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Contextual Fabric:
Dialogue, Silence, and Gesture in Making Local Meaning
of Educational Reform
Valerie Triggs
University of British Columbia
Some of my life as a teacher has been lived on land that from an airplane looks like a quilt—endless patches of yellow and brown tucked up against each other so one hardly notices the fences and roads between. The type of crop that’s grown changes the colour of the fabric piece and aside from minimal road allowance accommodations, each square joins comfortably to another piece...revealing one of the most altered landscapes in the world. Occasionally, there is a fold in the structure of the land that creates an opening, hidden between small hills—a place where enough moisture collects for something wild to grow—a place where deer lie in the shade of the trees. Most people don’t know that the prairies embrace these hiding places. The endless horizon carries the illusion of transparency.
The simplicity
of this rural landscape—wide open sky and what
seems to be a vast expanse of empty land, is contrasted
by the warmth of a stranger’s hand that invariably
rises in greeting as vehicles pass each other on the
road. There is a nod of acknowledgement, even as the
other hand attempts to keep the vehicle from blowing
off the road. Often, I am unprepared for the greeting
and I miss the second in which I can respond and then,
we have already both moved on. This little ritual seemed
odd to me at first—that anyone would make the effort
to greet every driver in these days of constant travel.
Yet, I have appreciated the alertness of the action,
feeling that it is a bit of recognition, a lingering
strand of rural. The external gesture weaves me into
the landscape and into this place.
Current emphasis on ‘improvement’ and
‘accountability’ in many local educational reform agendas narrows
opportunity for teacher professional growth and learning, and misses the richness
and potential in conceptions of teacher learning as situated, local, and relational.
In considering how my own inner landscape is continually reconstructed from the
outside through relations with others, I found myself rejecting initial notions
of researching ‘professional development’ of teachers and its underlying
current of conformity. I considered ‘teacher learning’ and
‘curriculum change’ and then wondered if it would be helpful to just
research change. Change seems to be a metonym for life itself, the process of
mapping one messy and unfinished layer of experience over the other.
Maybe what’s most
significant in regards to our own learning and growth
as teachers is the ongoing way in which our individual
experience continues to be woven by the perspectives
we ascribe to meanings and by how we further intertwine
newness conjointly, not necessarily as friends but as
strangers engaged in actions, mediated by the tools of
dialogue, silence, and gesture.
Instead of spatializing
the components of our personal and professional realities
in relation to each other to help us conceive of this
process, we might reconceptualize time and space as texture,
fabric that is used and recycled. Texture suggests touch,
which kindles a social response that tries to make sense
of the self in larger social terms, offering a relational
awareness. Dialogue, silence, and gesture don’t
exist on their own but are all part of a simultaneous
interobjectivity and intersubjectivity resulting from
interrelationships and interdependencies.
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M. Cole (2003) discusses the definition of context and its strong
similarities to the Latin term, ‘contextere,’ or ‘to
weave together.’ As I engage in an a/r/tographical
inquiry[1] (Irwin, 2004) that extends a renegotiation
and remaking of complex, textured moments with
senses of place and stories of lived experience,
I stitch together a variety of used pieces of
fabric—yellows, browns, ribbed, rough,
coarse, flannel…and I consider other people’s
stories of fabric…all part of an inextricable
matrix of ongoing and unfolding relation between
inner and outer, personal and professional, social
and individual, fact and fiction, past and present…
This paper reflects a layered dialogical mapping of geocultural narrative
and remnant river valleys of local landscape,
personal experience, and professional life.
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Tolman (1999) argues that, “The
individual is truly human only in society,” and “that
human individuality itself is achievable only in society.” (73).
If we were to understand that within every person’s
perspective is a new location through which we can better
see ourselves, I wonder if this would be what Engstrom
means (1987), in describing Vygotsky’s term, ‘zone
of proximal development’: “the distance between
the everyday actions of individuals and the historically
new form of the societal activity that can be collectively
generated as a solution to the double bind potentially
embedded in… everyday actions.” (174). Berger
and Luckman (in Davis, 2004) acknowledge that, “What
people ‘know’ as ‘reality’ in their
everyday, non- or pre-theoretical lives… constitutes
the fabric of meanings without which no society could exist” (113).
