Centering Aesthetically Within Place: a Geostory Composed from an Arts-Based Pragmatist Inquiry

CENTERING AESTHETICALLY WITHIN PLACE: A GEOSTORY COMPOSED FROM AN ARTS-BASED PRAGMATIST INQUIRY

A dissertation submitted to the Kent State University College and Graduate School of Education, Health, and Human Services in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Jennifer L. Schneider

December 2019

A dissertation written by

Jennifer L. Schneider

B.A., Kent State University, 2005

M.A., The Ohio State University, 2009

Ph.D., Kent State University, 2019

Approved by

______, Director, Doctoral Dissertation Committee James G. Henderson

______, Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Alicia R. Crowe

______, Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Linda Hoeptner-Poling

Accepted by

______, Director, School of Teaching, Learning and Alexa L. Sandmann Curriculum Studies

______, Dean, College of Education, Health and Human James C. Hannon Human Services

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SCHNEIDER, JENNIFER L., Ph.D., December 2019 Curriculum and Instruction

CENTERING AESTHETICALLY WITHIN PLACE: A GEOSTORY COMPOSED FROM AN ARTS-BASED PRAGMATIST INQUIRY (403 pp.)

Director of Dissertation: James G. Henderson, Ed.D.

Places are essential to our existence as humans. Unfortunately, however, places can fade into the background of our lives, becoming taken-for-granted in our experiences of living. Being disconnected and remaining nonreflective about the places we inhabit and the lives we make with them is profoundly problematic, especially given the influence of the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011) and the schism it advances between mind, body, and environment. Consequently, there is an urgent need to educationally cultivate our awareness of places in the hopes of making a more livable future for ourselves and all beings. Inspired by personal experiences and curriculum scholars who attend to places and honor mind-body connections, this dissertation empirically and reconstructively responded to the crisis of modernity through cultivating an understanding of place that involved “centering” (Macdonald, 1995) in it aesthetically.

A qualitative inquiry infused with principles and practices from arts-based research and pragmatism was designed to explore place in northeastern Ohio. Archival, familial, and autobiographical data were generated using a variety of methods including: public archives, private archives, oral history interviews, researcher journaling, wandering, gathering, photographing, and artful journaling. Through cycles of hermeneutic, interpretive analysis five experiential “objectives” (Ryan, 2011) emerged as significant: past~present, living~dead, material~immaterial, human~nonhuman, and

individual~collective. The compelling objectives grounded the making of a creative nonfiction “geostory” (Harway, 2016), which wove together visual and narrative data. In light of this place-based inquiry, educative consequences and possibilities are discussed with reference to the aesthetic and existential dimensions of curriculum and pedagogy studies.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As Rumi, the Sufi mystic and poet, wrote, “Yolu yürümeye başladığınızda, yol size görünür,” which roughly translates to, “As you begin walking, along the way, the road appears.” The creative and intellectually challenging process of doing this dissertation could not have been foreseen when I began my doctoral studies, and my way through it was only possible because of relationships with others. I genuinely believe when someone gives their time to something, they are sharing their energy with it and a tiny piece of their soul as well. I, therefore, want to express my deepest gratitude to those who offered inspiration and support during my journey.

To James Henderson: A tiny paragraph will never do justice to our years of working closely together. Fortune smiled upon me when I met you during my academic studies—a journey in which I never felt like I fit neatly into just one space. Through you I encountered the discipline of curriculum studies; this changed me. Curriculum is a space for thinking deeply about educational problems and embracing their aliveness, nuances, and complexity. Thank you for the countless hours deliberating over curriculum, pedagogy, leadership, and life. Thank you for nourishing the philosophical, ethical, pragmatic, and existential dimensions of education. Working with you, while dissertating and on other projects, has stretched my educational imagination for democratic living.

You have become more than an academic advisor; you are also someone I consider a mentor and friend. I hope my future scholarship can stand on your shoulders with grace and humility as I grapple with and invite others into educational questions around how we might live a good life with ourselves, each other, and all begins. iv

To Alicia Crowe: I will be forever grateful to have meet and worked with you during my doctoral coursework and dissertation journey. When I did not see a path yet, you guided me through murkiness and uncertainty. You trusted me, even when I did not fully trust myself, and you questioned and nudged me forward. Your guidance with a balance of educational leadership, theories, and practices inspires my teacher knowing and being. Thank you for your ongoing encouragement and willingness to be part of my committee. And thank you for holding a space that let me grow in unexpected and creative ways during my doctoral journey.

To Linda Hoeptner-Poling: Since my undergraduate studies in art education, you have been a teaching force in my life. You are a source of intellectual and professional guidance coupled with deep listening and caring. As an educator, you have always encouraged the embrace humility, criticality, self-exploration, self-expression, open- mindedness, and warm-heartedness. Thank you for letting me pour out my confusions, uncertainties, and insights with you during my journey through higher education. From you I have learned the educational value of both studying and practicing the arts and how through thinking, making, and sharing we might have agency in exploring serious, real- life questions.

To the KSU community: To those who were my doctoral peers, ones I met in passing and those I have/had closer relationships with may your professional journeys be enriching to your minds and souls. May you remain humble with open minds, critical eyes, and warm hearts amid the educational courses of action of which we are all a part.

A thank you must be given to Craig Resta for serving as my graduate faculty v

representative during the final phase of the dissertation process. To those KSU faculty, who are or once were, (Walter Gershon, Frank Ryan, Cathy Hackney, Tricia Niesz,

Vanessa Earp, Teresa Rishel, and Bill Bintz) thank you for offering open ears, critical pointers, and probing questions on my work when our paths crossed. Two others must also be acknowledged, Sherry Ernsberger and Shannon Stewart. Sherry, thanks for all the wisdom and support in helping me navigate and negotiate the bureaucracy of the university. Shannon, thank you for your friendship and heartfelt conversations over the years; you are truly a supernova.

To members in the Wooster, Ohio community: The on-staff Genealogy Librarians at the Wayne County Public Library, Christina and Deborah. Thank you for the conversations and guiding me in the archives. You are both gems. Rachel David for the grounded and adaptable space you create in your yoga classes, and Violet Nolletti, my personal trainer at the local YMCA and friend. Working with both of you in different ways pulled me out of spinning thoughts and self-doubts and put me back into myself, back into my strength, balance, and flexibility. Allison and Stuart Templeton thank you for your friendship and for creating an incredible space for sipping coffee, chatting, and eating. Your café was place that will forever be a part of where my thinking and writing for this dissertation came into form. Wooster misses you, and I miss you.

To my land and kin: An endless wellspring of life and wisdom without which the possibility of my dissertation journey would have been unthinkable. Thank you for sharing fragments of your lives with me and for letting me care for and create with those pieces. Thank you for inspiring and humbling me. To my mom and dad, thank you for vi

bringing me into a world with conscious intent despite unknowable futures, and thank you for teaching me in how to get dirty and clean up and how to be a curious, resourceful, gentle, and strong human being. My two brothers, thanks for sharing this lifetime with me and for childhood adventures fueled with fields and forest. I hope my effort here honors the gifts you all have shared with me in the highest possible way.

To my family in Turkey: Your loving kindness to a yabancı gelin (i.e., foreign bride) has all given me a sense of belonging within different place, culture, and language.

Thank you for the ongoing teachings in how one might live a life in which seeming opposites can seek deeper understandings and respect of differences.

To my husband, Ali Salih: Opposites. But an engineer and artist seem to be making a pretty good partnering. A pairing I treasure. You are one of my greatest joys and biggest mysteries. Thank you for being the sort of person who sees me as an equal and always honors my voice, feelings, intellect, and dreams. Saying thank you a million times over will never be enough for your endless patience and support during my academic pursuits, but I want to say it regardless, thank you so much, kocam canım.

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PREFACE

Figure 1. Letter from the private archive (Barnes, 1930-1957).

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16th October 2018

Warmest of Greetings great grandfather, Earl—

While reading through letters you wrote to family and friends, I came across the carbon copy of one addressed to a "little Newcomer". It was in a score of letters taken from your office at what was once the Ohio State University's Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station. All of your written correspondence got packed away after you passed unexpectedly from a stroke in 1957 at the age of 64. Kept out of a sense of obligation, sadness, forgetfulness, or preservation, I’ll never know, but your letters ended up with your son, Clarence (Bud) and his wife, Ruth and remained in a closet for over 50 years. Your granddaughter and my mother, Peggy happened upon the letters after Bud’s and Ruth’s passing in 2009 and no living members of the Barnes family knew the letters existed until then.

Although I was not the “little Newcomer" to whom were writing, I felt compelled to write you, albeit a response 65 years too late. As I write this letter sitting alone beneath a pin oak tree in what was once a field you tilled and planted, my mind dances with time. Your past speaks with my past and present and with a future not guaranteed yet nipping at my heals. Trying to sense this place as it once was is still a mystery for me and so too are you. Growing up, I knew you were my great grandfather and that my address, Earl Court, was named after you. But you were someone I never got to share a meal with nor see smile. A voice I never got to hear speak nor laugh. A face in old family photographs that others had to once identify for me. You lived in other generations’ memories but not in mine. Through exploring this place through the remanences and remembrances of family I have been touched by fragments of you and a linage I was born into.

Having lived during the United States’ agricultural and industrial eras, you must have seen so much change in your lifetime (1893–1957). A smile just bloomed in me as I recalled another letter where you expressed excitement for cars getting turn signals. I don’t know a world without them, which makes it seem like current material conditions have come a long way. Tremendous advances through the sciences rapidly change our ways of living. I imagine you might even enjoy some of today’s technologies given your frequent mailing of photographs, articles, and letters to people domestically and those you met abroad. But what all we have done and keep doing in the name of “better” and “progress” often gives me pause.

I wish I could enthusiastically, without doubt, tell you the world has become a far better place, but the faith you placed in us, future generations, to create a better world has not panned out, yet. From my view now, things still feel “badly out of joint” as you wrote years ago. Inequalities plague the globe. Tyranny, authoritarianism, xenophobia, and bigotry continue to be part of the human experience. Exploitation, consumption, ix

competition, and greed are ripping through and disregarding the Earth’s natural resources, creatures, and people. With over seven billion humans alive, scientists have called our current era, the Anthropocene—an epoch in which we are enormously impacting the Earth's ecological systems. Our habits of being are undoubtedly creating serious consequences not for our individual and collective wellbeing but also the wellbeing of other species and the planet.

Perhaps yearnings like yours for "Peace on Earth" or a "universal brotherhood among all the human race" are too lofty, too utopian? I’d like to believe in them as possibilities. Even today, people continue to dream of a future that will be better than the past and the present. And that hope is still placed in the hands of tiny ones yet to be made into flesh. Those little ones get left with our thoughtful actions as well as the burdens of our short sightedness. And they will imagine and make the world in ways we’ll never know.

When I imagine a future, my skin crawls with both excitement and frustration, and I live somewhere in between skepticism and hope for the planet and us, the human beings, who call it home. The crisis of modern life seems paralyzingly large to tackle, but perhaps the best one can do is to begin from within one’s self. To explore and create from within the relationships to which she is tethered.

With Gratitude,

Your great granddaughter, Jennifer (Schneider-Salih-Barnes-Derr- ...)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ………………………………………………………… iv-vii

PREFACE ………………………………………………………………………...… viii-x

LIST OF TABLES ……………………………………………………………………. xiii

LIST OF FIGURES ………………………………………………………………... xiv-xv

CHAPTERS

I. INTRODUCING THE STUDY ...………….……………...………………………….. 1 Experiential Incitements …………………………………...………….………...…… 3 The Problematic Situation and Inquiry Significance ...…………………………...….. 8 Research Purpose and Question ...……………………...………….……………...… 17 The Chapters to Come ….…………….….……………………………....……...…... 21

II. SITUATING THE SCHOLARSHIP ...………….………………....……………….. 25 Articulating the General Educational Problem ………...….………...……………… 26 A Historical Picture ………..…………………………………….…...………….. 27 Slicing Existence into Pieces: Either/Or rather than Holism ....…..…...….…...… 32 The Crisis within Curriculum and Pedagogy……………………….....….……… 37 Centering: A Curriculum Contribution from James Macdonald ...... ….……….….. 53 Curriculum Ideologies ...……...…………………………………...... 57 A Transcendental Ideology ……………..………………………...……………... 59 Centering: Immersion in Knowing-Becoming ...……..………...…….………..… 62 Tracing Aesthetics in Curriculum …...……………………………...……….……… 68 Elliot Eisner: The Arts and Cognition ...…………….………...……...... 68 Maxine Greene: The Arts, Becoming, and Freedom ....………...…………...…... 71 Subject-Matter in the Arts …………………………….……...………………..… 73 Autobiographical and Mind-Body Knowing ………….…...…………..……...… 78 The Aesthetics of Everyday Life …………………..…………………..…..……….. 82 Situating a Pragmatist Aesthetic …..…..……...….……….…….………...... 86 Mapping Place in Curriculum ………………….…….………….…..….…………... 96 Zoetic Place ...………………..………………………………………..………... 101 Recapping the Chapter …………………………………………….……….…….... 104

III. MOLDING THE METHODOLOGY …………………………………………….. 106 Research Design …..……………………………...………………………………... 107 A Qualitative Arts-Based Pragmatism ...………...………………...………………. 111 The Research Question ………………………...……………….….….…………... 123 The Research Context …………………………...….….…….………..………..…. 127 xi

The Participants ……………...………………..…...……...…………….…….…… 129 The Generation of Data …...………………………….….….….………………….. 133 Archival Domain ……...………………………………...……...... …………..… 143 Private archive ……………………………………...……..……...….….….. 144 Public archive ……………………………..………………...…….…....…… 163 Researcher journaling ……………………………………………....……..... 174 Familial Domain ……………………………………………………..….…….... 179 Oral history interviewing ………………………..………………...……...… 180 Preparations and enactment ………………………….……………..…... 183 Researcher journaling ……………………………………....………….…… 196 Autobiographical Domain …………………………………………………….... 199 Wandering …………………………………………………………...... … 200 Gathering …………………………………………………………..………... 203 Photographing ………………………………………..…………………..…. 207 Artful journaling ……………………………….…………………....…….... 211 The Analysis of Data …………………………………………..………..…...….… 213 Frist Cycle: Attending to the Domains …………………………….…..……..... 215 Second Cycle: Seeing Together ………………………………………..…...... 218 Indicators of Rigor and Ethical Considerations …………………..………...... … 224 Representation: Creating a Geostory through Experiential Objectives …….…...… 230 Recapping the Chapter ……………………………...………………………..….… 245

IV. THE GEOSTORY .…………………………………………...……..……………. 248 Prelude ……………………………………….…….……………...……………..... 248 A Morning Walk ………………………………….………….………...………..… 251 A Family Gathering …………………………………………………..……...... … 293 An Evening Campfire ……………….….……………………………………….… 304 Postlude .….………………………………………………………………..…...….. 316

V. CONSIDERING EDUCATIVE CONSEQUENCES AND POSSIBILITIES ….... 318 Contributions to Curriculum and Pedagogy …………...………………..……….... 322 Knowing-Being a Researcher and Educator ………….…………....…………...... 329 Locating Boundaries …………………….………….…………….....…………….. 337 Future Possibilities ………………………………………………...…………….… 339 Parting Thoughts: Implications of Centering ...……………….……....……...……. 345

REFERENCES ……………………………………………………………………..… 351

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LIST OF TABLES

Table Page

1. Methodological Features ….…….….….….….….…….….….….….…………...…115

2. Data Generation Techniques …….….….….….….….…...... ….….….…….....137

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1. Letter from the private archive (Barnes, 1930-1957) ………..…………………..…viii

2. The data generation process ….….….….….….….….….….……...….….………...136

3. Places are built on places; how much was done to make today possible.……..…...139

4. Listening to ghosts, the Miller family owned the land 1852-1893.….….……….....140

5. Deed packet cover …………………………………………………………….....…145

6. The archive’s main desk and filing cabinets (right) along with the computer and

microfilm stations (left) and librarians’ offices (back). ………………………....…147

7. The archive’s bound materials wrapping from the left around to desks………....…148

8. A 1943 property map from Barnes’s deed packet……………………………….....153

9. An original Baker’s Map of Wayne County………………………………..………154

10. The earliest Wooster Township plat map, 1820 (Smith, 1988)…………..………...155

11. A Wooster Township plat map, 1998……………………………………..…..……156

12. A digital map of roadways from ODOT (screenshot)………………………..…….157

13. Analyzing Earl’s letters ………………………………………………………….…165

14. Three albums (left) and some of the loose photographs (right)……………...……..167

15. Smaller clusters of photos: horses (top) and picnics (bottom)…………………..….169

16. Photograph: homes, barns, sheds, fields, and forest taken via drone…………….....171

17. Once my grandfather’s workshop in the basement………………………....………172

18. My grandmother’s bird watching log……………………………..……..…………173

19. Eastern wall of the tractor shed…………………………………………..………....173 xiv

20. A raw page from the public archive portion of my journal……………..……….…177

21. A raw page from private archive portion of my journal…………………..……..…178

22. Earl’s cow bell and likely worn by a heifer called, Bossy…………...……..………191

23. Two items from participants……………………………………………..…………192

24. Trying to track time….……………………………………………………..……....205

25. Play with leaves….………………………………………………………...………205

26. Spongy bodies….…………………………………………………………..……….209

27. Missing parts….……………………………………………………………..……...210

28. Milkweed, spreading seeds…………………………………………………..……..210

29. The sky’s songs, looking west….…………………………………………..………211

30. The experiential objectives….…………………………………………..……….…223

31. The dissertation’s flow.…………………………………………………..…………318

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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCING THE STUDY

Sinking into blades of grass, the weight of his soft body goes limp on me. The grasses here are not treated and neatly manicured nor are desires imposed for uniform colors or shapes. Mingling together are dandelion greens, nutsedge, plantain, crabgrass, and red and white clovers. His flock mates roam about, but he seems content to pause and relax in the summer sun’s rays with me. A wing fans open. Neck feathers perk up.

Eyelids slip shut. I try to synchronize my breathing with his.

… Inhale … ... … ... … Exhale …

My eyelids become heavy too, and my mind wandered off. Does he register the feel of my pulse beating? How does he know the sounds of the rustling leaves in the oaks, walnuts, and locust nearby? What is it like to sense the world as he does? Does he know he is an individual within a flock? How does he learn? His intelligence must be more than mere instinct. Does he think of me as separate from him? He must have some sort of understanding that I exist. He has, after all, chosen to visit me and rest breast to breast.

I did not call him over nor do I restrain him.

Chickens are remarkable creatures. They know the sound of my voice. I can call,

“chick-chick-chick ... chick-chick-chick" and the flock emerges running from bushes, fencerows, barns, and hillsides converging in my direction They also know me as a source of food when I walk outside with a bowl of food scraps or egg shells as treats for them. But I am more than a food source too. Other times, I can be outside walking, reading, resting, or gardening and they casually come over. They investigate what I am doing and eventually move on their way. Am I a curiosity? Entertainment? A companion? I will likely never know how they perceive me nor their physical, Earthly existence. My eyelids crack slightly, and as I adjust to the light and peer down at

Newman resting, I realize that with having chickens in my life the known, unknown, and unknowable follow me always.

In education, we often think of school buildings and classrooms as the sites of teaching and learning. Buildings and classroom are places where students are the ones who engage in studying subject matter content, and educators are the individuals who instruct, guide, and assess students' subject matter learning. But this place, with its soil,

3 stones, and grasses, is also a sort of school. A place of teaching and learning. Living here provides educational experiences. And my feathered fowls are a kind of teacher too.

I am a student of theirs as they guide me with a curriculum of knowing, living, and being human. Chickens guide me towards understandings of society and of myself. They push me to continuously reconsider what protection, consumption, release, balance, and kinship can mean.

Clouds slip in front of the sun temporarily cooling my skin. I open my eye and look down at, Newman then over at him flock mates hanging out in an old lilac bush. I speak, "Why can't this this place, this moment, and these relationships become a dissertation?” After all, curriculum studies becokens us to contemplate the classic question of, "What knowledge is worthwhile?" alongside other questions such as, "What is worth…experiencing, doing, needing, being, becoming, overcoming, sharing, and contributing?” (Schubert, 2010b, p. 235).

Experiential Incitements

Our daily experiences of living in the world hold the potential to jolt us awake, to open us up to problems in our lives. Other times, sensing problems can be subtler, taking time to build up momentum, such was my case. The negations, doubts, discords, pauses, impulses, disequilibrium, tickles, and pinches that we sense in our personal experiences are, according to pragmatists, moments from which genuine inquiry has the potential to arise (Dewey, 1938; Garrison, 1997; Rosiek, 2013a; Ryan, 2011). It is necessary, then, for an inquirer to acknowledge the motivating experiences that propel them forward into

4 action (Dewey, 1938). Motivating experiences are those that cause us to pause, consider, and articulate the “experience[s] of indeterminacy,” which disrupt our habits of living.

So much of our day-to-day living is experienced with a sense of "integral unity,” a default mode in which living is had rather than known. (Ryan, 2011, p. 26). Put another way, we all live in a sort of nonreflective state in which we do not go about discerning the qualities of our experiences, a sort of autopilot mode to existence. The nonreflective state is significant because it “affects the very way we think about reality” (p. 24). In other words, the nonreflective state shapes our ways of being and knowing in the world.

Amidst this nonreflective manner we do not differentiate between what is “‘in here’ from an ‘out there,’ a ‘myself’ set against an ‘other’” (p. 22). But when there are problems, events, moments, or happenings that puncture our nonreflective living, our “habituated background” the problem becomes “a subject of reflective focus” (p. 23).

Some problems can be resolved readily by one’s prior knowledge, for example, changing a light bulb, sharpening a pencil, changing a tire, spackling up a hole, or sewing on a button. Once such problems are addressed, we return to that start of integral unity going about our lives. But, at times, there are more challenging problems that arise, ones we encounter during our lives that have the potential to propel us towards

“transformation through inquiry” (Rosiek, 2013a, p. 697; Ryan, 2011). Or as Ryan

(2011) wrote, there is a “disruption of this unity by something unexpected or problematic” and this “initiates the cognitive distinction of thing and thought, self and other” (p. 27). Said differently, it is “only upon reflective analysis does [experience] break into external conditions” (Dewey, 1929, p. 19). Accounting for such moments not

5 only roots one's inquiry in the on-going stream of life but also serves as a way to not get caught up with “professionalized conceptual sparring” detached from personal, lived realities (Rosiek, 2013a, p. 697).

Opening this chapter with a moment from everyday life between myself and my late Barred Rock cockerel, Newman seemed like a fitting place from which to open my discussion of this dissertation's “experiential incitements” (Rosiek, 2013a). At that time though, my dissertation problem was in a state of emergence. I began caring for chickens early one spring after returning to Wooster, Ohio to live on the same land I grew up on, which has been a part of my family for four generations. I had begun my doctoral studies at Kent State University and living in Wooster seemed like a nice halfway point between

Kent and Columbus, Ohio, which was where my husband worked and lived at the beginning of my doctoral journey. Another part of my decision to return home was because my grandfather, Bud had passed away in July of 2009, and my grandmother,

Ruth was enduring bouts of radiation and chemotherapy.

Uncertain of how long she would be around, I dearly wanted to spend time with the woman who had so much influence throughout my youth, living, as she did, just one house over from mine. She had even retired from nursing to put me on and off the bus when I began morning kindergarten and “mothered” me after school in the afternoons

(Barnes, 1988). Although her health slowly withered away, she was still sharp in mind and memory. We shared meals and recounted our days, moments that still linger in me.

Being present for this stage of her life and living in a world after her passing, incited within me desires to turn back the pages of my life and unpack my memories.

I began turning my awareness inward and wondering more about who I am and how I come from this world through the place where I had lived and was living. I also began contemplating what the place means to me and why. My becoming in this world has been entangled with my family's land, and after returning to it, I encountered bell hooks' (2009) writings about her “sense of homecoming,” and “sense of being wedded to a place” (p. 2). A feeling similar to mine with this place, a place with deep memory, familiarity, and contentment. I felt as though the place was part of me and I of it, but I was also an outsider having not lived there for some time. The place was different. Part of this was me having grown older, but the people who were once constants in the place, my grandparents, would soon no longer exist. The place had also been remade by seasons and new growth in the forests and old fence rows. It was a place with pre- existing connections and full of newness. It was full of new happenings and traces of the lives before. There was movement from living to dead and rebirth again.

In addition to questioning my own existence, connection, and belonging with place, questions started to arise in me around what stories were being lost to time with the passing of older generations. And I thought about how sinking into the place where I was living could be a way to challenge my prior habits of “thoughtless action” and

“absentmindedness” around it (Dewey, 1922, pp. 163-164). What had the experiences of living on the land been like for my family members? What did they come to know through living in this place? How did they understand their relationship with this place?

My stream of experiences and questions began to mark “the onset of a problematic situation—an initial cognitive awareness that something is wrong and something must be

7 done about it” (Ryan, 2011, p. 28). At times though, we can know more than what we can express through language, and such was the case for me. I was making sense of my reality tacitly (Eisner, 2003; Polanyi, 1967). I was beginning to understand something about my existence by way of my body, feelings, and thoughts but was not yet able to articulate it.

The passing of my grandparents, living on the land again, and my adventures of caring for chickens were all done amid my disciplined “study” (Pinar 2006) of curriculum and pedagogy. One area in the literature I became intrigued by during my studies was the concept of place and the various ways scholars have explored it in relationship to curriculum and pedagogy (e.g., Bowers, 1997; Casemore, 2008;

Gruenwald, 2003a, 2003b; Helfenbein, 2010; Jardine, 2000; Kincheloe & Pinar, 1991;

Reynolds, 2013; Riley-Taylor, 2002; Whitlock, 2007). In addition to the concept of place, I gravitated towards scholars' writings that offered various interpretations of interiority, that is, studying subjectivity and self as sites of understanding (e.g.,

Blumenfeld-Jones, 2012; Brown, 2008; Doll, 2017; Jung, 2016; Macdonald, 1995;

Marilyn, 2004; Miller, 2005; Pinar, 1994; Wang, 2004). Through them, I began to sense how understanding involves our minds and bodies; they are inseparable in our educational experiences and vital in curriculum and pedagogy. Also present in our educational experiences is an interiority, that is, an immaterial, inner dimension to being human through which educational understandings emerge.

In curriculum studies, the prominence and relevance of place and self are both relative newcomers. Only since the reconceptualization of the field, which began in the

1970s, did space begin opening up for the significance of self (Miller, 2010), and not even 30 years ago, Joe Kincheloe and William Pinar (1991) began to lay the groundwork for studying place. As I read deeply and sat with what scholars had said, my sense of place was becoming displaced, “where that [place] is out of place and I must do something about it” (Ryan, 2011, p. 41). Said differently, the place where I had returned to live was getting unexpectedly disrupted by my living there again and through the academic study I was doing. From such disruptions, I began to make sense of the general educational problem I had been feeling throughout my life both inside and outside of educational institutions, that is, the disconnect between mind, body, and environment.

The Problematic Situation and Inquiry Significance

The “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011) is an ever-present and enormously complex historical and socio-cultural force that precipitates certain patterned ways of knowing and being in the world. Since our ways of “knowing and being are intimately entwined,” acknowledging and addressing the ways the crisis manifests within education is a worthwhile venture because the institutions we create and uphold in the name of education are steeped in the complexities of living within the crisis (Kane, 1994, p. 2).

Contemporary pragmatist philosopher, Frank Ryan (2011) was the central referent for the concept of the “crisis of modernity” because his work provided foundational philosophical and historical subtexts for a general education problem that can feel remote and abstract.

As Frank Ryan traced, the crisis is linked to the European Enlightenment and the emergence of rationalism and empiricism that radically transformed human thought and

9 ushered in the creation of the modern western world. Despite rationalism's and empiricism's contributions to industrialization and the information revolution through advancements in science and technology, fallout from the crisis has ensued with forms of ideological dogmatism and dichotomous (i.e., either/or) declarations that shape our thoughts and actions such as: facts over values, reasoning over feelings, science over soul, objectivity over subjectivity, humans over the natural world, and an individual over the collective (Bai, 2012; Bowers, 1997; Casey, 1996; Dewey, 1984/1930; Harding &

Pribam, 2009; Ryan, 2011; Tauna, 1992; Weaver, 2010).

The crisis of modernity was understood as this dissertation's general education problem, and the rift it supports between the mind, body, and environment was the specific manifestation I wanted to address. Although it can be contentious, even reductionist, to make broad-reaching claims about all educational institutions and the individuals who occupy them, the educational decisions we make and the actions we take can carry sensibilities and thought-patterns prompted by the crisis of modernity. An initial review of the literature in curriculum and pedagogy studies revealed that the crisis and its separation of mind, body, and environment have a long-standing presence that has not gone unnoticed. Through different avenues numerous scholars have drawn attention to the crisis's influences and consequences on our educational habits in terms of curriculum, pedagogy, and policy (Blumenfeld-Jones, 2012; Bowers, 1997, 2012; Doll,

2000; Eisner, 1994a; Henderson, Castner, & Schneider 2018; Hendry, 2011; Macdonald,

1995; Miller, 1990, 2005; Noddings, 2013; O’Loughlin, 2006; Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery,

& Taubman, 1995; Pinar, 2012; Slattery, 2006; Tieken, 2017; Ylimaki, 2011).

A historical glimpse into North American schooling is revealing in terms of how the crisis is part of our collective, inherited underbelly in education. Adams (1995) and

Child (2000) elucidated for us how the government used education and boarding schools in the name of “progress” and “Americanization,” but such actions deliberately displaced generations of Native American children by de-legitimized their cultural ways of knowing and being with devastating, dehumanizing effects. Winfield (2007) called attention to how eugenicist's ideology impacted educational practices, policies, and purposes. Eugenics shaped education and schools through definitions of intelligence and the sorting of students' social worth through racial groups. Critiquing the "dominator culture," bell hooks (2003) called into question the ways educational experiences are shaped by the "imperialist white-supremacist capitalist" patriarchy (p. 83), and Watkins

(2011) also pointed out how power, whiteness, and racism were—and are still— influential in structuring schooling in America. Highlighted by these scholars are just some of the ways through which education has been used as a manipulative, destructive force by institutions to disembody, objectify, and displace human beings.

