On
a rainy evening in early March, I walk home along Granville
Street, the words of curriculum theorist Maxine Greene
running through my head. “There have to be disciplines,
yes, and a growing acquaintance with the structures of
knowledge, but at the same time, there have to be the
kinds of grounded interpretations possible only to those
willing to abandon already constituted reason, willing
to feel and to imagine, to open the windows and go in
search,” she says, and I wonder how, in this city of
concrete structures and endless suburbs, I will ever
be able to open the windows onto the kind of pedagogy
I seek. Granville Street at dusk is crowded with commuters
rushing to get home, and the streetlights cast shadows
across their faces as they wait in long, patient lines
for the buses that will take them there. They do not
look at me as I pass them; their eyes stare into some
middle distance, without emotion, without expression.
A young beggar sits outside a sandwich shop, asking for
leftovers. So far, he has had no offers, and his feet
are getting wet in this rain.
I
cross the street to listen to a busker, a man with a
large belly and a grey beard who sings union songs from
the 1930’s and accompanies himself on a banged up guitar.
His voice is deep and gravely, and rides above the honks
and engines of the passing cars and buses. In between
his choruses, he plays a harmonica, his guitar slapping
his ample hip. I stand in the rain and watch him play,
oblivious to the crowds pushing past me, their sneers
and swears, their demands for me to “get out of their
way.” When the busker has finished his set, I drop a
couple of twoonies in his open guitar case and thank
him. He looks up at me and nods, smiling slightly. Water
drips from his beard onto his faded blue t-shirt, and
suddenly I remember the next line in Greene’s essay,
that “the search—sometimes rigorous, sometimes gay—ought
to be accompanied by the sound of a blue guitar.”
When
I get home, I turn on lights and the radio to make me
feel less alone. The news announcer speaks in slow, neutral
tones about the latest casualties and advancements in
Iraq. His voice has that a flat, mid-Prairie tone that
gives him a certain folksy appeal out here in the rain
forest, the kind of voice that can recite pickled herring
recipes, hockey scores, and stories of miraculous pets
in the same breath as rumours of a strange new illness
now taking hold in parts of southern China. I want his
voice to tell me something, to move my mind forward,
to bring out a dazzling blue guitar that on this stormy
evening only I will be able to hear. The wind twists
the tree outside my apartment window so it hits repeatedly
against the glass. I am reminded of another windowpane
in another storm, in a cabin on a mountain deep inside
the valleys of the Cariboo. And I want to write about
this memory, this feeling, so badly that I begin to shake,
to cry. I do not breathe until I find a pen and paper.
I
scrawl the first words I ever read by Greene across the
top of the first page: “Art offers life. It offers hope;
if offers the prospect of discovery; it offers light.
Resisting, we may make the teaching of the aesthetic
experience our pedagogic creed.” Then nothing. I begin
to question, to doubt myself. In the times we are living
today, do these words appear trivial? If we seek the
aesthetic in our teaching, are we denying the larger
issues and struggles surrounding us, our families, our
learning communities? Or, by allowing our selves to re-connect
to what keeps us alive, are we finding an opportunity
to build strength, solidarity, and resistance?
I
look up the definition of aesthetic, “concern with beauty
or the appreciation of beauty, a moment of feeling truly
alive,” and compare it with the entry under anaesthetic,
“a drug or gas that causes a loss of sensitivity to pain.”
I make two columns on the page and draw a line between
these two opposed meanings. From which can pedagogy be
born?
Stop, and for just a moment find your
heartbeat, your pulse. Close your eyes if you want to.
Allow yourself to breathe as deeply as you need to. This
might hurt, might sting a bit, for if I said you will
feel nothing I would be lying. This is, after all, not
intended to be an anaesthetic narrative.
I
want to tell you a story of how I have come to understand
the aesthetic, the ecstasy as well as the pain, of what
Ted Aoki calls the “lived curriculum.” It is a creative
telling, one I wrote that rainy night during the war.
I wrote of memories, embodied experiences, of the last
time in my life when I felt most truly alive, when following
Greene’s call for a pedagogy of the aesthetic came naturally.
It was five years ago and I was a community educator
in Lytton, population 800.
This
night in March, when winter seems to be near its end
and I so desperately want to breathe of spring, I write
of the seasons, of their power to hurt and to heal. I
write of enquiry, and memory, and how both a life and
a pedagogy can be lived within them. I write first of
Fall, starting here, in a house on a cliff, with frost
covering the grass in the early morning, suffocating
what remains of my garden. I can no longer walk barefoot
from the porch steps to the creek, and for a moment I
am afraid of the changes ahead. I put on my hiking boots
and walk down my trail to town, to the last farmers’
market of the year. Hunting season starts this weekend,
so the market is quieter than usual. The farmers stand
beside their pickup trucks chatting, smoking, and stamping
their feet. I can see their breath in the late afternoon
air as I choose the ingredients I need for pumpkin soup.
My clothes already smell of this season: of bacon and
wood smoke and only occasional rain.
