What might becoming a poet have to do with becoming a teacher? What might becoming a teacher have to do with becoming a poet? Is it possible to invite someone to become a teacher or a poet? What might such an invitation look like? What kinds of conditions are involved in "making poetry"? What might these conditions have to do with "making pedagogy"? Further, what might these conditions — of making poetry or pedagogy — have to do with "making research"? Based on a study of a six-week intensive language across the curriculum course involving a group of prospective Secondary School teachers, this dissertation explores the kinds of conditions that might create an interpretive location in which to entertain and address the above kinds of questions — of the making of poetry and pedagogy and research — i n all their relations. Moving backward and forward — between the lived particulars of a group of preservice teachers' writing practices in a workshop-styled setting, and the writing practice of a researcher/teacher educator/poet curious about the acts of learning and teaching, writing and researching — this work attempts to live well with the necessarily tangled relationships among literacy, aesthetic practice, and the ongoing production of subjectivity in teacher education and our educational researchings of teacher education. The value of writing practice, as this dissertation attempts to enact it, is not only in its offer of further practice — of writing to learn (about writing and teaching and researching) — but also in its offer of a location where we might become curious about the performative nature of learning itself. The dissertation seeks to show the ways that my own writing life, shaped as it is by the work of those who have brought hermeneutics, postmodernism, psychoanalytic theory, and the literary imagination to bear on teacher education, is deeply implicated with other writing lives, others who are always and already writing lives. The invitation to imagine the curious time of researching pedagogy, then, is part of an invitation to think differently about preservice teachers thinking differently about their time together in classrooms, engaged in acts of learning and teaching, writing and researching. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1985 M663 / Master of Arts

Thesis (D.A.)--Illinois State University, 1996. / Title from title page screen, viewed May 23, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Janice Grace Neuleib (chair), James Robert Kalmbach, Heather Ann Brodie Graves, John Francis Cragen. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 215-222) and abstract. Also available in print.

This book of poems ranges in style from narrative to condensed lyric moment, and shifts in perspective from observation to introspection. Thematically, these poems explore everyday life through its many manifestations – memory, nature, marriage, faith and death – with an emphasis on finding meaning in absolutely ordinary things. Though their tone is often vulnerable and tender, even when it is more distant the poems are always searching.

My initial intention is to try to show how, as a poet in South Africa, I suffer from a creative identity crisis. I am a white English-speaking male. I live surrounded by isiXhosa-speaking people. Is my poetry, or will my poetry be, relevant in the ‘New’ South Africa? Is English, the language of the colonial oppressors, the appropriate medium in the post-apartheid milieu? Will my subject matter be relevant? These questions and my attempts at answering them, form the basis of the poetry and the portfolio that accompanies the poems. My absorption with finding a creative ‘voice’, my concerns with the environment and a questioning of what post-apartheid poetry should write about all seem a bit Quixotic, especially to me! But at another level, they are deeply serious. (p. 5.)

My collection has the common theme of addiction: addictive personalities strung across the pages. Not only the usual addictions such as the daily-ritualized beer or joint, but also the pain of addiction to anti-social habits, pathologies, forbidden love, etc. I try to capture the behavior and life that surrounds addictions too: relationships, rehab, criminal behavior, all sorts of abuse, etc. Some of the stories are heavy-handed, slapping the reader in the face, some are subtler. Some are told with lightness and humor, some with gravity.

A middle-aged woman, living in Johannesburg, has an experience which catapults her into changing her life. In the process of confronting her alcoholism, she realizes how patterns of addiction extend to other areas of her life and tries to make sense of the tragic events that have occurred. Her world becomes a different place as she questions everything that she has been taught about relationships, religion, race and her place in society. In the search for answers she uncovers stories about the lives of her parents, grandparents, relatives, friends and acquaintances. Embarking on a journey of discovery and rediscovery through her experiences and those of others, she explores the ways in which the things that she thought she knew defined her behaviour and expression of herself.

This novella presents three characters, each occupying a different sphere of reality. One is a ‘living dead’ who is forced to return to the land of the living for his continued existence. The other is a young woman who, having lost the will to live, must find a purpose if she is to continue living. The third is a young man who dwells more in the inner than the external world. Their lives intersect through the scripture known as ‘a fragment of a bone.’

My novella is set in South Africa in a post-apocalyptic world. The drone technology theorised for the near future is widespread and scattered survivors live under the constant threat of drone strikes. The protagonist tries to negotiate these dangers and the looming threat of a slave empire to reconnect with his friends and family. He encounters bizarre hallucinations and flashbacks as a result of exposure to an unidentified gas.

My poetry investigates the extraordinary in the everyday, exploring my life as a mother and wife, to find the quiet truths that lie there. Using fresh ways of describing familiar experiences, the poems describe tiny, almost-missed moments and voices that have shaped me. Throughout the collection, I imagine my younger selves commenting on my current self and vice versa. Ultimately, my poems use simple words and clean lines to evoke how I feel (and how I want the reader to feel) in each of the moments they describe.