By: Qi Ye, Kristine Bagge Kousholt, Rachel Wilder and Kate Matzopoulos
Media Credit: Qi Ye
We gathered as a reading group to engage with Meandering as learning: Co-creating care with Camissa Oceans in higher education by Aaniyah Martin, Joanne Peers, and Theresa Giorza. In our research group, we come from different research interests in education, and we currently use water to think together, allowing it to hold, stretch, and connect our ideas. The paper we discussed this week invited us into a relational, processual way of engaging, and we took this as our frame: to explore what might emerge when we attend to our thinking not as fixed positions, but as something moving, shifting, and in relation.
As we spoke with one another about the paper, whenever a thought or feeling surfaced about our research, about the paper, about water and what water would say to us about our research, we wrote a line into the chat function on Teams. As in the paper, meaning emerged collectively—through fragments, relation, and flow.
These lines were not discussed, edited, or refined in the moment—they were simply offered as they came. In this way, we immersed ourselves in the methodology of the work we were engaging with, doing as others shared how they explored. Rather than only discussing the theory used in the paper, we sought to bring together theory and practice in a non-hierarchical way—and flowed through moments of resonance and tension, and through this meandering the lines used to create the poem came into being. The lines were later gathered and are presented here as a collective meandering—a response to the reading.
This was an experiment—one small way of re-imagining and putting in practice what education might be when meaning is formed using a process different from what we might normally do. We are grateful to the authors for the invitation to explore differently, to Shona for bringing our awareness to this paper and to all who were present—Qi, Kristine, Rachel and Kate—who all shared in the creation of the poem. A poem gathered in response to water and to a shared reading.
Poem
water says
be patient
the answers will come
knowledge should not be delivered
open ended
process based
what language does the water speak?
I don't know.
Is it Cambodian?
Vietnamese?
Is the water
a source of peace
or fear
or tension....
is language reworked
or reinvented
Ursula Le Guin:
The carrier bag of fiction
where does language create difference
and where does it bring us together
how does water divide
and where does it create flow
water in our bodies - ever shifting
reimagining
haunting
transforming
writing
killing
re-remembering;
the same water
and always changing
References
Martin, A., Peers, J. and Giorza, T., 2023. Meandering as learning: Co-creating care with Camissa Oceans in higher education. CRIStAL: Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning, 11(Special Issue 2). DOI: 10.14426/cristal.v11iSI 2.667
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