Coming to Create, Connect, and Exist within Spaces of Community: An Arts-based Youth Participatory Action Research Project

• Author / Creator

  Keeler, Stacey

• This thesis describes an arts-based, youth participatory action research study that examines the importance of lived experiences of youth, art applications and community connections. The questions which guided the study included: Can art be a form that connects youth and communities of place? Can art help build community within the lives of youth? How might art play a role in authentic learning experiences for youth? How does place/space affect learning? The research engaged three at-risk aboriginal youth who were participating in a drop-in program called Moving the Mountain, a pilot project at the University of Alberta. Through the application of photography, the young women explored and experimented with their version of what they saw and experienced within the university community. Utilizing an art process called gel transfer the pictures became malleable and transparent photographs. The youth experimented with their own realities and ties with the spaces that they encountered. The study came full circle when I moved to the country of Kuwait to teach, where my similar experiences of art and community were lived and reflected upon. Results from the study were drawn from the combination of assembled photographs from the youth, along with researcher journal entries. Understandings that came from the study not only applied and validated other ways of knowing, but also the realization that through creating, especially when doing so in the presence of others, community and enduring connections are made. In the end, community is built from the guidance and understanding of relationships and through the act of creating, there can be connections made for which some might be searching. [Supplementary thesis material available @ https://doi.org/10.7939/R3125QR47]

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Arts-based research
  • community
  • gel transfer
  • photography
  • place
  • space
  • youth participatory action research.

• Graduation date

  Fall 2018

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Education

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R32B8VT5G

• License

  Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.