This doctoral dissertation investigated the art museum summer teacher workshop model of professional development with the intention to better understand how in-service generalist teachers and art specialist teachers apply their experiences and learning once they have returned to their classrooms. The usefulness of professional development programs experienced at the district level has often been questioned due to a lack of connection to actual classroom practice (Guskey, 2009). In contrast, the art museum summer institute model of professional development is considered more successful as it offers rich learning experiences and can provide more resources than school district-supported workshops (Charland, 2008). While some studies have investigated teachers learning art museum pedagogy (Hausman, 1966; Hsieh, 2008; Sandell and Zimmerman, 2017), they are all from the perspective of the museum educator. This study is positioned from the perspective of in-service generalist and art teachers and their framing of the curricular and pedagogical experience in museum summer institutes and their own classrooms. To investigate the phenomenon, I designed a comparative case study in which I acted as a participant-observer in two professional development art museum summer institute programs in 2018 and recruited a total of eight in-service teachers, whose use of the curricular materials in their classroom practices I followed over the 2018–2019 academic year. Concurrently I conducted an autoethnographic study of my own use of the curricular materials in my grade 6 classroom. To frame this study, I applied curriculum theorist Dwayne Huebner’s (1968/2008) approach to language to understand curricula, which also provided the interpretive framework to analyze the data along with his Five Value System (1966/2008). Participating generalist and art specialist educators in this study had distinct experiences at the summer institutes; the two groups approached the art museum curricula with different objectives and viewpoints. I found that the art museum was perceived as a safe space for art specialists; the generalist teachers readily incorporated works of art into their lessons yet avoided discussing the aesthetic qualities of the works;
iv
standardized approaches to teaching limited what teachers could apply from their learning at the summer institutes; and that subtle power dynamics and tensions found in the participants’ school environments affected their curricula and restricted their ability to select specific types of professional development. The findings of this study suggest that professional development designed by art museum educators for in-service teachers should aim to strengthen instruction of Visual Thinking Strategies, focus more on how teachers can tackle socially challenging topics, provide more instruction on how to incorporate aesthetics into a discussion, offer more follow-up with the in-service teachers once the program has completed, and consider other channels to provide professional development for in-service teachers who cannot attend art museum summer institute programs.