This project stemmed from a collaborative effort in curriculum development and instruction between me and a fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Page (pseudonym). During the fall of 2018, Ms. Page and I facilitated a process-drama curricular unit (Kao & O'Neill, 1998), which introduced fifth graders to the overarching themes for science, social studies, and language arts. The purpose of the process-drama was to build a collaborative foundation of understanding for content-area and social learning goals that Ms. Page and her students could return to over the course of the school year. The structure of the process drama, adapted from earlier renditions, broke the class into four islands, each with its own natural resources and cultural identity. The drama lead students through a series of dramatic exchanges and creative collaboration. I participated as a researcher, collaborator, and teacher-in-role (Kao & O'Neill, 1998) in the classroom for the purpose of exploring students' language use in a collaborative, arts-based setting as the students were asked to embody their learning in new ways. As students become more autonomous in their collaborative and creative efforts, it became clear that not only were students using verbal language in interesting and iterative ways, but they were also using their bodies and physical space to articulate, negotiate, and build new meaning. This project builds upon theories of embodiment in collaborative meaning making to be understand the role of the body in critical, creative, and collaborative efforts. In order to do so, this dissertation is organized into five parts: (1) an introduction to my own embodied identity as a researcher/teacher/artist; (2) a reconceptualization of the imbricate and embodied nature of language, cognition, and bodies; (3) a methodological examination of arts-based research as a performative technique for examining bodies and space in the classroom; (4) an empirical discussion of the findings and significance of meaning-making bodies during critical collaboration; and (5) a poetic and improvisational imagining of the potential of arts-based research in embodied studies. Findings from this project suggest that students critically and flexibly negotiate the space of the classroom, the space collaborative group, and the ways in which they use their bodies, energy, time, and action to articulate, deliberate, and come to consensus of new meaning. The findings from this project are significant for researchers and teachers because they highlight the importance of supporting students in developing autonomous bodies and space in order to meet a range of material and affective needs, rather than continuing to treat bodies and space as highly routinized and controlled instruments of learning.
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