Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item “In All Their Diversity": Examining Participation, Funds of Knowledge, and Identity Representation in Art-Based Social Media Posts(2024) Hernly, Kenna; Clegg, Tamara; McGrew, Sarah; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Many art museums are currently facing issues of inequity at every level, including in collections, staffing, audiences, and engagement practices. In this dissertation, I hypothesize that one way to address these issues is by altering engagement and learning practices, which are traditionally grounded in didactic, expert-led approaches. In this multiple-method, three-paper dissertation, I use The Museum Challenge (TMC) – a social media challenge to re-create works of art with household materials – as a case study of participatory art engagement. This large-scale, global challenge, which was initiated by the public during the COVID-19 pandemic, relied on participatory engagement practices with digitized museum collection objects. To better understand the implications of TMC for participatory art engagement, I combine quantitative data on 81,086 Instagram posts from the first four months of the challenge and qualitative data from post samples and interviews with participants in TMC. As others who have researched social media use in art museums have found, these platforms can afford visitors and remote users alike the ability to choose what is important to them and to engage with art museum collections in a self-led, playful manner that is not always encouraged by the museum environment, especially for adults (Budge, 2017, 2018b, 2018a; Budge & Burness, 2018; Villaespesa & Wowkowych, 2020). My findings predominantly speak to three things: 1) Participants drew on slow-looking and embodied learning as they re-created art, often in an instinctive way connected to their funds of knowledge; 2) Participants offered their interpretations of artworks, adapting art for our times and in some cases challenging norms to represent their individual and group identities; and 3) Participants found joy in the process, learning and building a positive and supportive community that has had a lasting impact. My research presents an example of audiences showing museums what they want and challenging expert-led interpretations to adapt art for our times and, in the process, representing themselves “in all their diversity” (Wong, 2012, p. 284; Ebben & Bull, 2022).Item MAINTENANCE ART FOR OTHER POSSIBLE WORLDS: Rehearsing a Pedagogy of Care(2023) Peskin, Eva; Lothian, Alexis; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)MAINTENANCE ART FOR OTHER POSSIBLE WORLDS: Rehearsing a Pedagogy of Care brings together stories, moves and activations for approaching access and difference as preconditions for belonging. Both a text and an enactment, the project offers a framework for interdependent creative practice and care-oriented collaboration, doing multiple things at once: it demonstrates an ethic and technique of play-based learning, offers a story about maintenance as the work it takes to keep caring together, and embraces lunacy as a method for creative resistance. Drawing on Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ premise that attention to maintenance can pause the perpetual motion machine of capitalist consumption/production and Ruth Wilson Gilmore's insistence that freedom is a place we make together in the present, the dissertation stages a confrontation of the multiple trainings that have formed my ethical, aesthetic, and relational processes of learning – both within and beyond the academy, both amateurish and professional – in order to lean into the fissures and ruptures one might ignore that the other can see. This inquiry takes shape in a spiral geography of four repeating moves, a conceptual fractal which gives rise to the action of the work: Unsettling, Dwell, Meanwhile, Sensuousness. The project rehearses this repertoire of moves as a means to center consent, access, self-determination, deep listening, and joy – necessities for the creativity required to undo/step away from/dismantle the many intersecting projects of empire which conspire unendingly against life itself, and to collectively transform into a culture of care.Item Embrace the Wave(2023) Shahramipoor, Hosna; Strom, Justin; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Everything in the universe is made up of waves. "Embrace the Wave" is a journey of self-discovery, in which our own inner waves can resonate with and influence the world around us, dissipate, magnify, and transform.Item Akwantuo: Plight of the Immigrant(2018) Braimah, Mustapha; Keefe, Maura; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Akwantuo: Plight of The Immigrant was an evening-length dance concert performed March 9, 10 and 11, 2018, at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in partial fulfillment of the Master of Fine Arts degree from University of Maryland’s School of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies. This paper addresses the creation of the original piece, which blends African and contemporary dance with Ghanaian dance theatre. These styles have been linked to the ramifications of the development of dance in Ghana before and after independence. The project situates the choreographer’s personal experience arriving from Ghana at a US airport. This work tackles the feeling of vulnerability, injustice, frustration, humiliation, disappointment and sheer terror of being at someone else’s mercy when being denied a visa or entry into the United States of America. In sum, this paper is a documentation demonstrating the inspiration, research, movement motif, creative process, and conception of the project.Item ARTS INTEGRATION FOR UNDERSTANDING: DEEPENING TEACHER PRACTICE IN AND THROUGH THE ARTS(2017) Krakaur, Linda; Valli, Linda; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Arts integration is promoted as a powerful instructional method to address the needs of 21st century students. Teaching in and through the arts can support learners in envisioning, constructing, and communicating deep understandings of themselves, their communities, and the world. A co-equal, cognitive style of integration requires teachers to balance learning in the arts and non-arts content areas and orient instruction toward investigations of shared concepts. While the co-equal, cognitive style dominates the literature, in practice, this style is rarely achieved. This study centers on a professional development program designed to guide teachers in striving for a co-equal style. This research investigates the instructional practices of four teachers who completed a one-year course of studies at a large, public university. Course content focused on creative processes, arts integration theory, art forms and authentic assessment. The methods for this case study research included observations, pre and post lesson interviews, focus group interviews, and analysis of arts integrated lesson plans. The findings indicate that all of the teachers were able to achieve a co-equal style, but not sustain it over the course of the lesson. The case study teachers enacted a variety of roles to orient instruction toward understanding rather than isolated skills and knowledge. They demonstrated artistic habits of mind, made creative pedagogical choices, and facilitated