Running Head: a CONCEPT of CRITICAL FEELING Initial Thesis Submission 1St Proof

Running Head: A CONCEPT OF CRITICAL FEELING initial thesis submission a concept of critical feeling, a proposed basis for research in the teaching and evaluation of creativity. Rick Blackburn Department of Integrated Studies in Education McGill University, Montréal June 2018 "A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Educational Studies.” © Rick Blackburn, 2018 1st Proof YES | Word Spelling/Grammar YES | Grammarly TO DO | 2nd Proof TO DO 1 Running Head: A CONCEPT OF CRITICAL FEELING initial thesis submission 2 In Memoriam For Michel and Peter, good friends and giants their autobiographies ended before this was cut what they taught me, is here though for all of us to see and try to imagine as well as they did. Michel Brault, OQ b. 1928 – d. 2013, Prix Iris, (2005) Lifetime Achievement Award Peter Wintonick, b. 1953 – d. 2013, Govenor General’s Award, (2006) Visual & Media Arts Running Head: A CONCEPT OF CRITICAL FEELING initial thesis submission 3 Cast and Crew To my courageous advisors Boyd White, Chris Stonebanks and Will Straw who helped me stay the course. To Teresa Strong-Wilson, Spencer Bourdreau and Scott Conrod for getting me in. To Mary Maguire for seeing it first. To Bronwen Low, for the first year. To Desmond Morton, Brian Trehearne, Denis Salter and Abbot Conway for setting the bar. To Grant McCracken, for showing me the brink. To McGill’s first class librarians, Joyce and Elizabeth, the next generation’s John and Lili, and the omniscient Lonnie Weatherby, for the twenty-year ride along. To Pierre, Louise, Amber, Morgan, Karen, Bev, Alex, Jason, Jules, Marla and Jean-Francois for Salt. To Noreen Golfman, Tom Donovan and the students of Gonzaga High for The Pinch Of Salt. To Lee, Nisha, and Sharon for MIND. To Becky and Emma for their self-reliance. To Louise, who is always my first reader. To Teo, who is always my last. To Marc-Andre, for everything inbetween. Running Head: A CONCEPT OF CRITICAL FEELING initial thesis submission 4 Contents IN MEMORIAM ............................................................................................................................................ 2 CAST AND CREW ........................................................................................................................................ 3 CONTENTS ................................................................................................................................................... 4 PROLOGUE .................................................................................................................................................. 5 SUMMARY .................................................................................................................................................... 5 AVANT-PROPOS ......................................................................................................................................... 7 ACT 1 : DIVERGENCE THE HUNT FOR CRITICAL FEELING ............................................ 9 SCENE 1: THE PITCH .............................................................................................................................. 10 SCENE 2: THE PROBLEM ........................................................................................................................ 15 RESEARCH QUESTIONS .................................................................................................................. 21 SCENE 3: THE PROCESS ......................................................................................................................... 40 SCENE 4: THE PRODUCT ........................................................................................................................ 86 ACT 2 : EMERGENCE SORT STORIES OF DATA WRANGLING .................................. 123 SCENE 1: THE SORT .............................................................................................................................. 124 SCENE 2: THE SLICES ........................................................................................................................... 137 ACT 3 : CONVERGENCE CLEAR AND PRESENT POSSIBILITY ................................... 168 SCENE 1: THE PRACTICE ..................................................................................................................... 169 SCENE 2: THE PARADIGM .................................................................................................................... 198 RESEARCH ANSWERS .................................................................................................................. 213 EPILOGUE : THE BASIS FOR RESEARCH ............................................................................................. 214 WORKS CITED & BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................... 217 ENDNOTES ............................................................................................................................................. 239 Running Head: A CONCEPT OF CRITICAL FEELING initial thesis submission 5 Prologue This dissertation emerged over a period of six years, both result and record of a practitioner’s inquiry by a creative professional seeking to unpack his success teaching creativity. The main challenge of the project was to produce the discursive exposition of academic theory without corrupting the inherently non-discursive processes the project sought to explore. To accomplish this, the author designed a mixed methodology that grounded the academic theory in creative practice. The text is scripted in the three-act structure of a reflective conversation between the author-as-artist and author-as- academic, oscillating between creative and critical modes. Concepts and texts are engaged with, and emerge, from intuitive, affective, reflexive and reflective stances— each of which afforded equal weight in the exposition. The resulting text is organized around memos that record the author’s immediate, spontaneous, reflections to the scholarship. These memos serve as abstractions of the impulsive reflexes of the artist-practitioner to the research, fuelled by a review of scholarship—but also of artistic work and contemporaneous records of its production. The resonance and salience of the scholarship surveyed is measured against and in reaction to these memos so that the creative voice survives the discursive analysis. This dissertation posits a grounded theory of creativity to serve as the basis of a program of research into the teaching of creativity in language arts education. Following a hunch that the development of critical thinking abilities is far less dependent on the development of logical faculties than current teaching methods suggest, the author expounds the great potential of empathetic identification to teach creativity—arguing that the dominance of critical inquiry in language arts curricula disparages intuition and destroys the natural faculties of creative self-production that must be fostered for students to learn how to write and communicate effectively. To do so, he proposes an artistic knowledge paradigm, productionism, which enables meaning making from experiential acts of self-production he explores as storytelling and eventually distinguishes as storymaking. Each acts’ title identifies the primary creative tension that formed as that part of the analysis came into being. Summary The first part of the analysis, Act 1: Divergence, exposes the problem of prioritizing critical thinking in the language arts curriculum. An emphasis on criticality is discordant with the way in which individuals ascribe—and, indeed, make meaning. Affect is a necessary precondition to conceptualization. As such, rather than a focus on critical thinking, the author proposes an emphasis on critical feeling, defined as an affective stance of inquiry as the intuitive consideration of possibility that sparks imagination. The concept of critical feeling is grounded in the way artists assess the Running Head: A CONCEPT OF CRITICAL FEELING initial thesis submission 6 perceptual quality of meaning using affective inquiry, analogous to the way in which scientists assess the conceptual quality of meaning using critical inquiry. Critical feeling is understood in relation to Susanne Langer’s theory of presentational abstraction. Langer’s metaphysics of feeling proposes an artistic inquiry paradigm, which the author uses to explain how documentary’s production phases of scripting, shooting and editing externalize sub-processes of artistic creativity as acts of impulsive, actualized and consummated experience that can be taught as critical feeling’s dynamic processes of feeling, seeing and saying. In parallel with an exploration of the concept of critical feeling, the author expounds the suitability of a grounded theory methodology for an exploration of creative processes. In flipping the scientific method’s hypothesis-exposition-demonstration dynamic, grounded theory methodology holds the greatest promise for preserving the integrity of artistic knowledge. The second part, Act 2: Emergence, explicates the concept of critical feeling from an educational neuroscientific perspective. The power of storytelling is explained by the primacy of affective experience and emotional response in understanding the world around us. Langer’s metaphysical frame provides a bio-psychological grounding for the author’s proposition; that storytelling’s

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