| Summary: | This narrative thesis presents a collection of creative
writing that autobiographically traces a story about coming to
writing and transforming through writing. The creative writing
is structured so that the themes are re-worked through
additional sections of writing which contribute to the research.
This research approach is adapted from the two-step process of
narrative interpretive inquiry described by curricular theorist
Dr. Ted Aoki. Such a process builds upon a phenomenological
revisitation of lived experience with a post-structural
consideration of the possible meanings within experience as it
is written and re-written. The inquiry within this thesis is
also framed in feminist thought, interweaving the writings of
French feminists Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva, British
writer/feminist Virginia Woolf, and several North American
feminist writers and theorists. Such thought advocates
autobiographical and creative life writing and journalizing.
Further, the resultant, storied texts contribute to our
knowledge of the particularities of feminine experience. This
knowledge shifts and changes as the signs and signifiers of the
texts are destabilized in the intertextual relationship between
writers, texts and readers. Through the powerful process of
writing and storying, the writer comes to examine and understand
the selves while simultaneously writing these selves into text.
Such learning parallels the recursive nature of writing in a
back and forth movement that emphasizes how we learn to write as
we write to learn. Such learning becomes the means to reflect
upon the significance of the pedagogical selves, bringing a more
"thoughtful and tactful praxis" (van Manen 1990, 124-133) into
our teaching, as well as a fuller understanding of the writing
and reflecting process for students.
The approach of this thesis consists not only of writing in
various genres, but selecting them and shaping them into a text.
The thesis identifies and discusses an egocentric story that
specifies how a woman writer and teacher became through writing,
and how this becoming begins to transform to a subjectivity
which is decentered in relationship to other subjects and other
texts. The pedagogical implications of this story for
curriculum practice are situated within the empowering teaching
strategies which encourage the writing and which serve as a
model for teaching practice. === Education, Faculty of === Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of === Graduate
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