The three studies in this dissertation explore the benefits of arts-based educative experiences and art education amongst middle, high school and college level learners. The first study, Parallel Monsters, involves Monsterland, a pseudonym for a documentary-style performance theater. Monsterland emerged from Edinberg, a small rural borderland town in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where 87 percent of the student body at the university involved are Latin. The impetus to this play is important to explain because it triggered some of my own dormant issues related to grief, marginalization and immigration to the United States. In summary, Dr. Joseph Franklin, a pseudonym, came from the East coast of the United States, to the borderlands in the early 2000s to teach drama at a Hispanic Serving Institution of higher education, HSI. This is when he learned about the benefits of arts education for marginalized learners, and pushed the university he works at to create more opportunities for the students to learn. Specifically, on top of a high number of reported and unreported crimes, community members were disappearing, and some of Franklin's own students' friends, as well as family members went missing. The second study, Poetry is not a Luxury, involves young poets with an afterschool creative writing program, Writers in the Schools, WITS in the nation's fourth largest city, Houston Texas. In 2017, I began observing the youth in the urban metropolis of Houston in spoken word poetry slam performances. Organized by a non-profit, WITS, the creative poetry writing and poetry slams involve middle and high school-aged youth who voluntarily enter the program. They are taught to draw from their own lived experiences to write poetry, which they may opt to present in spoken-word poetry competitive performances - poetry slams. These first two studies, Monsterland and WITS, consider the ways in which performance arts-based education may allow for lived experiences and related knowledge to emerge for the learner. These performance-arts educative experiences were informed by real-life events from vastly different settings in Texas. The third study in this dissertation involves art teachers across five different middle and high schools in the Greater Houston area, using semi-structured interviews by the research team. This last study, Art for Art's Sake, explores art teachers' experiences in light of increasing school violence, as well as educational disruptions caused by natural disasters and flooding caused by hurricanes in the Gulf Coast metropolis. This third study investigates the impact of art practices and art teachers on the social and emotional health (particularly emotional self-regulation) of students. Given that this last study involves teachers, the study also seeks to identify the teachers' perceptions about the ways in which art classes may have supported learners emotionally, as well as academically. Along the way, I consider who and why performance art may provide benefits to marginalized students such as multilingual or multiethnic learners. In working with these three research projects, I was able to identify a gap - very little has been documented about the educational benefits of qualitative performance-arts based educational experiences or the benefits of art education.
