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| Sumara, D.
J. (June 2002). Enlarging the Space of the Possible. Educational
Insights, 7(1). [Available: http://ccfi.educ.ubc.ca/publication/insights/v07n01/contextualexplorations/sumara/] |
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Enlarging
the Space of the Possible
Dennis
J. Sumara
University of Alberta |
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March, 1976, Lethbridge, Alberta. I am
walking down a candle-lit hallway of my high school, which,
for this weekend, has been transformed into a location for a
Catholic religious retreat. There are about thirty of us in
the procession, mostly grade twelve students, several nuns who
are also teachers in the school, and one priest. We are singing,
"Make Me a Channel of Your Peace" and moving through
the "Stations of the Cross," a series of images depicting
Jesus' journey to crucifixion and resurrection.
At each station
we stop and stand silently as Father Watrin reads the scripture
that accompanies the image. At some point during this ritual,
I begin to feel disoriented, light headed. I am not sure what
this means. Will I faint? The feeling persists until it collects
into a rush of emotion that runs through my entire body. I wonder
if this is Jesus speaking to me. Or am I just exhausted? Perhaps
two days confined indoors, without television, radio, clocks,
or any contact at all with the world outside the retreat, coupled
with sleep deprivation, and continuous participation in unfamiliar
rituals and routines, have made me giddy. Maybe I'm hallucinating.
Whether by divine intervention or simply from the effects of
fatigue, I feel content and happy.
The next morning
I am energized. I continue to feel physical traces of my experience
of the previous night. Although I have not discussed it with
anyone, I can see that my peers are also excited, eager to continue
with the last day at the retreat. I begin to believe something
important has happened. *
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January, 2001, Edmonton, Alberta. I am
reading Mark Salzman's (2000) novel Lying Awake, the
story of a cloistered Carmelite nun, Sister John of the Cross.
After many years of religious confinement, Sister John finally
experiences what is perceived by her as God and is able to create
large amounts of writing that represents and interprets these
spiritual events. At the height of her spiritual and literary
powers, Sister John begins to experience debilitating migraines,
which are eventually associated with a rare form of epilepsy
caused by a small tumor in her cerebral cortex. In addition
to pain, she learns that other common symptoms include hypergraphia
(voluminous writing), an intensification and narrowing of emotional
response, and an obsessive interest in religion and philosophy.
She learns that Dostoevsky, an epileptic, had these symptoms
and that Van Gogh, Tennyson, and Proust are believed to have
suffered the same condition. Unlike these historical figures,
who needed to learn to live with their symptoms, Sister John
is told that a relatively uncomplicated surgical procedure will
eliminate the petit mal seizures that create her symptoms. Of
course, eliminating the physical pain associated with this disorder
would also mean abandoning the conditions that have structured
experiences Sister John considers spiritual and, at the same
time, would abruptly halt her ability to write about them.
As I read about
Sister John, I feel the hair rise on my arms. I have migraines.
Although I do not write about a relationship with God when I
emerge from my hazy white storm, I am able to create new focus
with current writing projects. Usually the exit of a migraine
creates a window of insight that unravels some knot I am trying
to untangle in my thinking. I wonder if I have a brain tumor.
I decide this is something I must think about investigating.
However, like Sister John, if there is a growth on my cerebral
cortex that helps to create conditions for my creative work,
I am loath to have it removed. How would I organize my experience
if I could not stitch it together with reading and writing?
* * * |
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January, 2001, Edmonton, Alberta. I am
writing about my experience of reading Lying Awake, and
making connections between this literary experience, Sister
John's epilepsy and her relationship with Jesus, and my recent
rereading of letters I received from friends and relatives at
a Catholic retreat I attended during my last year of high school.
As I type I feel hypnotized by the words appearing on the screen.
I am holding my breath. I am exhilarated. I realize that the
physical responses I am experiencing during this moment of interpretive
writing are almost identical to those I have when in the middle
of generating some sort of insight from reading books that I
like. Often these books are novels, but just as often they are
memoirs, philosophical arguments, or works of theory.