I
climb the trail back to my house, gathering kindling
from piles of fallen twigs. In my kitchen I shake dry
mud and leaves from my boots. I run my fingers through
my hair, finding twigs and leaves. Across the valley
the leaves are changing, and I can see small bursts of
red scattered just below the tree line. My cat has fallen
asleep in front of the wood stove, her stomach stretched
out in a curve to face the warmth.
On
a Wednesday morning, Johnson shuffles into my classroom,
his hands dug deep into his back pockets. He smiles as
he approaches my desk, lowers his eyes and fumbles with
his pocket. A dented package of cigarettes, half smoked,
falls out first. Then a wad of paper. He unfolds the
paper for me, smoothes the pieces out on top of my daybook.
Poetry. His own.
Um, I think these might be good
for that book thing you were talking about. His voice is barely a whisper, and
it takes forever to reach me. With that he is gone,
a final finger tap on the desk, a slight kick at the
door. I am left behind a sterile desk that has trapped
me in a code of lesson plans and outcomes for far too
long. My fingers trace those first words, written in
a hurried, edgy scrawl. Poetry is what you wanna
say when fear gets in the way. The wisdom of these dozen words
leaves me silent, humbled, questioning. I listen to
the stillness of my classroom and finally allow myself
to find my heartbeat. I do not move from my desk until
I have committed his entire poem to my memory.
I speak next of winter, remembering that this house
was designed decades ago by a man whose wife was dying.
He did not want her to suffer within these walls, so
he made sure every room had a view of the mountains and
the river. When she was too weak to go outside, she sat
here, beside the stove, and watched the birds flying
across the valley. I do not know where she was when she
died.
The
creek beside my house has long since frozen, making me
forget the sound of water on stones.
Light
becomes all-important now. It constantly lies to me,
cheats and abandons me, distorts my sense of time and
place. There are a few hours each day—a listless, in-between
time—when the sun rises over the mountains, but it drops
back behind them before I can feel any warmth.
The
road from my house to town has been covered in ice for
three days. My car is stuck in the drift, so I take a
garbage can lid and slide on it down the trail to town.
I carry it with me into the bar, where four unemployed
loggers take turns putting it on their heads and singing
songs about lumberjacks.
I
rise in the dark, and go to the porch to collect wood.
But the ice is black, so I slip. I hit the woodpile on
the way down and lodge a sliver under my right thumbnail.
I find a flashlight and a needle and work the sliver
out. I suck some blood from my finger, but it only feels
like ice.
Curtis
is trying to write a mock provincial exam. English 12,
checking his ability to spell, to comprehend, to formulate
an argument. This will be his third attempt at graduation,
and I think it may stick this time. After an hour, he
starts to rock back and forth in his desk, tapping his
pencil on the metal edge of his seat. “When can I get
out of here?” he asks me. “I’m starting to feel like
a rat in a cage.” A minute later he tosses his paper
on my desk, shouts to a friend down the hall as he leaves
the building. I see him in the parking lot, lighting
up a cigarette, getting in his car. The next day I find
two fresh cuts of venison on my kitchen table. This in
itself is not a surprise, as I, like most people around
here, never lock my door, but I wonder who left them
just the same. The next time I see Curtis is the morning
of the real provincial exam. As his teacher, I cannot
be in the room when he writes it, so I wish him luck
and continue down the hall. A couple of hours later,
he passes my room. “Hey, England,” he grins. “How’d you
like those steaks?”
Next come memories of spring, with the creek melting
now, soft rivulets of mountain water threading their
way through patches of moss. When I hike further up the
hill, to the plateau behind my house, I find the first
flowers of the season. The fiery red bottlebrushes remind
me of childhood nursery rhymes about little girls lost
in forests.
My
woodpile is almost finished now. I chop some more, wearing
only a t-shirt, allowing the sun to soothe my rough,
pale arms. It has been eight months since they were last
touched this way.
Chunks
of ice float down the river, each one’s journey destined
to be incomplete. They will melt before they reach the
coast, and no one will remember what they looked like.
Spring
break-up means the snow melts and my trail and road become
mud. Boots sink into the thick muck, cars get stuck on
the roads. We spend hours cleaning floors, shaking boots,
scraping tires.
A
package in the mail: goat cheese, spices for a Thai curry,
two books. I stay up all night reading one of the books,
a collection of poems written by a Quebecois poet who
died young.
My
father’s voice on the other end of the line: it doesn’t
look like she’ll beat it this time, the cancer I mean.
we need you to come home. I pack my car, leave my
cat with my neighbour, and drive south. Four days later
I am in my mother’s kitchen in Victoria, trying to work
the stove. I have brought treats from the North: smoked
venison, salmon jerky, loganberry jam. But her illness
has made her nostalgic for the sweets of her childhood,
for sugar tarts and chocolate mousse. She never eats
more than a spoonful of what I give her.
We
plan a field trip for the spring, a trip to the city.
We raise enough money, through bingo and bake sales,
to take the class to a matinee of Phantom of the Opera.
We leave before the sun rises, in a convoy of three mini-vans.
