Sixteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

This poetic rendering invites action inquiry for Western Canadian future secondary teachers and mentorship through reflexive, embodied arts-based and transformative writing expressions in discovery, knowledge, and action around trauma and grief. Engaging in these practices with at-risk Canadian students have intended benefits, particularly for indigenous youth and those from large numbers of refugee families with traumatic backgrounds of grief and loss, generational displacement, and perhaps many forms of violence. Leggo explains poetic rendering as inquiry, “…ruminating, investigating, and questioning… I slow down and linger with memories, experiences, and emotions. ….I am seeking ways to live with wellness. …to make …decisions that will sustain the ecology of our countless interconnections with all the sentient and non-sentient creation “ (2018). With knowledge of students’ historical narratives, dynamic action through curriculum choices supports emotional vulnerability and encourages multimodal, multiliteracy, and multicultural embodied expression through transformative poetry, music, art, dance, video and theatre. Students with different histories are encouraged to trust identity growth in awareness of what Jardine ad Batycky value as “…shared and contested inheritances, voices, and ancestries….” (2004). With redesigned perceptions around cultural connections of classroom, school, and broader communities, both teacher/researcher and student/researcher have choices to express individually but not in isolation strong, embodied emotions like grief and to have empowerment to feel and belong in safety. “We will not know if others’ intimate experiences are similar or different until we offer our own stories and pay attention to how others respond, just as we do in everyday life” (Ellis, 1993).