* * * |
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March, 1976, Lethbridge, Alberta. The retreat
is over and my stepfather is driving me home. The sun is too
bright, the street too wide. I yearn for the closeness of the
retreat. When we arrive home, I immediately excuse myself to
my room claiming fatigue, although I am not tired. I sit on
my bed and re-read my letters. I notice that my room is small
and cluttered. For the first time, it seems insufficient, almost
vulgar. I hear my mother and stepfather arguing upstairs about
some matter I consider minor and I realize that my world is
not theirs. At this moment I feel caught in the web of their
relationship. At the same time, I feel less attached to them
and our shared circumstances, and this is satisfying to me.
I know that the world of this family and this house can be transgressed
without leaving it. The space of what seems possible has been
enlarged and I am grateful for that. I re-read the scripture
that I transcribed on a card before leaving the retreat. I decide
that I can believe what I imagine, not just what I see. Although
I did not know it then, I realize now that this insight has
likely saved my life. *
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January, 2001, Edmonton, Alberta. My involvement
with the character Sister John helps me to understand that the
positive effects of my high school religious retreat were not
so much organized by what we humans have come to call God but,
rather, by the conditions created for those of us who participated
in such removals from the familiar world to invent a needed
relationship to the "mysteries." As I now reflect
upon that event, I am amazed at the audacity of my teachers
who organized and created the structures for these retreats.
During a time in our young lives when we sought certainty (Who
will I marry? Who will love me? What career will I have? How
can I respond to those who hurt me?), we were thrown into the
arms of ambiguity. While one might argue that religious retreats
create another kind of certainty (If you love God and surrender
yourself to God you will find peace and happiness), my small
experience of immersion at this retreat suggests to me that
the opposite is true: In asking human subjects to believe in
something that is unseen, unknown, "unlanguagable,"
the world of spirituality asks modern citizens to give up the
idea of certainty and submit some of their consciousness to
the mysteries.
The challenge
to submit to a "more than human" spirituality is not,
of course, confined to Christians. Whether one organizes spiritual
life around the teachings of Jesus or Buddha or Mohammed, the
key to the sort of productive spirituality that I am thinking
of is not so much reverence to a person, or a spiritual being,
or to a set of dogmas but, rather, is a daily lived belief that
there are some things that humans cannot know or, at least,
that humans will never find language to describe or fully interpret.
* * * |
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March, 1976, Lethbridge, Alberta. It is
Saturday night, 24 hours since we arrived at the retreat. I
am pleasantly tired. It has been a full day of prayer, singing,
and meditation. There have been periods of the day when I have
been asked to perform different tasks on my own: reading scripture,
writing responses, meditating upon a particular idea, sitting
quietly. Juxtaposed with this isolation are communal meals,
group mass and prayer services, and attendance at testimonials
given by some of my peers who made retreats earlier in the year.
Now, during
the time that I would usually be at home watching TV, working
at my job as a baker's helper in a local supermarket, or partying
with my friends, I am handed a packet of letters addressed to
me, written by different people I know. This surprises me. We
are told to find a private place to read these letters and to
reflect on what their contents mean to us. *
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January, 2001, Edmonton, Alberta. In preparing
to write about what it was like to receive and read these letters
at the retreat, I spend an hour re-reading them. It is surprising
to me that I still have these letters. Because I am not much
of a collector, I am able to contain all of what I have saved
in my 43 years in a cheap brown vinyl briefcase. I have eighteen
letters, equally divided between those written by peers and
those written by teachers and other adults in my life. I have
a letter from the mother of a young woman I was dating at the
time. She includes a hand-written copy of a religious poem and
she thanks me for being so considerate to her daughter. I have
a letter from my stepfather, most of which is an excerpt from
a published inspirational essay with a sentence of his own at
the end that encourages me to work hard and do well. I remember
feeling disappointed and relieved that my mother did not write
a letter. One letter is from a friend who chastises me for being
too eager to accommodate to others' wishes.
I have a few
letters from teachers. One is from the school librarian, a woman
who I hardly knew. She writes about her own interpretation of
what spirituality means. I cannot recall what I thought of it
in 1976. Today, I am struck by one of her sentences: "Two
key attitudes in our search for the Lord in our life are silence
and joy." I know that one gift writing has given me is
the opportunity to sequester myself in silence for several hours
a day while I write and read and think. The word "joy,"
however, is not one that I use to describe my experience. Instead,
I wonder if I am happy. I conclude I probably am, but find I
cannot find language to create a representative shape for happy.
Joy, on the other hand, echoing words like "rejoice"
or the French "jouissance" feels like pleasure, gratitude,
celebration.