The disembodiment and displacement of the crisis of modernity can be further illuminated through the sensibilities of objective rationality in education, which is easily witnessed in present-day pursuits for standardization. Objective rationality reduces curriculum, teaching, and learning to sterilized, technical matters that should be handled and made more efficient through linear processes and standardization. This in turn positions ideas, questions, uncertainty, challenges, and imagination as ill-suited for efficiency (Macdonald, 1995; Pinar, 2012). At its core, any form of standardization is

11 driven by the desire for homogenization rather than embracing and working within differences. Attempting to homogenize perpetuates being ahistorical, decontextualized, impersonal, anesthetic, and amoral within curriculum and pedagogy (Bowers, 1997;

Eisner, 1994a; Gruenwald, 2003a, 2003b).

Standardization breeds and supports habits of power over others in our educational institutions through curriculum and pedagogy driven by control, hierarchies, and management (Eisner, 2001; Henderson, Castner, & Schneider, 2018; Kumar, 2013;

Noddings, 2007). Such habits lack respect for teachers' and students' embodied, emplaced experiences, nor is substantial care given to their voices regarding educational policies, decisions, and evaluations (Henderson, et al, 2015; Miller, 1990).

Consequences of objective rationality in education are that fear, competition, conformity, alienation, insecurity, and dominance become infused, even calcified, within our minds, bodies, and educational places (Kumar, 2013; Macdonald, 1995). The effects of objective rationality are profoundly troublesome because of the oppressive tendencies and highly undemocratic conditions we continue re-creating in our educational institutions and across generations of educators and students.

Another timely illustration of the crisis of modernity being nourished is through attempts to corporatize education through applying metaphors and actions from the realm of business. When corporatization drives educational purposes and decision-making, the focus intensifies singularly on bettering individuals to be part of a global, competitive, capitalist economy, which has become a force through which human beings and the natural world get exploited for capital (Apple, 2006a, 2006b; Bowers, 1997; Noddings,

2013; Pinar, 2012, 2013). O’Loughlin's (2006) adds to the discussion of neoliberalism how bodies are objectified in education through habits of consuming and selling as well as inscribing bodies with social norms. Tieken (2017) also points out how neoliberalism propagates a fear-based myth of America failing to compete globally. School choice is advertised as the way we can “fix” American schools, students, and society. Within such a choice model, parents are consumers buying into the illusion that having a choice will bring better education for their children. When corporatization frames our purposes, policies, and practices, education becomes more and more entrenched in the Western industrial, technological, capitalist lifestyle (Bowers, 1997; Noddings, 2013).

Classrooms, teachers, and schools that seek to promote humanizing, localized, and nuanced educational experiences can be considered dangerous because they challenge economic and political ideologies (Apple, 2006; Watkins, 2012).

Continuing to promote beliefs, practices, and habits of disembodiment and displacement in education like corporatization and standardization is quite disturbing, especially given Blumenfeld-Jones’s (2012) reflections on the entangled nature of knowing and being in education. He wrote that it is “through educational experience we learn ways to be and these ways, perhaps more than cognitive learning, stay with us throughout our lives” (p. 29). With the crisis's influence in education, we are encouraging anesthetic, disenchanted ways of knowing and living through restricting freedom, creativity, diversity, imagination, uncertainty, openness, and alternative meanings. Although the crisis of modernity is disheartening, attentiveness to and concern

13 for the importance of place, mind, and body are well-established within the literature of curriculum and pedagogy.

Dialogues around the study of the environment and place are well-established within the literature. Kincheloe and Pinar (1991) were early pioneers in calling for the study of place in curriculum; they specifically explored a curriculum of southern place through a social psychoanalytic lens. More recent conversations have picked up their call and continued to unpack southern places through the critical analysis of culture and identity (Casemore, 2008; Reynolds, 2013; Whitlock, 2007). Additional approaches to the study of the environment and place in curriculum have sprung forth including: artmaking (Hurren, 2000), bioregionalism (Berry, 1992, 2002; Hensley; 2011), critical geography (Helfenbein, 2010; Helfenbein & Huddleston, 2013), indigenous and postcolonial perspectives (Ng-a-Fook, 2007; McCoy, Tuck & MacKenzie, 2016), memories and local histories (Hendry & Winfield, 2013), ecojustice and critical pedagogy (Bowers, 1997, 2012; Gruenewald, 2003b; Kahn, 2010), ecofeminism (Salleh,

1997; Warren 2000), ecospirituality (Riley-Taylor, 2002), and hermeneutics and poetics

(Jardine, 2000; Seidel & Jardine, 2014). Taken together, all these curriculum scholars ask us to consider the multidimensional ways in which we—as individuals and collectives—inhabit places, be they from a certain region of a nation to the schools and our neighborhoods. Moreover, their scholarly contributions around place intentionally push us to deepen our understandings of curriculum and pedagogy through “complicated conversations” (Pinar, 2011).

The divide between mind and body is also a pressing issue discussed in the curriculum and pedagogy literature, and there is a strong collection of scholarly responses seeking to reintegrate mind-body in education. One important cluster of contributions comes through arguments made for the significance of an individual's subjectivity as a site for generating meaning in education. Currere (Pinar, 1994) stands out as a noteworthy concept for autobiographical inquiry that has influenced many projects

(Brown, 2008; Doll, 2017; Jung, 2016; Marilyn, 2004). Autobiographical work has taken other shapes too such as through investigations around place (Casemore, 2008), cultural identity (Wang, 2004), and narrative (Fowler, 2006). The influence of feminist lenses has also been vital for encouraging dialogue about the mind-body in education through pointing towards how our ways of knowing and being are tied up with understandings of gender identity (Boler, 1999; Grumet, 1988; Hendry, 2011; Miller, 2005; Springgay &

Freedman, 2007, 2010, 2012; Wang, 2004). Curriculum and pedagogy studies has a rich collection of voices that offer up pointed critiques on the effects of the crisis and the ways that place, mind, and body get discarded in education. And their voices are vital for critically distancing from the effects in our educational theories and practices.

Regarding such critical work, however, I have been taken by an observation made by Donna Haraway (2016). Haraway remarked that we cannot continue pointing our fingers at and "blaming Capitalism, Imperialism, Neoliberalism, Modernization, or some other 'not us' for ongoing destruction webbed with human numbers. …These issues demand difficult, unrelenting work; but they also demand joy, play, and response-ability to engage with unexpected others" (pp. 208-209). What I take from Haraway's

15 commentary is that engaging in robust critiques that deconstruct the effects of Capitalism,

Imperialism, Neoliberalism, and Modernization—or the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan,

2011) in my case—are necessary for creating critical distance from them, and we should by no means halt such efforts. Continuous skepticism and critique are vital for plurality and generating understandings about living in the world.

Continuing to intellectualize them and simply pointing them out as things in the world, however, will likely not be an effective way to respond and transform their problematic nature. We cannot solely focus on deconstructing their presence and continuing to see them as separate things we identify, label, and speak about as if they are somewhere out there in the world. As Haraway (2016) pointed out too often there is a tendency to “invite odd apocalyptic panics and even odder disengaged denunciations rather than attentive practices of thought, love, rage, and care” (Haraway, 2016, p. 56).

We are outrun the crisis of modernity. And we are not separate from the crisis either.

We are living in its amidst, entangled with it on a daily basis. We are part of why it exists and are responsible for its continuation. We are left to problem-solve and generate transformation while living amidst it. And we need to work on ways of living in its amidst that are all at once critical, personal, relational, and reconstructive.

Although written many decades earlier, the cautionary remarks by the well-known educational philosopher, John Dewey (1938/1963) made decades prior resonate with

Haraway's sentiment. Dewey wrote that, “any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism’ becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms’ that it is unwittingly controlled by them” (p. 6). What Dewey was suggesting, and I believe Haraway is too, is

16 that -ism can undoubtedly be helpful tools thinking about the nature of knowing and being, but we also need to be cautious of the lure of –ism. We can get caught up and tied down with them as they foster dichotomous thinking to problems in our world. I decided, therefore, to not take up an -ism as the answer to the problematic ways the crisis separates the mind from the body and both from the environment. Instead of trying to solve or resolve this dissertation's problematic situation, I found Haraway’s (2016) advocation for,

“staying with trouble” to be a better way for me to respond. After all, Macdonald (1995) affirms that the problems we encounter in live “are not always solved” (p. 96). Problems are such that some “…disappear, still others become redefined, and some are solved in a sense of bringing to bear unity of self through thought, feeling, and action” (p. 96).

With Dewey and Haraway in mind, attending to this dissertation's problematic situation, involved staying with the trouble of the crisis of modernity and the schism of mind, body, and environment while finding a critical, generative way to respond. This dissertation, therefore, was by no means an attempt to solve the crisis nor its schism rather it was a chance to ruminate with it by engaging in inquiry. As pointed out in his last published essay, John Dewey (1952) wrote about how challenging it is to change one's self, not to mention our institutions and societies. Change is not a simple task.

… To change long-established habits in the individual is a slow, difficult and

complicated process. To change long-established institutions—which are social

habits organized in the structure of the common life—is a much slower, more

difficult and far more complicated process. (p. viii)

The sheer magnitude and complexity of this dissertation's problematic situation makes fixing it by one person within one piece of research an undoable venture. To even remedy the crisis in a single generation is a lofty—possibly deeply naïve—desire, especially given how deeply it has been injected into us and our institutions since the years of the European Enlightenment (Ryan, 2011). That said, however, for me, beginning to challenge the problematic situation involved drawing inspiration from existing critiques and concepts to respond in a reconstructive way. To do so, I sought to explore living in a place by “centering” (Macdonald, 1995) through the aesthetics of everyday life (Dewey, 1934/2005; Shusterman, 2000).

Research Purpose and Question

Feeling deeply troubled by living amidst the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011) and inspired by the many curriculum theorists who call upon us to engage with our mind- body understandings in education (e.g., Blumenfeld-Jones, 2012; Hendry, 2011; Kesson

& Oliver, 2002; Macdonald, 1995; Miller, 2005; O’Loughlin, 2006; Springgay &

Freedman, 2007) alongside those who encourage us to renew our attention to places (e.g.,

Bowers, 1997; Casemore, 2008; Gruenewald, 2003b, 2008; Kincheloe & Pinar, 1991;

Ng-a-Fook, 2007; Reynolds, 2013; Riley-Taylor, 2002), the intention of this study was to work empirically in a way that reconstructively responds to the crisis and its manifestation in the separation of mind, body, and environment. To do so, I felt compelled to explore the “breadth and depth” (Hatch, 2002) around living in a place as a way to respond to and disrupt the crisis within my life.

Investigating place is a worthwhile, necessary venture for several reasons. One reason of importance is that we do not exist without places. They are fundamental to our experiences of living. Every waking day we find ourselves immersed in relationships with places. We make our lives in places, and places make us as we immerse ourselves in the happenings and doings of life. Places make possible engaging ourselves in activities ranging from school to work, from family duties to hobbies, relaxation, and more. All too often, though, places become taken-for-granted, fading into the background of our lives, a fact not overlooked by scholars (Bowers, 1997; Casemore,

2008; Casey, 1999, 2006; Gruenwald, 2003a; Kincheloe & Pinar, 1991; Riley-Taylor,

2002). In other words, place often “recedes from [our] consciousness” (Gruenewald,

2003a, p. 622) becoming part of nonreflective experience (Ryan, 2011), which admittedly was the case for me at various points in life.

The lack of attention we give to place, according to Edward Casey (1996, 2009), is because we become absorbed with the to-dos and happenings of daily life and time.

Chet Bowers (1997, 2009) offered that place is outright ignored because of the lifestyle encouraged by Western industrialism/consumerism and its utter disregard for intergenerational knowledge and ecologies. Offering their observations on the cheapening effects this has on our individual and collective lifestyles, Raj Patel and Jason

Moore (2017) illuminated how capitalism has dramatically impacted us, other creatures, and nature. Elizabeth Kolbert (2014, 2015) has also written about the massive, human- driven crisis we are amidst—the sixth extinction or the Anthropocene—through evolutionary, ecological understandings. Donna Haraway (2016) too has expressed

19 similar concerns calling for us to recognize the impact of the Capitalocene and

Anthropocene on our well-being as a species and the very place each one of us lives, this planet, Earth. How might our nonreflective states of being in the world and our understandings of place(s) be influenced by living amidst these outgrowths of the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011)? There is an urgent need to educationally cultivate our

“wide-awakeness” (Greene, 1978) to our relationships with places in the hopes of making a more livable future for humans and all beings that dwell here. This dissertation project, therefore, sought to educationally cultivate an understanding of place through exploring it aesthetically.

After returning as an adult to the place of my childhood, I began wondering how much of my lifetime was spent with this place being part of my life's “integral unity”

(Ryan, 2011, p. 22). Giving focused attention to place through inquiry seemed like a way to challenge taking it for granted, while disrupting what I understood about it and how I exist in the world. Particularly intriguing are Casey's (1999) remarks that places are alive, and they gather “…all that occurs in the lives of sentient beings, and even for the trajectories of inanimate things” (p. 24). Places are always collecting and recollecting

“animate and inanimate entities… [as well as] experiences and histories, even languages and thoughts” (p. 24). Said another way, places team with pluralism, or as transactional pragmatism acknowledges, “there are different ‘reals’ to be experienced and reported”

(Ryan, 2011, p. 25). Places are alive, constantly changing with new beginnings and new endings. I began wondering about my current place's aliveness. It was teaming with lives, things, stories, and energies making it many things to many beings. Exploring a

20 place that my family has shared for generations was my way to respond to the scholarly calls for us to take pause, listen to place, and cultivate an awareness of a place.

The purpose of this study, therefore, was to engage with “careful[ly] scrutinizing” a place that has been experienced by my family for four generations (Barone & Eisner,

2012, p. 18). The site of this study was a place located in northeastern Ohio on the outskirts of a city called Wooster. With respect to studying the phenomenon of living in this place, one research question guided my exploration: What can be discovered by attuning to place aesthetically? Methodologically speaking, this dissertation falls under the umbrella of qualitative research (Hatch, 2002; Schram, 2006). Infused within this qualitative study were principles borrowed from arts-based research (Barone & Eisner,

2012; Leavy, 2015a, 2018) and pragmatism (McCalsin, 2008; Rosiek, 2013a; Ryan,

2011). The philosophical-aesthetic orientation of combining arts-based research and pragmatism combined two often separate methodological dialogues that enriched one another. These two were coupled because they aligned well with my desires to respond to the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011) by working with a creative, holistic, reconstructive framing. The generation of data unfolded via three interconnected domains (i.e., autobiographical, familial, and archival) each of which utilized a variety of methods.

A review of curriculum and pedagogy literature revealed that scholars have used a variety of avenues to interpret and investigate place. And the diverse voices are absolutely necessary because there is no single theory or way to study place, nor should there ever be (Gruenewald, 2003a). Moreover, such heterogeneity continues to nourish

21 the existence of a “complicated conversation” (Pinar, 2011) in curriculum studies around place in multidimensional ways. The complicated conversations around place are,

conversation[s] in which interlocutors are speaking not only among themselves

but to those not present, not only to historical figures and unnamed peoples and

places they may be studying, but to politicians and parents dead and alive, not to

mention to the selves they have been, are in the process of becoming, and

someday may become. (p. 43)

The rich heritage of interpretative work on place in curriculum is attempting to open up our educational conversations and understandings rather than narrowing them.

Curriculum scholars are trying to connect us, remind us, and jar us into exploring the significant ways place shapes our own lives and our educational institutions. That said, however, only a handful of scholars have pursued explorations that tap into the aesthetic dimensions of place (e.g., Hurren, 2000, 2012; Jardine, 2000; Riley-Taylor, 2002; Seidel

& Jardine, 2014). More empirical work, therefore, needs to be done exploring and seeing together mind-body-environment relationships as this will continue enriching curriculum's complicated conversations. Nested in the curriculum literature about place and aesthetics is where my dissertation project seeks to contribute, in a small way, specifically by exploring place through “centering” (Macdonald, 1995) in the aesthetics of everyday life (Dewey, 1934/2005; Shusterman, 2000).

The Chapters to Come

Chapter Two weaves together a written tapestry of relevant literature and supplies a backdrop for this dissertation in terms of the project's theoretical underpinnings and key

22 concepts. The literature review begins with a discussion of what the contemporary philosopher, Frank Ryan (2011) has called the “crisis of modernity.” An in-depth discussion of the crisis is necessary upfront because it is the general education problem informing this dissertation. Of particular interest is how the crisis manifests as a lack of relational, holistic understanding particularly with respect to the transactional nature of mind, body, and environment. This problematic focus is further illustrated within education by weaving together relevant curriculum and pedagogy literature that speaks to the nature of the general education problem and inquiry significance. The latter portion of the literature review describes the key concepts I took up to respond positively to the problematic situation: “centering” (Macdonald, 1995), the aesthetics of everyday life

(Dewey, 1934/2005; Shusterman, 2000), and place (Casey, 1996, 2009).

Chapter Three provides an overview of the dissertation’s empirical exploration by discussing the methodological foundations and research design for studying the problematic situation in a specific way. The chapter opens with an articulation of the philosophical-aesthetic perspectives that anchored the inquiry process. My aesthetic exploration of place fell under the umbrella of qualitative research. Because of their additional methodological clarity and guidance, my qualitative efforts were strongly informed by principles and practices borrowed from arts-based research and pragmatism.

Following the articulation of methodological commitments, a detailed account is given with respects to the various methods taken up for generating data and moving through cycles of data analysis. What emerged from the analysis of my aesthetic, place-based

“learning through experience” (Dewey, 1938/1963) were five experiential “objectives”

(Ryan, 2011). The chapter is rounded out by acknowledging indicators of rigor, ethical considerations, and concerns related to artmaking as a form of representation.

Chapter Four disrupts the more traditional form of presenting findings via modes like definitive themes, hierarchies, or sequential events. Rendering the data’s complexities and integrity in such formats would have worked against the study's philosophical-aesthetic underpinnings of arts-based research and pragmatism. To work with pragmatism means one is trying to “reveal realities” (Rosiek, 2013a), reach for meanings, and see together "an entire organism-environment system” (Ryan, 2011, p.

35). All the while knowing fully well that one can never know the whole, since experience is “infinitely varied and unknowable in any finite sense” (Macdonald, 1995, p.

91). Applying a more traditional form of reporting data would likewise work against the arts-based tenets of crafting expressive forms that are evocative and encourage deliberation, imagination, and resonance within the researcher and percipients (Barone &

Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2015aa, 2018). Chapter Four, therefore, is not meant to be consumed as a simple representation “of independent objects,” rather it is an artwork, a

“material semiotic intervention” generated amidst my “continuing stream of experience” of living with place (Rosiek, 2013a, p. 699). Inspired by Haraway’s (2016) call for creating and sharing “geostories” and the five experiential “objectives” (Ryan, 2011), I crafted a “creative nonfiction” (Miller & Paola, 2004) that wove together visual and narrative data elements. Through creating and telling geostories we can acknowledge our lives in motion through webbed relationships and the unresolvable tensions of thinking, acting, and living on Earth amidst the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011).

Chapter Five brings this dissertation’s understandings to a point of closure, although not done with a desire to offer a standardized protocol or prescriptions for curriculum and pedagogy. Elliot Eisner (1997) challenged such an ethos in education when he critiqued how we all too often frame knowledge as a thing that can be and must be concretized. When speaking about this tendency with research, Eisner wrote that,

“We prefer our knowledge solid and like our data hard,” and “knowledge as a process, as a temporary start, is scary to many” (p. 12). Blumenfeld-Jones (2012), Henderson,

Castner, and Schneider (2018), and Pinar (2012) also pointed out that there is an insatiability for step-by-step guides, activities, and scaffoldings within education, which can feed the utilitarian, instrumentalist, technical tendencies that have come to dominate so much of curriculum and teaching. Drawing upon the intellectual heritage of such scholars and continuing with inspiration from methodological influences of arts-based research (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Four Arrows, 2008; Leavy, 2015a, 2018) and pragmatism, this chapter does not seek to concretize or offer best-practices, rather a discussion unfolds around the educative consequences and possibilities (Dewey,

1963/1938; Rosiek, 2013a) in light of my aesthetic inquiry into place.

CHAPTER II

SITUATING THE SCHOLARSHIP

Curriculum is “the site on which generations struggle to define themselves and the

world” (Pinar, et al.,1995, pp. 847).

Dedicated to weaving together scholarship, this chapter’s literature review both clarifies and grounds the organizing concepts and theoretical underpinnings at the heart of this dissertation. Worth mentioning is that although thought and attention were given to composing this chapter it is by no means an all-encompassing review of educational literature. The chapter relied upon a survey of relevant publications from scholarly voices within the discipline of curriculum and pedagogy studies. This field was the most pertinent given the fact that it is where my doctoral coursework and dissertation research project reside.

The review of literature begins by articulating the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan,

2011), which served as the general education problem for this dissertation. The crisis of modernity is problematic because of the ways it both quietly and explicitly shapes our modern lives in disconnecting, disheartening ways. The separation of mind, body, and environment is a specific manifestation of the crisis that has pervasive—yet often overlooked—consequences influencing our educational beliefs, habits, and customs. To illuminate this significant educational problem with respects to curriculum and pedagogy,

I weave together curriculum scholars who have strongly critiqued the separation of mind, body, and environment from various interpretive avenues.

Given the existences of the mind, body, and environment separation within education, my dissertation sought to not only shed light upon it but also to respond to it a holistic, creative, and reconstructive manner through taking up the concepts of

“centering” (Macdonald, 1995), aesthetics, and place. The theorizing of the curriculum studies scholar, James Bradley Macdonald—in particular his concept of centering—was a conceptual anchor. The latter portion of the chapter provides pertinent background to clarify the ways different curricularists have worked empirically and theoretically with the concepts of aesthetics and place. The discussion of these two concepts simultaneously carves out how aesthetics and place were anchored for this inquiry project. In sum, this chapter utilizes relevant literature to accomplish two tasks: 1) to elucidate the “crisis of modernity’s” (Ryan, 2011) schism between mind, body and environment as an educational problem and 2) to situate “centering” (Macdonald, 1995), aesthetics, and place as key concepts taken up to respond positively to the problem.

Articulating the General Education Problem

The general education problem informing this dissertation is the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011). The crisis is a sort of insentient force that feeds by our modern times and becomes absorbed in our minds and bodies. The crisis inhabits our ways of knowing and being and the kinds things we imagine and create in the world. No single thing is the cause of the crisis and attempting to a fix it to a single cause is to think in a reductionist way about its problematic nature and to potentially overlook compounding factors that informed its coming to being. Therefore, what comes is a description that illuminates certain general features of the crisis while also contextualizing its influence

27 within curriculum and pedagogy. Of equal importance too is mentioning that the characteristics and examples discussed in this chapter are by no means the only ones and potential exists for varied interpretations on the crisis. The specific manifestation highlighted in this literature review—i.e., the mind/body/environment spilt—was informative for my inquiry project into the aesthetically “centering” (Macdonald, 1995) in place.

A Historical Picture

In order to understand the crisis of modernity, it is helpful to ground it within historical as well as philosophical subtexts. The crisis arose in part from streams of thought that emerged during the era of the European Enlightenment (Ryan, 2011). The

Enlightenment was an intellectual movement during the 17th and 18th centuries that happened across various regions in Europe including but not limited to Germany,

Scotland, and France (Bristow, 2011; Ryan, 2011). Broadly speaking, the Enlightenment brought about significant transformations to human thought by casting into question the existing, dominate cosmological order of the time. Enlightenment thinkers were deeply critical of the Medieval period as being an “age of religious faith” characterized by

“superstition, enthusiasm, fanaticism and supernaturalism” (Bristow, 2011, par. 12 & 51).

These thinkers radically impacted the culture of the time chipping away at “the medieval world-view and ushered in our modern western world" (par. 1). The intellectual contributions articulated by philosophers and scientists heralded in an age of thought rooted in the capabilities of humans’ intellect, observations, and skepticism as means to understand the what is real in the world and produce true knowledge.

Rationalism and empiricism became two predominant structures for thought, which gained strength and became highly influential during the Enlightenment and beyond (Bristow, 2011; Ryan, 2011). Worth noting, however, is that empiricism and rationalism did not spring forth all shiny and new from the Enlightenment. Intellectual thought rarely happens in a vacuum and is built upon others’ thinking. As Ryan (2011) noted, hints of empiricism and rationalism can be traced back to antiquity through the

Western philosophy thoughts of thinkers like Plato, an early rationalist, and Thales, an early empiricist. Although there can be similarities, the rationalist and empiricist systems of thought fundamentally disagree on the level of epistemology particularly around the question of how humans attain knowledge (Bristow, 2011).

To describe rationalism and empiricism, the work of Frank Ryan (2011)—a contemporary professor of philosophy at Kent State University who scholarship focuses on transactional pragmatism—was significant for this dissertation and served as the foundational referent for the crisis of modernity. Ryan's writing juxtaposes similarities and differences between rationalism and empiricism alongside acknowledging the

“different eddies” within both streams of thought (p. 11). Put another way, there is variation in terms of what constitutes rationalism and empiricism, and such variance depends upon the philosophical system advanced by a given philosopher. Ryan points out as examples the philosophers, René Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, and Baruch Spinoza can all be considered rationalist, but each has a different argument on the metaphysics of rationalism. The same holds true for empiricists, like John Locke and David Hume too who differ around empiricism. Among thinkers of rationalism or empiricism, however,

29 there are certain core assumptions shared between thinkers, and below is a concise account of the tenets.

In response to the question of how knowledge is attained, rationalism places considerable importance on the human mind as the source of knowledge. Rationalists believe in the power of the human mind of the matter of the world. When we use our mental faculties, we can determine what is true or real about our existence because the mind allows us to “‘see’ more clearly…than [we do] with our eyes” (p. 8). A central premise for rationalism is the mind over senses. For rationalists, our bodies’ senses (e.g., touch, sight, hearing, taste, smell, etc.) are slippery and unreliable for perceiving what is real and true in the world. Placing too much trust in our sense is not wise because they frequently give us “false or deceptive” information (Ryan, 2011, p. 12). Our senses can play tricks on us, for example, just because we see a line in the distance as the horizon does not mean the world is flat. The mind and our capacities for reasoning are, for rationalists, far more reliable for knowing world and what it consists of. Engaging our minds in accurate reasoning with the methodological tool of skepticism, we can know the world.

Human’s capacities for reasoning allow the mind to have dominion over the world. This sentiment is captured in one of rationalism’s principal figures, René

Descartes’ well-known statement, “I think therefore I am.” Rationalist’s thinking reoriented the nature of knowledge. Knowledge was “no longer [based]…on collective authority (what the king decrees, what the church demands) but on a newly empowered self—the individual mind and its ‘good sense’” (Shorto, 2008, p. xvi, emphasis in

30 original). Another thinker in the flow of rationalism was Isaac Newton who relied upon the use of mathematical reasoning and formulas for understanding phenomena in the world. What is real and true could be understood and explained most clearly through the laws that govern the universe. In short, rationalist’s thought can be boiled down to the core postulate that the world and all the objects that make it up “conform to mind” (Ryan,

2011, p. 8).

The dynamic asserted by rationalists gets flipped for empiricists. From the point of view of empiricism, humans gain knowledge through our bodies and senses. The senses, therefore, take precedent over the mind, and “the real world is physical and given to us by way of our senses.” (p. 11). According to empiricist, human knowledge is one of atomism, that is, we can come to know through the analysis of distinct, separable components. To illustrate this, Ryan (2011) offers a helpful example of a white cube, but any object could be substituted a tree, flower, chicken, rock, or any thing. When we encounter a white cube, we do not encounter an essence of the cube, rather we “have multiple ‘simple’ impressions” (p. 11). We get impressions of the cubes through its white color, highlights, shadows, size, lines, and squares that get pieced together. Put another way, when we are perceiving the cube—or anything in the world around us even ourselves—we do not experience the cube as a cube, but we are experiencing it indirectly through mental sense impressions we experience from the object. The “sense impressions and simple ideas are the assured givens we generalize into less certain regularities and laws” (p. 12). Empiricism, in sum, seeks to upholds the central notion

31 that the “mind conforms to objects” (p. 8). The matter of the world has dominion over the mind, and our senses are central to experiencing the world in which we live.

Since dawning in the Enlightenment and continuing to evolve thereafter, rationalism and empiricism have become incredibly dominate ways of thinking, especially in the western world. As methods of thought, they have brought forth significant contributions to human civilizations. One of the major outgrowths was the formation of the scientific method. This method of inquiry has early roots in Descartes’ rational system, which “involved questioning assumptions, taking no assertion on faith, and building our understanding of the world on provable observations rather than traditions” (Shorto, 2008, p. xvi). Applications of the scientific method have brought about astonishing innovations ranging from those in the Industrial Revolution during the

18th and 19th centuries (e.g., stream engines, telegraphs, typewriters, and sewing machines) to advances in the physical and life sciences as well as applied and technological sciences.

The technological advances of the 21st century that we are living amidst are built upon innovations in thought from the Enlightenment. Such advances impact our expectations and how we go about living our daily lives from the medicines we might be taking to the transportation and communication tools we use to our national and global economics structures. We can travel by air from the east coast to the west coast of United

States in a single day. With only a few clicks of keys on a computer or digital buttons on a phone, electrical currents are translated in a series of zeros and ones that allow us to video-chat with friends or family across the globe. We have sophisticated, life-saving

32 surgical procedures like transplanting vital organs from one human to another, or we can help parents conceive children through in vitro fertilization. Despite humanity’s continued material, scientific, technological, and information advancements, the predominance of rationalism and empiricism also has an underbelly, what Ryan (2011) termed the “crisis of modernity”. The crisis of modernity has had and continues to have profound implications in terms of what we think we know, how we live, and what we value in the world.

Slicing Existence into Pieces: Either/Or rather than Holism

One of the most disturbing qualities of the crisis of modernity is that is fosters fragmentation and dichotomies in our ways of knowing and being rather than encouraging holism and relationality. Said differently, the crisis of modernity encourages problematic schisms that are significantly troublesome because of how they influence what we know and how we existence in the world. The dualistic tendencies of crisis can result in various types of separations, e.g., facts/values, objectivity/subjectivity, mind/body, human/natural world, and individual/collective. And these schisms, among others, become ever more entrenchment in a Western industrial, technological, rational, capitalist lifestyle (Bowers, 1997; O’Loughlin, 2006).

One split that Ryan (2011) stressed is the separation between facts and values. In describing the fact/value split, Ryan (2011) discusses how concerns for values, ethics, moral judgements become separate from facts, and he points out how much of what is unfolding in our modern times is a reflection of the fact/values separation. In our contemporary societies we have,

hydrogen bombs, overpopulation, and poor stewardship of the earth are portents

of self-obliteration. Because facts have traditionally been isolated from values,

those who create these technologies typically deny responsibility for their effects.

