This thesis chronicles a journey for which there is no end. The journey is the author's
search for authentic curriculum -- teaching and learning built around socially relevant
themes, designed through an organic development process, and negotiated in relation
to the interests of individual learners and the communities that support them.
In struggling to find a "lens" that would allow children to navigate change in an
increasingly complicated society, the author shifted her focus from the substantive
domain to the perceptual. Influenced by Case's (1995) discourse regarding the
nurturing of "global perspectives" in young children, the author identified nine
characteristics of a "global/diversity" perspective. Rather than infusing curriculum with
more information, teachers would nurture an approach to learning that permits
children to suspend judgment, entertain contrary positions, anticipate complexity, and
tolerate ambiguity. Through the use of "counter-hegemonic" children's literature the
author found she could nurture the "seeds" of alternative perspectives forming a strong
foundation for understanding and tolerance in the classroom and beyond. It is
important to emphasise that the author had to internalise a "global/diversity
perspective" herself in order to nurture it in others through a generative process she
refers to as "living curriculum".
The research methodology of currere was employed as a means of exorcising the
unacknowledged biases, personal contradictions, and divergent influences that have
fed the author's identity, and thus necessarily informed her philosophies and actions
as an educator. The methodology of autobiography was a critical factor in permitting
the author to recognise and take ownership of her own education. Autobiography led
her into the tangled garden and compelled her to make sense of its organic cycles.
The method of autobiography typically rattles the comfort margins of educational
researchers who see it as patronising sentimentality, rather than a rigorous analysis of
self-knowledge within contemporary scholarship. It is important that autobiographical
researchers demonstrate resonance of their lived experience in scholarly discourse
and pedagogy. The author discusses a number of possible criteria that could be used
to evaluate autobiographical research - the most important of these being that the
work spawns reflection and stirs praxis within the reader.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/10783 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Hayward-Kabani, Christianne |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
Page generated in 0.0024 seconds