Open Collections

Morimoto, Ken

University of British Columbia

Beginning with Ted T. Aoki’s (1979/2005k) invitation to walk with him to the Nitobe Memorial Garden found on The University of British Columbia Vancouver Campus (p. 345), this study embarks on a process of becoming with artistic inquiry in education as enacted love. The work centers on the creative mapping of twelve chapters drawing from twelve significant features of interest in the memorial garden with which to sojourn. From the entry gate, the sections move across the Nitobe Lantern, the split path and waterfall, the pond and the plains, the seven-storey pagoda, family crest lantern, the way of teenage rebellion, the seventy-seven-log bridge, eight bridge, eleven plank bridge, pavilion, tea house, and island. Attending to each place creates moments to linger with Aoki’s curriculum theory and lived experience alongside Japanese and Canadian knowledges with which one might become in artistic and pedagogical relation. To this end, the study works with the methodology of a/r/tography (Irwin, 2003; LeBlanc & Irwin, 2019) that emphasizes artistic practice as a form of research alongside propositional theorizing based on Alfred North Whitehead’s (1978) speculative philosophy to enact a journey toward one’s becoming as an individual educator situated within a complex fabric of relations with oneself and others in the world. Each of the twelve chapters renders the features of the garden with which they are associated as a proposition that artistically weaves curriculum theory, philosophy, aesthetics, art, poetry, history, and culture that bridge the East and the West. Working propositionally, there are no direct questions or answers provided by the work. Instead, the resulting work offers itself as a curriculum of artful study with which one might linger—with Aoki, with their teachers and students, and with the world in its beauty and its messiness—in the hope that through it all there might be a glimpse of love itself.

Text

2024-07-25

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88692

Curriculum Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/