The moral leadership expected of churches, schools, pundits, and parents is

comparatively diffuse, enervated, and conflicted. (p. 63)

Ryan is questioning how scientific and technological advancements are “outpac[ing] the moral developments” needed to address the ethical questions that arise (p. 64). In a fact/value schism, metaphysical declarations of having souls “becomes a relic of pre- scientific thinking forever banished to the tower of babble-on” in the age of facts (p. 64).

Knowledge is predicated on what is observable, testable, and replicable. And there is a strongly held faith in and a desire for “an absolutely firm foundation for knowledge, a quest for certainty” and a proclivity for “hard-nosed facts” (p. 12 & 8). When we overlook, ignore, or outright deny that the individual and collective thoughts and actions do not have consequences, nihilism emerges.

The mind/body split is another schism the crisis has a tendency to incubate. To illustrate this, the thought patterns of rationalism are helpful. Rationalism posits the mind is superior to the body because of human’s intellectual capacities for reasoning and logic, which gives the mind the power to shape existence. Through reasoning, knowledge is seen as something that can give us certainty, predictability, and objectivity and is

“independent of human concerns or values” (Tuana, 1992, p. 36). Rationalism, thus, reinforces detachment from subjectivity and “the needs, desires, and particularities of the body” (Tuana, 1992, p. 37). Such assertions promote a particular understanding of

34 knowledge that separates it from concerns and questions around body even values and ethics (Ryan, 2011; Tuana, 1992). Put differently, matters like our preferences, senses, emotions, memories, and imaginations are positioned as having little value, thus are inferior and invalid sources of knowledge. They must be discarded or overcome in the quest to find what is true (Harding & Pribam, 2009; Tuana, 1992).

Another schism that finds expression through the crisis of modernity is the split between individual and collective. An eerily vivid illustration of this split can be found in John Dewey’s (1984/1930) early 20th century observations regarding “old individualism” and “new individualism.” What he termed old individualism refers to cultivating social structures and individuals who embody qualities of selfishness and profit along with social tendencies towards systematization, quantification, and standardization. Contrastively, new individualism is the cultivation of individuals and cultures that are sensitive towards and believe in the social, relational, critical, freeing dimensions of robust democratic living. Fragmenting the individual and the collective feeds the current alienation and isolation found in modern societies, and human being’s disconnection with a collective network of places, material objects, nonhumans, histories, others, and one’s self (Bai, 2012; hooks, 2009).

The notion of an autonomous individual is also a historical and linguistic concern because it positions others as “objects,” as external things without voices. Thinking of existence in such a way in turn result in a dichotomy between subject and object (Bai,

2012; Bowers, 1997; Weaver, 2010). The subject/object split can also be illustrated when we often go about trying to fix educational problems. We look around us at what is

35 happening in schools and say, “Ah-ha, that’s it! There’s the problem.” Then, we often proceed to take actions to remedy it. But problems are slippery creatures. What we do not do often enough is to seek understandings of “how we created and contributed to the problem by thinking, perceiving and acting in certain ways” (Bai, 2010, p. 312). The prominence of "narrow empirical or developmental views lead us away from our ontological ground of being rather than causing us to come to grips with human nature"

(Macdonald, 1974, p. 97). Stated otherwise, we position problems much of the time in externalized ways. The problems are with the objects out there in the world, and we seek to control or reorganize external components to solve educational problems. But we do not often question our part in the creation of problems and how we embody and reaffirm them.

When the individual-collective and mind-body connections are disregarded concurrently the environment can also disregarded. In other words, a schism is supported between humans and nature, and this is troublesome because our experiences of living are always embodied and always emplaced. "Unless it [i.e., the body] feels oriented in place, we as its bearers in the world, we shall almost certainly experience" a sense of rootlessness (Casey, 2009, p. 195). The crisis of modernity has encouraged a position that humans as the center of the world and therefore “separate and superior from nature”

(Weaver, 2010, p. 193). A sort of “hyperseparation” is encouraged between humans and nature (Martusewicz, 2005). Such thinking encourages humans to be and act in ways that exercise “control over nature” without attending to ethical concerns and/or implications

(Harding & Pribam, 2009, p. 5).

The schism between the natural world and humans encourages ways of thinking and being that are anthropocentric and decontextualized (Bowers, 1997, 2012). The disconnection is reflected in terms like the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, which are currently being used to describe humanities’ impact on the Earth (Haraway, 2016; Patel

& Moore, 2017). Cultures and economic structures driven by capitalistic consumerism encourage beliefs that the world is ripe for picking, and we can engage in endless consumption, disposable, and exploitation of the planet in the name of greed, survival, and/or self-sufficiency (Bowers, 1997; Noddings, 2013). The Earth is broadcasting in high definition our disregard for place(s) through showing us our contamination of watershed, destruction of forests and other nature resources for profit, towering mountains of garbage on the land and in the sea, and much more.

The natural and material world is not detached from individuals, our internal world of thoughts and feelings. Instead of continuing to fuel “what other philosophies had set apart in opposition: mind versus matter, self versus object, fact versus value,” another way of approaching living is through a transactional perspective, which is inspired by Dewey’s writing in the late 1940s (Ryan, 2011, p. 3). Slicing existence into pieces creates oppositions, and the “oppositions of mind and body, soul and matter, spirit and flesh all have their origin, fundamentally, in fear of what life may—bring forth. They are marks of contraction and withdrawal” (Dewey, 1935/2005, p. 32). Thinking dualistically creates “a mind enslaved” and supports “habit[s] of thought in which affirming one alternative entails denying another, where one can have either wine or water but not both" (Shusterman, 2000, p. xi). A transactional stance is about “seeing

37 together” (Ryan, 2011) a more holistic, relational, and reconstructive view of our lives and living.

A transactional stance sees the mind and body as interconnected with the environment and with what the knowns and unknows of existence. Put another way, transaction is about the “dynamically interdependent what we know and how we come to know it. ...Mind and matter together constitute our world and what we can learn about it"

(Ryan, 2011, p. i). There is a ceaseless, co-creative synergy between what is so often seen as either/or. Transactional knowing and being seeks a sort of holism, that is, honoring interconnectedness and understandings of relationships rather than working with dichotomies, separations, and absolutes (Ryan, 2011). Each one of us is entangled with certain things, places, and people; those people, places, and things are all in turn full of other connections. And those others become nodes for more connectivity to others and so on and so forth—a sort of entanglement rippling out into space and time through the living of our lives (Haraway, 2016). In sum, transaction works from a holistic frame which embraces the relations, possibilities, and consequences between all qualities of experience: facts and values, mind and body, humans and nature, subject and objects, individual and collectives, and so on.

The Crisis within Curriculum and Pedagogy

The “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011) and the mind/body/environment split are not just philosophical abstractions used by academics making arguments, rather they create a problematic situation that is alive and well within education. The crisis with its mind/body/environment split existences in many forms within education including but

38 not limited to: the perpetuation of ahistorical, decontextualized, impersonal, and amoral educational practices and policies (Bowers, 1997; Gruenwald, 2003); the dominance of objective, technical rationality as well as dogmatic hierarchies and authoritarianism

(Apple, 2006a, 2006b; Henderson, Castner, & Schneider, 2018); the lack of respect given to voices of students, teachers, and schools that have local, contextual knowledges and histories (Block, 1997; Bowers, 1997; Miller, 1990; Gruenwald, 2003); the use of business metaphors, neoliberalism focus on global, competitive, capitalist economy and consumerist culture (Apple, 2006a, 2006b; Bowers, 1997, 2012; Pinar, 2012, 2013).

These disembodying and displacing effects of the crisis of modernity can be traced and illustrated through the literature in curriculum and pedagogy studies.

Although I heed Hendry’s (2011, 2016) concerns for being cautious in how we reproduce curriculum history in hegemonic, linear ways, the crisis of modernity does show itself through certain historical contributions to education, curriculum, and pedagogy. Therefore, I begin the discussions of the crisis and its separation between mind/body/environment with education by highlighting certain historically contributions.

Following the historical contributions illustrating the emergence of the crisis, the discussion transition to how the crisis and mind/body/environment split is a pervasive and dominating force presently within education.

The field of curriculum studies started establishing a formal sense identity as a discipline with the emergence of curriculum specialists in the late 1920s and early 1930s in the United States of America (Marshall, et al., 2007; Pinar, 2009). The formative years of curriculum studies were home to a range of voices arguing about education’s purpose.

Individuals such as, John Dewey and Jane Addams—often labeled as progressivist thinkers—felt that democratic living, growth through inquiry, individual’s well-being, and improvement of society were foundational to education (Addams, 2002/1902;

Dewey, 1916; Hansen, Anderson, Frank, & Nieuwejaar, 2008; Kliebard, 2004; Pinar, et al., 1995). Education should, in short, look to cultivate: (a) student self-governed learning, (b) experiential-based learning into subject matter, (c) teachers as guides not dictators of knowledge, (d) learning environments that were fluid, and (e) fostering the whole student, i.e., social, physical, emotional, and moral well-being of individuals

(Dewey, 1938/1963).

Contrastively, at the same time there were early thinkers like, Werrett Wallace

Charters and Franklin Bobbitt who sketched out visions of education as well as curriculum, teaching, and learning linked to scientific rationalism and social efficiency.

In their visions, education should involve acquiring the skills necessary to participate in

America’s economic future through a trained labor force (Null, 2011). Bobbitt’s

(2009/1918) educational vision conveyed tones of the America’s need to keep pace with the nation’s growth, and his writing gesture towards progress as a sort of utopian idealism for the future. Glimpses of this can be seen when he made states like, “the evolution of our social order has been proceeding with great and every-accelerating rapidity” or

“never before have civilization and humanization advanced so swiftly” (p. 15).

With America being in an “age of science” Bobbit say a call for “exactness and particularity,” and education should meet these needs (p. 16). In this new age of science, the scientific method was to be the tool for developing curriculum objectives and learning

40 experiences in classrooms. And for Bobbit, if applied appropriately, this method had the ability to produce facts for educating the public. Education needed only to “find more effective methods for teaching” facts about the world (p. 14). Bobbitt’s (1918, 1924) argument helped set the stage for what has become a sort of educational logic driven by objective, technical rationality.

Moving forward in time, educational discourse of the 1940s saw waning interest in progressivist thoughts in favor of strengthening rationalism (Pinar et al., 1995). Ralph

Tyler became a prominent figure in curriculum development during this time. Having been a pupil of Bobbitt, Tyler picked up on his thinking and sought to improve upon it.

Tyler wrote what has been declared “the most influential curriculum book of the twentieth century” (Marshall, et al., 2007, p. 3), which was the Basic Principles of

Curriculum and Instruction (Tyler, 1949). The book provided administrators and teachers with a straightforward, step-by-step curriculum development framework concerned with: 1) determining educational purposes, 2) designing experiences aligned with purposes, 3) organizing those experiences, and 4) assessing achievement of said purposes (Tyler, 1949). With this framework, Tyler “opted for generalizability, not specificity” (Hlebowitsh, 2013, p. vi). Inherit in the educational threads woven by those like Bobbit and Tyler was a certain drive for rationality in curriculum and teaching.

Tyler’s curriculum development framework became well-known and called, “The

Tyler Rationale” (Kliebard, 1992; Kridel, 2010). The Tyler Rationale has been an unremitting object of attention receiving a mix of praise and criticism. Tanner and

Tanner (2007) felt it provided a foundational approach of curriculum and instruction, and

Hlebowitsh (2013) echoed this sentiment. There is an ever-growing collection and hungry for Tylerian-inspired models for curriculum and teaching. Take as contemporary examples, March’s and Peters’ (2008) approach to “standards-based instruction” or

Wiggins’ and McTighe’s (2005) scaffolding for “backward design.” On the other hand, scholars like Apple (1990), Macdonald and Purple (1987), Kliebard (1992), and

Henderson, et al. (2015) and Henderson, Castner, and Schneider (2018) do not so much take issue with Tyler’s four points but instead are deeply troubled by its rationality and the technocratic sensibilities which support being procedural, impersonal, unjust, ahistorical, value neutral, and decontextualized.

Historically speaking, another development that strengthened objective rationality in education was behaviorism, which bubbled up around education around the same time as Bobbitt and Tyler. Behaviorism is a stream of thought that developed by thinkers such as Edward Thorndike, Stanley Hall, and other pioneering voices in the then emerging discipline of psychology (Schunk, 2012). Psychology wanted to study the human mind to determine how individuals developed and to do so in a way that rivaled sciences like chemistry. Behaviorism used the scientific method to create knowledge through measuring how external behaviors are conditioned, and individuals were said to have learned once behavioral changes could be observed through stimuli and responses.

Through determining truths like in the “hard” sciences, behaviorism sought to help education by determining how learning happens, which could in turn help decide how to teach. Behaviorism ushered forth and reinforced certain notions in education such being able to observes, measure, predict, and control the phenomenon of student learning.

Take the belief, for example, that teachers should be aware of students’ behaviors and help them with good habit formation through modifying behavior and using a system of rewards and punishments. Another example can be seen in developmental approaches to learning in which curriculum is considered a collection of skills or knowledge that needs to get broken down and sequenced.

Although behaviorism is mentioned in the past tense, its influence is by no means gone. It contributed to the advancement of behavioral objectives written with measurable outcomes (Eisner, 1967; Pinar, et al., 1995), which Kridel (2010) pointed out became

“popularized in the 1960s and 1970s” (p. 908). Elliot Eisner (2003) offered pointed appraisal of the effects of this in curriculum and pedagogy when he wrote:

By the end of the first quarter of the 20th century the die was cast. Except for

some private schools, Thorndike won and Dewey lost. … [The] influence of

psychology on education had another fall-out. In the process science and art

became estranged. Science was considered dependable, the artistic process was

not. Science was cognitive, the arts were emotional. Science was teachable, the

arts required talent. Science was testable, the arts were matters of preference.

Science was useful and the arts were ornamental. (p. 347)

Although Dewey philosophy and his Chicago Lab Schools as well as other voices in the

Progressive Education Movement have had lasting impacts on educational theories and practices (Breault & Breault, 2005; Garrison, 1997; Tanner, 2010), curricularists like

Bobbitt and Tyler along with psychologists like Thorndike were instrumental in developing a logic of objective rationality.

Objective, technical rationality and developmental, cognitive, and behavioral approaches to curriculum and teaching still exist today in educational domains ranging of research to professional practices and policies. And many scholars have called out such trends in curriculum and pedagogy by identifying the standardized management paradigm

(Henderson & Gornik, 2007), instrumental rationality (Autio, 2009a), the ills of instrumentalism (Blumenfeld-Jones, 2012), social efficiency (Magrini, 2014; Pinar,

2012), corporatism (Taubman, 2009), and neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and authoritarian populism (Apple, 2006a, 2006b). Although I do not want to disregard the possible value of rationality in certain circumstances for specific concerns, a glaring consequence of that the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011) encourages a certain type of ethos in education. The qualities it supports include desires for and habits to: (a) control and predict, (b) compare and contrast, (c) use extrinsic motivations, (d) demand clear, specific outcomes, and (e) use measurements to evaluate performance (Eisner, 2001).

This ethos and rationality can be seen with positivist and post-positivist approaches to educational research and the resulting scientism (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013;

Pinar, 2009; Riley-Taylor, 2002). Such empirical work seeks to quantify life, breaking it into pieces and finding universal truths. Winfield (2007) provides a chilling, historical illustration of scientism through tracing how eugenics made its way into education.

Eugenics ideology was used to classify the intelligence of students from racial groups and sorting their ability and social worth accordingly. The quest of scientific efficiency and effectiveness in education though measurable achievement and a “quantitative ideology”

44 are reinforced by behaviorism, rationalism, scientism, and psychologism (Macdonald,

1995).

From the standpoint of objective, technical rationality, curriculum is often treated as external from educators and students, as “the course to be run” (Eisner, 1994a, p. 25).

It is “some external-to-the-self sources” of knowledge for instructional and evaluative purposes (Christodoulou, 2010, p. 331). Reflecting on such treatment of curriculum,

Slattery (2006) wrote that “generations of educators have been schooled to believe that the curriculum is a tangible object—the lesson plan we implement or the course guides we follow—rather than the process of running the racecourse” (p. 62). This is problematic because knowledge is positioned as fixed via a set of documents (e.g., standards, lessons, tests, websites, textbooks), and such documents often push a perception of what counts as true knowledge typically resides in disciplines that place emphasis on logic, reasoning, and economic profit such as science and mathematics rather than in those of humanities or arts (Nussbaum, 2010; Tuana, 1992). Moreover,

Autio (2009a) points out that there is an amoral sentiment, “no sight of the belief…that a sense of morality will develop through the acquisition of knowledge” (p. 89).

When curriculum is a thing viewed in an objective, technical matter, so too is teaching. Teachers are rarely tapped as knowledgeable creators of curriculum nor are they encouraged to critically deconstruct or reconstruct what is given (Henderson, et al.,

2015). Instead teachers are positioned as receivers of subject-matter content by those who design instruction and evaluation. Less trust placed in teachers’ decision-making and professional judgments. Put another way, teaching becomes a kind of technical

45 matter with sets of steps for drilling skills into student. Teaching, in other words, is a technology to produce “carefully fashioned products in learning and behavior” (Kliebard,

2009, p. 59).

When pedagogy gets reduced to this, there is not a lot of energy spent on critically questioning the whats of implementing curriculum dictated from the bureaucratic higher- ups or other experts/specialists. Learning experiences in schools are “glinting surface stimulations…a relentless rush from activity to activity, all in the name of 'keeping the children's interest,” and teachers in up “helplessly feeding the voracious activity beast"

(Jardine, 2000, p. 13). Teachers focus upon instructional implementation around the hows and the whens, that is, how will the pregiven curriculum be taught and when.

Limited attention is given to questions around the whys in curriculum and pedagogy, and if attention is given, it is limited in scope with limited reflective inquiry and problem- solving (Henderson, et al., 2015). Answers to why questions are already done “within the prescribed system; that is, we explain why we are doing something in terms of other objectives or, occasionally, in terms of goals” (Noddings, 2009, p. 426), rather than looking beyond schooling to a larger vision and purpose of education “where there are and must be all kinds of opening to possibility” (Greene, 1995, p. 5).

In the dominance of technical rationalism, teachers are at most seen as instructional leaders in that they are “advancing innovative teaching practices,” but rarely are they seen as curriculum leaders (Henderson, 2010, p. 221). The technical view of teaching can result in teachers feeling a sense of “being de-skilled… [by] control procedures” (Apple, 2009, p. 199) and their professional artistry is not honor nor

46 encouraged (Eisner, 2003, 2005; Henderson, et al, 2015; Henderson, Castner, &

Schneider, 2018). Positioning educators as semi-professionals is not new though and has historical roots in North American’s schools. This attitude reaches back to when teaching was considered cheap labor, women’s work, and a steppingstone for young men who would teach for a short while then move on to “better” careers (Grumet, 1988; Spring,

2011).

When curriculum and teaching are reduced to technical matters, so too is learning and students’ experiences in schools. A false assumption exists that if teachers follow the assigned curriculum students will somehow learn (Null, 2011). But learners are not

“lump[s] of matter mechanically cranking” along (Johnson, 2002, p. 344). Learning gets a “cognitive emphasis” (O’Loughlin, 2006, p. 72), and educational experiences become far too engrossed with “priorities, purposes, and programs of ‘intended learning’”

(Greene, 2009, p. 155). Learning becomes an external matter anchored in the absorption and memorization of pre-determined skills and facts. When learning is seen as a technical problem and there is an overreliance on students become predominantly engaged with a mind-centered “doing” (O’Loughlin, 2006). Learning is not done for the sake of inquiry or for a cultivating journeys democratic subject, self, and social understandings (Henderson & Gornik, 2007; Henderson, et al., 2015; Greene, 1988).

And the tendency is to overlook the embodied nature of teaching and learning (Castner,

2015; Kesson & Oliver, 2002; O’Loughlin, 2006; Ryan, 2011).

A current reality is that objective, technical rationality is influencing curriculum and teaching, which makes the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011) a deeply concerning

47 and problematic. Education is at its heart about people and thus is always full of complexities and “unforeseen developments in the every-changing conditions”

(Macdonald & Purple, 1987, p. 182). Such complexities and uncertainties cannot be resolves by solely using objective, technical, rational problem-solving. Many of the educational problems we face are not mechanical problems rather are deeply human problems connected to how it is we are living within ourselves and with others.

Within mainstream education, the crisis of modernity thrives in the area of policies and reforms the impact curriculum and teaching. The dominant culture underlining contemporary educational policy and reform initiatives harkens back to concerns voiced at the beginning of the 20th century by the German sociologist, Max

Weber. Among Weber’s (1905, 1983/1920) key observations were that capitalism’s growth in Western societies—which was supported by Protestant axioms—would be surmounted by an era of bureaucracy and wide-spread institutionalized rational models, which support instrumentality and utilitarianism. Education in the 21st century still carries Protestant ideologies (see Block, 2004; Blumenfeld-Jones, 2015; Hendry, 2015;

Pinar, 2013) and is becoming more and more deeply embedded in the vision Weber foresaw and cautioned against.

Although they may be perceived as well intentioned, at least in rhetoric, educational policies and reforms are displacing and disembodying. When pushed in

North America, they frequently are touted in the name of “progress” but are part of the never-ending, externalized, intensifying quest to attempt to find “what works” to fix a seemingly broken system of education (Pinar, 2012). Educational reform is, as Ayers

(2012) described, a “landscape…littered with rubble and ruin and wreckage on all sides”

(para. 2). The wreckage Ayers is speaking of can be seen in the ceaseless barrage of initiatives including the infamous No Child Left Behind before which was Goals 2000, to

Obama’s administration’s push for Race to the Top, and most recently adoption of The

Common Core State Standards Initiative by many states. If we go back in time, there was pervasive, fear-based discourses about education that helped spur reform, for example, A Nation at Risk and before then was the Russia’s launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 (Marshall, et al., 2007; Pinar, 2012). Often the politicians, bureaucrats, and special interest groups involved in educational reform can have destructive, amoral, ahistorical, uncritical agendas (Apple, 2006a; Taubman, 2009) that result in “school deform” (Pinar, 2012).

Thinking about schools as a “broken system” and education through political- motivated lenses promotes beliefs that in order to fix education there needs to be more oversight and control through bureaucratic means (Apple, 2006a; Ayers, 2010/2000,

2012; Pinar, 2012; Taubman, 2009). Bureaucratic control means that hierarchies and authorities, or “leaders,” must be put in place, and educational reforms end up taking shape as one-size-fits-all, top-down approaches. Organizational layers of control are set up around reform initiatives, which flow down from the federal-level and/or states-levels on to districts and administrators finally reaching teachers then students. The need for control pushes an agenda that seeks power over others and what they do instead of a cultivating power with individuals or fostering others power from within (Greene, 1988;

Henderson, et al., 2015). Underlining reforms is also an assumption that all students,

49 teachers, administrators, and schools are identical and interchangeable (Ayers,

2010/2000; Pinar, 2012). In brief, there is a sense that the politicians and bureaucrats at federal and state levels are attempting iron-out the historical, localized, lived complexities of being educators and students.

Thinking and writing at the integration of educational leadership, curriculum, and pedagogy, Rose Ylimaki’s (2011) insights are particularly helpful for unpacking the ideological tendencies dominant in educational leadership and policy that reverberate in curriculum and pedagogy. In conceptualizing management culture, Ylimaki recognized five central beliefs it encourages including: 1) progress is tied to economic productivity,

2) productivity relies on a disciplined workforce, 3) productivity relies upon technology,

4) productivity is improved through managerial decisions, and 5) productivity is improved via effective planning, implementing, and monitoring. This management consciousness underpins political reform agendas.

The “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011), therefore, shows up in education is through the growing influence of corporatization. The spirit of our time in one in which the ends and means of education are becoming tethered tighter and tighter with the economic profits, national gross domestic product, and private-business interests (Apple

2006; Ayers, 2012), rather than being about a public service, individuals’ well-being, and democratic rights. We can see the growing influence of corporations developing curriculum and buying political influence in terms of what is “right” for education. Take for example, The Common Core that was largely funded by Bill and Melinda Gates

Foundation, but they are not alone. Other cooperate big-wigs and billionaires have been

50 engaged in philanthropic efforts with schools, some offering large sums of money as grants while others offering technologies or other incentives (Pinar, 2013; Singer, 2017).

Again, in the name of “good,” corporations are finding ways to gear schools, administrators, teachers, students, curriculum, and learning experiences towards capitalists gains and business-driven motives. The individuals driving educational polices or funneling money into schools are oftentimes those disconnected from the everyday realities of schooling; they can have little, or even worse yet zero, experience working within schools or the complexities of teaching students. We need to look no further than the current individual voted in as the Secretary of Education in the United States of

America, Betsy DeVos—a business woman from a family of Michigan billionaires who has no disciplined study within the field of education and deep ties to vouchers, charter schools, and religious schools.

When a business-mentality and objectivity, technical rationality join forces to frame education, the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011) is at work. They support policies and practices of social efficacy (Magrini, 2014; Pinar, 2012) and affect individuals in disembodying and displacing ways. Teachers and students, even district- level administrators, can be left feeling a sense of isolation (Eisner, 2001; Magrini, 2014).

There are feelings of alienation between colleagues and administrators (Macdonald &

Shirley, 2009). Teachers not feeling like the leaders in their study and practice of teaching (Henderson 2010; Henderson, Castner, Schneider, 2018). There is a loss of feeling a vocational calling for teachers (Palmer, 2007) and a disregard to the personal and moral dimensions being and educator (Hansen, 2001). Also, there is loss of

51 individual and collective voice and empowerment for teachers and even students (Apple,

2006; Ayers, 2010; Miller, 1990). Additionally, fear, competition, conformity, insecurity, and dominance can get infused and calcify within minds and bodies of educational stakeholders like students and teachers (Kumar, 2013; Macdonald, 1995).

Reliance on standardization is perhaps one of the brightest trends today that can showcase the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011) and mind/body/environment split in education. With standardization close in toe are desires for comparison, homogenization, and predictability rather than idiosyncrasy and difference. Standardization is most often linked to efforts around what subject-matter should be taught. The adoption of The

Common Core illustrates such control and hegemony brilliantly through framing what subject-matter knowledge is of most worth English, mathematics, and science. Other areas like history, psychical education, the arts, world languages, and so on are peripheral. The creators’ curriculum reforms like this—and the endless array of supportive and evaluative materials fashioned as a result—have a “significant amount of control over the context, forms of knowledge, and pedagogies at the classroom level”

(Wayne, 2009, p. 298).

When describing the overall aim that guided the development of standards, The

Common Core Standards’ official webpage stated that, “State school chiefs and governors recognized the value of consistent, real-world learning goals and launched this effort to ensure all students, regardless of where they live, are graduating high school prepared for college, career, and life” (National Governors Association Center for Best

Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2014, par. 1). Although this tiny

52 passage of discourse suggests a concern for “real-world learning goals” and a declaration to work democratically for “all students,” one cannot ignore the statement’s neoliberal undertones (Apply, 2006a), and it is also befuddling how there is an upmost concern for students’ futures and lives in the name of progress but a complete disregard for students’ current interiority, experiences, and local places—their embodiment and emplacement.

Another disheartening outgrowth of pushes for sstandardization is the favor given to evaluation through the use of standardized testing. Tests are not in and of themselves horrible tools for evaluation, and certainly many teachers have used them and will continue to. But when testing couples with objective-technical rationality and a business- management orientation it is cause for serious concern because the “crisis of modernity”

(Ryan, 2011) and the mind/body/environment split is reinforced. Standardized testing can create “cram schools” (Pinar, 2012) and a “banking concept” of learning (Freire,

2003). Student learning is not done for any deep subject matter, self, and social understandings. Rather students are seen as minds memorizing pieces of information for the sole purpose of depositing what they received on a test. As a result, teaching and learning become narrowed because so much hinges on test scores, which often have little merit (Apple, 2006; Ayers, 2010; Pinar, 2012). And scores are often uncritically associated with the broader concepts such as student achievement, teacher effectiveness, school quality, and so on. Schooling becomes focused on end-products and the transmission of information for homogenous assessments with little room to no room for teachers’ and students’ input on curriculum matters.

High-stakes standardized testing also becomes an evaluation tools in the top- down, managerial, bureaucratic organizational structures (Schwandt, 2015). The

“problems arise when tests are rushed through just for the sake of a score and then are linked to high stakes—the promotion of students, the pay [and job security] of teachers, and even the jobs of administrators” (Noddings, 2007, p. 211). Testing is often are used for purpose of surveillance and dishing out rewards and punishments. And testing results become a tool for distributing funds to schools and are used to seek social-efficiency and accountability through management, control, and compliance. The bottom line of accountability is performance, which outweighs teachers’ and students’ holistic self and social journeys of understandings, individual and collective well-being, and education’s moral, democratic underpinnings (Henderson, et al., 2015; Noddings, 2007, 2009, 2010).

Centering: A Curriculum Contribution from James Macdonald

The curriculum studies scholar, James Bradley Macdonald (1925–1983) served as one of the foundational figures for this dissertation, particularly his notion of centering was an anchoring concept. To his work in curriculum, Macdonald brought an eclectic academic background combining his studies in sociology, history, political science, teaching, and eventually a master’s and doctorate in education from the University of

Wisconsin-Madison (Blumenfeld-Jones, 2010; Brubaker & Brookbank,1986;

Burke,1985; Kumar, 2013). His scholarly career continued to reflect this as he maintained a broad conceptual range, which Pinar (1995) wrote about in his introduction to a collection of Macdonald’s writings compiled after his death entitled, Theory as a

Prayerful Act. When describing Macdonald’s approach to theorizing, Blumenfeld-Jones

(2010) wrote that Macdonald’s perspective was “ever seeking, ever curious, ever insisting on answers not yet fully understood and yet beckoning forward” (p. 552).

Macdonald—who was always deeply concerned with life, schools, and children— theorized curriculum from a space in between his interests and other intellectual voices.

He drew from the likes of critical theorists such as Freire and Marx, to philosophers like

Dewey and Polanyi, to psychologists like Jung and Langer, to curriculum theorists like

Schwab and Kliebard (Macdonald, 1995; Pinar, 1995). Macdonald’s thinking on the nature of being human in the world and possible meanings of this in education was evolving and impacted by many thinkers.