Making sense of our own and others’
fragments of experience and treating them as meaningful and adequate is part
of negotiating our collective capacity for change. The creation of a space where
respective life experience is the primary and most valuable source for growth
and change is possible if teachers’ stories are not already written for
them.
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fragments
she fell
asleep in her two-piece bathing suit that she only
wore on the yard, hoping the sun’s heat would
quell her cramps. later, when she came around to
the door, she was shocked to see a suitcase on
the porch, keys for the old car, a quarter, and
a note that read,
“call when you want to be a real wife.” she tried the door to the
house but it was locked. no one responded to the knocking.
she drove away, feeling
as though this was all happening to someone else.
the city was new to her and she wondered where
she should go. she used the quarter to buy a
tampon at a gas station. she was barefoot and
felt naked in the bathing suit. she opened the
suitcase. it seemed to be a cruel kind of joke.
there was an odd assortment of clothes from another
life: dress-up clothes for work and mismatched
things she hadn’t worn in years, useless
fragments of a past that wasn’t exactly
over and nothing to cover her in an unknown future.
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Dialogue
Dialogue, as talk between
teachers, provides for us a way to mark the gap between
us and also to negotiate a bridge with which to remake
ideas and approaches in the midst of the important differences
between us. Speroni’s (in Rockwell, 2003) century
old definition of dialogue as a unity of diverse voices
continues to be regarded as anarchy in institutions that
focus on ‘continuous improvement’ and ‘accountability.’ Much
is benefited from naturally occurring talk between teachers
from which it is possible to continually refine dialogue
in ongoing adaptations, as a dynamic tool for sustained,
collective inquiry in which multiple perspectives are
sought and valued.
There is much to talk
about in the messy, complex job of teaching. Judith Little
(2003) argues that although conversations in which practical
solutions to teaching challenges are often desired, this
collaboration is not typically built into the workday
nor into most formal professional development programs.
Instead many decontextualized, disembodied classroom
accounts of classroom incidents are shared hurriedly
in moments in hallways or staffrooms. Some of these stories
linger at the edges of the tension and multiplicity of
our work and our lives, suggesting spaces that are distressed
or torn. However rushed and unconnected these accounts
are, Little reminds us that they do form pervasive and
meaningful elements of the talk among teachers and these
representations become a collective interpretation of
teaching practice and professional relationships, communicating
and forming what it means to be a teacher in a particular
place.
Since opportunities for
extended talk remain short, the culture of schools or
groups frequently grow out of moments of exasperation,
isolation, bewilderment, and survival manoeuvres. Little
(2003) argues further, that when opportunities are established
for teachers to talk, it’s often the comfort of
strategic answers and action that are encouraged, rather
than the discomfort of ambiguity or personal experience.
Provocative questions are considered hindrances, rendering
some teachers’
valuable questions and contributions worthless. Ultimately
some people detach from the conversation and their contributions
are lost. Engaging in more controversial perspectives and
dwelling in conflict is not easy nor encouraged but sitting
on the outer edges of the openings into need and pain and
desire only offer glimpses of some of the movement and
potential that is hidden by those folds in the landscape.
Perhaps the possible reverberations of discovering what’s
unfamiliar may provoke more fear or exhilaration than many
teachers have energy to deal with after days of teaching
and nights of preparation.
In addition, well entrenched
discourses often organize and constrain what can be said,
thought or done (Davis, 2004). Sometimes, when opportunity
is provided for dialogue among teachers, there is an
expectation to see how fast questions can be asked or
how quickly we can go from sight/sound/emotions, to words.
