Over the last three decades, there has been a surge in short-term, faculty-directed education abroad programs sponsored by U.S.-based postsecondary institutions. Surprisingly, there is little research that examines the pedagogies faculty program directors enact on these programs, which can leave them with few resources to support their work with students abroad beyond their own on-campus teaching experience. This arts-based education abroad research (ABEAR) project is designed to provide an opportunity for discourse and reflection on the multiple pedagogies I enacted as a faculty program director by asking: how do I, as a faculty program director, perceive student learning from arts-oriented, experiential, and place-based pedagogies on two education abroad programs designed to introduce rising freshmen to undergraduate education? I will respond to this research question through an examination of the program pedagogies I created and enacted on two such programs, contextualized within Elliot Eisner's curriculum theory (2002) and John Dewey's experiential learning theory (1938, 2005), as well as within the education abroad research literature. Through the methodological frameworks of performative autoethnography and a/r/tography, I examine my design and enactment of arts-oriented, experiential, intercultural education abroad pedagogy on two Michigan State University (MSU) First-Year Seminar Abroad (FSA) programs. MSU offers these programs to rising freshmen as an introduction to life in a university community. My "findings" chapter is offered as both a dramatic and performance text (a performance of the dramatic text for a live audience), both of which extend the examination of a/r/tifacts, the evidence of pedagogy I collected for this study, to a larger conversation about the pedagogical possibilities of education abroad programming. I approach this dissertation project as an a/r/tographer, which is to say that my combined identities of artist, researcher, and teacher inform and resonate throughout the project. This dissertation makes two important contributions to the education abroad research community: first, it is designed to inspire dialogue about the pedagogical possibilities of arts-oriented intercultural education abroad; and second, this study introduces a new methodological term, Arts-Based Education Abroad Research (ABEAR), to signal the application of Arts-Based Education Research (ABER) methodologies to the unique learning context of education abroad.
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