Visual Expressions of Anxiety : An Exploration of how Students with Anxiety Perceive and Interact with Formal Learning Environments

Graduation date: 2016The purpose of this thesis is to better understand how students who experience anxiety that interferes with their daily functioning perceive and interact with their formal learning environments such as classrooms and lab spaces so that instruction in these spaces may be improved. Specific attention was paid to the ways in which the student's anxiety influenced their ability to perform tasks necessary to their learning. The research exists in the intersection of student life and learning, formal learning environments (psychological, social, and physical aspects), and disability studies.\ud Visual art was used as an additional communication tool to gather and express information that might not be as easily expressed through written and/or verbal communication alone. The study used Arts Based Research (ABR) methods to help create a more complex understanding of the experiences of students with anxiety by exploring it in a different way. The students who were involved in the study are referred to as "co-creators" in this text to emphasize their active role in the research and the importance of their contributions. Incorporation of art in the data collection, synthesis, and dispersal of information opened the research to a broader audience. ABR emphasizes the importance of the research audience. In keeping with the ABR tradition, this study included an exhibit of the research for the broader community and includes actionable information to improve practice.\ud Through analyzing and synthesizing the data I developed 5 main themes. The first theme from the data is that the co-creators experiences dealing with anxiety in higher education can be organized as a self-fulfilling cycle. The second theme, "painful, social, silence", can be considered as being a part of the broader cycle because it references the most salient things for them, social interactions that feel heavy with distant silence. Many of these most salient things are tied to negative outcomes and require students to develop and use "survival strategies" such as those covered in the third theme. These first three themes all produced frustration for the co-creators, both directly and indirectly, which is summarized in the fourth theme: frustration with a system not built for your success. Lastly, all of the co-creators discussed hope for a different reality in the future. These findings in combination with the information from the literature review informed the recommendations and conclusion