We are valued for the speed with which we can throw our
opinions into the mix. But it is a selective mix, even
in university settings. Those who express opinions voiced
from seemingly irrational emotions or personal experience,
or pre-existent, unexamined beliefs are oft-times viewed
as unreasonable and quickly shut down by someone with
a voice of authority or a gift for articulation. Sometimes
there seems to exist a double-edged intolerance in educational
institutions that not only denies people the lived fabric
of unusual, or alternative experience, but also devalues
those who refuse to leave the certainty of what they
think they already know and who have no desire to dwell
in the spaces between.
Those who recognize the
importance of cutting up their maps of certainty and
using them to make new ones, move on to risk certainty
in their uncertainty. Uncertainty itself is not an end
product; its very nature is meaning that keeps slipping
away. A truly generative look at what educational society
considers unusual or inadequate will be self-conscious
of parceling out new categories, aware of multiple possibilities
and ways of being, and will appreciate not only what
is beyond and in between but also what is past. Agency
in society is not only in allowing the excess of others’
experiences to stand as valid but in recognizing our ongoing relationship and
responsibility to everything that spills over the edges of our commonly held
assumptions and categories.
A rich dialogue will
encourage thinking and reflecting on planning and practice
and philosophy but will also facilitate heated discussion
and frustration, including both anger and joy. Hashweh
(2003) and Little (2003) each contend that it is important
to pay attention to the nuances of life and mood and
experience in opportunities for dialogue because teachers’ experiences
and anxieties are not always optimistic and should be
listened to when they are shared. Even resistance is
a valuable starting point for dialogue—for tearing
apart the layers of meaning within an idea. Disagreeing
shows that we value someone enough to engage with them
(Ellsworth, 2004). Perhaps those who initiate reform
agendas should be most concerned about people who appear
to readily accept new innovations without any critical
resistance.
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torn
grabbing her hair, he
slammed her head against the steering wheel.
she hoped they would crash. instead, he jerked
the car to a stop. she leaped from the car and
ran down the highway, wondering how far they
were from where. he ran after her and grabbed
her shirt. she jerked away and the fabric tore
away from her body. as cars screamed past, she
held the fragments of covering around her and
realized that she now had to get back in the
car. later, when the police pulled them over
and an officer came to her door, she heard herself
say, “yes, everything is fine.”
she wished her shirt hadn’t torn—it was
such an amazing colour of blue.
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An essential topic in
opportunities for dialogue in education will always be
how our senses of a word’s meaning represent our
local learning culture. Much diversity resides in the
various interpretations of commonly used words and in
the resulting strategies that occur. Cochran-Smith & Lytle
(1999) in their study of teacher learning in communities
observe that although it has long been assumed that teachers
who know more, teach better, there are many different
interpretations to what
‘knowing more’ and ‘teaching better’ mean, as well as
a variety of interpretations to what ‘teacher learning’ should look
like. It is most important to look at the underlying assumptions about what these
words mean. As Davis (2004) notes, words must be understood as sets of relations
rather than as discrete word units.
When school or district
goals and aims and criteria are discussed, everyone must
have the opportunity to shape what words mean in that
time and space. And, time and space must be provided
for this individual and collective consideration so that
those who move more quickly to language or those whose
role carries more authority aren’t the only ones
who get to decide the sense that a particular word acquires
within that context. Various interpretations of words
lead to wildly different ideas about how to improve instruction
or how to bring about a particular school or curriculum
change, which can provide a rich variety. However, without
opportunity for a slower thoughtful response and invitations
to engage, one’s own interpretations might remain
unspoken, perhaps even unknown, and subsequently impossible
to reflect on and share. Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999)
explain that any innovation will ultimately reside in
the implications—the viewpoints, assumptions, and
values that each individual brings. They describe implementation
of any new collective ideas as interpretive processes
that will always involve further clarification and negotiation.
Interrogating and clarifying even words such as ‘implementation’
will be helpful in opening extraordinary new opportunities
for dialogue in which consciousness is raised and emerging
context is woven.