Another is
from my former grade one teacher, a woman I knew as Sister Mary
Louise but who eventually left the convent. As I reread this
letter I think that Sister Mary Louise (that's who she'll always
be in my memory) is now in her mid sixties. I remember her face
and her hands clearly, likely because this was all that was
visible, the rest of her shrouded by the black habit she wore
every day. To my six-year-old eyes, Sister Mary Louise was perfection
incarnate and I loved her. I know that the "most improved
student award" I received at the end of Grade One represented
my efforts to please her. Although promotion to grade two meant
a new teacher, I continued to visit Sister Mary Louise every
day after school, helping with small tasks.
Reading these
letters helps me to understand why my grade twelve year was
remarkable, and why I continue to feel such a strong attachment
and commitment to that experience and to the persons I knew
during that time. In choosing to create relationships around
something that we could not "see" or could not explain
in human terms -- something that was organized by ethics of
care, love and consideration -- we learned how to continually
interrupt the certainty of our daily lived situations and the
usual imperative to focus only on individual development.
While I am
not a participating Catholic, I have continued to organize my
life around a deeply held conviction that it is crucial for
humans to refuse to believe in the supremacy of the human subject.
For me this has meant remembering that human beings simply cannot
simultaneously participate in the world of their experience
and, at the same time, be fully and mindfully aware of the fullness
of that participation. Although I can provide informed descriptions
and interpretations of my experience, which utilize insights
learned from research and personal experience, I understand
that these experiences are, in large measure, organized by what
I do not notice or understand. Although it is popularly believed
that human beings must understand their contexts in order to
function effectively, it is largely the case that most of our
daily experience is maintained through acts of imagination and
invention. As I drive down the freeways that criss-cross the
city in which I live, for example, I do not know what everyone
else is doing or thinking, nor can I be aware of what's around
the next corner. While rules of the road create some conditions
to support my ability to drive safely, like all drivers I also
depend on acts of faith and invention. Like an act of human
conversation, where meaning is continually shifted through a
dance of dialogic exchange (Gadamer, 1990), any shared activity
requires an ongoing evolution of structural relationship (Maturana
& Varela, 1987). That one should be able to proceed without
knowing everything that influences one's experiences means that
human existence is always, to a large extent, a surprise, not
a plan. * *
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May, 1997, Tofino, British Columbia. It
is the evening of the third day of our teacher research group's
retreat. Guided by structures created by our colleague Rebecca
Luce-Kapler, we have produced writing that we are now reading
aloud to the group. Terry writes about her love of the natural
spaces that still comprise the tiny amount of the North American
Rain Forest located on the west coast of Vancouver Island where
our cabins are located. Her writing is poignant, reminding us
that we European-descended white people were not the first to
lay claim to these lands. As others read poems, autobiographical
narratives, and interpretations of ideas they have been thinking
about over the last few days, I am struck with the intensity
of our engagement with one another. While we had been meeting
for a full day, once a month for two years prior to the retreat,
it is not until tonight that we seem to have found new ways
of understanding and expressing our experiences.
Sitting in
this wood-paneled candle-lit room, the small roar of the open
ocean outside our front door, we read writing that represents
insights we have created. As I read my own writing, I feel a
new fondness for my colleagues. And, as I look at the faces
of the others, I realize something is happening. No one is fidgeting,
or merely waiting for his or her turn to read. Everyone is attentive,
waiting for the next word to drop, wondering what it will mean
when it does. When we are finished reading we sit quietly, nervously,
not wanting to break the spell that has been created.
Understanding
that this event needs personal interpretation before it is ruined
by public pronouncements, Rebecca quietly asks us to take our
writing journals and spend thirty minutes writing. She does
not tell us what to write, but by now we understand that the
directive to write means to simply open our notebooks and start
writing. The act of writing, we have learned, is an act of learning
what needs to be learned.
The morning
that we are to leave our cabins we are different people. Although
our shared living experiences over the last few days created
a communal bond that did not previously exist, our interpretation
practices, and the rituals that conditioned these, have also
made us strange to one another. We are quiet and tentative.