arts-based discourses during instruction. Yet, the teachers demonstrated challenges when facilitating student reflection in the arts and designing authentic integrated assessments. This study suggests that a co-equal style is possible and benefits both teachers and students, but greater training in how to facilitate creative processes may be needed, so teachers can account for the unique ways of knowing that occur in the third-space.Item The Arts Center at the University of Maryland(2016) Holstine, Russell Wayne; Eisenbach, Ronit Z; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)I believe people can have a relationship with another human being across space and time through art. The research question examines how architecture can facilitate a personal relationship across space and time by exhibiting art, beauty, knowledge, artifacts of human creativity, and ideas and objects of artistic expression through an art museum on a college campus. This thesis provides an opportunity to work with potential stakeholders on a project that is in the beginning stages of thinking called the Phillips Collection and David C. Driskell Contemporary and Modern Art Center at the University of Maryland (title in process). The applied design research will investigate the implications of an art museum and a university research/teaching center. The Phillips Collection (Washington D.C.) is a collection of over 4,000 works set in the home of Duncan Phillips (1886‒1966). The David C. Driskell Center (University of Maryland, College Park), established in 2001, honors the legacy of David C. Driskell - Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Art, Artist, Art Historian, Collector, Curator, and Philanthropist – by celebrating African American visual art. Both collections have outgrown their space and are seeking a partnership in which to expand their ideas and collections. This thesis addresses questions about the organization of museum typology in a university setting, the value of collecting art, aesthetic experience, affirming cultural identity, increasing status of place, and the relationship of architecture and art. Through designing the program and building, I will explore the potential for partnership between the University of Maryland, David C. Driskell Center, and the Phillips Collection by supporting aesthetic and spatial experiences.Item Rural Decay Almanac(2016) Winkler, Dane; Sham, Foon; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Rural Decay Almanac is an exhibition comprised of sculptural objects and video/sound documentation. The following is an explanation of inspiration and personal history, a proposed schematic/manual for the objects in the gallery, and other contemporary artists I frame myself within. The front half of The Art Gallery at the University of Maryland as well as the atrium space directly outside the gallery hosts the work: four large scale Site-Responsive sculptural objects, and one video/sound loop projection. The library of materials comes from a farm site in Ijamsville, MD which has been re-purposed into the structures. As a sister work, the process of dismantling documentation is shown alongside the objects in a sound/video installation. The gallery space is transformed into a meticulously controlled environment via hard objects, sound, light, and video.Item EXAMINING TRANS-SYMBOLIC AND SYMBOL-SPECIFIC PROCESSES IN POETRY AND PAINTING(2013) Loughlin, Sandra; Alexander, Patricia A; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)There is a growing interest in multiliteracies and the processes by which nonlinguistic and multisymbolic compositions are understood. However, as indicated by Unsworth (2008), there is currently no "trans-disciplinary" theoretical framework robust to these examinations. This study investigated the degree to which the Trans-Symbolic Comprehension framework (TSC; Loughlin & Alexander, 2012; Loughlin et al., 2013) might serve this purpose. The TSC posits that every act of comprehension, text or otherwise, entails both trans-symbolic and symbol-specific processes. Trans-symbolic comprehension processes are general processes that are necessary for understanding information encoded in a variety of compositional forms (e.g., text, paintings, musical score, physical formula), while symbol-specific processes are particular to a given symbol-system (e.g., text-specific processes). This study used the symbol systems of language and visual array to determine the viability of the TSC framework. Offline and online comprehension processes measures were administered before, during, and after studying a poem and a painting to capture the comprehension processes used by 12 English and 12 Art education majors. Verbal protocol analyses of these data resulted in the identification of 7 poem and 8 painting comprehension processes, which manifested in 48 associated subprocesses. The 48 comprehension subprocesses were then compared to determine degree of trans-symbolism. It was determined that a significant portion of the comprehension processes and subprocesses were shared; that is, iterative manifestations applied to both poem and painting. However, processes that did not appear to iterate were also identified (e.g., inferring mood). The discovery of these apparent trans-symbolic processes and symbol-specific processes is in line with the predictions of the TSC framework. Implications of this study for education research are discussed, specifically with respect to the burgeoning literature on nonlinguistic literacies. Preliminary implications for educational practice are also drawn in relation to the growing praxis of teaching literature, including poetry, through visual art in middle and high schools, and ongoing policy efforts to expand this type of instruction.Item SKIN(2013) Jalehmahmoudi, Bahar; Craig, Patrick; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My work is a response to my search for identity and to my alienation as a refugee in particular, thus challenging all human condition. Through the use of domestic and textile artifacts I explore the traces of the feminine body in space, and the tension between traditional expectations and the cultural trauma of displacement. Forces like beauty and violence present in my work portray this tension.Item DUKE ELLINGTON SCHOOL OF THE ARTS: CREATING IDENTITY THROUGH ARTISTIC AND ARCHITECTURAL EXPRESSION OF CULTURE IN A HISTORICAL CONTEXT(2012) Clark, Linda Jeanay; Williams, Isaac S.; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis proposes to redefine an existing building type: a public arts high school in an urban city context, as a building that becomes more than an important place for its students, and the community, but as a home for the arts, academics, and learning through social interactivity. The case study for these explorations will redefine Duke Ellington School of the Arts as a prototype for this architectural theory. It is sited in the historic Georgetown neighborhood in the northwest quadrant of Washington D.C. The thesis of this project attempts to create a contemporary building in a historic presence that reflects the school's identity and increases its visibility and presence within its Georgetown community, and rethinks how art schools adapt to change, by exploring themes of flexibility, growth and adaptability in various learning environments to changing pedagogy and technology.