ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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- All Subjects: Cultural Anthropology
- All Subjects: pedagogy
- Creators: Blumenfeld-Jones, Donald
Description
ABSTRACT There is a body of literature--albeit largely from the UK and Australia--that examines the ways in which class and gender influence life course, including educational attainment; however, much of this literature offers explanations and analyses for why individuals choose the life course they do. By assuming a cause-effect relationship between class and gender and life course, these studies perpetuate the idea that life can be predicted and controlled. Such an approach implies there is but one way of viewing--or an "official reading" of--the experience of class and gender. This silences other readings. This study goes beneath these "interpretations" and explores the phenomenon of identity and identity making in women who grew up working-class. Included is an investigation into how these women recognize and participate in their own identity making, identifying the interpretations they created and apply to their experience and the ways in which they juxtapose their educative experience. Using semi-structured interview I interviewed 21 women with working-class habitués. The strategy of inquiry that corresponded best to the goal of this project was heuristics, a variant of empathetic phenomenology. Heuristics distinguishes itself by including the life experience of the researcher while still showing how different people may participate in an event in their lives and how these individuals may give it radically different meanings. This has two effects: (1) the researcher recognizes that their own life experience affects their interpretations of these stories and (2) it elucidates the researcher's own life as it relates to identity formation and educational experience. Two, heuristics encourages different ways of presenting findings through a variety of art forms meant to enhance the immediacy and impact of an experience rather than offer any explanation of it. As a result of the research, four themes essential to locating the experience of women who grew up working class were discovered: making, paying attention, taking care, and up. These themes have pedagogic significance as women with working-class habitués navigate from this social space: the downstream effect of which is how and what these women take up as education.
ContributorsDecker, Shannon Irene (Author) / Blumenfeld-Jones, Donald (Thesis advisor) / Richards-Young, Gillian (Committee member) / Sandlin, Jennifer (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
ABSTRACT This narrative study traces the development of a dance curriculum as it unfolded in an inner city public school. It examines the curriculum emergence through intersecting worlds of artistic practice, improvisation, lived experience and context. These worlds were organized and explored through themes of gender, emotion, longing and intersections and examined through lenses of critical theory, aesthetics and currere. It examines the interior dialogue within one individual educator who is both a dance artist and a teacher and reflects the differing and at times conflicting perspectives within those two positions. The curriculum acquired the name "curriculum by accident" because several highly unexpected events contributed to its development. The students were initially suspicious and hostile and presented significant resistance to classical dance as an artistic form. This resistance was circumvented through creative process and improvisation. The act of improvisation became both a way to approach teaching and curriculum development and as an artistic process. Improvisation courts chance, the unplanned and the accidental through a structure in which the unknown is as valued as the known. The school setting is one full of known subjects; curriculum, settings, procedures, people and expectations. Curriculum by accident was a circumstance in which a known (school) and an unknown (the evolving curriculum) melded. The development of curriculum by accident was a response to an array of intuitive and serendipitous cues. The curriculum seeped through the cracks of school experience and transmuted into a curriculum that was very successful.
ContributorsBendix, Susan W. (Author) / Blumenfeld-Jones, Donald (Thesis advisor) / Barone, Thomas (Committee member) / Jackson, Naomi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010