The dynamic processes and protective factors associated with building and expressing resilience are important to societies and individuals who wish to make positive adjustments when faced with trauma, adverse events, and stress. The belief that resilience is promoted through dynamic dispositions associated with studio art practices in contexts such as the middle school art classroom led me to question how resilience could be further promoted through art as a goal and outcome in the art classroom. To investigate this question, I chose to engage in aesthetic research and research about resilience to create an interactive data wheel that would provide middle school art educators with practical strategies and suggestions for promoting resilience in the classroom. Through the creation of this data wheel, I synthesized five key processes associated with the development of resilience and five key areas of the visual art classroom designated by the Florida Sunshine Standards for education, resulting in twenty-five strategies for integrating the resilience construct into principal areas of the middle school art classroom. The research and interactive data wheel generated during this project serve as a potential model for art educators nation-wide aspiring to encourage resilience processes in their classrooms.

http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00013659/00001