Auto-Poetic Possibilities of a Walking Practice and Curriculum Theorizing

• In Event: Material and Digital A/r/tographic Explorations in Community

Abstract

Objectives: In attending to autobiography and poesis, I walk. I walk in-and-out of step with time, both in quotidian stride and click to screen. Tracing the materiality of teaching in a classroom to digital discourses. Walking that eases the heartbreak of loss and invites curiosities inherent in a new path. This research explores the a/r/tographical search for one’s own truth in times of upheaval. The step steadies in an effort to think historically in the present. I ask how does walking contribute to theorizing the curricular? In entangling walking and curriculum, how is arts-based education research a generative path for auto-poetic inquiry?

Theoretical Perspectives: To think through turmoil and new horizons – is an act of curreré. To make meaning in the present is both an analysis of the past in relation to the present/future and a synthesis that in turn is made manifest in action – be it textual or otherwise (Pinar, 1994). This writing attends to material and digital art works created over a period of seven years of a walking practice alongside social justice research and teaching in an articulation of auto-poetic inquiry.

Methods and Data Sources: Data gathering, and curating is informed by the writing of Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec (2016), who note that “(s)pending time with your data is spending time with yourself” (p. 128). And, in this theory and practice of auto-poetic inquiry, I read, listen, write, and make to locate and hone my voice alongside others, understanding that “poetic inquiry can be an active response to social issues, a political commentary, and a call to action” (Faulkner & Cloud, 2019, p. xi). In curating a series of images from the personal archive of thousands, there is an effort to understand this sorting of self and that “(a)utobiographical writing refers the writer and reader to themselves” (Pinar, 1994, p. 58). A risk-taking (and risk-giving?) that George Grant (1995), describes: “may be that at any time or place, human beings can be opened to the whole in their loving and thinking, even as its complete intelligibility eludes them” (p. 68).

Results: Susan Walsh (2018) writes that “(t)here is rhythm in a contemplative practice “a kind of attunement with the world and with other people” (p. 2). This a/r/tographical work unfolds in manifold iterations – cadences and patterns move theorizing curriculum in a loosening of the pedagogic imperative toward the turn to tempered truth-telling in hypermodal troublings.

Scholarly Significance: Joan Retallack (2003), notes that “everything in mass culture is designed to deliver space-time in a continuous drone. One writes poetry and essays to disrupt that fatal momentum” (p. 5). Auto-poetic inquiry offers “a fundamental restructuring of one’s relation to self, an opening of the contents of one’s unconscious, an attunement of one’s voice and articulation of that content and voice” (Pinar, 1994, p. 59). Auto-poetic inquiry through walking and curriculum theorizing is both a search for and a sharing of one’s own truth.

Author

• Joanne M. Ursino, University of British Columbia
  Presenting Author