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A hand in the action : an arts-based inquiry of metaphor and meaning making as tools for inspiring transformation

University of British Columbia

This arts-based action research documents the living inquiry of one learner/educator as she strives to make sense of her own and her learner/participants’ learning journeys. Using art and metaphor as tools for self-reflection, learners engaged with personal challenges in an effort to transform understandings of our personal ideologies so that we might live more consistently with them. The artist/researcher/teacher worked with a grade 6/7 class in an urban Canadian centre over a period of six weeks to develop puppetry as a tool to inquire into personal challenges. The use of puppets around the world and throughout time to captivate the imagination, create spectacle, speak truth to power, inspire therapeutic communication and reflective engagement, and reflect the human condition made it an intriguing medium for individuals to explore and expand their ways of being in the world. The learner/educator’s struggles to develop relevant arts-based curriculum and to democratic learning practices reflected students’ struggles to both understand their challenges in new ways and to make sense of arts-based inquiry. The challenges faced pointed to a problem-solution conception of learning in which the end result is predetermined. By reconceiving of the challenges as journeys, the new metaphor creates entrances into new understandings.

Text

2010-01-08

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/17837

Art Education

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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