Martha J. Strickland

Cognition and Student Learning through the Arts

In recent years, an increasing number of studies have suggested connections among cognition, social and emotional development, and the arts. Some of this research indicates that students in schools where the arts are an integral part of the academic program tend to have an academic advantage over students for whom that is not the case. This study examines factors in schools and at home that contribute most to the variance in student learning and achievement, particularly as they relate to the arts, using a sample of more than 8,000 students in grade 5. The findings suggest that in-school arts programs alone may have less of an impact on student achievement than previous research has proposed. Parental influences likely have more of an effect than school on most children, and efforts to involve parents in the arts with their children may be more productive than simply providing arts programs in schools.

Contrapuntal orchestration: an exploration of an interaction between researchers’ and teachers’ stories around the concept of culture

What occurs when an African American woman professor and a European American woman professor review narrative data and interpret what the students write differently? This research illustrates how race and the experience of two ethnically different female researchers impact data analysis of teachers’ interactions with narratives of personal past experiences. These interactions exposed multiple voices and intrapersonal as well as interpersonal contexts, resulting in a dialogue which embraced multiple equally valued individual voices, interwoven yet distinct – a contrapuntal orchestration. This resulting contrapuntal orchestration suggests the importance of intentionally creating a dialogic space which includes researchers of diverse theoretical backgrounds within diversity discourse in education classes, and within that space providing for self-awareness of the cultural attributes we use to construct cultural meaning of everything around us. This paper explores how analyzing teachers’ autoethnographies challenged the researchers’ own construction of culture and what it meant to provide for dialogic space in that construction process.