I am anxious to enter into my old life with the new insights
I have gained, but I am also reluctant to leave behind the conditions
that made these insights possible. I understand, however, that
if I were to stay here those conditions would quickly evaporate,
since what made them possible was the fact that this place is
not home, my colleagues are not my primary relational contacts,
and the writing rituals we shared are not identical to those
I would use at home. *
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In 1987, biologists and cognitive theorists
Umberto Maturana and Francisco published a small revolutionary
book entitled The Tree of Knowledge, where they used recent
discoveries in evolutionary biology as well as insights from
philosophy to argue that the mind is not confined to the human
brain. Several years later Varela co-authored a book with Evan
Thompson and Eleanor Rosch (1991), which provided a more comprehensive
account of how this view of mind was supported not only by recent
scientific research but, as well, by the ancient eastern wisdom
traditions, particularly Buddhism.
Arguing that
the mind exceeds the brain is a risky business, particularly
in Western societies that have been influenced by Enlightenment
thinking which, according to Descartes' famous maxim "I
think therefore I am," suggests the human subject can only
be known by what goes on in his or her brain. Supported by the
ideas and structures of democracy and capitalism, which are
organized around the belief in the rights of the individual
and are elaborated by naive interpretations of Darwin's "survival
of the fittest" idea, the "mind" is considered
to be something that each human subject develops from some seed
of disposition present at birth.
Notwithstanding
the fact that this view of mind has, to a large extent, supported
the continued belief in infinite growth so valued by developed
countries, and has brought about disastrous effects through
practices associated with this fundamental belief, it has also
created conditions where each human subject, to some extent,
is considered responsible for "being all that she or he
can be." This emphasis on personal achievement and development
can only exist alongside the belief that the mind is confined
to the individual brain.
But, of course,
this commonsense theoretical belief is contradicted by daily
experiences. Anyone who has watched a child learn language understands
that the ability to speak can only occur when one is immersed
in communities in meaningful ways. Although the particular degrees
to which a human is able to learn and creatively manipulate
language are always influenced by an inherited biological structure,
language is not an individual achievement but, rather, functions
as the glue that knits people together into communities.
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My colleague and friend, Pat Chuchryk,
begins her qualitative research course by asking pairs of students
to spend the first half hour of class interviewing one another.
Then she asks them to sit back to back so that they cannot see
one another and to list details about the other person: What
color are the eyes? Are there earrings? What do they look like?
Shirt or sweater? Jeans or skirt? Shoes or runners? Of course,
most students are quite inaccurate in their descriptions. What
is perceived and remembered usually has little relation to what
exists. This is not only a lesson about conducting research;
it is a lesson about reading. As is now well known, readers
are prone to projecting their interpretations and wishes on
a text, even when the arguments presented discourage them. And,
of course, it is a lesson of everyday life: Are things seen
as they "really are" or are they seen as the perceiver
wants them to be?
Recent research
in the science of perception (Norretranders, 1998; Sacks, 1995;
Pinker, 1995) has clearly shown that in order for humans to
be able to perceive, processes of discarding must be learned.
This means that when we humans look at anything, we usually
see what we expect to see. It is difficult to be surprised.
Learning to notice something new usually means that it needs
to be distinguished from the backdrop of what is usually ignored.
That is why it is so interesting to go for a walk with someone
who is either more familiar or less familiar with a landscape
than we are (Butala, 1994; Norris, 1993). Those who have decided
to learn about the details of a particular landscape can provide
informed details: "This plant is called spear grass. This
is a buffalo flower." Those who are new to a landscape
usually notice larger things: "There are so many trees
that I can't see the sky!" Or, as is common with those
who are new to a prairie landscape: "Standing out here
makes me dizzy! It all looks the same."
It seems that
human beings do not merely "see" what's out there;
human beings learn to see and, most importantly, in order to
accomplish this, they learn how to "not see" most
things in their immediate worlds of contact. It is this learned
discarding process that allows each of us to negotiate our daily
worlds without becoming exhausted. If the discarding process
were not in effect, each day would be like visiting anew a strange
land, which, as any traveler can attest, requires considerable
energy.
The problem
with creating conditions for a relatively effortless daily existence,
however, is that familiarity often obscures the possibility
to notice what is interesting. As Grumet (1991) has explained,
it is the major work of the teacher to "point" to
aspects of the world that interrupt familiarity. And, as Gallop
(2000) has suggested, this attention to detail must be learned.
