My Embodied Transformative Educational Journey as an East Asian International Student Learner: A Self-Study Approach
Abstract
This thesis is my personal, educational, and embodied journey of a female Chinese student learner who has travelled across contexts for education in both Canada and my home country China. Using a self-study approach, this thesis examines how embodied knowledge informs my educational experiences and learning in different contexts. I question the taken-for-granted knowledge (Greene, 1995) existing in the education I have received, and challenge the assumptions I have toward my learning. Through processes of creative writing, new knowledge and understandings emerges and I explore possibilities of how knowledge can be considered, in fluid and malleable ways shaped by different cultural contexts. Inspired by the documentary Schooling the World directed by Carol Black (2010), as well as many other literatures, I bring in first-person source materials like poems, land-based reflections, and narratives to explore my understandings of the role of knowledge and education. In this process, I also explore the clashing nature of my educational journey within, and in-between different educational contexts is shaped by different forces. My thesis project takes up various themes and questions around the implications of education in the 21st century; specifically, I consider the following themes: (1) the role of embodied knowledge and land-based approaches to learning; (2) representations of resilience in academic and social environments; (3) different proximities to spaces of learning and knowing; and finally, (4) the role of intersectionality and liminal space in learning as an international student. As an emerging scholar, I reflect on my lived experiences of acquiring an education in both Chinese and Canadian contexts, and how a methodology of self-study allows my imagination and creative expression to animate various themes in this thesis.