Macdonald was quite prolific throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, however, he passed away at the young age of 58 in November 1983 leaving behind a rich collection of his thinking-in-progress. During his short stint in this world, Macdonald’s questioning positioned curriculum, teaching, and learning in a way that dwelled within dimensions of the existential, personal, psychological, social, political, economic, functional, aesthetic, moral, contemplative, playful, and so on (Burke, 1985; Kumar,

2013; Macdonald, 1977, 1995; Pinar, 1995). Even with an eclectic sensibility,

Macdonald’s scholarship did have several core tenets that Blumenfeld-Jones (2012) pointed out including: a focus on “exploring the blockages to and the hope for liberation as the goal of education,” “finding oneself as a human being and working out the density of being human,” and contemplating “how school life might contribute to, unintentionally interfere with or actively inhibit, the development of the person” (p. 551).

For Macdonald, there are many potential questions within curriculum and pedagogy studies, but “the key question in curriculum: How shall we live together?”

(Brubaker & Brookbank,1986, p. 215, emphasis in original). Considering Macdonald's provocative question of living together means contending with knowledge (i.e., the epistemological) as well as existence (i.e., the ontological). He is pushing us to question how it is we have been and are living and relating in the world. Macdonald is asking us, as educators, to examine deeply how we have been, how we are, and how we might exist.

Also, encapsulated his use of shall is an awareness of future consequences and possibilities of our living in the world. In light of the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011),

Macdonald’s question is incredibly timely and perhaps one of the most educationally pressing given the current environmental crisis and mounting social inequalities across the globe. Issues that are not absent from our educational institutions.

Curriculum and pedagogy might be well served in promoting educators, and other educational stakeholders, with examining who we are and how it is we are living in relationship with the world, within ourselves, with others, and with our environments.

There is educational value in struggling with and reflecting upon our relationships with how we are living together in the world and how we shall live together in the future.

From the vantage point of 2019, James Macdonald was from a prior generation of curriculum scholars, but as William Pinar (1995)—a founding, prominent member of the generation who identified as curriculum studies’ reconceptualists—described,

Macdonald’s contributions to the field were “ground-breaking” because he opened space for and “provoked the Reconceptualization of American curriculum field” (p. 1).

Macdonald has also been understood as a key, historical figure for scholars seeking to explore spirituality within curriculum and pedagogy (Morris, 2016). Despite such proclamations about his impact, however, Ashwani Kumar’s (2013) argued recently that

“Macdonald’s work has not received much attention in spite of its significant potential for educational theory and pedagogy” (p. 129).

Perhaps, and it is speculation, Macdonald’s work has been overlooked in the past decades because there a tendency to seek new theories or concepts rather than to work with older ones. Novelty and freshness can be alluring. Blumenfeld-Jones (2012) called attention to this when he wrote, “We tend to treat our traditions as errors we leave behind.

...But what do we lose when we act in this way?” (p. 101). To what degree do those of us living in the present believe we somehow have a better grasp of education than scholars who came before us? And how we are doing with embodying and enacting certain educational ideas of the past in the present? Pinar (2007) pointed this out with respects to

John Dewey's educational vision. Deweyan ideas are often referenced but how well are we at actually doing Dewey in our schools and classrooms, especially when Pinar say

Dewey is still an “elephant in the room” in the curriculum studies field (p. 18)? In light of Kumar’s (2003) argument, perhaps the same can be said about Macdonald's scholarly contribution to curriculum and teaching, particularly his notion of centering.

Although Macdonald’s ideas have been overlooked in the decades since his death, several scholars have picked up on his contribution. In order to explore the nature of human consciousness through positioning curriculum as meditative inquiry, Kumar

(2013) put Macdonald in dialogue with the Indian philosopher and educator, Jiddu

Krishnamurti (1895–1986). Referencing Macdonald’s thoughts on prayerfulness in education, Wilson (2004) described the intersection of art making and aesthetics as

“contemplative,” and Blumenfeld-Jones (2012) wove Macdonald’s voice into his argument for curriculum-teaching-learning being grounded in a hermeneutic search for meaning and living aesthetically. Willis (1998) also drew upon Macdonald’s theorizing to discuss evaluation within curriculum. Despite these examples, empirical applications of Macdonald original theorizing still remain incredibly limited, and his thinking “needs to be expanded and enriched” (Kumar, 2013, p. 129). Macdonald’s theorizing maintains relevance particularly given the crisis of modernity’s separation of mind, body, and environment and the stronghold it has in curriculum and pedagogy and how we are living within educational contexts.

Curriculum Ideologies

Before delving into Macdonald’s (1995) concept called “centering,” a brief account of the curriculum ideologies he identified provides useful backdrop for situating the concept within the broader scope of his thinking. Macdonald (1974, 1995) distinguished between four curriculum ideologies including: the romantic, the cultural transmission, the developmental, and the radical. Through juxtaposing these four curriculum ideologies, Macdonald finds each one to possess a certain degree of phenomenological and ontological vagueness.

The romantic curriculum ideology places knowledge purely in the existential or phenomenological dimension, i.e., the inner world rules the outer. This ideology puts strong emphasis on an individual’s inner experience of self and maturation. Truth and

58 value are generated through self-knowledge. In terms of ethics, when individuals are free, they are believed to be “essentially good unless society makes them otherwise”

(Macdonald, 1995, p. 69). Contrastingly, the cultural transmission curriculum ideology sees the individual as shaped through stimulus-response encounters with environments.

The external world shapes individuals, and this external world has objectivity and truth.

Regarding this ideology’s ethical considerations, there is either neutrality or a belief that the individual should be shaped by objective truths and/or agreed upon cultural values.

While the romantic and transmission ideologies encourage either/or hierarchies between the inner self and outer world, the developmental and the radical do not uphold absolute, strict boundaries.

Within the developmental and the radical curriculum ideologies a sense of permeability is present between the inner and the outer. The developmental curriculum ideology believes knowledge occurs when there is “a resolved relationship between” the inner and outer dialectic, a sort of transaction between them (p. 70). With this in mind, truth is positioned as pragmatic or relative to certain individuals, contexts, and situations.

Although inner and outer are intertwined, there is a tendency for this ideology to be

“weighted on the side of [the individual’s] inner cognitive structures” (p. 70), and there are philosophical, universal ethics serving as the means and ends for individual development. And there is an assumption that “inner experience should be fundamentally the same for all individuals" (Willis, 1998, p. 350).

The radical curriculum ideology also believes that knowledge is generated through the dialectic of inner and outer, and truth is pragmatic (Macdonald, 1995).

However, the radical stresses critiquing the social structures and conditions that shape reality and individuals (e.g., gender, class, power). From this viewpoint, “the way people live together is determined essentially by the structure of our economic arrangements, the ownership of means of production, and the distribution of goods and services through the possession of power” (p. 72). Hence, from a radical ideology there is a strong emphasis placed on the outer world as needing to change so that individuals can develop more fully.

A Transcendental Ideology

Macdonald’s theorizing did not simply offer descriptions and critiques of the curriculum ideologies discussed prior, but he also set out to articulate an alternative set of beliefs for a more holistic vision of curriculum, which he referred to as a “transcendental ideology”. The commonplace definition of the verb ‘to transcend’ is often tied to theology not curriculum. And to transcendence can also conjurer up images of the immaterial and escaping, detaching, leaving behind, rising above, or going beyond the stuff of the physical world. Conventional meanings for the word transcend, however, are not completely compatible with my reading of what Macdonald was attempting to capture with his vision of a transcendental ideology of curriculum. While there is an element of the immaterial—or a “spiritual attitude” (Willis, 1998, p. 352)—to a transcendental ideology, Macdonald equally acknowledges the physical world of our human experiences of living. According to Macdonald (1995), a transcendental approach to curriculum involves a "shifting of predominant rationality toward the aesthetic,

60 intuitive, and spontaneous" (p. 94). This shifting involves “a dual dialectical process” in which inner and outer dance together in “reflective transaction” (p. 79).

The dual dialectical process of transcendental curriculum ideology honors the reflective meaning making and the permeability between an individual’s interiority and the outer material, physical world. Cultivating understandings of knowledge and existence “is not simply things and relationships that are real in the outer world and waiting to be discovered, but it is also a process of personalizing the outer world through the inner potential of the human being as it interacts with outer reality.” (p. 83). What is highlighted here is that as long as we are living, we are making ourselves and making worlds. As soon as we find ourselves in bodies, we are encountering and navigating our interiority and entanglement with other individuals (e.g., humans and more-than-human) along with created cultures and discourses. Our experiences of living are always ripe with situations, judgments, decisions, structures, factors, and so on, and we are continuously navigating the world and ourselves. We are making meaning about ourselves, making meaning about the world while simultaneously making ourselves and making worlds. Macdonald’s transcendental ideology of curriculum gestures towards how understanding of knowledge and existence that involves a dialectic between the individual-social-environmental, while highlighting a strong existential bent to personal meanings generated from the uniqueness of one’s experience of living.

Another significant component of Macdonald’s vision for a transcendental ideology of curriculum and pedagogy is ethics. Values are embedded within the dual dialectic process, and reflective analysis on human actions and the effects of our activities

61 is necessary for cultivating values. In his own words, Macdonald described values as emerging from “reflecting upon the consequences of an action and sounding the depths of our inner selves. Only a process something like this can explain why ‘what works, is not always good’” (p. 79). Macdonald’s point here on reflectivity and values heeds further attention because he is also gesturing towards a noteworthy problem-solving distinction.

Often problem-solving can take on utilitarian and technical dimensions, and while perhaps helpful at times in certain situations, when such characteristics drive all problem- solving, they are cause for concern. When “schema[s]” dominate our problem-solving, the “…activity is externalized, and it necessitates the organization human activity into a social power structure. It further implies that development is a process of mastering the outer world through solutions by problem-solving methods” (p. 96). When we utilize pre-determined approaches and externalize problems, separations can begin to creep between self, others, values, materials, environment, and more. In such problem-solving a deep desire for a state of resolution is also present. The problem, in other words, should be solved, remedied, fixed, or eliminated. From Macdonald’s relational perspective, however, “problems are not always solved… some problems disappear, still others become redefined, and some are solved in a sense of bringing to bear unity of self through thought, feeling, and action" (p. 96). A transcendental curriculum ideology seeks, from my reading, to work towards evermore holistic, nonhierarchical understandings on the nature of experience while acknowledging personal and cultural histories alongside one’s inner experiences and values. There is an ongoing interplay between the temporal, immaterial, and material dimensions of human existence.

Centering: Immersion in Knowing-Becoming

Centering is a key aspiration in the transcendental ideology of curriculum, and

Macdonald even went so far as to proclaim that centering one’s self in the world should be “a central aim of education” (p. 86). Since a general discussion of Macdonald’s curriculum theorizing has happened, I now turn to sculpting an account centering.

Centering is on purpose a slippery, slightly mysterious concept with no singular means of definition, or as Willis (1998) pointed out, “centering cannot be described in specific terms” (p. 352). Understanding centering requires a degree of description while maintaining mutability, fluidity, and openness for infinite possibilities. To define centering as a thing would be to pin down a specific meaning or an exact nature.

Sculpting, however, implies exercising one’s imaginative and creative energies to express and give form to certain qualities.

Part of the challenge of sculpting centering is that it is an active, existential phenomenon through which an individual will give the concept substance. Because of this individualized quality centering is does not utilized any sets of protocols or linear, sequential, step-by-step stages. Centering, consequently, is not so much a fix, observable object or thing, rather it is a curriculum undertaking, which according to Macdonald

(1995) can be understood as “a process that one enters into” (p. 91). Entering into the process of centering suggest that a person has an initial awareness that they are openly and actively choosing to embark on a journey of understanding. Worth noting too is with centering a person does not ever get to a final product or resolution, although there can be moments of coming in touched by wholeness and personal meanings.

Given its unfinishable quality, centering is a process that engages a person “in the art of living” amidst life-long relationships within one’s self, other beings, and the world

(p. 96). The process of centering involves a turning inward into one’s self along with an understanding of experience as “infinitely varied and unknowable in any finite sense” (p.

91). Although considerable emphasis given to the individual, Macdonald stressed that centering is “not haphazard,” not a "romantic notion of the natural unfolding of" an individual (p. 97), nor “self-actualization” (p. 87). To engage in centering means to embrace the existential quality within human experience but also encourages a continuous pursuit in seeking a holistic understanding of living in the world. Such understanding involves exploring one’s interior “awareness of wholeness and [the creation of] meaning as a person” (p. 87). In short, a quality of centering is that it involves the messiness of an individual’s making meaning.

Although interiority is characterized in part by a personal, inner space of knowing, being, and becoming, Macdonald stressed that interiority is not self-contained nor is it cut off from others, environments, and sources of “power and energy…that are not completely explicable” (p. 87). Centering is individualized but also deeply relational in nature, recall the transcendental ideology’s dual dialectic and reflective transaction.

Both qualities are at play with centering. Centering one’s self in the world, then, is not a process in which a person is a solitary, autonomous individual void of or independent from other beings and the world, rather centering cultivates understandings of existence that are always relationally informed.

When one enters the process of centering, it always “takes place within the culture of the individuals, and the process of centering utilizes the data of an individual's culture, what he[/she/it] explicitly knows through social praxis” (p. 87). Macdonald continued his explanation of centering by distinguishing how the understandings generated through one’s process of centering are quite different than explicit knowledge about the world.

Understanding is a deeper concept. It demands a sort of indwelling in the other, a

touching of the sources of the other. Understanding others is not a ‘useful’

procedure in the sense that knowing is, in that it does not provide the basis for

planning, manipulating, and calculating. Understanding provides the grounds for

relating, for being fully there in the presence and as a presence to the other. (p.

95)

Macdonald further fleshed out the nature of relational understanding, or what he called a

“indwelling in the other” (p. 95). He wrote about such indwelling and wrote that it be encouraged by locating one’s center.

The process of locating one's center in relation to the other; to 'see' one's self and

the other in relation to our centers of being; to touch and be touched by another in

terms of something fundamental to our shared existence. This act of relationship,

called understanding, is only known after the fact. 'Now, I understand!’ It is an

act of listening, but not to the explicit content that a person is expressing. Rather,

it is 'tuning in' to the 'vibrations' of bodily rhythms, feeling, tone, inward

expression of a person's attempts to integrate and to maintain his integrity as a

whole person. (p. 95)

Part of understanding existence in the world as a human being is to connect with the wholeness in others and to do so with an attentiveness to the exchange between beings.

Consequently, understanding is not the same as explicit knowledge about someone or something, and just because we might have considerable explicit knowledge that does not mean we have understanding. Macdonald beautifully captured this nuance when talk about teachers and students; “to know a child is to describe his characteristics; to understand him[/her/it] is to be able to write a poem that capture his[/hers/its] essence"

(p. 96). Centering involves a deep listening on behalf of individuals with one another.

Such listening is not only hearing what is being said with our ears, but it is attuning to another being with other sensory faculties like our hearts, intuitions, guts, minds, skins, noses, and more.

The process of centering can involve a person’s engagement through dialoguing.

Dialogues can occur between two or more entities (e.g., me and you) as well as within an individual through their “inner verbal and visual [and multisensory] activities" (p. 94).

Inner dialogues can be comprised of features such as values, needs, senses, beliefs, ideas, dreams, desires, potentials, explicit knowledge as well as tacit knowledge. All this information whirling around, according to Macdonald, can be explicitly known or not at any point in time. As for dialogues between entities (e.g., you and me), these can be moments for understanding to emerge, but they can also promote static between persons and their centers. Macdonald cautioned that others and “explicit knowledge” can at times promote “cognitive dissonance” and “interference with really listening to the center” (p.

95). Such discord has the potential to propel meaning making but can also create

“barriers in ourselves to understanding” and ceasing “our own expression of our being"

(p. 95). Dialoguing within centering is about exchanges betwixt an individual’s mind- body connection and their self-world connection. An unfolding that also embraces what we do not and will not know in all that the shapeless and infinite.

Another quality centering possesses is a spiritual dimension. In mainstream educational discourse spirituality can often be rejected or seen as problematic, which is in part because of technical rationality’s dominance and spirituality’s enmeshment in organized religion. Macdonald acknowledged that spirituality is “fraught with heavy cultural biases,” (p. 88) but that it also “is not dependent upon any sect or creed" (p. 87), and he argued that it is important that we do not ignore or avoid centering because of possible resonance with the spiritual. When articulating centering’s spiritual attitude,

Macdonald wrote that “the variety of religions, mystics, spiritualists, and other manifestations found throughout history fundamentally tell us that inner resources and strength can be made available and used but not what verbal form or perceptual reality this potential takes” (p. 87). Thus, as a concept and process, centering embraces that there is an innate immaterial dimension of human experience, and this dimension can influence our experiences but is not easily articulated via senses or intellect.

Macdonald suggested several endeavors that can encourage centering included: pattern making, playing, meditative thinking, imagining, aesthetic principle, the body and biology, and the education of perception.

• Pattern making refers to situating one’s self in time, place, and space alongside a

personal search for and creation of meaning by "transform[ing] reality

symbolically” through “personal ordering of cultural data” (pp. 91-92). Part of

pattern making involves playing with thoughts, other persons, things, etc.

• Playing engages an individual with “cultural substance” in a joyful way and frees

an individual to create “with a self–regulating potentiality” (p. 92).

• Meditative thinking at its core is about contemplating existence or asking ‘why’

questions. Such thinking is not thought “in a functional, utilitarian way, a

problem-solving process” (p. 92), rather meditative thinking is a more holistic

pondering about yes, no, and maybe and practicing a “releasement toward things

and an openness to the mystery” (p. 92).

• Imagining absorbs the whole person with its “ability to picture in the mind what is

not present to the senses;” in other words, imagination “is a perceptual power”

and places a person “in contact with the ground of…being” (pp. 92–93).

• Aesthetic principle nurtures an individual’s creative expressions of experiences

and relationships through activities such as “dramatization, designing, dancing,

playing music, and making or crafting” (p. 93).

• The body and biology put emphasis on the whole human body as a site of

exploration and learning as well as the “biological and physical potential” for an

individual’s development (p. 93).

• The education of perception acknowledges the potential for the existence of

“other worlds of consciousness…aside from our present one,” and part of

centering process could likely involve “the creation of altered states of

consciousness” (pp. 93–94).

Tracing Aesthetics in Curriculum

In their text on the history of American curriculum studies, Marshall, et al.,

(2007) pointed out that the field has been “greatly influenced by the humanities, the arts, and social theory” (p. 178). Such cross pollination of ideas continues to enrich the study of curriculum and pedagogy. That said, however, articulating a position in curriculum studies that weaves together ideas from another discipline is particularly challenging.

One ends up needing to both situate an argument within curriculum studies while also entering into and making sense of a continuum of thought from another field, and such a challenge happens when thinking at the intersection of aesthetics and curriculum.

Working at the intersections of the arts, aesthetics, and curriculum is by no means new and many interpretative avenues exist (e.g., Barone, 2000; Blumenfeld-Jones, 2012;

Bresler, 2004; Doll, 2000; Eisner, 2002, Garrison, 2010; Greene, 2001; Hurren, 2000; jagodzinski, 1992; Latta, 2001; Morris, 2009; Springgay & Freedman, 2007; Springgay,

Irwin, Leggo, & Gouzouasis, 2008; Uhrmacher, 2009). What comes, therefore, is a short discussion that traces key aesthetic threads within curriculum. Doing this is helpful for both situating and articulating a working definition for the aesthetics of everyday life

(Dewey, 1934/2005; Shusterman, 2000), which was a key concept in this dissertation.

Elliot Eisner: Arts and Cognition

Elliot Eisner (1933-2014) has been an undeniable force in advocating for the artful ways of knowing curriculum and pedagogy. Eisner's scholarship has influenced the work of many scholars (e.g., Barone, 2001; Henderson, Castner, & Schneider, 2018;

Henderson, et al., 2015; Uhrmacher & Matthews, 2005). Eisner had a distinct stance on

69 education that offered caution to curriculum and pedagogy approaches that seek standardization because they limit ways of knowing and what is seen as valued in schools. The arts, for Eisner, offer us educational possibilities and opportunities for thinking about knowledge through somatic, idiosyncratic, imaginative, process-based, and non-linear ways.

According to Eisner, (1971) the arts exemplify the “creation, transmission, and representation of knowledge are not limited to” scientific claims about the reality of the world and our experiences of it (p. 33). Nor are human understandings limited to linear paths or reducible to thoughts forms via words or language (Eisner, 1991). The arts enliven curriculum and pedagogy and offer “unique educational contributions” for those who study and engage with them (Eisner, 2002, p. 234). Engagement with the arts encourages cognitive processes that play a vital role in the transformation of human consciousness. Benefits arise from thinking about and doing art, and Eisner described seven habits of the mind that the arts can help foster including:

• Attention to relationships: This involves cultivating understandings of the nuances

that exist in all relationships between “parts that constitute a whole” (p. 75).

• Flexible purposing: This involves cultivating a sense of timely, thoughtful,

creative problem-solving or “the ability to shift direction, even to redefine one’s

aims when better options emerge in the course of one’s work” (p. 77).

• Using materials as medium: This involves cultivating an awareness that different

types of media do different things. Different forms of media offer variation in

ways for communicating and the mediums “imposes its own possibilities” (p. 70).

• Shaping form into expressive content: This involves transforming form(s) and

media through the process of creation into content that is communicative in

nature. The expressive content “evoke[s] responses in different aspects of our

being. In a sense, their form finds its echo in our soma” (p. 82).

• Exercising imagination: This involves cultivating ways of “seeing things in ways

other than they are normally seen. In so doing they help us wonder, ‘why not?’”

(p. 83).

• Transforming qualities into speech and text: This involves cultivating capacities

to transform arts experiences into linguistic forms, working at the space between

visual and verbal.

• Framing the world aesthetically: This involves cultivating our mind-body

connection and enriching our ways of perceiving the world. This involves

“…being moved, of finding out something about our own capacity to be moved; it

is a way of exploring the deepest parts of our interior landscape. In its best

moments, it is a way of experiencing joy” (p. 84).

The arts contribute is the cultivation the artistic, creative, imaginative, and capacities of being human as well as encouraging us to pay attention to experiences through our bodies and senses like the five well-known ones of sight, touch, smell, sound, and taste and also others like hunger, thirst, thermoception, equilibrioception, magnetoception, etc. In articulating what aesthetics is, Eisner (2002) contrasted it with an anesthetic, which “suppresses feeling: It dulls the senses. It renders you numb to feeling. What is aesthetic heightens feelings. What is aesthetic is pervaded by an

71 emotional tone made possible by being engaged in a world of art” (p. 81). Put another way, engaging with the arts means that we are “exploring our interior landscape[s]” (p.

11) as well as cultivating “the ability to perceive things, not merely to recognize them”

(p. 5).

Maxine Greene: The Arts, Becoming, and Freedom

Maxine Greene (1917-2014) stands out as a philosophical pillar in aesthetic interpretations of curriculum and pedagogy. In brief, Greene embodied “the soul of an activist who works tirelessly for change and betterment in the project she called education” (Miller, 2010, p. 418), and Greene’s scholarship did so by inhabiting the worlds of aesthetics, imagination, possibilities, morality, freedom, community, public spaces, learning-as-process, and existential becoming (Baldacchino, 2009; Greene, 1988,

1995, 2001; Lake, 2010; Miller, 2010). Akin to Eisner, Greene’s perspective of aesthetic understanding rejects fixed truths and challenges linear and positivistic thinking and “the taken-for-grantedness of so much of what is taught” (Greene, 1978, p. 171). Greene believed critical distancing is of central importance especially for challenging controlling, mechanical approaches in education as well as in our daily lives. She pushed for embracing living in the world aesthetically and intelligently with a sense of personal responsibility and agency.

Greene argued understanding is generated through the social realities we live and how those might be otherwise (Greene, 1978, 1988, 1995, 2001). She invites educators to tap into their interiority and to be seekers, embracing what they do not know in an unfolding journey of understanding—the “not yet” of becoming. Greene’s (1995)

72 interpretation of understanding asks educators to get to know the “connective details” necessary for self-reflectivity (p. 95). A self-reflective practice involves action and

“implies the taking of initiatives; it signifies moving into a future seen from…[one’s own] vantage point as an actor or agent” (p. 15). Greene’s stance on learning also supports “being fully present” and “wide-awake” with the happenings of experience

(Greene, 2001). Wide-awakeness is done individually on an internal level and also socially through coming together through reflectivity, inclusiveness, and plurality

(Baldacchino, 2009; Greene, 1995, 2001). Wide-awakeness is also a kind of social imagination that holds the potential to break us from habits and what is taken-for-granted

(Greene, 1995).

With an existential focus on learning, Greene envisions education to be about creating “just and humane educational communities” with aesthetic sensitivity (Miller,

2010, p. 417). Educational communities should encourage learners “to become different, to find their voices, and to play participatory and articulate parts in a community in the making” (Greene, 1995, p. 132). Greene’s perspective of human understanding is infused with the notion of a dialectic of freedom, that is, freedom from and freedom to (Greene,

1988). Educational spaces should promote freedom from things like coercion, oppression, and limitation while fostering a sense of freedom to or “connections between the individual search for freedom and appearing before other in an open place” (p. 116).

Freedom from and freedom to are about transitioning from autonomous individualism to a world with more relationality, interdependence, and agency.

The arts, according to Greene (1995), can propel us towards such a transition in education, that is, from oppressive, reductionistic, and dehumanizing theories and practices towards inspiring, affirming, and democratic possibilities.

Encounters with the arts and activities in the domains of art can nurture the

growth of persons who will reach out to one another as they seek clearings in their

experience and try to be more ardently in the world. If the significance of the arts

for growth and inventiveness and problem solving is recognized…a desperate

stasis may be overcome and hopes may be raised, the hopes of felt possibility. (p.

132)

This passage highlights Greene’s awareness of the aesthetic dimension in human understandings, which is made possible through engagement with the arts. The arts have the power to rouse us from slumber. The arts can awake us to the existential nature of existence. The arts have the potential foster the aesthetic sensibilities for wide- awakeness, imagination, freedom, and social justice. Greene’s scholarship, in short, moves us towards shifting schools away from ridged structures of control towards fluidity, democracy, humility, criticality, idiosyncrasies, creativity, and imagination.

Subject-Matter in the Arts

When exploring aesthetics and curriculum, one cannot ignore the bond that exists between aesthetics and the arts—a marriage not limited to the field of curriculum as I point out and question through an aesthetic of everyday life (Dewey, 1934/2005;

Shusterman, 2000). The arts and aesthetics appear to go hand-in-hand like bees and honey or cows and milk. Said differently, when the arts are present, they make possible

74 aesthetics. The two also mutually feed the each other. The bond is not surprising given how subject matter gets created, organized, and taught through curriculum. As

Henderson, et al., (2016), Kliebard (1992, 2004), Pinar (2012), and Watkins (2001) remind us, developing curriculum is a significant force that shapes how we structure and perceive of knowledge and how knowledge moves from one generation to another through educational institutions.

Arts curriculum and pedagogy reinforce the linkage of aesthetics belonging to the discipline of the arts. Having an academic background in the arts has given me an opportunity to explore the linkage between artworks and aesthetics through exploring how art education curriculum. A glimpse into art education curriculum is worthwhile for illustrating how aesthetics has been tethered to examining, interpreting, and judging the quality of artworks. Exploring arts curriculum reveals several aesthetic orientations including: contextualism, instrumentalism, mimetic, formalism, and expressivism.

Important differences exist in how these aesthetic orientations cultivate perceptions, but in art curriculum the orientations exist with varying degrees of interplay; for example, in some pedagogical beliefs and practices expressivism and contextualism might blur together.

To begin, contextualism encapsulates aesthetic orientations that investigate social, political, and historical contexts in which an artwork was created and in which it is experienced (Stewart, 1997). Contextualism, broadly speaking, follows two pathways: institutionalism and instrumentalism. Institutionalism strives to cultivate perceptions of art by virtue of studying the ideas that surround them. Such examinations illuminate how

75 certain objects come to be called art. An illustration of this can be seen with the embrace and inclusion of art history in art curriculum (Clark, Day, & Greer, 1987; Smith, 1996).

Art history involves cultivating understandings of art through studying a broad range of artworks from the past and present. For example, learners might explore: the formation of monastic schools and craft guilds during the Middle Ages; the ancient civilizations of

Egyptian and Aztec architecture, Neolithic cave paintings, Ancient Chinese Tang

Dynasty terracotta soldiers, and Japanese masters of porcelain pottery and woodblock printmaking; the philosophies and criticisms brought forth through the birth of –isms, e.g., Realism, Impressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism (Stokstad, 2007); or the contemporary explorations of artists in the Public Broadcasting System’s (PBS) series Art

21 (PBS, 2017).

Contextualism’s other thread, instrumentalism is an aesthetic orientation that promotes perceiving an artwork’s functional, practical purpose. Instrumentalism considers an artwork to have value based on its influence on society, achievement with a purpose, and/or ability to impact individual’s thoughts, actions, morals, ethics, religions, politics, and so on (Stewart, 1997). To illustrate instrumentalism’s collision of art teaching and aesthetics on social worth or value, several examples are helpful. In the late

18th and 19th centuries viewing, collecting, and making art were luxuries reserved for

America’s upper class who had money, leisure time, and a desire to appear similar to the

Europe aristocracy (Stankiewicz, 2001). Drawing, for example, was thought to prepare young ladies for “good marriage[s]” and maintaining “a tasteful home,” while for young men it was seen as a “gentlemanly attainment” (“Teaching America,” 2006, p. vii). In

76 the 20th century, instrumentalism influenced the creation of Discipline-Based Art

Education (DBAE), which was a concentrated effort to organize a clear structure in response to calls for excellence in American public education (Carpenter & Tavin, 2010a;

Efland, 1990; Smith, 1996). Instrumentalism also takes form in arguments that seek to link studying the arts with academic achievements (Jensen, 2001). The arts have value in so much as they can help learners’ achievement with higher test scores, better grades in other subjects, graduation rates, and college entrance exams and acceptances.

Another aesthetics orientation in art curriculum is mimesis. A mimetic orientation encourages perceiving how objects are represented in either in a literal or an idealized form (Efland, 1995; Stewart, 1997). Mimesis can be seen in the phrase “art is imitation” (Efland, 1995, p. 29). In this orientation creating, critiquing, and judging art focuses on convincingly imitating the external world and the objects that make it up.