* * * |
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In recent years I have been asking my pre-service
undergraduate teacher education students to write about old
shoes. At the beginning of the term I ask them to find a pair
of old shoes of their own and bring them to class, concealed
in bag. I insist that they do not show these shoes to other
members of the class. I then redistribute the shoes, asking
each class member to take home someone else's shoe and place
it in a prominent place in their home -- for example, on top
of their computer monitor, on their bedroom dresser top, on
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When they return the following week (with
the shoe), I ask them to place the shoe on the table in front
of them. Throughout these exercises, I continually remind them
that they must not identify their own original shoe. I ask students
what it was like to live with someone else's shoe. "It
was strange!" "I found it disturbing and eventually
had to put in my closet." "It was like an invasion
of someone else's and my privacy." "I felt like the
shoe was watching me."
For the next
several hours, I ask students to engage in short writing practices
that try to create new contexts and situations for the shoe
they have adopted: "Write about a place this shoe might
have been." "Write about something this shoe might
have done." I then ask each student to pair up with another
to link these short narratives. "Tell each other the stories
of where your shoe has been and what it has done and see what
happens when you put these together." In every case, students
invent interesting stories that reveal complex characters.
Although I
use this activity to teach a lesson about identity (Identities
are not innate, they are made.) and, as well, to teach something
about creative writing (Characters emerge from settings and
plots, they do not announce settings and plots.), I also use
it to demonstrate to my students the importance of interrupting
perceptions of the mundane objects and events that structure
daily experiences. When students complain that the old shoe
made them feel uncomfortable in their own home, and later when
they produce rich narratives from imagined features that become
attached to these shoes, they are learning to transgress the
boundaries of what organizes their perceptual and interpretive
worlds (Davis, Sumara, & Luce-Kapler, 2000).
This experience
of boundary crossing becomes especially interesting when the
owners of the old shoes bear witness to the new narratives that
have been constructed around them by others in the class: "This
was the shoe that I wore to my high school graduation -- Now
I'll never be able to look at it without remembering how it
was involved in a passionate love affair on a cruise ship!"
Memory, it
seems, is not only a representation of a particular event that
happened in the past, it is also an interpretation of those
images and narratives that have, over time, collected around
that memory (Gadamer, 1990; Merleau-Ponty, 1962). As a cultural
object, the shoes of my students become newly significant in
ways that do not always please them: "That sandal was the
one I wore during my year in South Asia. I'm not sure that I
like the fact that for me it is now associated with a character
who was, it seems, utterly loathsome! I'm going to try to forget
I ever heard that!" Good luck. Whether the perceived attachments
are explicit or rendered covert, seemingly not noticed or forgotten,
they continue to influence the topography of thinking.
I mention my "old shoe" lessons in this writing because,
for me, this activity helps both my students and I to remember
that while perception is structured by physiological abilities,
it is continually organized and reorganized by experiences.
As neurologists have shown (Damasio, 1994; Calvin, 1996), in
order to see, human beings must learn to see. |
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In his essays documenting the experiences
of those with neurological or perceptual disorders, Oliver Sacks
(1995) has helped clarify this idea. In a study of Virgil, a
middle-aged man who regained sight through a new surgical procedure
after a lifetime of blindness, Sacks shows that one's history
of learning how to see becomes integral to the organization
of memory and experience. Although Virgil's surgery was successful
and he was able to physiologically "see" following
the procedure, what he perceived was the visual equivalent of
"noise." In order for Virgil to discern faces and
objects in his visual field, he needed to learn to discard most
of this visual noise. In addition, Virgil needed to re-interpret
his memories, since the addition of new visual images meant
a required revision of the past. This, of course, was exhausting
and, in many ways debilitating. After several years, Virgil
eventually became "agnosic" -- psychically blind.
Interrupting
familiarity is exhausting. That is why learning is such hard
work. This is not merely a psychological or social phenomenon
-- it is a biological one. Any time the brain is asked to learn
something new it uses many times more physical energy than usual.
Thinking requires fuel. Learning to accommodate to new understanding
requires much more. This is one reason why traveling to new
places creates daily exhaustion for the traveler. It is why
my partner and I choose to go to the same location by the sea
and rent the same cabin for one week each year. While we want
to become removed from the pressures of daily work life, we
do not want to be challenged with the energy-sapping task of
having to learn and negotiate a new setting.
