General education programs, in postsecondary institutions, provide a broad base of learning in the liberal arts and sciences with common goals that prepare undergraduate students for living informed and satisfying lives. In the United States, dance units in public institutions, offering general education coursework for non-majors (dance…

This paper presents an analysis of how guided engagement with the arts can provide leadership lessons for school leaders and administrators. The study was conducted as part of two projects funded by the School Leadership Program (SLP) grants from the U.S. Department of Education. The principal interns and practicing school leaders participated in…

Pertinent research literature recognizes the importance of using multimodalities to enhance and extend ways of learning across the curriculum in such subject areas as literacy, geology, media studies, physical education, social studies and disabilities studies. As an action researcher who constantly seeks ways to improve my own classroom practice,…

In this paper I explore the layers of voices represented in a classroom of high school students with special needs. As their guest music teacher, I learned about their strengths and challenges, their teachers, and their engagement with music. Issues of inclusion, access, privacy, and personal bias confronted me as I worked to construct narratives…

The authors used artistic inquiry to study intersubjectivity in a weekly, stimulated creative arts therapy studio experience for one year. They found that the conversion of meaning from the meta-verbal, imaginal, aesthetic language of dance and visual art into verbal and textual discourse required complex translational processes. Personal…

In this paper, "bead collage," an arts-based research method that invites participants to reflect, communicate and construct their experience through the manipulation of beads and found objects is explained. Emphasizing the significance of one's personal biography and experiences as a researcher, I discuss how my background as an…

Out of the mouth of babes (and even more nonverbal) has come perhaps the wisest music teacher education I have ever received. In this narrative I share my foibles as a young, over-confident, and naive music instructor who, through a great amount of error, eventually learned the value of letting a child lead his own music learning. Throughout this…

Utilizing a/r/tographic methodology to interrogate interpretive acts in museums, multiple areas of inquiry are raised in this paper, including: which knowledge is assigned the greatest value when preparing a gallery talk; what lies outside of disciplinary knowledge; how invitations to participate invite and disinvite in the same gesture; and what…

In this manuscript, the word "circumstances" serves as a conceptual lens through which to examine reflective vignettes of one university art educator and two art education undergraduates written in response to service-learning experiences at a local outreach Center for the homeless. Experiences included the design and teaching of art workshops to…

In this paper we suggest that narrative representations that seemingly fail to reach an audience as intended may engage the audience in more meaningful ways. We use reader response theory to explore how an audience's responses to a conference narrative presentation made available a multiplicity of interpretive frameworks and narratives to the…

This study explores the relationship between flow, transcendent music making experiences, transcendent religious experiences, and music education. As a teacher-researcher, I studied my graduate students' autobiographical accounts of their experiences making music. Across these narrative writings produced over the past four years, a pattern…

In a music education graduate class addressing teaching and learning strategies for learners with special needs, teachers were invited to consider the experience of the children in their music classrooms. Using narrative to enter into the learner's experience of school, teachers confronted their own perspectives and reconsidered those of their…

Our personal and professional lives draw us to a shared interest in "identity" and "relationships", and our understanding is shaped by our lives as narrative inquirers. As we struggle to name this complexity we begin to play with metaphors; the metaphor of "kites", and thus string, kite and kite flyer provide us with a way to think about imagining…

Until recently, qualitative research has made limited use of visual sources, particularly visual texts (drawing, painting or photographs), but also including multimodal data (video and web-based) and visual data (tables, graphs, charts, etc.). Thus, discussions of ethics and evidence in this area have lagged behind those related to textual data,…

Juxtaposing visual images with stories, this work addresses the formation of my transnational identity and my experience in the "betwixt-and-between," illustrating my struggles as artist, scholar, and international faculty member at an Anglo American university. I exacerbate tensions between my professional and attributed identities to complicate…