Writing and rewriting feminist and irreverent texts : Poetry, narrative, pedagogy and life

• Main Author: Norman, Renee
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/3528

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