Journal, Darlene St. Georges, Barbara Bickel

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Full Issue

Part-Time Faculty In Art And Design Higher Education: Support & Challenges, Katherine Ye Jin Lee

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates the challenge part-time faculty in art and design higher education face and the institutional support they receive through a case study conducted at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Through an extensive, anonymous and voluntary part-time faculty survey across different departments at RISD, it examines: 1) current perceptions of available institutional & departmental teaching support, 2) teaching approach & practice, and 3) student-faculty engagement. The research aimed to gather data on challenges that are unique to part-time faculty in art and design fields, especially in relation to faculty-student engagement to understand areas where they can be better …

Echándole Ganas: Pláticas Of Belonging + Resistance In Art + Design, Itzanya Bravo

Masters Theses

This thesis centers the experiences of Mexican American students, alumni, faculty, and community-based artists navigating art and design higher education in the United States. Grounded in the question ¿Dónde está la gente latina?—where are the Latino people?—this research examines how representation and culturally sustaining practices shape Mexican American students' sense of belonging and creative agency in a country with systems built on white supremacy

Using pláticas as the primary methodology—a relational, conversational approach rooted in community and storytelling traditions—alongside autohistoria-teoría and Chicana Feminist Epistemology, this study draws on eight in-depth pláticas with Mexican American creatives across art + design higher …

Reclamando Corazón Y Voz: Latinas Speak Their Truth Through Plática As Resistance In California Community College Learning Disabilities Assessments, Maricela Becerra

Dissertations

Although California Community Colleges (CCCs) offer learning disability (LD) assessments to determine eligibility for academic accommodations, for Latina students navigating converging forces of race, gender, language, citizenship, and ableism, these assessments often surface unspoken histories of harm. This study advanced Chicana feminista DisCrit (CFDC), extending disability critical race theory through Chicana spirituality and cultural intuition to examine possibilities when an educadora situates assessments in a plática grounded in consideración—respectful, relational, and unhurried care.

Rooted in Chicana feminist pláticas methodology and authored from the positionality of a disabled Latina scholar–practitioner, this qualitative decolonial dissertation explored how Latina students reflected on …

Sense Of Belonging And Self-Efficacy Of Women In Stemm At The University Of South Alabama, Emilie Dedeaux

Honors Theses

Despite decades of calls and initiatives to diversify science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine (STEMM) disciplines, females are still more likely to leave STEMM career paths compared to their male peers, which is often depicted as a 'leaky pipeline'. Females in STEMM often report greater social alienation, greater selfdoubt, lower sense of belonging and academic satisfaction due to a mismatch in values in STEMM disciplines. STEMM values have traditionally been normed by cisheteronormative, white, male ideologies . While extensive research has focused on the barriers females experience in STEMM that reduce sense of belonging , less research has focused on …

Intimate Partner Violence In The Queer Community, Kathleen A. Oslé

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Queer college students face unique barriers to receiving intimate partner violence (IPV) prevention services, of note the instability of emerging adult life. At question is whether or not targeted intervention services appropriately serve the queer community in this regard. A new digital media landscape for the romantic world creates potentially harmful life goals by glorifying unhealthy behaviors and ostracizing survivors, all for the sake of money. Previous research shows that early intervention and education provides a preventative factor in IPV. Data from an in-person intervention workshop is used to determine the feasibility of targeted intervention services, and provides means-tested results. …

A Unique 21st Century Relevant Analysis Of Carter G. Woodson’S The Mis-Education Of The Negro And Teacher Occupational Resilience, Nadrian D. Antoine

Virginia English Journal

This article offers a contemporary analysis of Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933), emphasizing its enduring relevance to 21st-century educational challenges and the emerging framework of Teacher Occupational Resilience (TOR). Woodson’s central argument that American schooling functions as a system of psychological conditioning that marginalizes Black identity, history, and agency remains strikingly applicable in modern debates on culturally relevant pedagogy, systemic inequity, and digital‑age misinformation. The article explores Woodson’s critique of leadership, the omission of curriculum, and the reproduction of miseducation by credentialed yet culturally detached Black professionals. It then connects these insights to TOR theory, which …

Apprenticing Towards Deeper Learning In The Ela Classroom: Using Young Adult Literature To Support Students’ Mastery, Identity, And Creativity, Julianna Kershen, Kacy M. Price, Nynke Wimp, Evie Jackson, Kaitlin Rogers

Virginia English Journal

This practitioner focused article highlights the perspectives of pre-service teachers and undergraduate researchers investigating the kinds of learning interactions and instructional decisions that result in deeper learning outcomes for high school students. Deeper learning outcomes are often described as 21^st century skills, including mastery learning, support of holistic and scholarly student identities, and the ability to engage collaboratively with critical and creative problem-solving skills. The authors suggest a series of young adult literature texts that can serve as springboards into project-based learning opportunities that provide authentic and real world-connected activities, iterative cycles of learning, peer-peer collaboration, and in-depth disciplinary …

Honors In Focus: A Study Of Public University Programs With New Course Proposals For Arkansas Tech University, Haley Greer, Payton Mccain, Hannah Melton

ATU Scholars Symposium

This project evaluates the structure and effectiveness of honors programs at Arkansas Tech University and five comparable public institutions—University of Central Arkansas, Arkansas State University, Truman State University, Northeastern State University, and the University of Central Missouri—to identify best practices that support student achievement, engagement, and retention. The study was designed to assess how honors programs influence academic rigor, curricular flexibility, community development, and access to high-impact educational opportunities. Using a mixed-methods approach, the researchers collected data through student and faculty surveys, follow-up interviews, and a comparative review of institutional materials, including honors curricula, housing models, scholarship structures, and program …

Making Social Studies Work In The Age Of Ai, Angelo Letizia

The Councilor: A National Journal of the Social Studies

The purpose of this paper is to first outline a more embedded stance toward AI use, which I have labeled invisible philosophy and history as DNA and use this embedded framework as a backdrop for a more concrete discussion of skills and dispositions in regard to the use of AI in the social studies classroom and beyond. This dual positioning, one more theoretical and one more concrete, calls attention to the fact that AI should not simply be seen as some flashy tool divorced from a more nuanced and embedded understanding of its role in society. A list of practical …

The Migrant As A Pilgrim: Decolonising Identity And Belonging, Susan Nemec

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

This paper responds to pilgrimage scholar George Greenia’s assertion that meaningful intersections exist between pilgrimage and various forms of displacement, such as migration or involuntary exile due to famine, war, or political unrest. Greenia proposes that vulnerable, displaced individuals might find shelter, both conceptually and emotionally, within the framing of pilgrimage. By extending concepts of pilgrimage, it can be understood as a deliberate and intentional journey, simultaneously emphasising the transformative potential inherent in migratory movement. By adopting a working definition of pilgrimage as ‘any form of travel that is intentional, purposeful, or transformative,’ the paper considers how migrancy, particularly within …