Seeing Ghosts: Interweaving Ecoliteracy, Art, and Poetry to Explore Forgotten Stories of Canadian Place(s)
Creators: name: Meadows, Mindi Lee
Publisher: name: Graduate Studies
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Ecoliteracy
subject: Critical Place Praxis
subject: Education

description: This research journey considers how reading within a transdisciplinary critical place-based ecolit-eracy frame can complicate colonial/frontier narratives that have determined and continue to in-fluence whose living histories are seen to un/belong within the imagined settler nation known as Canada. This frame emerges within the recognition that the complexity of un/belonging requires extending understandings of literacy beyond a particular skill set acquired in educational spaces. Instead, it involves fostering understandings of literacy as a social practice that require partici-pants to negotiate the diverse texts that shape their understanding of the world around them. I consider the possibilities this frame presents as a pedagogical approach to actively broaden our understandings of the ethics of being human, and what this means as a member of the “more-than-human” world beyond our communities. Throughout the text, my own visual art and poetry are presented in response to both academic literature and other poets’ writing to create an arts-based critical discourse analysis. I explore selected poems written by poets living within Canada such as Connie Fife, Di-onne Brand, and George Elliott Clarke taken from The Broadview Anthology of Poetry (Rosengarten &amp; Goldrick-Jones, 2009). I also investigate selected poems by Jordan Abel, James Arthur, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Suzanne Buffam, Chad Campbell, Sadiqa se Meijer, Sonnet L’Abbé, Nyla Matuk, and Souvankham Thammavongsa which are included within The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry (Johnstone, 2018). My choice to engage with poems included in anthologies was informed by my experiences as a humanities and social studies edu-cator in a public school system where anthologies are often used as classroom texts because they make a broader range of poets available to learners than would otherwise be possible. I chose to focus this critical inquiry on poetry because it is itself a way of knowing, that communicates the subjective experience of Place(s), while also acting to connect with others. I recognize that I could only present a partial view of the situation because the complexity of Place(s) and who is seen to un/belong within them cannot be broken down into fixed component parts. In this project, my visual images and creative texts are renderings of different articulations of living histories of un/belonging that were encountered while reading poetry within a broad-ened ecoliteracy frame. I do not claim to communicate a universal story of the Place known as Canada, but instead provide an unfinished inventory of the fragments and traces of Places, and other narratives of un/belonging encountered along this research journey. This project is rooted in the belief that public education spaces can be a source of hope and change for future generations. However, this requires that educators experiment themselves. Educators must seek to identify and understand their own values, beliefs, and positions within colonial/frontier narratives and consider how this is shaping their understanding of curricula and well as their pedagogy. In this project I share my own visions and practices as an educator to enact change.