Drawing pedagogy in art curriculum, for example, has mimetic ties. While some have argued that teaching drawing was not so much about aesthetics rather powerful socioeconomic elite training for the working class during the Industrial Revolution

(Efland, 1985; Smith, 1996), the impact was undeniable and shaped early conceptions of art teaching and curriculum around repetition and mimicry (Eisner & Ecker, 1970).

Generations of students and art teachers were instilled with an aesthetic that equated

“good” art to realistic representations of external objects.

Although postmodern leaning educators might proclaim formalist aesthetic orientations irrelevant, formalist perceptions are still alive and well. According to many scholars, particularly during the 19th and 20th centuries, art education’s objective was to

77 cultivate all American citizens’ aesthetic sensitivity to and appreciation for beauty and thus develop taste (Bailey, 1914; Whitford, 1929; Winslow, 1928). In order achieve this purpose, art teaching needed to help students “become thoroughly intellectual…

[through] rational or artistic standards in one’s own absorbing affairs” (Bailey, 1914, pp. viii-ix). Put another way, to interpret and judge artworks one should be concerned with how the subject is depicted rather than potential meanings (Gaudelius & Speirs, 2002).

In formalism, there is a desire to know beauty and acquire taste, which is underpinned by analytical, scientific rationality (Siegesmund, 1998). An artwork’s composition has a formal order, and this order—or significant form—is found through close examination of the artwork’s arrangement of particular elements and principles of composition such as texture, line, color, repetition, balance, emphasis, and so on (Logan, 1955; Stewart,

1997). Factors like subject matter, imagination, personal experiences, or social concerns have no significance when interpreting or judging artworks. In short, formalism seeks a universal means through which to perceive artworks, and when applied as analytical tool, this can help a viewer can find arts’ significance and true beauty (Efland, 1995; Weitz,

2001).

An expressivist aesthetic orientation is on the opposite side of the pendulum from formalism. Expressivism believes artists, viewers, and artworks all have the ability to express. Expressivism shows up in art curriculum whenever we seek to understand artworks through exploring our emotions, intuitions, identities, imaginations, and creativity (Efland, 1995; Stankiewicz, 2001; Weitz, 2001). The progressivists and child- centered movements of the 1920s and 1930s were particularly important in the rise of art

78 curriculum and pedagogy that focused on the vital qualities of an individual’s creativity and expressivity (Efland, 1990; Eisner & Ecker, 1970; Freedman, 1987; Siegesmund,

1998; Smith, 1996; Stankiewicz, Amburgy, Bolin, 2004; White, 2004; Wygant, 1993).

Mantras around this orientation came be felt in phrases like, “art is the objectification of feeling” (Langer, 1967, p. 87), “art is self-expression” (Efland, 1995, p. 29), and “all children are creative” (Stankiewicz, 2001, p.19). In addition to honoring the feelings and beliefs artworks evoke, an expressivist orientation places emphasis on the idiosyncratic process of artmaking (Efland, 1995; Stewart, 1997).

Autobiographical and Mind-Body Knowing

When thinking about how aesthetics is framed in the curriculum and pedagogy, strong impressions of aesthetics as such are alive and well within the literature. Writing about aesthetics within curriculum and pedagogy, Grumet (2010) noted that:

[Aesthetics] brings a world that is interesting, surprising, frightening, or beautiful

together with students who met the world through sensation, thought, and

emotion. The world does not come to us hermetically contained. … Our thoughts

and understandings of the world are thoroughly intertwined with the sensory

experience of our bodies, feelings, and emotions, as well as our habits of

perception and application of logic and analysis. (pp. 16–17)

Grumet’s remarks on aesthetics are particularly intriguing because she points to an interpretation of aesthetics that extends, even challenges, aesthetics frequent attachment to artworks. Aesthetics enfolds an individual’s mind-body and the social, material, and temporal dimensions of being human. Aesthetics experience also involves human

79 beings’ spectrum of sensing and perceiving experience. I find many scholars who resonate with this space, even though some do not necessarily identify their work with aesthetics.

The emergence of autobiographical inquiry in curriculum studies is area that, for me, embraces aesthetics. Autobiography arose in the field of curriculum studies during the 1970s alongside the reconceptualization of the field. Before then, Miller (2012) pointed out that there was “virtually no autobiographical scholarship” within the field (p.

61). When autobiographical work emerged, it “paired with existential-phenomenological theories” along with literature, arts, and psychology (p. 62). Currere stands out as foundational concept and method that grounded autobiographical, educational inquiry

(Pinar, 1994). Currere positions curriculum not as a now but as a verb. And in doing so curriculum becomes a living, creative, imaginative, personal, freeing, historical, dynamic, fluid, recursive, energetic force; it is about a development-from-within of persons’ interiority and their journeys of understanding manifesting in the material world (Doll,

2000; Greene, 1995; Henderson, et al., 2015). Currere helps foster studying “the relations among school knowledge, life history, and subjective meaningfulness in ways that potentially could function self-transformatively” (Miller, 2010, p. 62). Applications of currere are plentiful (e.g., Brown, 2008; Doll, 2017; Jung, 2016; Marilyn, 2004) and so too are other interpretations and applications of autobiographical inquiry (e.g., Casemore,

2008; Grumet, 1988; Miller, 2005; Wang, 2004). Both currere and autobiography ask individuals to turn inwards exploring their lived experiences and perceptions as well as

80 how such experiences are entwined with factors like time, place, culture, language, identity, and so on.

Another area where aesthetic awareness is found is through scholars that embrace the mind-body unification, and this unification is found in the concept of embodiment.

Marjorie O’Loughlin (2006) blends phenomenology, pragmatism, and feminism to explore embodiment through “creatural existence”. She notes how “our bodies are constantly in interaction with our environments, world and self continually inform and reshape each other” (p. 11). Communicating and perceiving existence through our bodies is how we interface with the world around us, and our bodies are “active, sensuous, and productive” (p. 6). Embodied experience unfolds through both the “multisensoriality” of the body and the intellect’s “capacity for independent [and collective] practical reasoning” (p. 59). We “feel joy, fear and anger” among others, and these emotions compel our bodies into “actions that continually construct a world…share[d] with other species” (p. 8).

From a slightly different angle, embodiment is also utilized and interpreted by

Kathleen Kesson and Donald Oliver (2002) in their piece in Bill Doll’s edited collection dedicated to curriculum visions. Kesson’s and Oliver’s contribution sought to challenge the “unbalance sense of knowing and being” that has become predominate from “Platonic

Christianity and the Enlightenment” (p. 185). Such thinking and acting for them crushes the mysterious, magical, and unknowable in in curriculum and pedagogy in the name of fixedness, certainty, and control. To challenge this imbalance, Kesson and Oliver called for reconceptualizing experience centered around the idea of “embodied actors,” which

81 for them involves getting “the mind back into the body that can reenact and remember in nerve and muscle, as well as in work” (p. 188). Working with the symbol of a beating heart circulating blood, we are invited to reconsider experience from their proposed theory of “throb theory” (p. 186).

The collaborative efforts of Stephanie Springgay and Debra Freedman (2007,

2010, 2012) also contributed to embodiment by unpacking and deepening explorations of the body in curriculum and pedagogy studies through feminist, post-structuralist vantage points. The body is a vital site knowing. Through it we feel ourselves and make sense of existence; however, educational practices often “silence, conceal, and limit bodies”

(Springgay & Freedman, 2007, p. xiv). Springgay’s and Freedman’s efforts focused on the intersections of bodily knowing, critical cultural studies, and identity. The body is undeniably cultural but also personal, and our cultural body “problematizes what it means to live as and with a bodied subject” (p. xxvii). One of Springgay’s and Freedman’s more recent publications (2012) is an edited book on “m/othering” in which the contributors in various way explore the maternal subject, the maternal body, the act of mothering, and the silences, tensions, and conflicts of mothering. A “bodied curriculum” is one that embraces and explore the ways in which knowing and being are always enfleshed.

Another pivotal voice in curriculum studies engaged with bodily knowing is

Donald Blumenfeld-Jones (2012) whose artistic medium movement and dance. His thoughts on aesthetics and art have particular resonance with my dissertation because he approaches aesthetic from what he calls “living aesthetically,” which is something many

82 of us have withdrawn from in our personally and educationally because of disembodied living and instrumentalism. “Everyone has latent aesthetics consciousness which needs enlivening” (p. 57). His point is that aesthetics is within everyone, and his use of living with aesthetics to nurture democratic qualities and to challenge the classical link of aesthetics to the fine arts. While he does not dismiss high art, galleries, theaters, concert halls, or art degrees, Blumenfeld-Jones's viewpoint on art and aesthetics is a “plea for non-elitism” (p. 279). Living aesthetically involves,

an active participation in the world through one’s sense, the outcome of such

engagements being unknowable beforehand...but having a profound effect on

one’s sense of place and value in the world. ... I place the act of discovering

personal meaning as basic to aesthetic living. ... Aesthetic experience, of any kind,

engenders this experience of wholeness. (pp. 30–31)

Living aesthetically is about a way of existing and hermeneutically making sense of being in the world. Blumenfeld-Jones’ efforts encourage movement towards practicing aesthetic attentiveness in our daily lives, which aligns with how aesthetics was understood for this dissertation.

The Aesthetics of Everyday Life

Since the reconceptualization of the curriculum studies field, scholars have been encouraged to think interdisciplinarily with their work, and I did so in crafting a working definition of an aesthetic of everyday life. My definition of an aesthetics of everyday life, however, cannot ignore the boarder landscape of aesthetics thoughts. Particularly from around the 1990s onward, aesthetics has seen growth blending with ideas around

83 emotions in ethics, the ontology of art, environmentalism, social sciences, cultural studies, and more (Davies, Higgins, Hopkins, Stecker, & Cooper, 2009). Richard

Shusterman (2006) even remarked on how within the field of aesthetics the very concept of aesthetics has been seen as “very vague, variable, and contested” (p. 217). The nebulous nature of aesthetic is so much that theorists “have often expressed distinct frustration and sometimes even skepticism concerning this concept and its cognates” (p.

217).

When reading what has been written on aesthetics, one is confronted with and must acknowledge its extensive linkage to the Western philosophy tradition. The word aesthetics is tied to the ancient Greek’s word for sensory perception, aishitikos

(Shusterman, 2006; White, 2009). The study of aesthetics, although hinted at by

Aristotle and Plato, grabbed the attention of the German philosopher, Alexander Gottlieb

Baumgarten and became the center piece of his thesis in 1735 (Guyer, 2016).

Baumgarten’s thesis did two major things with respects to aesthetics one of which was declaring that aesthetics should become formalized as a discipline of study, "epistêmê aisthetikê, or the science of what is sensed and imagined" (Guyer, 2016, par. 1), and the other was that he built an argument for aesthetics around beauty and its relationship to art. The form of art he was invested in was poetry.

The early work of Baumgarten became a part of the long-standing academic tradition of applying philosophical thought-systems to studying aesthetics. The writing of Immanuel Kant (1790/2000), for example, became a cornerstone in the study of aesthetics. Kant focused much of his energy on aesthetic judgements, or what he called

“judgements of taste.” His interest was in how we have feelings—particularly feelings of beauty—and how we find meaning in feelings. Aesthetics for Kant is both subjective and universal, and he pronounced four moments or dimensions to aesthetic judgements: quality (e.g., How beauty is held in our minds?), quantity (e.g., How beauty gets distinguished form other feelings?), relation (e.g., What does beauty associate with in our minds?), and resolution (e.g., How does the feeling beauty in something reflect upon itself?).

Another example of a philosopher who studied aesthetics via artworks was

Theodor Adorno (1970/1997). Adorno was a significant figure in the realm of post-

World War II theorists and part of the Frankfurt School of critical theory and thus was deeply concerned with modern artworks and society. His writings on aesthetics were not just philosophical but sociological too. Although oversimplified, Adorno situated art as a thing-in-itself and always tied to sociohistorical conditions far more than the subjective.

An artwork holds significance in certain times and contexts as a result of the content and form it possesses.

In the study of aesthetics, there are other voices not connected to the discipline of philosophy. The writing of Ellen Dissanayake (1995) is an example. Through an anthropological lens, she reached back into our human history and argued that aesthetics is an essential dimension to human evolution. She argued that aesthetics has been and continues to be woven into our daily lives and communications as a way of “making special” living. Ben Highmore (2010, 2011) is another scholar thinking about aesthetics who is not in philosophy. Highmore’s investigations of aesthetics reside within cultural

85 studies, and he works is at the intersection of the social dimension humans’ lives and the everyday, ordinary objects in our midst—what he terms a “social aesthetic.” Highmore

(2010) posed several intriguing questions in terms of the discipline and history of aesthetics.

Anyone interested in the history of aesthetics must be face with this odd

predicament: how does a form of inquiry that was once aimed at the entire

creaturely world end up as a specialized discourse about fine art? How did an

ambitious curiosity about the affects, the body, and the senses end up fixated on

only one tiny area of sensual life—beauty and the sublime? What happens to

fear, anger, disappointment, contentment, smell, touch, boredom, frustration,

weariness, hope, itchiness, backache, trepidation, and the mass of hardly

articulated feelings and moods that saturate our social, sexual, political, and

private lives? And aren't these the elements (rather than beauty and the sublime)

that fill most of our lives most of the time? (pp. 121–122)

Highmore is not suggesting total rejection of aesthetics in the arts, but he is encouraging us to question why such a link is so often the case.

Parallel to Highmore, others have also called into question why aesthetics so often gets bound up with artworks and beauty. White (2009) wrote that aesthetics today

“should not be constrained to discussions of beauty, or taste, or limited to the art world”

(p. 5). Shusterman (1992) reflected these sentiments, noted that we should not

“confine…[aesthetics] to the traditional academic problems, but [we] must address today's live aesthetic issues and new artistic forms” (p. ix). This dissertation took

86 seriously the provocative questions and critical perspectives offer by those like

Blumenfeld-Jones (2012), Dissanayake (1995), Highmore (2010), White (2009), and

Shusterman (1992). They are incredibly helpful in opening up space for pushing the study of aesthetics into our everyday lives.

Situating Pragmatist Aesthetics

For the purpose of this dissertation, the aesthetic of everyday life was an interpretation of aesthetics that garnered support from the pragmatist aesthetic viewpoint.

Among the voices within pragmatism, there is no singular theory for approaching aesthetics. Aesthetics must remain open to applications in order to maintain the pluralism that is foundational to pragmatism. Interpretations of aesthetics should strive to be understood “very broadly” and not as “a monolithic theory” (Malecki, 2014b, p. 3). Any interpretation, then, should never be understood as secure rather as a temporary hanging together of ideas to play and think with, which can be further refined. This sentiment is embodied by pragmatist philosopher, Richard Shusterman (2000) statement that his writing on aesthetics as not striving to be flawless rather “a useful tool for thought” (p. viii). Despite criticisms from those wanting “neat accounts of what delineates the artistic” and aesthetics, no one has the final say (Stroud, 2014, p. 33). An aesthetics of everyday life, therefore, is open to generative potentials.

Given that there is no predetermined structure and no desire for finalized ends nor perfect philosophical stances in pragmatist aesthetics, I prefer to think about the discussion to come as building some dimensionality around concept of an aesthetic of everyday life. Through utilizing pragmatist aesthetics as an anchor, I flesh out several

87 dimensions by relying upon a constellation of thinkers. Of key importance to this dissertation is the historical figure, John Dewey (1934/2005) and his contributions in Art as Experience. Because pragmatist aesthetics aims to “celebrate historicity” but is “not condemn…to holding on to the status quo” (Malecki, 2012, p. 8), alongside Dewey are contemporaries. Richard Shusterman (1992) is one of those individuals who took up

Dewey's thinking as “an example and inspiration” and “recuperated and refashioned” it

(p. ix). Shusterman has been a vital force in pragmatist aesthetics, specifically because he was the one who actually named it as a field and called for more inquiry in the area.

Wojciech Malecki’s (2014a) edited collection was an important referent of current contributors who have theorized around and practiced within pragmatists aesthetics.

A couple additional background notes can help situate a pragmatist aesthetics in general especially since this dissertation is informed by John Dewey. First, John

Dewey’s (1934/2005) Art as Experience stands as seminal in pragmatist aesthetics literature because of its depth and radical stance for its time. Dewey wrote his book as a response to “prominent New York intellectuals” who thought “pragmatism was simply inadequate for aesthetics,” which became bothersome for Dewey (Shusterman, 2014, p.

17). That said, however, proclaiming Dewey to be the founder of pragmatist aesthetics is not without contention, although he does stand out in a “leading role” (Wilkoszewska,

2012, p. 255).

Seeing him as having a foundational role can be problematic because Dewey was adamant about not blending his philosophical project with his work on aesthetics

(Shusterman, 1992, 2000, 2014). Shusterman (2014) pointed out that this “was

88 deliberate, strategic, and sustained” on Dewey’s behalf in light of the historical circumstances and attitudes surrounding pragmatism within the discipline of philosophy

(p. 14). At the time, pragmatism was thought to be “essentially opposed to aesthetics;” there was also “no establish pragmatist tradition in aesthetics” (p. 17). Add to these, mounting critiques were growing on Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy as “being [seen as] excessively utilitarian and technocratic” (p. 17). All of these mattered, and Dewey never adopted or advanced his aesthetics by associating it with pragmatism or labeling it as such. But that is not to say that his thoughts on aesthetics were devoid of transactional pragmatism’s sensibilities.

Worth noting too is that like any scholar, Dewey’s argument did not just happen or come to him fully formed and finished. All ideas are built upon the ideas of others, and Dewey’s thinking on aesthetics is no exception. As Shusterman (2011) pointed out,

Dewey’s thoughts on aesthetics were deeply indebted to “essential themes” articulated by

William James, although James never “wrote even the briefest treatise on aesthetics” (p.

347). Like James’s influence, Dewey was also impacted by Charles Sanders Pierce’s thinking on pragmatism and semiotics (Shusterman, 2014). Worth mentioning too is that in the second edition of Shusterman’s (2000) book on pragmatists aesthetics, he added explanations on how Ralph Waldo Emerson and African American philosopher, Alain

Locke were also important aesthetic thinkers that influenced Dewey. Mentioning this upfront is important because while I draw upon Deweyan ideas there are always other voices in need of acknowledgement. They are part of the lineage-of-thought dancing on the borderlands of this project just not brought to the fore.

One of the essential dimensions of pragmatist aesthetics is the concept of experience, or as Stroud (2014) affirmed, pragmatists value “the everyday experience of life and not simply the achieved experience of a small cadre of individuals” (p. 33). We all have aesthetic experiences—you, me, and the person down the hallway, behind you in a checkout line, next to you on the bus, or in the homes next to yours. Dewey

(1934/2005) hits us with simple, yet beautiful, illustrations of an awareness of how everyday living is central to pragmatist aesthetics.

To understand the esthetic…one must begin with it in the raw; in the events and

scenes that hold the attentive eye and ear of man[woman], arousing his[her]

interest and affording him[her] enjoyment as he looks and listens; the sights that

hold the crowd… The source of art in human experience will be learned by

him[her] who sees how the tense grace of the ball-player infects the onlooking

crowd; who notes the delight of the housewife in tending her plants…the zest of

the spectator in poking the wood burning on the hearth and in watching the

darting flames and crumbling coals. (p. 3)

Dewey’s words point out for us that aesthetic experiences are a part of the transactional nature of living in the world.

Aesthetic experiences emerge all around us each and every day, even if awareness of or resonance to them is not present within individuals. Dewey (1934/2005) spoke about why people may not sense the everyday as aesthetic when he said,

To the being fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the

present as a halo. It consists of possibilities that are felt as a possession of what is

now and here. In life that is truly life, everything overlaps and merges. But all too

often we exist in apprehensions of what the future may bring, and are divided

with ourselves. Even when not overanxious, we do not enjoy the present because

we subordinate it to that which is absent. (p. 24)

Our orientations to the happenings that are alive and unfolding in our environments can shape our sense of aesthetics, and Dewey seems to be gesturing towards a sort of awareness of the present as an important particle of aesthetic experience.

Picking up on Dewey’s point of an individual’s orientation, Stroud (2014) pointed out that “our non-aesthetic experiences might be causally conditioned by the habit we bring to them” (p. 40). The “difference-making factor” in living aesthetically or not resides in our “habits of attention and goal valuation” (p. 42). Put another way, the quality of experience might be “altered based upon the attitude…[we] take toward it” (p.

42), and our “habitualized ways of thinking and perceiving...render objects dull and easily glossed over” (p. 40). Take, for example, an act that many human beings do quite regularly, eating. Eating is the act of ingesting substances that our bodies that gets broken down for energy. We consume energy to make energy for the purpose of sustaining life. But when was the last time we were moved by food we ate? How is it we attend to the act of consuming foods? How often do we give the act of preparing and/or eating foods sensory engagement and thought? Where does it come from? How did it get in front of us? What are the colors, textures, flavors we are consuming? Formis

(2014) and Koczanowicz (2014) point to pragmatist interpretations of how the simple act of eating food can be understood as an aesthetic experience. In short, an individual’s

91 habits of attention—or our mind-body-environment attentiveness—is central to aesthetics.

Aesthetic experience in everyday life clearly involves the phenomenological, in that is involves the objects of our direct experience, but aesthetics also has a temporality that needs acknowledged. Understanding aesthetics and art as living lead Dewey to shift from the classical question, “What is art?” towards a question more like, “When is art?"

(Leddy, 2016). The shift in this orienting question is important because it significantly alters aesthetics and art from being solely focus on an external object/thing and moves towards a focus on the transactional (i.e., subject-object) states of being occurring within situations and time. The past and future combine in the present with aesthetic experience, which hangs in the complexities and transactions of being a living, breathing creature in/from/of the world bound up in time (Dewey, 1934/2005; Stroud, 2014). Aesthetic experience possesses a “simultaneous integration with and demarcation from surround experience” (Stroud, 2014, p. 35). Part of the unfolding of aesthetic experience is that there is “an individualizing quality among its parts; it has some emotional meaning or tone that makes it that noticeable stretch of experience” (p. 36). When aesthetic experience unfolds it “goes somewhere” and becomes imbued with meaning (p. 36).

Aesthetic experience then is both physical and mental as well as about things and events, which are transformed through the interactions of living beings.

To flesh out more about aesthetic experience from a pragmatist lens, Shusterman

(2006) is particularly helpful. He highlighted several properties to aesthetic experience

92 including: phenomenological character, perception and knowledge, intensities of feeling, and varieties of unity.

• Phenomenological Character: Aesthetic experience always carries a

phenomenological character within it that is “double-barreled” as subjective and

objective. Aesthetic experience is subjective in that “it is distinctly felt…by the

experiencing subject rather than simply being registered in an unconscious

inattentive way” (p. 219). Aesthetic experience is objective in that it “also

implies some object of experience (the ‘what’ of experience)” (p. 219). The

double-barreled notion comes into play because such experience is not just about

a subjective state. “It always has an intentional object of some kind, even if that

object is only imaginary: a mirage, a silent narrative of thoughts, an unperformed

melody” (p. 219). In having an intentional object and thus being about something

(e.g., that street, that field, that horse), aesthetic experience always has a

dimension of meaning. There merging interactions between subject and object.

The sunlight may hit our faces, “but unless (or until) we consciously notice and

attend to the warm sunlight, we would not really say we are experiencing it

aesthetically” (p. 219). Aesthetic experience is about sensations, an awareness of

it, and movement towards meaningful perception.

• Perception and Knowledge: Aesthetic experience is about perception and

meaning (Dewey, 1934/2005), but Shusterman (2006) pointed out that “the

intentionality of aesthetic experience does not entail flawless knowledge of the

intentional object” (p. 221). Our experience can be “genuine but inaccurate in its

perception” (p. 221). One can also have aesthetic experiences even though one

may not possess certain knowledge. For example, one may not speak a language

but feel resonance, joy, or beauty from songs or poems. In other words, we might

not know details about something but can still have aesthetic experiences.

Shusterman also gave an example of “seeing” a snake in the grass and feeling fear

before realizing it was actually a garden hose. This is another example of the

dance between perception and knowledge. “Even if one denies that I really

experienced fear of a snake, insisting instead that I only feared the idea of a snake,

it is undeniable that I had an experience of fear” (p. 221). And in that moment

that experience there were certain qualities of a snake in the grass. Feelings,

perceptions, and knowledge are all part of aesthetic experience.

• Intensities of Feeling: Although there are definitions and physiological

explanations for them, feelings are not a sort of tangible things or objects that we

can see in the world nor are feelings always predictable. Feelings arise from

within us in relationship with the world, an inner-outer dance of sorts. Ghostly,

energetic, emergent happenings feelings are of importance to aesthetics, and “it is

hard to see how it can be altogether devoid of feeling or affect” (p. 223). While

feelings of beauty and pleasure are often associated with aesthetics and its value,

Shusterman pointed out that feelings in aesthetic experience can range in type and

intensity. “Experiences of disturbing shock, fragmentation, disorientation,

puzzlement, horror, protest, or even revulsion…can be valued for the novel

feelings and thoughts they provide, whose provocative power can enrich our

vision of the world” (pp. 218–219). Aesthetic experience, therefore, should

embrace a spectrum of feeling like moments of joy and despair, confusion and

clarity, shame and strength.

• Varieties of Unity: Unity echoes similar to ideas around feelings. To have

aesthetic experience there is a need for unity of some type, “a nameless, unifying

quality” (Shusterman, 2011, p. 348). At times, unity can imply a complete

coming together, or a pleasing whole so to speak, but like with feelings varying so

too does unity. Aesthetic experience “can certainly be fragmented, dissonant,

disrupted, or incomplete. … Experiences of fragmentation, dissonance, or

breaking off can...be positively appreciated aesthetically” (Shusterman, 2006, p.

222). Unity in a broadly conceived sense means that there is “the basic integrity

or cohesiveness needed for being identified as a recognizably distinct unit of

experience” (p. 222). Unity is that hanging together of a strand of experience

because it is distinguished from the “often unattended flow of humdrum

experience” (p. 222).

Another significant dimension to pragmatist aesthetics is the democratization of both aesthetics and art. The democratization of art and aesthetics is about the

“emancipatory enlargement” and imagining both “in more liberal terms” where they are not “isolated from life” (Shusterman, 1992, p. viii). Dewey (1934/2005) cracked open this door by arguing that artworks and aesthetic experience do not always need to be seen as mutually exclusive. Shusterman pointed to this saying that pragmatist aesthetics “is not directed against the established genres of high art, only against their frequent claims

95 of exclusivity” (Läkevä, 2002, p. 8). Dewey offered caution early on about this exclusivity facilitating potential “object fetishism” (Dewey, 1934/2005; Malecki, 2014b).

Such devotion to art as an object supports narrowed, elitist, “canonized high-brow” art forms and limiting aesthetic experience to encounters with artworks (Shusterman, 2000, p. xi). The aesthetics of everyday life takes to heart and shares in Dewey and Shusterman thoughts on the democratization aesthetics and —they are available to anyone, in any place, at any time.

Present within democratic thread of pragmatist aesthetics is a desire for cultivating an ethical awareness of living. Aesthetic experience is about everyday living and “also extends to the social and political” (p. viii). Parsing this out further,

Shusterman noted that “class snobbery, imperialism, and capitalism's profit-seeking oppression, social disintegration, and alienation of labor” can be the “divisive institutional realities” that reinforce positions that high art and aesthetic experience as separate from everyday life (p. 20). Pragmatist aesthetics is concerned with and attentive to how we are living in the world, and “the ultimate goal is not knowledge but improved experience, though truth and knowledge should, of course, be indispensable to achieving this” (p. viii). Stroud (2014) echoed this sentiment in saying that aesthetics asks for

“intelligent integration of our habits of attentions and action with the goal of better quality experience” (p. 34). There is a sense of democratic meliorism in pragmatist aesthetics.

Although not necessary for aesthetic experience, pragmatist aesthetics can also weave in a dimension of expression. Expression involves transforming experience into

96 new forms through the use of materials for the sake of one’s self and/or for sharing with others. Enlarging his theory of aesthetic experience, Dewey (1934/2005) added the element of expression to the equation. When an individual has aesthetics experiences, one can bring expressions forth into a form, the transformation of what is known. “Form is actualized in the subjective experience of a doer…when their orientation focuses their attention on rather than distracts it from the present situation or object” (Stroud, 2014, p.

44). The expression of experience occurs from an organic process in which the doer works with media building forms, that is, “the interactions of organic and environmental conditions and energies” (Dewey, 1934/2005, p. 67). Transmuting experience through forms as a process is “expression of the self in and through medium” and results in a process where “both of them [the individual and object] acquire a form and order they did not at first possess” (p. 67-68). Expressive forms need not be artworks, but forms can also be transformations in terms of how one goes about being and making their world.

Generating expressive forms is part of an ever-changing, personalized process of reconstructing what we know and how we come to make meaning about existence.

Mapping Place in Curriculum

In his writings, Edward Casey (2009) asks us to imagine, if we can, what it might be like to if places did not exist. Can you imagine "an utter, placeless void! ...Can you eliminate any trace of place from your experience of things? ...Can you really picture yourself in a world without places?" (p. ix). Can you do it? Can you imagine no places, no you, no body, no things? Sense nothingness is a struggle, for me. My imaginative powers fail in trying to conceive of a world without place(s). To inhabit a living,

97 breathing body—these physical forms of flesh, nerves, and bone—is in one sense to be in a kind of place situated in space and time that is entangled with other places and bodies.

We do not exist without places (Casey, 1996, 2000, 2009; Mitchell, Strong–Wilson,

Pithouse, & Allnutt, 201; O’Loughlin, 2006; Pink, 2009).

In the field of curriculum studies place is a multidimensional concept. More than two decades ago, Kincheloe and Pinar (1991) began laying groundwork for studying place in curriculum through a social psychoanalytic lens. In their argument was a call for more work to be done around Southern place in the United State of America. Recent publications have picked up on that call particularly with respects to Southern place, identity, and “Southern epistemology” (p. 10). William Reynolds (2013) put forth an edited collection inspired by a class he taught and the conversations the unfolded during it. The book’s authors each critically analyzed Southern culture and identities via different mixes of lenses such as race, gender, class, economics, history, and so on.

Looking through autobiographical lenses, Casemore (2008), Cutts (2012),

Whitlock (2007), and hooks (2009) have all studied Southern place too. Casemore

(2008) utilized psychoanalysis to examine the personal, social, and historical nature of place and his formation of selfhood as a white man from Louisiana. Cutts (2012) troubled self-identity, being black, and belonging or not to an Alabama hometown.