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stained
it was her fault. she hit him first—but only in the chest. he
was drunk and obnoxious and wouldn’t stop
accusing her, swearing at her. his words ran together
in her mind. she heard the crack of his fist on
her face before she felt it. again. she ran to
the door. he had his counsellor on the phone who
wanted to talk to her. she refused—it was
his problem. her face was wet and when she looked
down, she saw that it was blood soaking into her
pyjamas. suddenly she realized that it was everywhere,
running down her face and plastered into her hair.
She wanted to run, to find someone to share the
indignation with her but she was embarrassed because
her pyjamas had feet attached and they were pink
and now the fabric was stained with blood. |
Educational dialogue as both speaking and listening not just to agree or disagree, begins to weave
and colour the texture of a time and place. Perhaps we can extend Raine’s
(1996) description of touch to the tool of dialogue which is also a form
of touch: “There is differentiation but that which is differentiated
is neither background nor a mirror for the developing subject but an unknownness
whose presence is registered at the level of unconscious desire as nonvisual,
nonsymbolic traces of tactile experience” (246). Consciousness of our
collective textured experience enables the appreciation of the other in otherness.
We also see our own current compositions of who we have been and who we are
not. Some of these selves can identify with one another without
“aspiring to assimilate in order to become one, without abolishing differences
and making the other a same in order to accept him/her.” (Ettinger in
Rain, 1996, 246). These kinds of encounters allow for constant renegotiation
of boundaries of designations and an intimate, anonymous simultaneity of the
known and the unknown in the same place.
Langer (1997) writes that reflection and
advocacy and inquiry into the ideas of others, opens the individual and the
group to the power of disconfirming and discomforting data, inviting new
fields of experience and relation, and thereby, possibilities for incongruities,
fresh perspectives, and divergent thinking. A co-existence then of professional
teacher relationships will not be one of conformity nor does it have to be
said that teachers are necessarily even interacting but they are neither
primarily in opposition. Rather, teachers would have the opportunity to participate
in a collective process of personal and local interpretation which is capable
of unravelling as well as of acquiring newness, and in which all viewpoints
have validity (Bohm, 1996) in emerging adaptations.
Silence
Dialogue loses meaning when there is no ability
for silence; both are part of a much larger landscape. A willingness to let
words linger in the atmosphere, as spheres through which we feel texture
or see shape and colour, may slow the oft-quick reflexes of critically evaluating
the accuracy of each other’s questions and answers. Letting the knowledge
and experience of others make meaning of us,
will offset a linear race for ‘accountability’ or ‘continuous
improvement.’ An awareness of the potential in silence would add much
to group dynamics. Within provided opportunities for dialogue, speaking often
seems to be a privileged form of discourse and silence a deficit. It is often
forgotten that some thoughts are too fluid to grasp; sometimes images and
feelings don’t have words yet; and sometimes it is precisely because
of an enormous capability for emotion and involvement that it becomes too
difficult to respond. Learning and living is about being in the midst of
becoming and “being in the midst is so much more/other than language
and what it can grasp. It’s what precedes language itself and out of
which language comes” (Ellsworth, personal communication, May 28, 2005).
Sometimes ‘being in the midst’ tears
at the edges of us so that there’s an unravelling that provides openings
for relation instead of smooth surfaces that deflect one from the other.
Long ago, William James (1917) wrote that our judgements concerning the worth
of things big or little depend on the feelings they arouse in us. Of course,
knowing this doesn’t seem to make self-expression any easier. I often
feel restricted by the limits of my own capacities, where inner emotion slams
against outer limits of an inability not only to communicate or represent
but also to receive and perform, leaving me feeling foolish and inadequate.
The helplessness of the linguistic self in coping with emotion that surpasses
language leads inevitably back to our material bodies where it seems that
even sensations can remain inaccessible since as Raine (1996) notes, they
too resist image and exceed knowledge.
