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Heartful inquiry : a parallactic approach to English language arts curriculum

University of British Columbia

Before I embark on explaining the structure of this work, I would like to invite my reader(s) to seek resonances and dissonances with the words read from the page. While this conceptual thesis is written as a triptych – a set of three artistic works intended to be appreciated together – the individual parts speak to autobiographical and heartographical ruminations within the existing literature, thereby supporting a parallactic approach to English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum. The autobiographical narrative is written in fragments. These stories of hopeful struggles, within schools as both a student and then an educator, are what have led me to become a language and literary researcher. While some may contest autobiographical writing in the academy, it is necessary to understand oneself in order to then understand the Other. The heartographical section is the pièce de résistance. It is the centerpiece of this thesis as the heart is the single life-giving organ from which everything flows; it fills the fissures of the earth and brings light-full hope amid the despair of darkness. This piece will bridge some of the ellipsis seen in the fragments and the telling rather than showing a parallactic approach to ELA curriculum. The heartographical is the prominent present – pedagogically, philosophically and poetically – pulsing through the personal and the collective while heeding the past and questing without certitude courageously into the future. It is a place where the artist does not heed time or space in unleashing their inner spirit-between the experiences of the artist, researcher, and teacher. A/r/tography is an arts-based methodology that examines the contiguous relationship between and among the three identities. The slashes in-between the three identities present an interstitial space that I, as a neophyte to a/r/tography, have come to know as a place of responsibility to acknowledge that one never dwells only within one of these identities. As such, art, in its various forms, is always an invitation and a gift that passes on learned lessons from one person to another, from one place and time to another.

Text

2015-07-27

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/54168

Language and Literacy Education

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/