Whitlock (2007) studied being from/in the South and the feelings of being a Southern, and she sought to disrupt the nostalgia for homeplace and consideration of Southern identity through queerness, class, race, and religion. In a collection of essays focused on belonging, hooks (2009) also wrote autobiographically about her homeplace, Kentucky

98 and wove through her writing reflections on kinship, race, class, gender, and land ownership. All of these authors unpacked Southern places through the critical analysis, and they expressed a sense of how the South is incredibly significance in terms of politics, culture, and individual/social identities.

Southern places are not the only geographical regions represented in the literature so too exploration of rural places. This is not to say that Southern places are not thought about or considered rural at times as hooks (2009) reminds us when speaking about the knowing and being of rural-ness and land ownership. Appalachia is also a location, a place, woven with explorations of identity. An example can be found in Thomas

Barone’s (1989) research with a teenage Appalachia boy named, Billy Charles Barnett.

Billy lived in northeastern Tennessee, and Barone explored his life through case study.

Barone uncovered certain dynamics of place inside and outside of school where at play in

Billy’s life as well as Billy’s perceptions of himself along with teachers’ and administrators’ perceptions of Billy. Barone’s research pointed out how “the institution of the school has also failed to facilitate mutual acquaintance among the people who inhabit it” (p. 151). Places and our experiences within them are always bound up with cultural and identities.

Place in curriculum studies has been thought about through additional critical lenses that must not be overlooked. One of those domains is the application of critical perspectives around colonialization. McCoy, Tuck, and MacKenzie (2016) have a fine collection of essays by from authors across the globe who apply Indigenous, postcolonial, and decolonizing lenses to making sense of lands and places. Nicholas Ng-a-Fook’s

(2007) study of the United Houma Nation in Louisiana is another strong example of such work. Through life history narratives, he explored how local policies and a colonial education system impacted and “continues to affect indigenous communities” (p. 16).

Conversations around Indigeneity and environmentalism are enriching curriculum and pedagogy with voices that have often been silenced and broadening understandings of what places mean to people, and what places were, are, and might become.

Another sphere of thought that has been unfolding around place does not necessarily put it at the center rather organizes critical investigations around the spatial dimensions to which places are a part. Pérez, Fain, and Slater (2004) ventured into the concept of 'space' as a sort of place where learning is connected to the social, identity, aesthetic, and political dimensions of experience. Another important voice on thinking critical about space is Robert Helfenbein (2006, 2010). Much of Helfenbein’s research and theorizing relies upon the concept of “critical geography” as an analytical tool for studying place-making and individuals’ identities. Like Helfenbein, Walter Gershon

(2011, 2013) too has done rich ethnographic research with learners in schools on the relationships between individuals, race, place, and space, but Gershon takes up a particular area of intrigue, that is, making sense of sound in education. Gershon attunes us to on how sounds abound all around in educational contexts and have meanings. In sum up, the critical analysis of spatial dimensions and how these get negotiated by individuals’ minds-bodies have been used to inquiry into and discuss the nature of place.

Another prominent set of threads tied around the study of place are the ecological lenses. In these positions, primacy given to inquiring into humans’ relationships with the

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Earth, critiquing boarder cultural ideologies, and recommending transformations necessary for the sustainability of the planet, ourselves, and communities. Berry’s (1995,

2002) and Hensley’s (2011) writings emphasis what knowing and being mean in local places, that is, bioregionalism. Bioregionalism encourages us to attended to, reflected upon, and care for our local places. The application of critical pedagogy and concerns for social justice to the current environmental crisis is another existing position (Bowers,

2008; Gruenewald, 2003b, 2008; Kahn, 2010). They are not only concerned with the oppression of human beings but also with human beings’ oppression of the more-than- human world too. Ecofeminism has similar concerns but looks at them through a gendered lens (Salleh, 1997; Warren 2000). An ecospiritual lens addresses the current environmental imbalance but does so through the sacred relationship of humans and the natural world (Riley-Taylor, 2002). Ecological views, in short, are concerned with substantiality, justice, and the impending crisis between humans and the Earth. And many of them seek to cultivate our understandings of how broader cultural desires and ideologies (e.g., privatization and corporatization) are planted and grow within schools as well as in our thoughts and actions.

Amidst the curriculum scholars who touch upon place is a cluster of works that resonate with this dissertation because of their embrace of aesthetic sensibilities and artful expressions. The Canadian scholar, Wanda Hurren stands out as an example who situates her work in post-structural, post-modern veins. Hurren (2000) blended personal journals, maps, postcards, narrative writing, and geography to explore place and identity and how we might represent our world for curriculum, teaching, and learning. Hurren

101 has also partnered on several collaborations with Erika Hasebe-Ludt, another Canadian curriculum scholar with interest in place, literacy, and language. Hurren and Hasebe-

Ludt (2011) used autobiographical vignettes to discuss place, identity, and food. In their edited books, Hurren and Hasebe-Ludt (2003) looked at the physicality of place while also arguing for curriculum as intertext, i.e., a space of displacement and borderland. In

2013, they embraced a mixture of texts (e.g., poems, narratives, reflections, and visual) to create a collection dedicated to Ted T. Aoki’s ideas of intertextuality and the lived and planned curriculum.

Thinking with another cluster of theoretical tools is David Jardine who works with place is at the intersections of aesthetics, hermeneutics, ecopedagogy, Buddhism, and poetics (Jardine, 2000, 2016; Seidel & Jardine, 2014). Akin to Hurren, Jardine often uses lived experiences, poetry, metaphors, and language as his form of artistic expression.

Jardine’s works interpretively with teachers and students in the place of schools in an ecopedagogical way, that is, "the belonging-together-in-diversity of the full range of human understanding" (Jardine, 2000, p. 25). For Jardine, place is part of how our existence and is always a part of our living fields of relationships.

Zoetic Place

A more conventional definition of place, as seen in Merriam-Webster Dictionary

(2017a), positions it as a particular point in space, a carved out physical location, a localization of sorts—that star, that country, that city, that field, that landmark, that park, and so on. I am, for example, writing this passage while enjoying a café Americano at a local coffee shop in Wooster, Ohio called Templeton’s Scottish Bakery and Coffee

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House, which is owned by charming couple who met in Glasgow, Scotland. The husband is originally from Kilmarnock, Scotland and the wife from Cleveland, Ohio.

The coffee shop in is near and far from other local business establishments like

Hartzler Family Dairy about five miles north or the Broken Rocks Café just across the street. The location of the city I am in, Wooster, has varying degrees of proximity to other locations in Ohio like Funk, Fredericksburg, Cleveland, and Dayton. Even further yet are places like New York City, Sikasso, Mali, or Adana, Turkey. You are reading these words located in a place somewhere in the world, and that place is also tied up in sets of relations based on proximity. Understanding place is in part about certain locations and proximities, but it is also about much more. To be in a “living-moving” bodies means that we are always in/on/at/between/near certain physical locations, and we shape places as we move in, around, between, and away from them (Casey, 1996, 2009).

As I combed through existing literature and considered how to frame place, I returned again and again to Edward Casey’s philosophical scholarship about place, and in particular the quote used to open this discussion of place. Casey’s work poses something provocative by emphasizing just how much we are at/in/with/from places. Places, their physicality and materiality, are essential to our every waking day. We are “placelings”

(Casey, 2009) in that our existence as humans is always immersed in and relational to places. To be living means to be connected to place(s).

For this dissertation, the concept of place acknowledged the conventional definition of a location, which for this study was 65 acres of land in rural Ohio but also embraces more complexity with respects to place. Such sensitivity was required because

103 as highlighted in literature from curriculum studies, place never has just one dimension.

Said differently, place is a geographical location but is also all at once cultural, historical, phenomenological, ecological, political, and ideological among other features (Casey,

1996; Gruenewald, 2003a). Place is, and should remain, a "complicated conversation"

(Pinar, 2011) within curriculum and pedagogy.

Given the complexity and holistic nature, place was thought of as an event

(Casey, 196, 200). As a concept, then, place should not convey a sense of stagnancy rather a vibrancy, liveliness that carries qualities of constant, change, and openness for remaking and reinterpretation. Interestingly, John Dewey’s (1934/2005) writings in, Art as Experience echoed this sentiment. He wrote that “...places, despite physical limitation and narrow localization, are charged with accumulations of long-gathering energy” (p.

24). Of equal importance to places’ eventfulness was also how they gather (Casey, 1996,

2009). Places gather “…all that occurs in the lives of sentient beings, and even for the trajectories of inanimate things” (Casey, 1996, p. 24). A place, then, is not unchangeable, definite thing rather is a “kind of something,” that is, place “happen[s]” or better yet is happening, and place “depend[s] on the kinds of things, as well as the actual things, that make them up” (Casey, 1996, p. 27). Places also affect us and are reflected in our

“perceptual” and “sensing body” (Casey, 1996, 2009), and as a concept must embrace transactions between the minds, bodies, and environments (Casey, 1996, 2009; Howes,

2005; O’Loughlin, 2006; Pink, 2009).

Places, therefore, are “arena[s] of common engagement,” collecting and recollecting “animate and inanimate entities… [as well as] experiences and histories,

104 even languages and thoughts” (Casey, 1996, p. 24). Places are as much as part of us as we are a part of them. And places are part ever-changing, co-constructive assemblages between humans, plants, creatures, and things living and moving amidst one another.

With all this mind, then, I decided to use the adjective zoetic—which is derived from the

Greek word zōē meaning life—to try and capture a sense of place as being full of movement, vitality, complexity, and life-giving of which we are a part one of many

(Merriam-Webster, 2017b).

Recapping the Chapter

In order to frame this dissertation, ample discussion unfolded in this chapter around several key concepts anchored by foundational thinkers. The general education problem of the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011) and its schism between mind, body, and environment were contextualized by drawing upon certain philosophical and historical subtexts. These threads were used to expressive what the crisis is and where it comes from. Then, the crisis was further illustrated within education through tracing ways it has and continuous to have disembodying and displacing effects in curriculum and pedagogy.

After situating the general education problem, relevant literature was woven together to elucidate three of this dissertation’s guiding concepts: “centering”

(Macdonald, 1995), the aesthetics of everyday life (Dewey, 1934/2005; Shusterman,

2000), and place. The section on centering intended to not only articulate the concept but to also locate it within of James Macdonald’s broader arguments with curriculum and teaching. The discussion of the aesthetics of everyday life did two things. Firstly, it

105 grappled with how aesthetics has been taken up within curriculum and pedagogy, and secondly, it pulled heavily upon pragmatist aesthetic to carve out an understanding of aesthetics that has resonance with certain curriculum thinkers. The discussion of place mapped interpretative lenses used to theorize and empirically explore place in curriculum and pedagogy. The understanding of place taken up for this dissertation was also articulated as one that embraced place as complex, multidimensional, and holistic.

To guide my exploration of place though “centering” (Macdonald, 1995) in the aesthetics of everyday life (Dewey, 1934/2005; Shusterman, 2000) empirical work was undertaken. The coming chapter, Chapter Three is dedicated to a describing my qualitative inquiry, which was informed by arts-based research (Barone & Eisner, 2012;

Leavy, 2015a) and pragmatism (Cherryholmes, 1999; McCalsin, 2008; Ryan, 2011;

Rosiek, 2013a). The chapter contains a detailed recounting of my dissertation research’s methodological orientation and overall research design from enactment through analysis.

The chapter also describes the artmaking used for the representational phase of this dissertation, which is expressed in Chapter Four as a “geostory” (Haraway, 2016).

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CHAPTER III

MOLDING THE METHODOLOGY

“Wherever you stand, be the soul of that place.” Rumi1

When it comes to methodological thought and decisions regarding research design, Cleo Cherryholmes (1999) reminds us that all approaches to research are attempts to interpret the world. Said another way, always embedded in research are assumptions about the nature of knowledge and the nature of reality. Venturing to communicate such matters is a fundamental part of situating any inquiry project. The primary function of this chapter, therefore, is to engage in the exercise of disclosure and transparency with respects to my research project (Hatch, 2002; Leavy, 2015a). By doing so, readers are provided with a thorough account of what was studied and why along with how the research process was envisioned and what unfolded. Within this chapter, I provide such details to give shape to the actions and rationale that were a part of my exploration of place through the aesthetics of everyday life (Dewey, 1934/2005; Shusterman, 2000).

The methodological underpinnings of my study were rooted in the umbrella of qualitative research (Hatch, 2002; Schram, 2006). Woven together for this qualitative inquiry were central features of arts-based research (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy,

2015a) and principles from pragmatism (Cherryholmes, 1999; McCalsin, 2008; Ryan,

2011; Rosiek, 2013a). The philosophical-aesthetic orientation of an arts-based pragmatism combined two often separate methodological dialogues because they aligned

1A line from the poem, One Song by the Sufi mystic and poet, Rumi.

107 well with my desires to respond to the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011) in a way that worked relationally, honoring mind-body-environment. The methodological approach also strongly resonated with my study’s positive, reconstructive response to the crisis through employing the concepts of “centering” (Macdonald, 1995), the aesthetics of everyday life (Dewey, 1934/2005; Shusterman, 2000), and place (Casey, 1996, 2009), which were each discussed at length in Chapter Two.

Following an articulation of the methodological commitments for my inquiry frame by a qualitative arts-based pragmatism, a detailed account is provided with respects to the methods taken up for generating data and the cycle of data analysis. Next, further consideration is given to concerns of rigor and ethics with respects to doing research.

The chapter closes by addressing details related to my process of crafting an arts-based form of representation using the study’s data and its findings of five experiential

“objectives” (Ryan, 2011). In light of the five experiential objectives, a work of “creative nonfiction” (Miller & Paola, 2004) was generated, which drew upon visual and narrative data and the concept of “geostory” (Haraway, 2016) to express the study’s aesthetically rooted findings.

Research Design

Amidst the swelling sea of literature about conceptualizing and doing research the word paradigm—often in reference to Kuhn’s (1970) historical analysis of scientific disciplines—is commonly taken up to articulate methodological differences in research.

Paradigmatic discourse asks us to be attentive to and think through the metaphysical dimensions at play within research (see Creswell, 2009; Crotty, 1998; Guba & Lincoln,

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2005; Hatch, 2002; Lather, 2006; Maxwell, 2009; Schram, 2006; Tuck & McKenzie,

2015). Research paradigms are “ways of thinking about how the world is or is not ordered, what counts as knowledge, and how and if knowledge can be gained” (Hatch,

2002, p. 19). Echoing this sentiment, Leavy (2015) discussed how perceptions of knowledge always direct our research practices. What Hatch and Leavy are pointing out is that when a researcher is thinking through a research design and doing a study epistemological concerns need to be addressed. Contemplating and articulating a perception of knowledge, therefore, is a critical part of methodological design efforts.

Adding a significant observation to the discussion of paradigms, Cleo

Cherryholmes (1999) noted that present within all research are not only metaphysical assertions about the nature of knowledge, but of equal import are aesthetic decisions. A researcher must become aware of how aims and actions are always tethered to consideration of what is beautiful and/or desirable with respects to research processes, practices, outcomes, and artifacts. What Cherryholmes is calling attention to are the assumptions and expectations around how research should exist in the world and how our desires express particular values that are linked to matters of power. Research is full of aesthetic expectations and determinations. To engage in research, then, is a value- informed undertaking, which is a point stressed by arts-based research and pragmatism alike (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2016, 2018; McCaslin, 2008; Ryan, 2011; Rosiek,

2013a). Significant to a methodological design, then, is expressing an awareness of epistemological concerns alongside ontological and axiological ones, that is, concerns for the nature of reality and value.

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To ever so briefly illustrate this intersection, take the philosophical–aesthetic commitments of a positivist’s frame in research, which has roots in the theories of the sciences and scientific method (Guba, 1990). Eloquently capturing this in his memoir on living with and eventually passing from terminal lung cancer, Paul Kalanithi (2016), an

American neurosurgeon, wrote that, “We build scientific theory to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena to manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity” (p. 169). A core assertion of positivism is to promoted is the determination of Truth; said another way, “there exists a reality out there, driven by immutable natural laws,” and this reality is something that we can know fully (Guba, 1990, p. 19). To find the truth, research must be value–free and driven by objective knowledge. When applied to our social world, then, phenomena are perceived as overseen by certain rules, and these rules “result in patterns, and thus causes relationships between variables” (Leavy, 2015a, p. 7). This posits, then, that reality is something that is “predictable and potentially controllable" (p. 7).

Contrastively, qualitative research—with its beginnings in anthropology with the early ethnographic work of those such as Clifford Geertz (1973) and Margaret Mead

(1930)—generally speaking positions the nature of the social world and phenomena in it as constructed, situational, and multiple (Hatch, 2002; Maxwell, 2009; Leavy, 2015a).

Returning to Paul Kalanithi’s (2016) reflections on the nature of scientific research, he wrote,

… scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human

life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the

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most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data but its power to do so is

predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspect of human life hope,

fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue. … No

system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience. (p. 170)

Kalanithi passage above was tapped into the aesthetics of qualitative research.

Qualitative research involves “an interactive process, shaped by…[one’s] own personal history, biography, gender, social class, race and ethnicity, and by those of the people in the setting” (Denzin & Lincoln, 1999, p. 6). Beyond the classic distinction between quantitative and qualitative takes on research, the paradigmatic mix can be enlarged through the various intellectual turns at play in research such as critical lens, new materialism, spatial, and indigenous and decolonizing (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). Such turns in research have picked up and explored many of the specific qualities of existence and knowing that Denzin and Lincoln mentioned above.

A detailed discussion of research paradigms and different turns within paradigms are far outside of the scope of this dissertation, and I resonate with Barone and Eisner’s

(2012) sentiment that "when it comes to any sort of paradigm war we are pacifists, refusing to fight in a meaningless battle" (p. 47). That said, however, being aware of the nuanced differences in research is a helpful heuristic from which to understand the worldviews that influence research. Each paradigm or turn poses different sorts of questions, does different things, and carries different intentions. Paradigms and turns remind us too that all “research-generated construction of the world” are interpretations and expressions of the world “at the expense of alternative views” (Cherryholmes, 1999,

111 p. 34). This means that as a researcher should consider its worldview alongside research questions and intentions. Then, one must for a time settle upon a vantage point from which to do work. And so, I now turn to an articulation of the philosophical-aesthetic view that organized my exploration of place through the aesthetics of everyday life.

Qualitative Arts-Based Pragmatism

Within the spectrum of research orientations, my dissertation was positioned under the umbrella of qualitative research and borrowed from arts-based research (ABR) and pragmatism because of their additional methodological clarity and guidance. To being with, using a qualitative backdrop provided three qualities that framed my inquiry.

One feature was that the researcher is positioned as a primary instrument in the research process from the generation of data through representation (Hatch, 2002; Schram, 2006;

Maxwell, 2009). As the researcher, I pursued and did this inquiry with particular intentions. Being the doer of the inquiry also meant that my subjectivity could not be ignored, and my positionality needed be acknowledged and discussed in relationship to a research design. A second feature of qualitative research involved the interpretation of relations through seeking participants’ perspectives and meanings. Said differently, to explore any phenomena participants’ subjective experiences, perceptions, feelings, contexts, and values are vital, which in this study involved my family members and my experiences with our shared place. Another characteristic of qualitative work was that it can require extended engagement with a specific site, which of this study was specific plot of land located in northeastern Ohio upon which I live. Each one of these features

112 underscored this dissertation project and are illustrated in greater detail in the coming sections of this chapter.

The foundational voices of Tom Barone and Elliot Eisner (2012) noted that within qualitative discourse ABR is a newcomer of sorts but is “a species of qualitative research” (p. 11). The emergence of ABR has historical roots at Stanford University and in particular with Eisner’s professorship there. In the early 1990s, focused efforts emerged during the Arts-Based Research Institute to create a space dedicated to collaborative, collegial exchanges exploring how the arts could inform research practices in the social sciences (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Eisner, 2008). Speaking as an arts-based researcher herself, Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor (2008) mentioned that Eisner’s scholarly efforts provide “a beacon” for researchers, as it does for this dissertation too (p. 6). The intellectual energies of the institute coupled with Eisner’s highly prolific career dedicated to emphasizing the arts, imagination, and creativity into education and research (see

Eisner, 1994a, 1994b, 1997, 2002, 2005) were significant in terms of bringing to life an argument for ABR. A synergy between ABR and pragmatism, for purpose of my research, is not surprising particularly when considering the influence pragmatist thought

(e.g., John Dewey) had on Elliot Eisner’s (1994a, 1994b) conceptual efforts, and in turn how much Eisner’s scholarship became central to the emergence of ABR.

The cautionary remarks of jagodzinski and Wallin's (2013), however, are worth noting here. We need to be cautious, even critique, tendencies to give exclusive credit to any one thing for the birth of ABR. The emergence of ABR within critical conversations about qualitative research was supported by a collision of forces and thinkers. ABR also

113 sprung forth in part because of support gleaned from postmodernist, poststructuralist, and deconstructionist philosophical treads (Leavy, 2015a, 2018; jagodzinski & Wallin, 2013).

As these philosophical currents were taken up by qualitative researchers, significant shifts were encouraged in terms of how research might be conceptualized and enacted. Some of the significant ripple effects include: rejection of truth and grand narratives; critiques of power structures and political dynamics; considerations of researcher’s role; subjectivity and identity; concerns for social justice; questioning interpretations and representations; ownership of knowledge (Lather, 2006; Leavy, 2018). Such methodological concerns regarding the nature of qualitative research have deeply informed ARB dialogues and been taken up by scholars in thinking through research practices (Leavy, 2015a, 2018; jagodzinski & Wallin, 2013; Cahnmann-Taylor, 2008;

Irwin & Cosson 2004; Springgay, Irwin, Leggo, & Gouzouasis, 2008).

Growth around ABR has also occurred in part because of scholars who self- identify as artists along with being researchers and scholars, and they want to work creatively with research practices and challenge reductionistic perceptions of knowledge.

One of ABR’s noticeable figures, Patricia Leavy (2015) beautifully captured this in saying that ABR strives “to bridge and not divide both the artist-self and researcher- self…merging their interests while creating knowledge based on resonance and understanding” (p. 3). Researchers-artists who use arts-based lenses explicitly question

“the dominant, entrenched academic community and its claims to scientific ways of knowing” and challenge how research might be done, and data represented and shared with others (Finley, 2008, p. 72). It is also worth pointing out, as Barone and Eisner

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(2012) did, that ABR is not, and should never, be limited to those who consider themselves arts’ professionals with training. McNiff (2018) echoed this sentiment reinforcing that ABR is “available to every person” with interest or desire (p. 24).

ABR has become quite generative when it comes to contributing “a new set of perspectives” within social science research (Barone & Eisner, 2012, p. 53); so much so that it has even been characterized as an emerging paradigm (Barone & Eisner, 2012;

Leavy, 2015a, 2018). Worth noting though is that ABR does not seek to replace or reject well-established takes on research. Rather ABR sets out to support imaginative, creative, and expressive capacities as ways “to diversify the pantry of methods that researchers can use to address the problem they care about" (Barone & Eisner, 2012, p. 170). ABR encourages risk taking and investigating “the less well explored” rather than over relying upon research methods “that break no new methodological grounds” (p. 4). The growing interest in ABR has resulted the making an extensive lexicon by researchers to describe and distinguish their creative efforts including: a/r/tography, living inquiry, arts-informed inquiry, artistic inquiry, scholartistry, aesthetic research practice, performative inquiry, research-based art, and among others (Leavy, 2015a, 2018). Because of ABR’s encouragement for methodological experimentation in the pursuit of critical, creative, and generative possibilities, I borrowed inspiration and principles from pragmatism to further ground my aesthetic exploration of place.

Blending ABR and pragmatism was instructive methodologically given how I situated my understanding of this dissertation’s problematic situation of the crisis of modernity’s specific manifestation of the mind/body/environment separation and my

115 desire to positively respond to it through “centering” (Macdonald, 1995) aesthetically in place. In order to highlight the methodological features of a qualitative orientation informed by ABR and pragmatism, Table 1 was created through considering parallels and extensions in these two often separate discourses. Table 1 was created by combining the perspectives of intellectual authorities who utilize ABR (e.g., Barone & Eisner, 2012;

Leavy, 2015a, 2018) and pragmatism (e.g., Dewey, 2013/1938; Cherryholmes, 1999;

McCalsin, 2008; Rosiek, 2013a; Rosiek & Pratt, 2013; Ryan, 2011) and is intended to provide a summative account of this study’s philosophical-aesthetic qualities. These qualities underpinned the ways in which I proceeded to “reduce, interpret, and translate data” for my inquiry into place (Leavy, 2015a, p. 281). Some elaboration has already occurred around the features found in the table but much more occurs throughout the remainder of this chapter.

Table 1 Methodological Features Arts-based Research Pragmatism Issues from daily life, Historical, contextual, Aims consciousness-raising, transformation of human of research empathy, deliberations experience, future consequences and possibilities Constructed, subjective, Transactional, fallible, relative, Perceptions diverse, situational, critical, continuity, & value- of knowledge ineffability, intuitive, particle infused No Truth, ethical Contingency, transformation, Perceptions attentiveness, creative action experiential and experimental of being truths, abundant, expanding, Process and form oriented, Not predetermined, problem Perceptions heterogeneity, generating propels question(s) and methods, of data and data, emergent ends, abductive logic, hermeneutic, analysis participants’ viewpoints interpretive analysis

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Role of Artist-researcher, cautious of Humility, reflectivity the researcher solipsism Expressive forms, concerns Open to possibilities, revealing Representations of coherent, incisive, realities, descriptive, of research concise, resonance, and reconstructive, first-person, evocation localized, experiential

Blending qualities from ABR and pragmatist carries an issue-based, problem- solving impetus as an aim of research. This commonality supports research ventures with beginnings in the issues, quandaries, and/or problems found in our daily lives that we feel compelled to address (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2015a; Ryan, 2011; Rosiek,

2013a). As Leavy (2015) noted, researcher “are often trained to hide our relationship to our work… ABR practices allow researchers to share this relationship with the audiences who consume their works” (p. 3). Illustrations of pragmatism at work can be seen in

Eddie Glaude’s (2007) exploration of cultural and political history of being African

American and Charlene Seigfried’s (1996) study of feminism’s resonance to pragmatism.

Both a striking illustration of how “pragmatism is a living tradition” rather than “a deductive system” (Seigfried, 1996, p. 18). When a problem arises from daily living and remains at the heart of inquiry, it urges being attentive to the ethical and value-laden dimensions for doing research (Leavy, 2015a; McCaslin, 2008; Rosiek, 2013a; Ryan,

2011) as well as not getting overly caught up with “professionalized conceptual sparring”

(Rosiek, 2013a, p. 697).

Pragmatism positions the problems/issues from our experience of living in the world are always existentially, contextually, temporally, and subjectively specific, while concurrently attempting and reaching of “a universalistic thrust” (Bernstein, 1992, p.

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834). This thrust is not channeled by desire for creating homogeneity through reductionism and objectivity, rather it is a reaching out from the subjective into relationships, towards understanding transactions (Rosiek, 2013a; Ryan, 2011). ABR, also, works from the issues and problems of one’s life world and the subjective, situational particularities therein, and the artistic expressions are created from such particularities but have a thrust towards the telling of truths too (Barone & Eisner, 2012;

Leavy, 2015a). Problems, as pragmatism points out, are disruptions in our nonreflective, habitual ways of knowing and being, that is, interruptions in one’s “integral unity” of living (Ryan, 2011, p. 22). The sorts of problems that propel inquiries forward are those not easily resolved based on what we readily know and can draw upon (Dewey,

2013/1938; Ryan, 2011), which for this dissertation study was the “crisis of modernity” and its manifestation of the mind/body/environment separation (Ryan, 2011).

An orientation informed by ABR and pragmatism also has a research aim that pursues potential change or transformation that is characteristically internal and potentially external. For pragmatism, the intent of inquiry is exploring the present with the possibility of transforming our present and future human experiences (Rosiek, 2013a;

Ryan, 2012). “The world where we, all of us, are [is] constantly thrown forward as the present approaches but never quite reaches the future” (Cherryholmes, 1999, p. 3). Since problems/issues have beginnings within an individual engaging in inquiry, particular focus is given to the transformation of the inquirer’s consciousness and subjectivity because her/his subjectivity is “an important site of ontological transformation” (Rosiek

& Pratt, 2013, p. 584). The sparks for transformation from within can be seen in ABR’s

118 aspirations to encourage consciousness-raising inside both the maker of the art and percipients of the art created (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2015a, 2018). The expressive forms created are done so with a desire to propel deliberations regarding the problem/issue grounding the inquiry, that is, “to raise significant questions and engender conversations rather than to proffer final meanings” (Barone & Eisner, 2012, p. 166), to propel us toward the “enlargement of meanings” (Barone, 2001). The potential insights that surface from encounters and deliberations can “jar people into seeing and/or thinking differently, feeling more deeply, learning something new, or building empathetic understandings” (Leavy, 2015a, p. 21). This dissertation’s methodological work through an arts-based, pragmatist qualitative approach, in short, involved provoking a sense of transformation, resonance, empathy, and critical consciousness in the researcher and percipients (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2015a, 2018).

Because research is tied to the aim of establishing knowledge, epistemology is a significant element to discuss given it informs methodological thinking and acting, and this fact brings to the fore another synergistic point between ARB and pragmatism.

Neither approach pushes for irrefutable knowledge claims, rather quite the opposite is the case when working with these two methodological kindred spirits. Knowledge is not fit together in a specific order to show “the one and final reality in-itself, independent of any and all observers” (Ryan, 2011, p. 37). Treating knowledge as such is value-neutral, reductionist, external from a knower, and a pre-existing thing and will never be sufficient for addressing the inherent complexities of knowing and living. For ABR and pragmatism, knowledge is understood in a way that disrupts reductionistic tendencies to

119 neatly pin it down and to make it absolute. William James (1948) beautifully captured this in his statement, “we have to live today by what truth we can get today, and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood” (p. 170). Knowledge, in short, is elastic in perpetual motion getting reorganized, relinquished, rediscovered, reimagined, reconsidered, reinterpreted, and retold. All the while, knowledge is also always slippery, fallible, ethical, ambiguous, and imperfect (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2015a, 2018;

McCaslin, 2008; Ryan, 2011; Rosiek, 2013a).