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discarded
her body shook with fear. from her hiding place in
the closet, she could see him through a crack in the door, masturbating
drunkenly on her bed, smelling her sheets. she could hear him groaning
and calling her name. “it’s my fault,” she sobbed
silently, “was i too friendly?”
after he left, she stayed in the closet. sometime before dawn, she came
out feeling bruised and unwell. she pulled the sheets off her bed. she
couldn’t make it to the bathroom in time to throw up. she stuffed
the sheets into a garbage bag, touching them as little as possible, and
she drove them away to the town garbage dump. she wondered if her mother
would ask where the sheets she bought for her were when she came to visit.
she tried to prepare herself for a day of teaching, not knowing that
the next time he broke in, she wouldn’t have time to hide. |
Some material bodies appear to absorb and
hold more of the joy and pain of our collected being-human. Murray (in Pintrich
& Schunk, 2002) writes about beta presses representing each individual’s
own idiosyncratic perception and construction of a context. The associated power
and intensity of emotion has the potential to be physically and/or mentally destructive
to some people, particularly when alpha presses, which Murray identifies as ‘objective
reality,’ or societal influence, inhibit personal experience. Those whose
lives have been woven with seemingly excess awareness of humanity’s emotion
and sensation experienced beyond language, are silenced unless they feel comfortable
with some way to express or engage.
Our educational institutions have long over-rated
functional literacy (Park, 2005) and omitted the language of making, of visual,
tonal and kinaesthetic images and gesture, and of wisdom of the body. These
are necessary languages in mediating learning, in dialogue and collaboration—ways
to enlighten us on the nature of feeling (Broudy, 1987). Probably everyone
suffers to some degree as a result of our arts-linguistic poverty that robs
us of ability for expression that’s more than just transference of
messages. I find that I am constantly seeking for a language to express and
find what matters most to me–silent.
Gesture
Ultimately it is the body that mediates language,
dialogue, and gesture. At an intersection of dialogue and emotion and inadequacy
of speech, potential arises for raising a hand in acknowledgement of another,
for reconnecting with the body which is where the sensory experience of one’s
history of social interactions are first located (Mensing, 1995). The body
is what is in the inbetweeness of roles; we are the middle space that exposes the border between self and others
as constituted and fragile. Much of our external experience is remembered
through texture, a presence felt against the flesh. We long for texture,
touch–the material–the earth. The importance of the land is always
interwoven with our memories and this relation of body-to-earth might be
compared to Fynsk’s (in Nancy, 1991, p.xxxiv) measureless description
of having an “experience of the world as offered, and of existence
as a reception and articulation of this offering” (p.xxxiv). The materiality
of a life actualized is a response to our connection to the earth.
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covering
he
was weak but he wanted to come to her classroom, back to the small
town school he had once attended to talk to students about living with
AIDS. he decided to cover his head with a burlap bag so that nobody
would know who he was. |
In her Siluéta series (1993-1997) Cuban artist, Ana Mendieta uses her body as the
channelling surface through which the self encounters the materiality of
the earth. Working at outdoor sites, she used materials of earth, plants,
and her own body to trace her silhouette on the landscape. The tactile
boundary between her body and the land symbolizes the passage from one
place to the other through the process of becoming. An interesting part
of her work is its ability to point to the “collapse of representation
in the unrepresentable [and] the inadequacy of language and images” (Raine,
1996, 245). She demonstrates that it is not only the human body that can
barely be known by representation but also the ‘otherness’ of
materiality and mortality that are always more than can be represented.
In a description that seems to extend ideas
in Mendieta’s artwork, Annie Dillard (1999) writes of her experience
at an archaeological dig in China at the tomb of the first Chinese emperor,
Emperor Qin, who had thousands of life-sized clay replicas of his army buried
with him over 2000 years ago:
The earth was yielding
these bodies, these clay people: it erupted them forth, it pressed them out.
The same tan soil that embedded these people also made them; it grew and
bore them. The clay people were earth itself, only shaped. (15).