This also helps
to explain why many readers choose to read a steady stream of
romance, mystery, or crime novels, and why the most popular
television shows are soap operas, police or hospital dramas,
or situation comedies. While the players and settings change,
each of these genres is developed around specific and well-known
plot structures. In order to be entertained, it seems that our
perceptions must not be overly taxed or challenged. This does
not mean that learning does not occur, nor does it mean that
these activities should be discouraged. It does suggest, however,
that an exclusive menu of such activities can create fixed boundaries
for one's perceptions, reducing possibilities for the enlarging
experiences that have the potential to condition the development
of new insights. Involvement in formulaic experiential structures
only makes small challenges to perception while involvement
in more unfamiliar structures becomes a much larger perceptual
challenge. |
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The significant differences between small
and large challenges to perception can be understood by examining
the shoe activity. In thinking about this activity, it is important
to note that I do not ask students to write about their own
shoes. I do not do so because, in most cases, students would
not be able to detach the shoe from its remembered histories
and, as well, because a familiar shoe evokes nostalgia, not
insight. I ask students to examine other people's shoes, because
old shoes are intimate artifacts that reveal the trace of one
human's history. In noticing the marks of wear and the dirt
embedded in creases, the interpreter feels as though the intimate
world of another human is being presented. At the same time,
by including this artifact in the middle of one's own present
life, the interpreter feels watched. This is why the collection
of shoes at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., piled in
glass walled rooms on either side of a hallway that all visitors
must pass through, is such an emotionally charged experience.
Shoes collect the biological and phenomenological traces of
their owners and so become intimate artifacts of history and
memory. As Anne Michaels (1996) explains in Fugitive Pieces
"It's a strange relationship that we have with objects
that belonged to the dead; in the knit of atoms, their touch
is left behind (p.265). *
* * |
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September, 2001, Edmonton, Alberta. I am
revising some writing and thinking about the bombing of the
World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington,
D.C. All week, I have been watching the effects of this disaster,
including the rescue and recovery efforts. As nations around
the world conduct rituals of mourning, I am reminded that the
boundaries erected around human experiences are merely heuristic
conveniences. As national anthems and songs of remembrance are
sung, as prayers are recited, as eulogies are given, I am reminded
of the importance of shared forms and rituals. I remember what
I learned at my Catholic Retreat. I understand again why my
"old shoes" activity is interesting. I am more convinced
than ever of the value of shared interpretive projects, especially
those that ask human beings to imagine what exists outside the
familiarity of perception. *
* * |
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| References
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S. (1994). The perfection of the morning: An apprenticeship
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Calvin,
W. (1996). How brains think: Evolving intelligence, then
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Damasio,
A. (1994). Descartes' error: Emotion, reason, and the human
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Davis,
B., Sumara, D. & Luce-Kapler, L. (2000). Engaging minds:
Learning and teaching in a complex world. Mahwah, NJ:
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Gadamer,
H-G. (1990). Truth and method. New York, NY: Crossroad.
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J. (2000). The ethics of close reading: Close encounters.
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Pinker,
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Sacks,
O. (1995). An anthropologist on Mars: Seven paradoxical
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Salzman,
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Varela,
F., Thompson, E. & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind:
Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press. |
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| About the Author |
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Dennis
J. Sumara is Associate Professor of Teacher Education
at the University of Alberta. He is author of Private Readings
in Public: Schooling the Literary Imagination (New York:
Peter Lang, 1996) and co-author of Engaging Minds: Learning
and Teaching in a Complex World (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum,
2000). His work is developed around studies of literary engagements,
with particular attention to the ways they function to create
sites for learning and interpretation. His latest book (in
press with Lawrence Erlbaum Associates) is entitled Why
Reading Literature in Schools Still Matters: Learning to Create
Insight From Literary Engagements.
Correspondence: Dennis J.
Sumara, Department of Secondary Education, Faculty of Education,
University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2G5, Canada.
E-mail: educational.insights@ubc.ca |
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| About the Artist |
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Gailene
Powell is an artist and educator. She is a graduate student
in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia.
Gailene's paintings are symbolic in nature and often represent
a solitary object set in an abstract space. Gailene has exhibited
widely and her work is held in numerous private collections.
Correspondence: Gailene Powell,
Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia, Vancouver,
B.C., Canada V6T 1Z4
E-mail: educational.insights@ubc.ca |
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