The tradition of pragmatism was particularly valuable methodologically because it provided a certain philosophical depth to situate the nature of knowledge and how it is tethered to ontological questions of reality. The dotted line used in Table 1 on pages 115 and 116 was my attempt to capture this interconnected pulse between knowing and being within pragmatism. Pragmatism acknowledges a transactional relationship between knowing and reality. As a knower has more experience and engages in more problem- solving, their perception can shift and so too does possibilities for knowns and realities.

Ryan (2011) offers a sharp illustration of this symbiosis of how what is known changes through inquiry.

The ‘stick’ of the infant becomes the child’s ‘pencil;’ further inquiry discloses a

‘graphite cylinder’ with a core of allotropic carbon. A physicist further specifies

an alignment of carbon atoms and perhaps envisions quarks and quantum fields.

No single disclosure is the real object, let alone the philosopher’s phantasmic

thing-in-itself. There are simply an open-ended number of potential reals suited to

various purposes and contexts of use. (p. 30)

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Dewey’s postulate regarding existence and knowing (i.e., “What is is what it is experienced as.”) nicely captures what Ryan examples, which welcome “the obvious fact that whatever is experienced really is experienced that way” (Ryan, 2011, p. 27). When too epistemologically focused through being overly preoccupied with concerns of validity or bogged down in the quest for truth, research for pragmatism becomes “perennially flawed” (McCalsin, 2008, p. 673). Methodologically, then, there must be an open-ended quality to research, a quality that embraces multiplicities.

Instead, for pragmatism what we know and consider real is “relative or situational” and should be understood “as a way of forming signposts or landmarks concerning the nature of reality" (McCalsin, 2008, p. 672). The knowledge and truths we hold to be real at any given point because they are what are considered useful. But truths are always are bound up with time and context and thus are temporary and mutable through problem-solving, which is necessary because knowing and “reality [are] abundant…an expanding range of relationships” (Ryan, 2011, p. 47). Plurality and interpretive play matter for pragmatism but so too do facts as well as consequences. Any form of rigorous interpretive research framed through pragmatism does not surrender to immature delusions, haphazard claims, or ideological rigidities. In other words, although pragmatism embraces openness, fluidity, transformation, and creativity, it is worth reaffirming that inquiry is always discipled and guided by the empirical consequences that arise.

Amidst the diverse positions of pragmatists, the significance of experience stands out as a unifying principle (Thompson & Hilde, 2000). Experience is “how we come to

121 know our world, everything that was, is, or could be known [and this] involves knowers”

(Ryan, 2011, p. 49). If inquiry is “unrelated to [the] practice[s]” in our everyday lives living in the world (e.g., experience) as knowers it would be seen as “moribund”

(Seigfried, 1996, p. 21); this is because the knowledge and truths we have are “practices that happen within experience and that shape experience,” it is necessary to highlight experience as a core principle when working with pragmatisms (Rosiek, 2013a, p. 695).

The centrality of experience for pragmatism, as Rosiek mentioned, is the “primordial ontological category” of concern (p. 696). Likewise, Ryan (2011) captured a sense of experience’s importance in his succinct statements that, “experience is our window to the world” (p. 26) and there is “one phenomenon, experience” (p. 45).

Experience embraces “deep ecologies” (McCalsin, 2008) and relationships— dissolving dualities, avoiding reductionism, and ultimate reality. Taking this a step further, as Rosiek (2013a) pointed out, experience is “a single—albeit complex— ontological category” one which “collapses subject/object and knowledge/value distinctions” (p. 694). Rosiek continued by stated that experience is “the myriad phenomenal qualities of living including our sense of identity, community, and anticipations of possible futures—all we ever have of a real world” (p. 696). Ryan’s

(2011) writings confirm this when he stated that experience is “an inclusive term wherein what we experience is always bound up with how we are able to experience it…There are not, then, separate realms of things and thoughts merely brought together in interaction”

(p. 45). To give an illustration of that deep ecologies and the collapsing of subject,

122 object, and environment in experience, Dewey (1929) text, Experience and Nature is worth quoting in length as it provides a nice written illustration.

Experience denotes the planted field, the sowed seeds, the reaped harvests, the

changes of night and day, spring and autumn, wet and dry, heat and cold, that are

observed, feared, longed for; it also denotes the one who plants and reaps, who

works and rejoices, hopes, fears, plans, invokes magic or chemistry to aid

him[/her/them], who is downcast or triumphant. …[I]t recognizes in the primary

integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains

them both in an unanalyzed totality (p. 18).

Two decades later, Dewey and Bentley (1949) again called attention to the holistic quality of experience when they wrote the following, “organisms do not live without air and water, nor without food ingestion and radiation. They live, that is, as much in processes across and ‘through’ skins as in processes ‘within’ skins” (p. 139). Experience encompasses a holistic view of being alive in the world as human beings; this is the breath and pulse of pragmatism. To be alive, enmeshed in our streams of life-making is to be in experience full of phenomenal qualities.

What ARB brought to the methodological fore, which pragmatism did not explicitly do, was emphasizing the aesthetic dimensions of knowing and being.

Emphasized in ABR are the tacit, imaginative, and ineffable nature of experience and harnessing the spectrum of creative artmaking as part of knowing-being. ABR encourages working intuitively, conceptually, critically, symbolically, metaphorically, and/or thematically with research endeavors (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2015a,

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2018). In other words, coming to understandings and representing what we know involves more than words and their literal meanings neatly organized into linear paragraphs with clear beginnings and ends. Educational scholars have used diverse expressive forms in their research including but by no means not limited to: poetry

(Leggo, 2008; Prendergast, Leggo, & Sameshima, 2009; Sameshima, Fidyk, James, &

Leggo, 2017), narratives and fiction (Leavy, 2011a, 2013a, 2013b), dance (Blumenfeld-

Jones, 2012), and performance (Saldaña, 2005, 2011a). Scholars even blend forms like the photographic and written (Guyas, 2007a, 2007b) or the tactile, visual, and written

(Springgay, 2003). Through utilizing artful, creative actions, sensitivity for aesthetic knowing becomes threaded throughout the doings of the research process (Barone &

Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2015a), and such sensibilities were sought in this dissertation’s guiding question and through the processes of inquiry and representation.

The Research Question

With principles of pragmatism guiding my methodological efforts, an important action for the researcher to take is to be as transparent as possible through providing a discussion of the decisions made with reference to framing the question(s) (McClasin,

2008; Rosiek, 2013a). This is done in order to make one’s motives available and open for future critique and potential transformation. Although some initial traces of such transparency were expressed in Chapter One’s discussion of the “experiential incitements” (Rosiek, 2013a) for this research project, I wish to speak more in this section with respects to the emergence of the guiding question, which was: What can be discovered by attuning to place aesthetically?

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Crafting the guiding question emerged slowly through the ongoing, hermeneutic experiences in returning and living on the farmland while doing coursework towards my doctoral degree in curriculum and pedagogy studies. Writings from various curriculum and pedagogy studies’ scholars who argued for our mind-body understandings as educationally significant were particularly informative and inspirational (e.g.,

Blumenfeld-Jones, 2012; Boler, 1999; Hendry, 2011; Kesson & Oliver, 2002;

Macdonald, 1995; Miller, 1990; O’Loughlin, 2006; Springgay & Freedman, 2007), and these scholars were on my mind for a chapter I wrote on the embodying democratic, holistic understanding in curriculum (Schneider, 2015). The mind-body readings were also done amidst others such as Bowers’s (1997, 2012), Casey’s (1996, 2009),

Gruenewald’s (2003), Kincheloe’s and Pinar’s (1991), Ng-a-Fook’s (2007), and Riley-

Taylor’s (2002), which were invitations encouraging us to renew our attention to place, to take pause, giving it serious consideration in our lives. During this time, I took courses with, Dr. Frank Ryan in the Philosophy Department at Kent State University to study semiotics as well as transactional pragmatism and became intrigued with his concept of the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011). The academic study I did was done amidst my daily experiences of living in the place. I was collecting eggs, walking, caring for creatures, cleaning stalls, talking with family, gardening, planting trees, removing old fences, canning, drying, and freezing food, shoveling snow, and so on. I brought my studies to bare on such activities and began wondering what all of these ideas meant in relationship to my life, my sense selfhood, and place.

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Feeling both intrigued and deeply disturbed by the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan,

2011) and how to address the mind-body-environment manifestation within my own life,

I initially considered focusing on exploring my experiences with place by crafting an inquiry projects rooted autobiographically. Over time, however, focusing my inquiry solely as such began to feel too narrow and potentially problematic for several reasons.

One reason was in part because of critiques on autonomous individualism that I read from Bowers (2012), Dewey (1984/1930), and Springgay and Freedman (2010). Another reason came from a comment by Barone and Eisner (2012) that was arts-based researchers should be wary of the lure of solipsism. They were cautioning researcher on reinforcing the belief that the self is all that can be known. Adding to this was pragmatism’s perceptions that any individual’s knowledge, truth, and reality are always relative, experiential, relational, historical, and contextual (Cherryholmes, 1999; Ryan,

2011; McCalsin, 2008; Rosiek, 2013a, 2013b). Given such intellectual arguments and my awareness that the place where I live is also historical, intergenerational, and familial,

I began to question designing a study that focused too much upon my experience of living in the place.

My understanding, truth, and reality are only ever a nod in the transactional web.

While I wanted maintain sensitivity towards the pragmatist tenet that “knowledge is ultimately grounded in and must return for its validation to the course of personal experience,” my sense of self is individual but also always bound up with many others who have been part of the land (Rosiek & Pratt, 2013, p. 586). Living with the land is not only about my experience; my experiences are only ever a tiny fragment always

126 enmeshed in a whole of relationships. Places team with pluralism, or as transactional pragmatism acknowledges, “there are different ‘reals’ to be experienced and reported”

(Ryan, 2011, p. 25). A strong desire within me arose to explore place in a way that might cultivate a more relational, holistic awareness. I wanted to engage in an empirical venture that pushed against dichotomies, that is, towards relationships and liminality.

Hence, why I settled upon exploring place transactionally, which requires seeing “the individual…within a set of relations…an entire organism-environment system” (Ryan,

2011, p. 35).

In light of these experiential details, the purpose of this study was to explore the experience of living in a place that has been a part of my family for four generations, for over 80 decades. Knowing that it is impractical—even impossible—within a single study to explore the whole of any given phenomenon, I narrowed my question in a way that tried to move towards a holistic exploration and decided to investigate place through the aesthetics of everyday life (Dewey, 1934/2005; Shusterman, 1992, 2000, 2006). With respects to studying this phenomenon, one research question guided my inquiry efforts:

What can be discovered by attuning to place aesthetically? Although I sought structure through utilizing the research question and research design, I maintained an awareness that unpredictability abounds in what was being explored. The remarks of arts-based scholars Barone and Eisner (2012) rung loud that “all phenomena begin encountered possess a certain randomness, a lack of coherence or structure” (p. 50), and pragmatism echoed this with a perception of existence as all at once relational, fallible, experiential,

127 and creative as well as full of chance and contingency (Cherryholmes, 1999; McCaslin,

2008; Rosiek, 2013a; Ryan, 2011).

With respects to crafting my guiding question, ABR and pragmatism were encouraging forces that pushed me to frame my inquiry and artmaking in “the realm of local, personal, everyday places and events” (Finley, 2008, p. 72). Depth was also provided to situate discovery and aesthetics in the research question. For the purpose of this study, discovery was the generation of understanding, which was anchored by Frank

Ryan’s (2011) contemporary rendering of John Dewey’s “transactional” epistemology.

Transactional experience “assumes an entire organism-environment system” and in doing so “sees the individual forged within a set of relations” (p. 35). Generating understanding involves meaning making through a hermetically informed “knowing and known” process (Dewey & Bentley, 1949) coupled with existential “becoming” (Greene, 1998b) of ever-budding new beginnings and transformation (Cherryholmes, 1999; Rosiek,

2013a, 2013b; Rosiek & Pratt, 2013; Ryan, 2011). Drawing upon this dissertation pragmatist thread, aesthetics was a concept rooted in the everyday life and attentive to the distinctions within the stream of living. The distinction within experience involves an intensity of feeling entwined with the qualities of experience and an unnamable unity.

The aesthetic infused experience with qualities of emergent meanings and possibilities to enrich our vision of the world (Dewey, 1934/2005; Shusterman, 2000).

The Research Context

In locating the research context for this dissertation, I want to first begin rather broadly since the locations we find ourselves in are always nested within a larger set of

128 relationships with other places. The research context is located on the content of North

American and on land that became known as the State of Ohio on March 1, 1803. The research context, more specifically, is located in northeastern region of Ohio in Wayne

County, which has a population of roughly 116,000 (U.S. Department of Commerce,

2017). However, at one point in time—prior to 1808 when the name Wayne County

“was given authority”—this region of Ohio went by the name of Columbiana County and

Killbuck Township, (Phillips, 1980; Locher, 2012a, p. 1).

Wayne County is comprised of 16 townships. Congress, Canaan, Milton, and

Chippewa are the four townships that make up the northern most line of Wayne County.

Paint, Salt Creek, Franklin, and Clinton Townships create the south boundary of the

County. Meshed in the middle are the remaining eight townships including: Baughman,

Green, Wayne, Chester, Plain, Wooster, East Union, and Sugar Creek. Of particular interest for my dissertation project is a place located within Wooster Township near the

City of Wooster. Wooster became the seat of Wayne County in 1808 and in October 13,

1817 was incorporated with an election of city officials the following year (B. F. Bowen

& Company, 1910; Wayne County History Book Committee, 1987)

The specific place at the heart of my inquiry project a little over a mile southwest of the City of Wooster and can be pinpointed using the coordinates of 40.786151N

(latitude) and 81.962053W (longitude). The place is a parcel of land consisting of 65 acres. The place is a track of land that was once my great grandparent’s farm and is a place upon which four generation of my family have made their lives and where several still do. This particular place was purposefully selected (Creswell, 2007; Hatch, 2002)

129 because it is an “arena of common engagement” for family members and me (Casey,

1996, p. 24). The place was also purposeful because it was a way for me to work contextually and personally in response to the mind-body-environment bifurcation of the

“crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011). As will be discussed at length in coming sections, various methods were utilized for generating data about the research context. In brief, the methods were chosen because of their potential to generate data about the research context itself and the experiences of living there.

Even when we are not present in them, places live inside us. Casey pointed towards this when he said that our "lived bodies belong to places…[and] places belong to lived bodies” (p. 24). In other words, places are a part of us, and we are a part of them even when we are not physically residing there. This is critical to note here within section on research context because there are members of my family connected to the research context who do not currently reside there. While I currently live in the place, some of my participants are scattered across other regions of Ohio. Still yet, others live across the United States of America including Nebraska and Texas. Given this reality, the entire process of data generation did not happen in the research context. Rather data were, at times, generated about the research context in other locations. Traveling to other locations was part of my data generation process, and at participants’ homes, we spent time exploring their lived experiences with the land located in Wooster, Ohio.

The Participants

Being that the nature of qualitative research is to understand “the world from the perspectives of those living in it,” I sought out individuals to take part in my project

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(Hatch, 2002, p. 7). This study involved individuals who had experiences living in the research context. As Casey (1996) noted, places are animated through bodies and bodies are animated through places; they “interanimate” each another. Inviting participants allowed me to explore the place through how it was a part of the memories, feelings, and meanings through various subjective viewpoints. All participants as well as the research context were purposefully selected (Hatch, 2002). Purposeful selection is a term used by qualitative researchers to describe the selection “individuals and sites for study because they can purposefully inform an understanding of the research problem and central phenomenon in the study” (Creswell, 2007, p. 125). The selection of participants for this study were purposeful because they all at some point in their lives lived on the land for a period of time. Since the site at the heart of this study has been owned by my family for four generations, the participants naturally included members of my immediate and extended family members.

As I had anticipated in my original research proposal, eight living, family members were invited and decided to participate in my inquiry. But since there was also an autobiographical dimension to this study, I included myself within the tally.

Therefore, a total of nine living, human participants offered their time and energies to my exploration of place through the aesthetics of everyday life (Dewey, 1934/2005;

Shusterman, 2000). The living participants included an intergenerational group of women and men who varied in age ranging from the youngest being in his late-20s and the oldest being in his mid-80s. Worth noting though is that I exist within sets of family dynamics as daughter, sisters, niece, and cousin, and not all family who lived in the place

131 were a part of the inquiry because of certain family dynamics and personal choice.

However, it was my intention to include as many family members as possible, i.e., those who wanted to take part. Their viewpoints offered multiple, experiential realities and truths with respects to understanding place (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2015a, 2018;

Ryan, 2011; Rosiek, 2013a). At the same time, their perspectives were seen as always

“partial, tentative, [and] shifting” (Barone & Eisner, 2012, p. 135). Said differently, each participant’s experience of living in the research context enriched the realms of reality in my inquiry.

While the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) and Kent State

University’s (KSU) Institutional Review Board (IRB) classified my eight family members mentioned above to be the study’s participants—and rightfully so in terms of involvement and permissions needed—a discussion of the many beings that participated in this inquiry project is not so simple and straightforward. Not all participants were bound to human fleshly form. Many participants were formless, that is, those who have passed away. Susan Nordstrom’s (2013) research is a helpful referent here. She argued that data generation can be "spectral” in nature, that is, data that "emerge[s] from a relationship formed between a living researcher and a deceased person in a qualitative study" (p. 316). Generating data for understanding place through the aesthetics of everyday life (Dewey, 1934/2005; Shusterman, 2000) involved, for me, ended up evolving into relationships with the dead. And these dead were those I knew once upon a time and those I never met.

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Some of the deceased participants were immediate and extended family members of mine who had lived on the land at various point in their lives. These participants were all members of the Barnes Family and included: my maternal grandparents (i.e., Clarence

‘Bud’ and Ruth Irene (Derr) Barnes), Bud’s deceased siblings (i.e., Mary, Dorothy,

Carol, Margaret, and George), and Bud’s parents (i.e., Earl Elmer and Florence Belle

(Marsh) Barnes). Bringing deceased family into this dissertation with the living pushed the total number of participants to 18. During data generation in the archival domain, however, more deceased individuals emerged as essential to understanding the place.

The names that rose from the archives were not my blood relatives, but they were individuals who had lived lives in the place. They appeared as names imprinted on pieces of paper and voices lost in time. The participants included all those who held ownership of the land at one time or another reaching back to the first individual, Thomas

McCracken, who purchased the land from the United States’ Federal Government in

February 1816. To add here though, 1816 was not when the place began, and participants emerged reaching back further to the Native American tribes of the Delawares (Lenapes),

Wyandots, and Shawnees who resided in the Wayne County region (Kaufman, 1973;

Farver, 1963; Locher, 2012b; Mills, 1914; Ohio Historical Society, n.d.; The Landmark

Committee of the Wayne County Historical Society, 1976; Wayne County History Book

Committee, 1987; Williams, 1983). When the dead became part my research process, all of those who once existed in relationship to the place were enfolded as participants.

In qualitative research it is fairly commonplace to conceptualize participants as the humans who take part in our studies (e.g., Crotty, 1998; Hatch, 2002; Schram, 2006),

133 but restricting who is a participant to this is somewhat limited when one considers what it means to exist in the world and how meaning is made from a transactional pragmatist lens. Pushing for a more “radical” view of living where “organisms and environments are transactionally interdependent,” a plethora of nonhumans participants need acknowledgement too as part of my exploration into place (Ryan, 2011, p. 4). Nonhuman participants included other inhabited of the place: living and dead pets, features of the land, human–made objects/structures, an incalculable number of wild creatures and plants, an all-weather spring, pond, and creek called, Killbuck. Although they were not interviewed, they matter to this dissertation. They matter to understanding place. Their presences at times and absences at others is part of the life of the place. It is a challenge then to provide a fixed number of participants. Each and every one of the humans and nonhumans was and is a part of the whole gathered within place (Casey, 1996, 2009;

Dewey, 1934/2005).

The Generation of Data

Within this section of the chapter, a description is given regarding the methods taken up and woven together in order to generate data around place. Before delving into a detailed discussion of each specific methods, however, I first want to provide general commentary to situate this portion of the inquiry process. To being with, I want to point out a subtle nuance with respects to my choice to rely upon the word generation rather than collection with respects to data. As a descriptor for the research process, the word collect can carry a connotation that data exists out there in the world somewhere as a sort of pre-existing thing, and to do research all a researcher needs to do is pinpoint the data’s

134 location and acquire them from the source. In such a view, data can be reduced to objects or external things to be manipulated rather than immersed in a personal, contextual, ethical endeavored. Moreover, using collect felt counter to the features of arts-based pragmatism, which positions research as a transactional, creative inquiry process with an emergent, process orientated view of data.

The word generation, instead, felt like a most accurate descriptor, which I pulled from Leavy’s (2015, 2018) writing on arts-based research. Generation was better suited for situating how the process unfolded and the activities I did with respects to data. With generating data, there is an awareness that the process was simulations systematic and unpredictable in open, emerged ways. With such framing, data and knowledge were not assumed to be an external thing that was predetermined, known, or given (Barone &

Eisner, 2012; Dewey, 1933/1910; Leavy, 2015a, 2018). The word generating, in sum, better captured the influence of the personal, contextual, imaginative, and creative activity that happened when settling upon a research question and the nature of data

(Rosiek, 2013a).

For pragmatism and ABR, data methods are not preselected, rather methods are selected with careful consideration of the inquiry’s problem situation and question(s).

Before determining methods, I thought about what could aid me in becoming attentive to place aesthetically and to do so in a way that positively responded into the problematic situation of the crisis of modernity’s (Ryan, 2011) separation of mind, body, and environment. Given my vested interest in exploring my experiences with the place, generating data about and through my experiences was identified as significant, and thus,

135 there was an autobiographical domain to my inquiry. Both pragmatism and ABR, however, asked me to be “cautious of solipsism” (Barone & Eisner, 2012) and not

“yielding to subjectivism” (Ryan, 2011).

Having grown up in the research context with family members, their experiences of living with place also seemed pertinent to understanding place. Generating data through a familial domain allowed for the multiple, experiential realities and truths with respects to understanding place (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2015a, 2018; Ryan,

2011; Rosiek, 2013a). Living in the research context immersed with objects collected and used by family members for generations made me acutely aware that objects, documents, and records might prove enriching for understanding place aesthetically.

Exploring such materials felt relevant, and hence an archival domain was conceived. The familial and archival domains imagined to be spaces of data generation, which could also

"problematize my own autobiography" (Berry, 2004, p. 135). Figure 2 was a sketch originally drafted on a coffee-stained napkin at a café, which I later manipulated digitally in order to capture how I wanted to become attentive to place aesthetically.

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Figure 2. The data generation process.

Seeing how place was the heart of my inquiry, it is centered in the image with the overlapping domains swirling about it; meanwhile, the aesthetic experience of living in the place surrounds the entirety of my data generation efforts.

After settling upon the archival, familial, and autobiographical domains as sources by which place would be explored and better understood, I turned my attention to thinking through the methods that would support my inquiry. Nine methods emerged because of their potential for “the generation of possible interpretations” with respect to the aesthetics of place (Rosiek, 2013a, p. 698). The three domains and methods were also chosen as ways for me to engage in “reflective analysis” in order to “break [my experience of place] into external conditions” (Dewey, 1929, p. 19). Table 2 highlights the three domains for data generation, identifies the methods in each, and provides a brief description for each of the method that was utilized for inquiry. Table 2 is intended to serve as an anchor point for the in-depth discussion to come.

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Table 2

Data Generation Techniques

Domains Methods Descriptions Public Archive Publicly accessible place-related documents and materials through institutions: local libraries, historical societies, and databases Private Archive Privately owned place-related legal documents, everyday objects, photographs, Archival journals, letters, ancestors’ belonging, and so on as well as location-specific geographical features Research Journaling A record of the researcher’s transactions working in both archives and speculations regarding the data being generated Oral History A space for living, human participants to Interviewing share their thoughts, descriptions, feelings, stories, memories, objects, and so on about the place Familial Research Journaling A record of the researcher’s experiences with participants before, during, and after interviews along with speculations regarding the data being generated Wandering The leisurely movement around the place with no pre-determined intentions, purposes, and directions only an openness to the emergent forces that catch one’s senses and mind Gathering An action that occurred when wandering and involved accumulating objects of Autobiographical spontaneous attraction Artful Journaling A record of the researcher’s experiences, insights, questions, and inspirations created while wandering as well as post-wandering additions Photographing An action that involved both spontaneous and deliberate generation of visual data from the place

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The archival, familial, and autobiographical domains were simultaneously distinct and interconnected with one another. The archival domain focused on discovering available historical forms of documentation connected to the research context. The familial domain was dedicated to exploring my family members’ lived experiences with our shared place. The autobiographical domain was attentive to my experiences of living on the land. Although in Table 2 and in the sections to come data appear to be separate domains, the process of generating data did not occur in linear, sequential steps nor were the domains always isolated from one another. Rather the data emerged in a process of ebbs and flows and the domains bleed into and out of one another at times. Said differently, when enacting the generation of data, the domains were not attended to in isolation rather considerable movement occurred between the domains.

Examples of such boundary blurring in the data generation process occurred quite often and thus need to be mentioned. One example of this occurred when I went into the public archives while uncover materials related to the place. Finding details and pieces of information about past landowners led to unexpected generation of data and expressive ventures in the autobiographical domain. An impulse arose to not only continue reading about prior inhabitances’ lives but to find remains however I could in present time.

While reading literature about the history of Wooster and Wayne County, I learned of a local memorial erected for Wooster’s bicentennial (1808–2008) and dedicated to the past, current, and future citizens of Wooster (Locker, 2012b). On a sunny, summer afternoon I ventured out the memorial, which is located in the southwestern corner of Schellin Park where Beaver Street and Freelander Street meet. The memorial was purposefully located

139 in close proximity to where the three major Native American trails once converged near the south part of what became Wooster. The trails included the Great Trail, which later became U.S. Route 30. The War Trail that became Route 585, and the Peace Trail that became U.S. Route 250. I spent over an hour photographing and artful journaling at this location while reflecting on the archive materials I had been encountering.

Figure 3. Places are built on places; how much was done to make today possible.

During the same outing to the memorial, I decided to travel southbound up

Madison Avenue to the Wooster Cemetery, which was once called, the “hill of a thousand springs” by the Delaware Indian’s (Locher, 2008b). Based on details I found from both the library’s archive and online, I wandered around to the gravesites of those who had been prior owners of my family’s land (Find a Grave, 2017). I also visited the graves of my great grandparents and grandparents beside which there are several

140 unoccupied plots awaiting more family. I spent time several hours wandering, photographing owners’ tombstones, and meditating in my artful journal about the place, the persons who once lived upon it, and my archive efforts. Such moments of data generation were not anticipated in my initial research plan, rather they emerged through the enactment of my inquiry and accompanied my meaning-making about place. This is expected in pragmatism, that is, not all research-related choices can be made prior to enacting a study (Rosiek, 2013a).

Figure 4. Listening to ghosts, the Miller family owned the land 1852-1893.

Other moments of domain blending occurred when interviewing family members about their lived experiences with place. Some of the participants asked me about what I had been discovering through the public archives, and I would share the in-progress

141 timeline I had been piecing together along with details I uncovered about the place and owners. Several of them insisted that I keep them informed about what I learn because they were genuinely curious. When family members recounted experiences, memories, and feelings surrounding the place, certain experiences at times entwined with mine such as certain events, persons, and creatures. Taken together, all of the interviews done held moments in which participants not only shared their personal understandings of living in the place but also a blending of the familial domain woven with autobiographical and archival moments.

Another point to make about the data generation process was how early cycles of analysis ended up permeating it. The process of data generation, in other words, was not understood as needing to be complete before analysis began. Speaking about the nature of analysis, Rubin and Rubin (2005) wrote that “analysis is not a one-time task, but an ongoing process” (p. 16). Leavy (2015) echoed this idea in her discussion about the cyclical nature of data analysis. Moreover, as Corbin and Strauss (2008) noted, posing questions about data early on is a way to help the researcher begin to think about and

“become more acquainted with the data” (p. 69). Such ideas are helpful for characterizing my interactions with the data and the point I want to stress here. Initial cycles of analysis developed organically in each of the domains. Doing analysis in such a way allowed me to sift through and think about the data as it emerged overtime rather than all at once after generation. Woven into the explanation of data generation, then, is also descriptions of the initial analysis that occurred in each domain.

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To close out this section, a note regarding the management of generated data is necessary. Although I knew this would be a necessary part of the research process, finding ways to manage and organize the emerging data became a critical for my inquiry process because of the sheer amount of data. The data beckoned for a combination of an electronic storage, when possible, as well as hardcopy storage. By hardcopy storage of data, I am referring to the treatment of data by keeping it in a physical form during the research process. Examples included physical objects such as public and private archival artifacts (e.g., books, journals, keys, etc.) or natural forms (e.g., hills, ravines, stones, trees, acorns, dirt, nests, pinecones, bones, twigs, eggs). Material objects were rendered digitally when relevant for the crafting of the “geostory” (Haraway, 2016).

Creating electronic storage sites of digitized materials was done during the data generation process. For example, archival materials that were on microfilm were saved as digital image files. Photographs and letters were also scanned, and slides converted into digital images. Digitized material was stored in three locations for multiple backup sites. The locations included on a personal cloud server, an external hard drive, and a personal laptop all of which were protected by usernames and passwords. All the storage locations were organized via a folder-based system around the three domains: archival, familial, and autobiographical. In the archival domain folder, for example, there were two main folders public and private within which were folders dedicated to place-related data. The familial domain contained folders dedicated to each living participant in which were transcripts, MP3 recordings, and photographs of any additional materials shared with me during interviews. The autobiographical domain ended up organized into folders

143 by seasons (i.e., autumn, winter, spring, and summer) in which were photographs I took while wandering.

Archival Domain

To explore place through the aesthetics of everyday life (Dewey, 1934/2005;

Shusterman, 2000) beckoned for me to seek out collections of materials related to place.

The desire to explore archival materials for transpired through my experience of living on the land amidst materials from generations gone by. Dewey’s (1934/2005) writings that

"places, despite physical limitation and narrow localization, are charged with accumulations of long-gathering energy" (p. 24). Doing archival work was a way to try and explore the long-gathering energy of the place through artifacts ranging from books, deeds, photographs, letters, maps, objects, and more. The archival domain provided the opportunity generate, sit with, and analysis these different forms of data about place.