Seeing the open
pits in the open air, among farms, is the wonder, and seeing the bodies twist
free from the soil. The sight of a cleaned clay soldier upright in a museum
case is unremarkable, and this is all that future generations will see. No
one will display those men crushed beyond repair; no one will display their
loose parts; no one will display them crawling from the walls. Future generations
will miss the crucial sight of ourselves as rammed earth. (18).
The landscape is evident in not only mortality
but also as the actual constitution of the material body. Mendieta’s
use of her body to act as a living threshold to the nonhuman rather than
simply as an act of division and Dillard’s image of ourselves as ‘rammed
earth’ speak of the physical impossibility of such a union and the
terrifying thought of ultimate decomposition of the self in death and also
of “the unimaginable situation of human body and non human landscape
literally occupying the same space” (Raine, 1996, 245). Similarly,
dialogues of diverse voices can never be expected to be in full communion—one
body, one subject; if realizable, this would be death (Nancy, 1991).
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soiled
his father sent him
to school with excrement in his pants because the three handicapped
sons were too much for him to deal with on his own. the classroom
stunk. students were complaining. the boy was already in a man’s
body and obviously uncomfortable, his hands fluttering helplessly
in front of his face. her teaching assistant was a life saver. she
unhesitatingly led him away to clean him up. she found him cleaner
pants in the lost and found box and washed his dirty clothes in the
home-ec room.
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Raine (1996) argues that the relationship between the human
and nonhuman earth remind us of the impossibility of ever really knowing the
other and of the utter necessity of adapting our dialogue to attend to that
impossibility. Moreover, we begin to see each other in new ways when we realize
that it is only for a lifetime that our bodies are separated from each other.
Sumara and Davis (1997) remind us, “We are never merely interruptions
in the ongoing events of others’ lives. We are always and already participating
in the unfolding of their lives” (304).
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Further to Mendieta’s exploration of body as threshold,
Rogoff’s (2000) description of the body as border suggests that our material
selves are full of “…questions, anxieties, incredulities, and
the sense of unreality that so often permeates such zones of disidentification.”
(137). As border zones, there is a constant reassembling in the process of becoming
and we acknowledge our own bodies as sites of questions, wonder, and indefinity—fascinated
by ordinary, moment by moment experience. As borders, we might pause a little
longer, letting the texture of a particular time and space and place make meaning
of us—its landscape, its horizons—before we continue our relentless
pursuit of ‘understanding.’ Identifying ourselves as ‘questioning,’
may keep us from certainty and from the certainty of uncertainty that robs us
of our ability to be awake to diversity and to notice significant moments and
potentialities—all valid and all worth exploring. Being a ‘border’ and/or
a
‘threshold’ moves us out of comfortable relationships and partnerships,
exposes us as individuals who can’t be extricated from those whose joy
and pain surrounds and defines our own. There we find, as Nouwen (1966), that
what we experience as most unique seems to be the most concretely embedded in
the public condition of being human.
Local
When I show the quilt that I am making to
the A/r/tography class that I am taking in my Master’s degree program,
several people are more interested in the other side of the quilt—the
messier, frayed, unfinished pattern that is not supposed to count. This interest
in the other side might speak, more than anything, to my lack of skill at
quilt-making! Or it might remind us that the most compelling stories are
the ones that we don’t know the endings to, the ones that aren’t
already sewn up. As I look at the connected pieces of used fabric, I am reminded
of Bryson and de Castell’s (1996) description of postmodernism’s
disruption of fixed positions: “a pedagogy of salvage and recycling.” In
the class, I share my thoughts on how past experience and the sense we make
of particular meanings are mediated by language, dialogue, silence, and gesture
through our bodies as we engage in actions together and how it was, that
in the making, I suddenly realized that the quilt does not represent
the context. Context cannot be a covering under/on which people behave in
certain ways. Instead, people consciously and deliberately generate context
(Nardi, 1996).
