Building a Visual Vocabulary: An Art Therapist’s Self-Inquiry into the Poetics of Found Material

Found material offers many benefits to the artist who chooses to use it. Not only is it environmentally sustainable, found objects can provide a sentimental and nostalgic quality for the artist to engage with. The experience of finding an object in one’s environment can help cultivate a sense of connection to place and foster a sense of curiosity. Allowing oneself to project this nascent emotional content onto the found object and ascribe meaning to it can generate art material that has a self-imposed poetic quality. This meaningful material can then be creatively manipulated in aligment with the projected emotional content, propelling transformations from within and without. This research, using an art-based heuristic self-inquiring approach, seeks to explore and investigate the potential for self-reflection and self-insight through the creative use of found material. The artist-researcher examines how the process of engaging in her environment through mindful walks and collecting found material can facilitate processes of self-awareness and emotional regulation. Through guided meditation and reflective writing practices, the found objects become imbued with meaning and worked with creatively in the artist-researcher’s studio. Once complete, the artworks are further reflected upon in order to construct a sense of meaning out of the experience. This research presents an intimate account of the artist-researcher’s experience working with found materials and reveals the potential for the proposed art-based process to facilitate self-awareness, self-reflection, emotional regulation, and self-insight. Based on the findings, this art-based intervention could potentially be applicable in an art therapy context

Effects of professional development on the knowledge and classroom practices of elementary school science teachers

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of professional development on the knowledge and classroom practices of teachers of science in kindergarten through Grade 5. These teachers, trained to be generalists in the content areas, were strongly prepared in pedagogical practices, reading skills, basic language arts, and mathematics content areas. Science reform has led to more content-specific science standards that were difficult for these unprepared teachers to address without professional development. The researcher implemented a professional development program that used a collaborative model involving 8 teachers in Grade 4. The researcher conducted the professional development, assisted at times by personnel from the New Jersey State Department of Education. The new standards were learned, reinforced, and adopted. The data that were analyzed to determine the effects of the professional development came from a comparison of student achievement of the classes of 2 sets of teachers in Grade 4, one of which was the control set ( n = 8). The other was the experimental set (n = 8). The researcher administered pre- and postintervention content tests to both groups to measure teacher knowledge. In addition, the researcher reviewed lesson plans, conducted observations, and administered surveys to determine whether professional development in science impacted teacher practices in the classroom. This limited study suggested that teacher instruction did not significantly differ after professional development intervention. It also suggested that teacher content knowledge did not significantly increase due to the intervention. The researcher believes that local factors influenced the outcome and recommends a more systemic program that includes the involvement of all stakeholders