When we get to the city, we have enough time to walk
around Stanley Park, take a tour of the UBC campus; we
eat our packed lunches on Locarno Beach. They seem overwhelmed
with all this newness and scale, and I wonder if we have
tried to do too much, to show them a future they don’t
want. It is after dark when we hit the Canyon, and most
of the students are sleeping. Mindy says she wants to
sit up front, she thinks the stars will look better from
there. “That UBC place, that looked really cool. That’s
where I’m gonna go be a lawyer,” she murmurs before she
too falls asleep. I drive the rest of way through the
canyon, alone.
Now, finally, as it hits three in the morning in Vancouver
and the rain shows no sign of stopping, I tell of summer
in the canyon, of the first time I wade in the creek
behind my house. I scoop my hands into the water and
splash it over my head, my shoulders, my thighs. The
northern lights caress my naked body as I lay on the
grass at midnight, drinking hibiscus tea.
When I first arrived here three years
ago this summer, my father and I drove our rented van
down the dirt road to my house and almost crashed into
the village fire truck. Parts of the cliff behind the
house were on fire, and a dozen locals were running around
with water buckets, brooms and hoses. The flames died
out after a few hours, but the smell of burnt wood lasted
for weeks. This summer the fires are everywhere, spreading
a pink fog across the valley. The tourists think this
makes for more photogenic snapshots.
The
end-of-summer fruit has begun to fall from the trees
in my garden: apples, cherries, peaches. My neighbour
and I gather them in old boxes and sacks. We will give
some away, bake some into pies, can the rest. Even now
we are planning for the next season, the long days of
darkness we know lay ahead.
Tomorrow,
I will go into my classroom to start preparing for the
new year. Some news: Curtis has found work in Alberta,
Mary has moved back to Saskatchewan. Mindy will start
grade nine in September. My principal thinks the registration
will be up a little from last year, and that the senior
boys basketball team will give those Kamloops boys a
run for their money. I sink my feet into the long grass
beside my herb garden. The air is full of parsley, basil,
mint. I pick a sprig of fresh sage, roll it between my
fingers, think about what to cook for supper. My cat
rolls lazily on the porch, catching the last of the evening’s
sun. The entire valley is bathed in the kind of hazy
golden light that no art or memory can truly describe.
Somewhere a bird is singing.
This
is my home.
Stop. Run. Listen to what you know
as well as what you don’t. Learn to trust the voices
and hearts you never knew were there. Find the aesthetic
moment, make it your own. Be taught, be curriculum. Live
within the beauty and life of silences when you need
to. Yes, there are wars raging on the planet, and people
we love are dying. Yes, cutbacks have made our work heartbreakingly
difficult, almost impossible. Yes, I wept for two days
straight when I found Johnson on the corner of Granville
and Davie last November, his arms pocked with needle
tracks, his eyes vacant as he asked me for money. But
you know what—he also asked me to read him a poem as
we held hands in the dark and the rain and the cold.
So maybe I was weeping for that.
It
is almost dawn when I finish writing, my eyes watery
and my hand shaking. In the apartment next door, an alarm
has gone off, maybe someone working an early shift, and
for a moment I am startled that someone else was sharing
this space with me all night. I try to bring this story
to a conclusion; I give it a title, “Explaining the seasons
to one who is not here,” and struggle, like a good researcher,
to find a way to ground it in literature. I feel too
raw, too exposed, to rationalize this story, and wonder
if I have hit what Greene calls “the pursuit of freedom
and critical understanding that lead to a transformation
(if we are lucky) of lived worlds.” I hurt, but I am
alive. And that is what counts. Here. Now.
I
want to quote bell hooks and John Dewey, to echo their
notions of ecstasy and experience in education, but I
hear instead the words of James Baldwin arguing that
“the purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that
have been hidden by the answers,” and Walt Whitman singing
to me to “love the earth and sun and animals, despise
riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for
the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to
others.” And I think maybe he has a point, that when
my school district cuts its music program we’ll simply
take our students down to Granville Street so they can
learn how to sing from an elder in a blue t-shirt. And
so I will keep writing, and creating, and asking questions
about peace and pedagogy, about the heart and where it
fits in curriculum. I won’t stop taking walks around
the city late at night in search of my own blue guitar.
And yes, godamnit, when the school district cuts our
supplies my students and I will make our own stunning
guitars, and we will paint them any colour we want.
Suddenly,
in the midst of this long, sad winter I know that there
must be a spring somewhere around the corner. I know
too that we as educators, artists, researchers and academics,
should never be afraid of turning towards the aesthetic,
that which makes us feel most alive, no matter how much
it may hurt. For if we do, we will ultimately be what
Greene calls the “persons able to call, to say, to sing,
and—using their imaginations, tapping their courage—to
transform.”
Sshh
. . . listen.
That
is the sound of your own blue guitar, waiting for you
to find it.
About
the Author
Jacyntha
England is
a Drama educator and writer who has lived and worked in Canada,
Thailand, Tanzania, and Kazakhstan. Her curiosity has taken
her on countless adventures around the world, and winds of
change brought her recently to a new life in Singapore. In
the midst of this crowded island/city/state, she is thrilled
to be teaching in an international school that sits on top
of a jungle-covered hill and has a view of the ocean from
her classroom window.
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