Context is both internal to people—involving
objects and goals and also external to people—involving other people,
artifacts, and settings and mediated by dialogue, silence, and gesture. We
continually use our narrative construction of memory to creatively make something
new (Ellsworth & Kruse, 2005) of our ongoing process of negotiating who
we are and how we fit in relation to others (Park, 2005). The external and
the internal are interconnected and the folds and openings only serve to
highlight the way everything is united. An individual actively modifies and is modified
by situations and places as a direct result of responding to them (Vygotsky,
1978). Bal (2002) similarly describes the context of a work of art “…where
the viewer’s unconscious meets the work’s power, in a pastness
of each viewer’s memories that comes after, not before, the encounter” (178).
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odds and ends
she was intrigued by
his rebellious attitude and his poncho with central american symbols—an
unusual outfit for a prairie lake in the 80s. he came in on his harley
and seemed to have crashed the retreat, uninvited, determined to
make a statement. as they lay in the dark on the patterned garment,
she asked him why he’d been in jail.
“the big m,” he said tiredly. “what’s that?” she
wondered.
“murder.”
it all seemed odd but
then the extent of her lived experience was still small and she wanted
to know what it was like to be everyone else.
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Location is such a context. It’s a process of vulnerability—it
resists fixation and is insatiably curious about the webs of differential positioning
(Rogoff, 2000). We can inhabit the same physical space, regardless of its name
and still be in different layers or weaves which are defined by what they are
and what they are not and what we do and make of them. Locations must perpetually
resist closure, finality, or simplification. I am beginning to understand my
own reluctance to identify with categories and labels and language that forecloses
on peoples’ ability to make choices. The resistance has provided moments
of belonging and unbelonging and has occasioned an emerging realization that
all locations in which I have lived have both something and nothing to do with
me. Remappings of contexts and identities are fluid, alternative, fragmented—collections
of shifting social constructs and definitions of gender (Rogoff, 2000). These
changing textures demand perpetual questioning, compelling an ongoing grappling
with a social response—our relation to others. Rogoff (2000) describes
unbelonging as “the express purpose of journey and its unexpected consequence” (18),
of which difference and subjectivity are constitutive parts.
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wrap
sometimes the thought
startled her, “oh, that’s right! i’m not a man!” she
grew up wanting to be a warrior instead of a princess and she wondered
if she had really ever taken on the role that had been fashioned
for her as a woman. she did love being a mom but she also loved being
a dad—she wasn’t sure when she was which and sometimes
forgot she was either. how do we get wrapped in these fabrics of
skin? |
The quilt itself is/becomes, the collected
meaning that is temporal and local in a certain time and space and yet is
a part of a constant iterative sequence of motion. It is the complex rapport
of unbounded dialogue, silence, and gesture that invites teacher learning
to spiral towards new senses of meaning, bringing the other and the self,
the interior and the exterior, into folded and overlapping positions. Textures
of time and space and experience emerge through actions taken in response
to the ever-changing agendas of issues that we identify and also those agendas
that are imposed upon us. New stories emerge in how we daily fabricate location and meaning with our bodies—through a word, a look,
or a gesture.
The square quilt
pieces of yellow and brown fit comfortably against one another but the
irregular shapes caused bulges in the fabric which rippled across the other
pieces until I was finally able to sew them down as folds. These folds
produced a bit of interiorization of the exterior—joining the outside
with the inside. If it were not for the nonconforming pieces, the two sides
would have remained separate. Like the new understandings we pause at tentatively,
the quilt is an interweaving of elements where the unusual, the everyday,
and the marvellous are always imbricated (Sumara & Davis, 1997)—one
with the other. Once we are awakened to the wonder of our eternal entanglement
with each other, we discover that our centre actually borders someone else’s
geography. We raise our hands in greeting and nod in recognition.
The quilt should
probably remain unfinished.
Endnotes
[1.] A/r/tography
is a research methodology that explores the imbricated practices of artist,
researcher, and teacher through acts of ongoing living inquiry.
References
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