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profoundly significant in my attempt at enacting purposeful pedagogies. At the bottom of the collage portrait next to the drawing of the baker metaphor, is a student drawing of a butterfly. Students explained that before the butterfly becomes a butterfly, it was a caterpillar. Then, once it spins itself a cocoon to protect it, it transforms into a beautiful colourful butterfly. Students drew this metaphor to represent the visible change they could see in my teaching strategies. When I adopted a social constructivist approach, students got the freedom to learn—depicted by the photographs of a show they had arranged in which a sketch and mock Zulu wedding were included. The two photographs captured this event.
At the top right hand corner, is a student metaphor drawing showing me and the students working together. The caption says “Taking the Journey Together,” which, students explained to me, is my transforming self. My reinvented self is the one that takes students’ voices into account and we work together and make decisions together. The metaphor drawing shows me holding the hands of students and walking together with them. They drew me as the larger person in the picture because students explained that I was the one leading and guiding them. This was what I wanted to achieve with my social constructivist approach—not to leave students alone but to guide and lead them towards enlightenment. The light bulb that is drawn in this scenario depicts the enlightenment that I was leading them towards.
Apart from the metaphor drawings in this collage portrait, I included typed copies of my reflections on my teaching, reflections on my conversations with critical friends, reflections on the peer- reviewed feedback of the paper I developed on the critical moment in my teaching activities, and reflections on my presentation of my critical moment conference paper at a teaching and learning conference.
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Although some might argue that fairy tales and children’s fiction have nothing to do with reality and experience, Zipes (2012) vehemently argued that fairy tales and children’s fiction are linked to, and representative of, real-life experiences. Zipes (2012) claimed that we often brush off fairy tales because:
They tell more truth than we want to know, and we absorb fairy tales because they tell us more truth than we want to know. They are filled with desire and optimism and drip with brutality, bluntness, violence and perversity, they expose the untruths and at best are bare, brusque and concise. (p. 1)
Zipes (2007) also pointed out that people believed in fairy tales in ancient times, and he drew a comparison with modern day belief in religion. He argued that while fairy tales are not based on a particular religious belief, fairy tales are informed by human beings’ desire to change the world to make it more habitable for them to live in, and transform themselves in order to fit into this changed world. Likewise, Weber and Mitchell (1995) maintained that fictional work such as novels can portray not only our own personal innermost desires and emotions, our work situations, and our experiences but can also shed light on those of our family, students, peers, friends, and associates.
Weber and Mitchell elaborated further that fiction writers do not write or exist in an empty space because their interactions with others and their lived experiences infiltrate their writing and their stories (1995).
Furthermore, Weber and Mitchell (1995) argued that teachers are shaped by the “memory and myth—fantasy and fiction which have constructed [their] childhood for [them] and which have then allowed [them] to scrutinise and revisit the contradictions that those fictions embody” (p. xi). This point has a special appeal for me as I explain in Chapter Three; I reconstructed my childhood personal history in parallel to the storyline of The Secret Garden. By returning to the novel as a creative nonfiction device in writing this thesis, I have been able to scrutinise and revisit the contradictions and challenges in my personal history and my professional learning.
Significantly, I came to see how, as Weber and Mitchell (1995) highlighted, fictional influences are never totally lost. Gilman (as cited in Weber & Mitchell, 1995) explained that whilst images from the past may change over time, they will never completely vanish because the present is intertwined with the past of which we may not be aware. Thus, from time to time, popular fictional characters
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and stories from the past are subtly interjected within the modern works (Gilman, 1985). Gilman claimed that this happens because present day writers are influenced by fictional work that they experienced in their childhoods.
Zipes (2012) elaborated that children’s fiction and fantasy writing can provide us with
“extraordinary hope” (p. 1). Similarly, as a young child, I was drawn to the children’s novel, The Secret Garden, and as an adult, the novel still holds the same appeal for me because of the similarity of the fictional life experiences of the central character, Mary Lennox, with my past lived experiences. Having lost both her parents, Mary comes to live with her uncle as an ill-tempered neglected child, but the secret garden soothes her and helps her to piece her life back together again.
Colin, a selfish, bedridden, and sickly child is transformed by the garden, and he eventually finds solace and happiness through the garden. I, too, sought solace in The Secret Garden when life became too overwhelming for me. In writing my personal history narrative, I have come to see how the novel acted as a therapeutic mechanism because it shielded me from the reality of my troubled world and it is for this reason that I fashioned my thesis in alignment with the story of Mary and the secret garden.
Nevertheless, I experienced some distressing moments when I found aligning the factual data with the fictional life experiences of the heroine in The Secret Garden challenging because I was new to the genre of creative nonfiction writing. However, as I consulted literature on this form of writing, I was reassured by authors who described creative nonfiction in such gripping and compelling ways.
For instance, Gutkind (n.d.) advised:
In some ways, creative nonfiction is like jazz—it’s a rich mix of flavours, ideas, and techniques, some of which are newly invented and others as old as writing itself. Creative nonfiction can be an essay, a journal article, a research paper, a memoir, or a poem; it can be personal or not, or it can be all of these.
I found that taking snapshots of my lived experiences and comparing them with the fictional life experiences of the protagonist in The Secret Garden gave my writing much more depth and meaning.
At times, whilst writing about my personal history, I became very emotional and I wanted to write in a way such that my emotions could be felt by the readers of my work. However, my early drafts of the writing were dispassionate, inexpressive, and detached from the actual experience. When I equated my lived experiences with those of the fictional life experiences of the heroine, Mary, my
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writing became more expressive, demonstrative, and emotional. Borich (2013) had similar thoughts when she described creative nonfiction as a type of writing that can be from memory, especially with autobiographies, when the author takes snatches from her world. Despite the fact that she agreed with Gutkind (2008) that creative nonfiction can take the form of poetry, stories, a memoir, or an essay, Borich was quick to add that in creative nonfiction, writing that is selective, the “I” who is the author is vividly present in the writing whilst at the same time facts are also present. She explicitly mentioned this point because she explained that creative nonfiction can be public or private writing.
In writing my thesis, my aim was to explore and depict the profound experiences of my life that have shaped the person and teacher educator I have become so that I could better understand them.
When exploring literature on how I could use a creative nonfiction device for doing this, I found that different writers use creative nonfiction writing for different reasons. For instance, Gutkind (n.
d.) explained that he writes in this way to spread information that can be understood, and the feminist writer, bell hooks, explained that she wrote her creative nonfiction memoir, Bone Black (1999), in order to bring her past to the front.
During my writing process, I found that a feeling of uncertainty, and the ambivalent nature of presenting fact and fiction together, gave me a particular edge of expectancy and ambiguity, a thrilling feeling of being animated and stirred to write. Barone (2008) reassured me that despite long-standing traditions of representing research data in more conventional ways, many researchers in the social sciences have championed the challenges they faced in representing their data in creative ways by aligning facts alongside fiction. I was further comforted by Barone (2008) who added that the improbability of presenting fact and fiction together is what gives social science research the excitement that is now being embraced in research studies instead of being avoided.
Borrowing the analogy from Gutkind (n.d.), I delightedly imagined my writing to be a jazz ensemble and in this way managed to juxtapose fact and fiction as I represented a version of myself in my context at certain points.