Boundary Bay is a novel that explores important areas of investigation linked to education. These
fields of inquiry include: literary study and the teaching of literature, aesthetics and artistic
production. The novel also investigates the nature of teachers' lives in school and university
settings, the nature of institutional education, societal issues affecting intellectual and creative
life, the roles of the woman poet and teacher, the social structures and conventions of marriage
and contemporary women, the conflicts and paradoxes of motherhood, the issues of teen suicide
and homosexuality, and the transformative power of literature and artistic forms of seeing the
world. As an example of arts-based qualitative research, the "art of fiction" is envisioned as an
extension of human experience. The novel or literary narrative as a viable mode of representation
for research is envisioned in light of the perception that ideas can be reflectively addressed
through the arts in order to enlarge human understandings. Boundary Bay explores the vital roles
literary fictions play in our everyday lives and in educational processes. Fictions are not the
unreal side of reality or the opposite of reality: they are conditions that enable the production of
possible worlds. In this sense, fiction can become a premise for epistemological positionings.
The writing of Boundary Bay is informed by narratives of beginning secondary school teachers
as well as the narratives of Ph.D. candidates and university educators. Boundary Bay is a novel
that forms a response to the debate at the 1996 Annual American Educational Researcher's
Association Meeting (AERA) between Elliot Eisner and Howard Gardner recorded in "Should a
Novel Count as a Dissertation in Education?" (Saks, 1996; Donmoyer, 1996). The debate
between Eisner and Gardner continued as Boundary Bay was presented at a symposium titled
"Shaking the Ivory Tower: Writing, Advising and Critiquing the Postmodern Dissertation" at
AERA 1999 in Montreal. The manuscript of poetry interwoven through Boundary Bay was
short-listed for the 1998 CBC Canada Council Literary Awards. Boundary Bay was a semifinalist
for the 1999 Robertson Davies Prize for fiction. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/9957 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Dunlop, Rishma |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 10827601 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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