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Abstract
This dissertation study was designed in response to the focus in schools on test scores and accountability, which has increasingly impacted students’ experiences in schools as well as art education curriculum and pedagogy. In this study, I responded to and aimed to disrupt the neoliberal culture of public schools in my high school art classroom by implementing a yoga-informed teaching practice. While yoga in the United States is most commonly associated with asanas, or body positions, the pedagogical approach I developed was grounded in the broader philosophy of yoga, drawing from the concepts of abhyasa (steady and consistent effort), vairagya (comfort with our efforts and contentment with where we are in the current moment), ahimsa (nonviolence), and interconnectedness. The yoga-informed pedagogy I implemented was also based on my research of engaged pedagogy (hooks, 2010) and contemplative practices aimed at disrupting neoliberalism through relational, process-oriented approaches to teaching. Using posthumanism and affect theory to guide my post-qualitative approach to research, I took on the role of educator-researcher to investigate how events in my public high school classroom from January to May 2023 were shaped by yoga-informed pedagogy. I analyzed the classroom events by thinking with theory to construct written narratives and collages based on transcribed classroom conversations, photographs, students’ in-progress and completed work, and educator-researcher reflections. By thinking with affect theory and using collage as analysis, I sought to understand what affects were produced and how classroom experiences were impacted. Throughout the study, tensions with neoliberalism were present, though teaching with a yoga-informed pedagogy and thinking with affect led to new understandings of the role of the assemblage and nonhuman bodies in education. Study events demonstrated how affects were both carried into and developed as part of the art classroom, shaping the experiences of both the students and the educator. I end the dissertation with implications for further understandings of affect and yoga-informed pedagogy’s impact for art education practice and future research. I recommend a process-based approach that draws on yoga-informed pedagogy and takes affects into account in order to cultivate connection, vulnerability, and trust and push back against neoliberalism.