Margaret McKeon’s proposal defence will take place on Wednesday, October 25th at 11:30 am under the Eagle Tree at the UBC Botanical Garden. (Marked #2 on the Garden map).
All are welcome. Please note that garden admission is free for UBC students, staff and faculty only. Others should let the gate staff know they are attending this event to have their admission covered.
Date: | Wednesday, October 25th |
Time: | 11:30 a.m. |
Location: | UBC Botanical Garden |
Supervisory Committee:
Dr. Carl Leggo (LLED)
Dr. Michael Marker (EDST)
Dr. Vicki Kelly (SFU)
“Centring Land in Poetic Practice to Explore Reconciliation”
Margaret McKeon
Abstract:
“The truth about stories is that’s all we are,” Thomas King (2003) famously tells us. We should not overlook the narrative nature of our worlds and of communal change. Stories shared through the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) on Indian residential schools in Canada and its subsequent calls to action have spurred emerging scholarship considering what reconciliation means to education (Chung, 2016) and to my field of environmental education (Korteweg & Russell, 2012; McCoy, Tuck & McKenzie, 2016; Root, 2010). Highly emphasized in Indigenous decolonization discourses (Coulthard, 2014; Tuck & Yang, 2012) but little taken up by non-Indigenous counterparts (including in scholarship, government and curriculum studies) is the central importance of the land.
My research emerges from formative experiences living and working in Mi’kmaw communities of Western Newfoundland where I served as school district outdoor education coordinator. Through collaborations of co-teaching, mentorship and friendship I have had the great privilege of being invited into and taught from Indigenous stories, traditions and histories. As I engage a scholarly path, I continue to grow into and through these early teachings. Indigenous peoples commonly express relationship with land as inseparable from self, community, spirit and culture. Learning is both about land and from land. Mi’kmaw Elder Stephen Augustine (2016) speaks for all Canadians to look to land as mother and government.
Through my research I inquire into my relationship with land to bring forward stories and poems that might guide my living and teaching in a good way, particularly as an outdoor educator of newcomer/settler ancestry in a place of colonization. Rooted in poetic inquiry (Prendergast, Leggo & Sameshima, 2009) and lifewriting (Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers & Leggo, 2009), this research takes an arts-based approach guided by North American Indigenous, European land-centred and Western epistemologies and teachings about the relationship between story and land. Through a creative work of and through the self, I seek new understanding by encountering and nurturing different ways of knowing and being on the land.