On Reverie: 16 Studies in Chicago-based Education through Durational Curriculum Inquiry

This conceptual, arts-based research study examines how curricular approaches to reverie experience contribute to understanding the potential of curriculum as a platform for self-education. Grounded in literatures of curriculum studies, studio art practice, cultural theory of civically-engaged art forms, and psychoanalytic theories of human development that position experiences of reverie as those most central to the creation and development of the mind, this dissertation uses the unifying construct of autobiographical methodology to draw an analytical synthesis through sixteen sub-studies. Chapters include a contemporary art teacher program, a multi-year curriculum studies conference for graduate students, a series of socially-engaged art projects, an eulogy, several published journal articles exploring the conceptual frameworks that underpin the study and its method, a set of paintings, a published edited book for teachers, and other studies of reverie directed by the author/artist/researcher in a range of educational contexts across Chicago neighborhoods specifically.