Author ORCID Identifier:
https://orcid.org/0009-0001-5367-3597
Date of Graduation
8-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts in Art Education (MA)
Degree Level
Graduate
Department
Art
Advisor/Mentor
Camacho Valencio,Paulina
Committee Member
Brown, Kathy
Second Committee Member
Zollinger , Rachel
Keywords
Arts Based Research; Professional Growth; Professional Learning Communities; Rhizomatic; Self Study; Whiteness Studies
Abstract
This self-study contributes to the field of art education by examining the tensions and possibilities within Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) through an arts-based lens. Framed as both a love letter and a palimpsestic work, this thesis reimagines professional development as a layered, living practice, rooted in collective care and criticality. Using collage as both method and metaphor, the study interweaves Freire’s dialogic praxis, bell hooks’ radical tenderness, and the marginalia of a weathered PLC handbook—redacted, annotated, and reassembled with lived experience. Through deliberate redaction and reassembly, the research intentionally disrupts the normative invisibility of whiteness in educational structures, making visible how white-centered pedagogies both shape and constrain professional development frameworks. In the interstices of mandated compliance, the author traces the spectral presence of singleton art teachers navigating standardization amid histories of segregation and systemic inequity. Visual journals, sewn texts, and altered documents become data, resisting rubric-driven metrics in favor of relational, rhizomatic learning. The redactions illuminate rather than erase, exposing how authentic professional growth often emerges in the unrecorded, artful exchanges between educators. Through this creative-critical inquiry, the thesis reveals that the most vital learning lives in the crease between critique and creation—in shared materials, in whispered resistance, and in the courage to imagine otherwise.
Citation
Danenhauer, A. M. (2025). Layered Redactions: An Arts Based Research and Self Study Handbook for Art Teachers Navigating Professional Learning Communities. Graduate Theses and Dissertations Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/5970
