As an educator, I approach each of my classes as a designer of a place of learning by offering an assemblage of materials, environments, texts, dialogues, and experiences that I hope will catalyze the possibility for significant, even transformative, learning to occur.
Associate Professor of Art Education
I am passionate about the field of art education and about my role as a professor in higher education because I believe that the work art educators do, particularly in schools, is crucial to the lives of students. What drives my work as an educator is a commitment to preparing and supporting educators who design art experiences that value young learners as worthy, intelligent humans and that show them the potential for art to be both personally and socially transformative.
My passion for supporting art educators carries through in my research, which has focused primarily on investigating the experiences of early career art teachers and developing content-specific approaches to mentoring them. My work pays close attention to the social and political forces shaping public schools and aims to locate generative sites of possibility for the ways art education is conceived and practiced.
As an educator, I approach each of my classes as a designer of a place of learning by offering an assemblage of materials, environments, texts, dialogues, and experiences that I hope will catalyze the possibility for significant, even transformative, learning to occur. I view learning experiences as those in which both teacher and students are challenged to open themselves to new understandings and new ways of being.
I have a spouse and three children in high school and college. I pursued my first graduate degree while working full-time and the second while raising three young children on a single income, which helps me relate to some of the challenges many graduate students face while pursuing their degrees.
Christina’s primary research is situated within the context of early career art teaching, especially as understood through arts-based methodologies and poststructural and posthuman theories. Through this work, she both interrogates and intervenes in the complex network of relations that exists at the intersections of art education and the current climate of public education in the US, which is significantly impacted by practices of accountability and compliance. Through on-going work with early career art teachers, Christina aims to locate spaces of possibility where art teaching, mentoring, and professional learning can be imagined and practiced anew. In addition to her work with early career teachers, Christina pursues historical research of women art educators in the US.
Christina is an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Education and on the Editorial Review Board for Studies in Art Education. She has published in journals such as Studies in Art Education, Visual Arts Research, and The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education.