Since archival work characteristically involves interacting mostly with inanimate, historical materials rather than living people, my efforts within the archival domain began while awaiting IRB approval for my research.

Engaging in the archival domain was by no means a passive venture of simply gathering materials to then analyze, rather it was an immersive process of following hunches and threads while weaving together unconnected resources about the place. The process of archival work was accompanied by continuous unpredictability and excitement and at times even nonfulfillment. Reflecting on the nature of doing archival research,

Hill (1993) wrote that "we know not where it leads," (p. 7). Uncertainty exists because in many ways such research is at the mercy of what exists in an archive, and often times, the

144 materials that are present in any given archive did not come to it in a systematic way.

Moreover, what ends up housed in an archive depends upon what is considered worth saving and the persons who consider the materials worthy of being saved. In my proposal I mentioned that I wanted to work with archival data, and as my efforts in this domain got underway, I found Hill’s sentiment to be true. I could never have predicted what I would end up doing nor what would be discovered.

Two branches emerged as significant within the archival domain the public archive and the private archive. Utilizing these two branches enabled the generation of data about place to accompany the data generated with participants and by myself. The public and private archives brought the exploration of place in contact with a wide assortment of materials including family–owned artifacts and others that were publicly available. Many of the materials I encountered can be considered what Hill (1993) described as "unique, irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind items" (p. 22).

Public archive. My venture into the public branch of the archival domain was spurred by a private archive document my mother discovered and shared with me when my desire to explore place aesthetically as a dissertation focus was a budding idea. This, again, is an illustration of how the undertaking data generation did not unfold in neat, orderly, separate domains. While purging old paperwork several years after my grandparents passed away, my mother came across the original deed document that my great grandparents, Earl and Florence Barnes received in December 1942 after paying off the farmland. Knowing I was researching our shared place, she gave me this document to read and use. Like other private archive materials encountered during my research, my

145 great grandparents must have passed along this paperwork to my maternal grandparents,

Bud and Ruth Barnes who had kept it safely filed away. The deed was several pages inside an official packet of sturdy, yet slightly transparent, pieces of paper. The packet’s pages had been done by typewriter, held together by three metal, round-head paper fastener, and tacked to a now faded, tattered orange piece of paper.

Figure 5. Deed packet cover.

After making my way through the packet’s collection of unfamiliar names, the place took on a different feeling. It stretched beyond the generations of my family. The packet’s details revealed a chronology of ownership through deeds belonging to my great grandparents as well as prior owners. Six ownerships were documented in total. The packet’s chronology began with a man named, Michael Miller who passed away in May

1891 leaving matters of his estate to his executors, his son Ben Miller and son-in-law,

Henry Myers whom I later learned through research was the husband of Michael’s daughter, Elizabeth. From these details, questions flooded my mind. Who were these

146 ghosts like Michael Miller that had walked upon the land before my great grandparents?

What did they do here and for how long? When and how had Miller procured the land, and who held ownership before him? What other forces might have shaped the place beyond what this deed-packet could tell me? Wanting to move with the impulse created by these questions, digging for local, historical details about the place and its inhabitants propelled a portion of my proposed research.

Utilizing archives as a data generation method was a way to possibly understand the place’s past, a blank space staring back at me. In terms of what archives were accessed, I decided to work locally in the Wayne County area. Working in such a way seemed like the most appropriate course of action because the study focused on exploring a local plot of land in this area. Initially, I reached out to representatives at three local archives including the College of Wooster Archives Collection, Ohio Agricultural

Research and Development Center’s (OARDC) Library, and Wayne County Historical

Society. Based on prior knowledge I knew these locations housed local historical resources specific to Wayne County and Wooster. In speaking with the librarians at their archives and about my project, I realized their materials were likely not going to be productive for my research direction. In my conversations, however, the representatives from all three locations encouraged me to explore what the Wayne County Public

Library’s resource center on local history might have, which was direction I had considered but had not yet taken steps towards.

With the deed packet in my backpack, I ventured into the Wayne County Public

Library and on the second floor entered the Genealogy and Local History Department.

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Upon entering I was greeted by one of the on-staff Genealogy Librarians, Deborah who asked if I needed some help. I shared with her the deed document and the nature of my research project being an exploration of a specific place. During the initial visit, I learned that the department housed a rich collection of paper-based and microfilm resources about Wayne County’s early history, development, and residents as well as access to digitalized resources. There was, however, only the prospect of relevance then. In order to determine the degree of usefulness, I had to start digging into the available materials and moving forward into the uncertainty of archival research that Hill (1993) was speaking about.

Figure 6. The archive’s main desk and filing cabinets (right) along with the computer and microfilm stations (left) and librarians’ offices (back).

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Figure 7. The archive’s bound materials wrapping from the left around to desks.

The photographs I took give a sense of the library’s Genealogy and Local History

Department where I spent time. The department was open Mondays through Saturdays.

On weekdays, the hours ranged from around 10:00 in the morning until five or eight o’clock in the evening. Quickly learning that Saturdays were particularly busy in this department and at the library in general, I reserved my research efforts for afternoon on weekdays because for the quiet and stillness they provided. Some weeks I spent three or four days in a row at the department and other weeks one or two. Each visit was no less than two or three hours in length, and oftentimes, I lingered working until the archive closed. No strict schedule was kept for the number of days I went because I found that time was needed to digest the materials encountered and to allow questions around the data to emerge as I lived with it. Overall, my immersion in the public archive ended up lasting around five months. On occasions though did return because of a lingering

149 question that emerged about place, while other times I simply wanted to sit in the space writing this dissertation.

The time spent in the public archives at the Genealogy and Local History

Department pushed my research process forward by slowly pulling me back through time and lives of the dead who had part in shaping the present. Before I began combing through archive resources, I reread the deed packet to glean details about the history of the place. The deed’s description of the place became one of the guides for my archival work, that is, a plot of land and located in Range 15 of Township 13 (i.e., Wooster

Township) in Section Eight (i.e., R 15, T 13, S 8) in the southeast quarter. Additional anchoring points were dates and owners’ names. Since the packet documented these details back to May 1891—when Michael Miller passed away—a lineage of 127 years was recognized, but who and what came before was not in the packets. The unknown propelled me forward. I listed the packet’s details on the first pages in my researcher journal. These details provided a starting point for my archival efforts and served as the beginning of what would evolve into a place–specific timeline created out of my analysis of documents.

I began working as broadly as possible beginning in the archive’s indexes. I searched indexes using the land’s general property description as well as the owners’ names from the packet. All the indexes were bound in hardcovers, and their styles varied. Some of the indexes were photocopies of original documents while others contained typed pages done via a typewriter or computer. Any new names found in relationship to R 15, T 13, S 8 were written down in my journal, and as backups, I took

150 photographs of pages with my cell phone and put them on my cloud storage. The archive had quite a selection of indexes, and their existence was made possible because of community members interested in local history. Their labors to create the indexes that made my archive research possible.

One of the largest set of indexes were the personal property taxes collected in

Wayne County between the years of 1831–1865, which were compiled by the Wayne

County Library (1992a–n), and Bonnie Knox was the individual tasked with photocopying the original tax documents found in the Office of the Wayne County

Treasurer. Another helpful index was compiled in 1980 by C. Arthur Phillips with the help of the Wayne County Historical Society, and this index contained reprinted data from the United States’ Census records and tax lists for Wayne County from 1795–1820.

Phillips created the index from primary records in the State Auditors Land Office in

Columbus, Ohio as well as the Wayne County Recorder’s Office. Phillips (1993) compiled another index for the Federal Census of 1850. Additionally, I searched indexes for Wayne County’s early land records, the local will abstracts, estates and guardianships, and the Federal 1880 Census, which were all compiled by Richard G. Smith (n.d., 1978,

1987, 1988). With authorization from the Probate Court Judge, K. William Bailey,

Vandersall (1995) created a two–part index for the probate court records in Wayne

County from 1812–1934.

After exhausting the indexes for associations with R 15, T 13, S 8, I moved on to work with microfilm. Some indexes, but not all, directed me to specific microfilm volumes with entries on owners. Reading the microfilm reels, then, had a twofold

151 purpose. One reason was as a primary source exercise to verify the index details I found, and the second was to learn more details about owners. The microfilm documents had the potential to reveal details about what might have been on the land such as barns, dwellings, animals, equipment, and so on. I searched microfilm volumes including:

Wayne County Land Deeds, Wayne County Will Abstracts, Estates and Guardianships as well as the Wayne County Probate Court Records. While investigating microfilm deeds,

L. Richard Kocher’s (2005) books was an invaluable reference for translating the deed document’s survey measurements into modern terms of linear measurement, for example,

80 chains or 320 rods equals a mile. As I found relevant entries, I used the microfilm software (i.e., PowerScan 1000) to transform the film materials into digital formats.

While the public archive held a lot of resources related to local history, it also had many resources for genealogical research. Therefore, the department gave library patrons free access to the genealogical databases found on Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/) and FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/). I search these databases for digitalized materials related to the names of past landowners. In many cases, I encountered historical records such as United States’ Censuses, births, immigration, and military, which shed light on the details of the owners’ life stories and family histories.

Comprehending the documents on microfilm was exciting but challenging at times too. My skin hummed with delight when I found details about the place and owners’ lives. I felt like I was fitting together a jigsaw puzzle but without any idea of the puzzle image. Frustrations arose at times though, particularly around the handwritten cursive script in the 18th and early 19th century records. There was variation in the

152 handwriting styles depending on the persons who recorded the details. Moreover, both the antiquated language and phrases used as well as the crispness of markings from pens proved challenging. Even with the PowerScan 1000’s ability to lighten or darken the microfilm reel, at times the documents could still be too dark to read content or pieces from pages could be missing, and in these cases guess work had to be done about the unreadable details.

There were several techniques I relied upon regularly to decipher challenging passages in microfilm. One practice was to print out the materials, read them aloud, and make annotation on letters and passages that puzzled me. Embracing repetition was also helpful in the sense of rereading documents and looking form similar letters and words when stumped. Navigating the fact that the spellings of names at times showed up differently in documents (e.g., Thomas McCracken as McCrackin, William Kelly as

Kelley, or Jacob Loop as Lupe) was an unexpected but necessary to accept with microfilm work. Technique four was to take breaks and even stop for a day or so. When frustration set in, I stopped reading and turn my attention to different documents, task, local history books, or another portion of data generation process. Doing this refreshed my body and mind allowing me to return to documents renewed and receptive.

Microfilm provided written details related to the place at the heart of this inquiry, but the documents were simply that, words about place. Maps emerged as another significant resource in the archive because they provided a visual, spatial way of studying place. The first map of the place I had was from the original deed packet I went into the archives with.

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Figure 8. A 1943 property map from Barnes’s deed packet.

But very quickly relevant maps illustrating the property as well as Ohio, Wayne Country, and Wooster were found. Many of the maps were ones were in a physical format, and I photocopied, photographed, and/or scanned them. There were also relevant electronic maps, which I downloaded and saved as JPEGs and PDFs. Of the physical maps, many were reprints of originals, and they were laminated for durability. There were a few delicate ones, however, which could only be photographed. One such original map was a beautiful Baker’s Map of Wayne County, Ohio from 1856 that lived with tattered edged tucked behind glass and hanging on the wall (Lorey & Hein, 1856).

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Figure 9. An original Baker’s Map of Wayne County.

In terms of composition, the maps varied with respects to the information made available on them through codes, symbols, keys/legends, and measurement scales.

Across the maps the precision and amount of details provided varied greatly. For example, juxtapose two of the maps I encountered. The first was the earliest plat map, which was rendered in by Richard G. Smith who worked for what was once called the

Genealogical Section of the Wayne County Historical Society and what is now

Genealogy and Local History Department. Smith (1988) compelled data from U.S. patent land grants, deed records, local tax books from the Wayne County Court House, and the 1814–1838 microfilm of tax lists of Wayne County in house in the Ohio

Historical Society in Columbus. The 1820 map was created using this data and depicted landowners across Wooster Township. The second was a plat map of Wooster Township was made 1998 for Wayne County Public Library Genealogy and Local History

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Department (Smith, 1998). The orange squares were added to both maps in order to highlight the parcel of land at the center of this inquiry.

Figure 10. The earliest Wooster Township plat map, 1820 (Smith, 1988).

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Figure 11. A Wooster Township plat map, 1998.

Another important factor to acknowledge is that several sorts of maps surfaced as significant to place. One cluster of maps came in the form of plat books for the 16 townships for Wayne County. Plat maps display land ownership in the rural area through depicting details such as: names, acreage, property lines, and lots/parcels as well as prominent features in an area like roads, waterways, and railroads. To read these maps, I relied upon the general property description (R 15, T 13, S 8) to hone in on the place’s location in the Wooster Township maps. The plat maps I compiled through working at

Wayne County Public Library’s Genealogy and Local History Department the spanned a

157 large timeframe including the following year: 1820, 1826, 1856, 1873, 1922, 1939, 1950,

1952, 1959, 1963, 1969, 1971, 1973, 1976, 1979, 1983, 1988, 1990, 1992, 1996, 2003,

2005, and 2013.

Another cluster of significant maps were those that depicted Ohio as a state and the regions within it. Some of these maps were digitized and publicly available through federal, state, and local governing agency webpages such as: Library of Congress, Ohio

Department of Natural Resources, Ohio Department of Transportation, Ohio

Environmental Protection Agency, Wayne County Board of Commissioners. As an example, the Ohio Department of Transportation’s (ODOT) has publicly available digitized maps of roadways in Wooster Township (ODOT, 2012).

Figure 12. A digital map of roadways from ODOT (screenshot).

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Among the hardcopies of Ohio maps were also the several atlases created by Clagg

(1959), Mills (1914) and Walling (1867) that offered details on a range of matters from

Native American nations and trails to geographical features of the area as well as yielded in terms of agricultural crops and livestock. Taken together the various kinds of maps were insightful for exploring place aesthetically.

Exploring the maps was not just a passive looking at them rather was actively engaging with them through the context of this inquiry project. As my map gathering unfolded so too did my analysis of them. Time was spent with each individual map deciphering its details and examining its codes—or lack thereof—for owners, property lines, roads, rivers, dwellings, and so on. This initial effort was to begin getting a sense of what each map had to say with respects to the place. As more maps were pulled from the archive’s drawers and copies made, I began by putting them in chronological order first and often laid the maps side-by-side on the archive’s desks to look at them. Other times, I sat with the maps in smaller groups of three or four seeing them together. As for electronic maps, I studied them through zoom in and out for their contents. Initial analysis brought me into a web of names and lines carved upon the place and reconfigured over time. In addition to studying their contents, artistically playing with the maps brought them to life in an aesthetic way.

Having both digital and hard copies of allowed the maps to travel with me, and I frequently studied, contemplated, and played with them while living within the place they represented. Understanding place through the maps was done through remaking them on pieces of paper with pens, retracing their lines, coloring in their pieces, seeing them

159 together, and pulling them apart. I also employed digital effects through tools in

Microsoft Suite and Adobe Photoshop to manipulate the electronic maps. I wanted to see what would come from playing with transparency, layers, colors, and shapes. Such actions were creative and imaginative but also rooted in the reality of the boundaries from the past that linger on in the present. The consequence of studying and playing with maps was that I began to sense the temporal nature of place, as situated and shaped by natural and man–made features. As I read the maps again and again, they showed me a place continuously shifting overtime through a network of relationships. The maps began presenting traces to the stories of ownership alongside geological forces, colonization, agriculture, and development.

In addition to microfilm and maps, reading an assortment of literature also emerged as a significant, yet initially unanticipated, activity of my archival work. The usage of literature, as Leavy (2015) pointed out, can be a vital part of the research process. Reading literature about the Wayne County region and particularly about

Wooster, Ohio, became important because I thirsted for materials that could propel me into a deeper understanding place aesthetically. Literature provided a path for exploring the historical land space and culture currents within which the place existed. As I read literature, what went through my mind was how does this piece help with understanding the place at the heart of this dissertation project.

Newspaper articles and books were the two forms of literature I explored, and although not always my guiding force when reading, I did look for any details about the place’s prior owners. When pages, articles, or passages felt relevant, I made

160 photocopies/printouts. As I read and re-read them, I wrote annotations on the margins and underlined passages. I kept these printed materials in a folder, but I also wrote their citations along with abstracts or summary statements about them in my journal. For the hardbound literature that was too fragile to copy, I wrote out passages in my researcher journal using citations as headings and then photographed pages or passaged with my phone’s camera.

In terms of newspapers, the public archive had a fantastic digital collection of local newspapers, which I accessed via the genealogy portal that was created for the

Wayne County Library (2017), and to narrow searches in the newspapers, I did use prior owners’ names as keywords. One database housed a collection of 24 newspapers in the

Wayne County area from 1840–1982. I also searched three main newspapers including: the Wayne County Democrat, Wooster Daily News, and Wooster Daily Republican that ranged from 1845–1920. The stacks housed in the archive and library had many relevant books in focused on Wayne County’s history and the Wooster area. As for books, I read broadly about Wayne County from geography to Native Americans and Western pioneers and more to get a sense of what was happening in the area (e.g., Conrad, 1994; Douglass,

1879; Eldridge, 2000; Lewis, 1976; Locher, 2008a, 2012a; McCormick, 1990; Mills,

1914; Nabokov, 1999; Oberholser, 1999; The Wooster Book Company, 2015; Wayne

County Historical Society, 1976; Wayne County History Book Committee, 1987). As I read, however, I reminded myself that this dissertation’s focus was not to do a local, historical analysis of the Wayne County and Wooster, Ohio. Rather I was focusing on aesthetically understanding a particular place nested within the region of Wayne County,

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Ohio. That said, reading on the area’s history was a way of imagining (Macdonald,

1995) and understanding place aesthetically through what others had written.

A point came while working in the public archives when the flow of data began to slow. The microfilm documents related to prior owners dwindled and so too did the details from newspapers, books, and available maps. Consequently, I became aware of the fact that I was exhausting the resources I had limited myself to in the Wayne County

Library. The generation of data had reached a point of saturation. Saturation with respects to data generation occurs “when no new or relevant information emerges”

(Saumure & Given, 2008, p. 195), and such was the case with my public archival efforts.

The judgement call was made to suspend my efforts to dig for more details about place in public archive materials.

In my description of what unfolded in the public archives, it would be remiss of me to not mention the priceless guidance from two of the on-staff Genealogy Librarians,

Christina and Deborah. These two women aided my orientation to and navigation with archive’s materials. On occasions, they also stopped by my table to chat. They would ask how my research was progressing and what was proving helpful in my exploration of the place. In turn, I shared details of what I had been doing and discovering. I from time to time asked them questions too, and they would suggest certain sets of material. If I had not yet reviewed them, I ventured into the suggestions in the hopes of discovering new details, and at times, I found some and other times did not.

Other times, the materials I encountered left me feeling utterly perplexed and stumped on how to proceed. A vivid example of this occurred when attempting to figure

162 out who might have built the farmhouse on the land that my great grandparents lived in.

My great grandparents moved into the home when they bought the land, and Earl referred to the farmhouse in his letters, which I had been analyzing as a part of my work in the private archive. I had also seen the house in several old family photographs and was left wondering about the home. When I shared my confusion with Christina, I showed her the photographs of the farmhouse and the land’s location on plot maps of Township 13

(i.e., Wooster Township), and she ventured into my confusion, momentarily.

I continued searching for new materials and re-reading old microfilm and maps about the owners. Exploring deed and tax records looking for mention of a farmhouse on the property or mention of other dwellings. I read guides for how one might be able date homes and early farmhouses in America (Green, 2002; Light, 1997; McMurry, 1997) in an attempt determine architectural details from the books might help in analyzing the farmhouse photographs. When not busy with other matters, Christina at times searched the databases of old newspapers for possible details. When she or I found a possible lead, which were often about owners, we shared them, but nothing provided definitive answers on my great grandparent’s the farmhouse. We laughed and joked about our mutual puzzlement around who could have built the farmhouse, which was, as Christine remarked, “clear as mud.”

Generating data in the public archive was a process of weaving together an assemblage of newspapers, old maps and plat, microfilm documents, photographs, and books to explore place. My exploration and analysis of place through the archive brought about moments of resolution with clear connects and facts, but so too did muddiness

163 prevail. I continued searching for more in the hopes that an untapped piece of information might bring to light new connections. However, some of my questioning and conclusions could only be speculative, best guesses based on the details surrounding me a point in time.

Private archive. Studying place through the Genealogy and Local History

Department at the Wayne County Public Library generated highly relevant data with respects to historical context and figures associate with the place at the heart of this inquiry. However, exploring place through the public archives alone was a degree removed from the location of the research context. Beyond details like names, dates, roads, and property lines gleaned through documents, the place itself was practically absent from the archive’s public records. Said differently, while the public archives housed data about the place such data was not from within the place. Casey’s (1996) remarks that places gather “…all that occurs in the lives of sentient beings, and even for the trajectories of inanimate things,” nicely captures a sense of the private archive and my efforts within it (p. 24). The place itself was, and is, a living archive created through lives of sentient beings and material objects. The private archive, therefore, was rawer than the public one. Unlike the public archive, the private one was not housed in a building with on-staff librarians offering guidance. The materials in the private archive were also not digitized or organized on shelves by barcodes, categories, and serial numbers. Nor were there collections of published books with authors’ ideas and carefully crafted tables of contents or indexes.

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Engaging in private archive work was a way of generating data about place through spending time with what all the place gathered over time. My efforts in this archive involved navigating decades of family belonging inside and around four houses, two barns, and four sheds. When engage in private archival work, I always had my researcher’s journal as well as camera with me as recording tools for the data generation process. I dedicated time to rummaging through these structures, sitting with the belongings they housed and asked myself: What has gathered here?, To whom did objects belong?, What were their purposes?, and What can they tell me about the place? Three groupings of objects emerged as highly relevant to understanding place: letters, photographs, and everyday objects. Many of these artifacts, e.g., letters and photographs, are "unique, irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind items" (Hill, 1993, p. 22), while some of the everyday objects (e.g., canning supplies or tools) may not be one-of-a-kind items per say but were still important nonetheless to the place and lives lived there.

The first grouping of private archival objects that were relevant for understanding place were letters. Accompanying the original deed documents that triggered my venture into the public archive, there was a box filled to the brim with a cache of old documents once belonging to my great grandfather, Earl. These documents included: type-written letters, envelopes, photos, postcards, receipts, a notebook, flyers, and magazines. I also digitized two large metal cases in which there were over 300 old glass slides and quickly learned they were taken by Earl. Many of the slides were of photos taken during his and

Florence’s trip to Europe in 1949 as well as trips to Jamaica in 1951 and 1952. Although the slides were not about the place at the heart of this dissertation, they were a visual

165 record of what Earl’s eye saw and what he felt was worth photographing. In a letter on

January 10, 1952 to his sister, Blanche, Earl mentioned how he, Florence, and their children “enjoyed looking over the slides I [Earl] took in Europe and those I took in

Jamaica last summer" (Barnes, 1935-1957). Certainly, these slides were time set up and projected in old farmhouse while recollections of experiences, now lost to time, were shared with family and visitors.

Within the box of old documents, the correspondence Earl had with people was of particular relevance to understanding place. Many of the letters were carbon copies

Earl’s typewritten letter, but some of the letters were ones he received from people. The letters were particularly noteworthy with respect to exploring place because they were

Earl’s first-hand recounting of daily life with the land. There were approximately 1,400 letters written from the years of 1935, 1936, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955,

1956, and ending in 1957 when he passed unexpectedly from a stroke (Barnes, 1935-

1957).

Figure 13. Analyzing Earl’s letters.

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To engage in analysis of the letters, I began by reading the letters chronologically.

I began by doing a primarily reading all of Earl’s letter from 1935. After finishing an initial reading, I did a more detailed reading of the year’s letters in a Word document on my cloud server. The document began with the year noted on the top. This was followed by detailed entries for each of the relevant letters. Each entry began by documenting a letter’s month, day, and year alongside the correspondents (e.g., November 30, 1953 –

Charles E. Marsh to Earl), and afterwards I typed quotations and passages related to place. Once I finished the letters from 1935, I proceed on to the next year, 1936, and so on and so forth through 1957. The letters gave rich details around the beautifully mundane, daily occurrences on the farm from the weather and crops planted, to the selling of eggs and milking of cows, to meals eaten and chores that needed done. In the letters, Earl also spoke of his family, visitors, local outings, trips, work, and politics.

Existing photographs were another group of objects that became significant resource from within the private archive. At my grandparent’s house were an abundance of old photographs inside an oak cabinet with two glass paneled doors. I had seen some of the photographs at points during my life, but there were others I recalled never seeing.

The vast majority of the photographs were printed. My grandmother compiled them throughout her lifetime, and true to her character for tidiness and organization her cursive writing noted dates and names associated with the vast majority of photos. I looked through all of the albums, envelopes, and boxes of images she complied. For many of the oldest images, there were only the printed on photopaper, but for others the developed

167 filmstrips existed. As I made my way through photographs not all were relevant to the place, for example, the 125 old, cardboard slides were from family vacations to Florida and Mexico, which I found out after converting them to a digital format. When I happened across photos not related to place, I returned them to the cabinet, but when image associated with the place were uncovered, I separated them out for further examination.

The photos that garnered further examination included three family photo albums along with approximately 300 loose photos. The images varied in terms of qualities.

Many were sharp with crisp depictions, but there were others with degrees of blurriness.

Having been stored flat in albums and in envelops, none of the photos were too badly tattered, wrinkled, or ripped.

Figure 14. Three albums (left) and some of the loose photographs (right).

The photos had a documentary quality, that is, being a “visual record” (Pink, 2009) of place, for example, from family gatherings. The documentary nature of the photos was not a surprise. Sixty, or even 40, years ago taking and developing photographs from film

168 was a process that took time and was costly. Photographing, then, was a luxury of sorts and not the instantaneous, inexpensive process it is today with digital cameras. The first order of business, then, involved converting the irreplaceable images into a digital format by scanning them.

During the conversion process, I did not mindlessly scan image one after another, rather focused energy and attention were given to each image as part of this process.

This process was part of my initial analysis of the photos. As each was scanned, I read and relabeled the digital images with my grandmother’s notations in order to identify each image’s content. After the images were digitized, I did a closer examination of the photos’ content. I laid the photos out around me on the floor, sat, and examined them in mass first. Since there were approximately 300 loose photos, I had to lay them out in several large groupings times to explore their contents. I wanted to surround myself with place through pictures. When reading through the spreads of photos, I started seeing patterns in images and ended up arranging them into smaller clusters based on commonalities. One way I did this was through organizing images with similar content in chronological order as a way to sense time and changes. The other way was pooling photos with similar content into smaller clusters.

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Figure 15. Smaller clusters of photos: horses (top) and picnics (bottom).

Overall, the early analysis of photographs became a way of understanding place through images taken by family members and kept by my grandmother. Although knowing who took a photograph is of importance, I did not get weighted down with

170 needing to know this detail when initially working with the photos. However, the question of determining the authorship of photographs was given serious attention as an ethical issue when creating the “geostory” (Haraway, 2016) representation. Through the clustering practice I began to bring to see and take note of themes in the photos including: family gatherings, visitors, projects, views, seasons, plants, buildings, and animals. The activities of examining and re-arranging were paired with research journaling about the photos too. Exploring images activated two sorts of journaling. One sort was recollection was from personal experience. In other words, journaling from my memories connected to certain images, for example, picnics or animals. Another sort of reflecting was on photos taken before my existence. Said differently, certain photos brought me in touch with what had happened around the place, happening that had been part of others’ experiences.

Rounding out my work in the private archive was a final group of objects that were significant of generating data about place, and these objects were from everyday life. Everyday objects were the simply, mundane materials that have gathered through living in relationship with the research context, and these objects have been and are a part of the place’s material reality. My exploration of everyday objects was guided by two questions: What objects have gathered in this place through time, and how and by whom were these objects used? The process of generating data with respects to these questions involved cataloging and thinking about the everyday objects found around the place.

Photographing and journaling were used in tandem when exploring the place’s everyday objects. Taking photographs of the place’s material reality was done the spirit

171 of documentation. Said differently, photography was used to deliberately create a “visual record” (Pink, 2009) of the objects that have gathered around the place. Accompanying this visual record was a researcher’s journal, and journaling became a second means of generating data about the everyday objects. Journaling involved writing descriptions of the objects along with my reflections on their usages and by whom. Since participants’ lives were emmeshed with the place, journaling was also a space for where certain everyday objects became interlaced with familial and autobiographical data.

In terms of the sort of everyday objects that were significant to place, there were buildings. The four houses, two barns, and four sheds built on the land were important objects in and of themselves, and all of them were photographed. Each structure is a part of the place’s history, brought into existence through the generations of family living in the research context.

Figure 16. Photograph: homes, barns, sheds, fields, and forest taken via drone.

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Of equal significance were the objects held in and around the buildings. One example was my grandparents’ house. Their home was particularly rich in terms of everyday objects, and to explore everyday objects, I went into their home and spent time looking and sitting with their belongings. My interaction within this home was guided by the questions of what, how, and by whom.

Figure 17. Once my grandfather’s workshop in the basement.

Their house became a space for me where my grandparents spoke to me about their relationships with place through everyday objects.

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Figure 18. My grandmother’s bird watching log2

Another example of a building interior that was explored was what is been commonly known as, “the tractor shed”.

Figure 19. Eastern wall of the tractor shed.

2 Her log contained notes on the species of birds she saw around the land along with dates, locations, and at time what the birds were doing (Barnes, 1983-2001).

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This shed was built in1990 by my grandfather’s friend, Terry Snyder with his construction crew. It originally housed a camper bought by my grandparents but in time became a storage space for tractors and took in more functional objects for maintaining the property such as: workbenches full of hardware and tools, oils and gasses, fencing, tractors, buckets, fencing, planks of wood, extra mechanical parts, air compressors, leaf blowers, chainsaws, hatches, shovels, rakes, wood splitter, push mowers, cabinets, and much more.

Researcher journaling. Maintaining a journal was instrumental throughout my efforts with the archives. Half of the journal was dedicated to the data generation process in the public archive, while the other half housed data in the private branch. Journaling became a living record, a way for me to record impressions of place during my archival efforts. The initial intention of keeping a researcher’s journal while in the archives was to preserve my insights, thoughts, and questions as a novice researcher (Schram, 2006).

Although this intention continued, an unanticipated purpose surfaced as I began breathing life into the journal’s pages through adding content. The journal became a document straddling the space between data generation and analyzing because it captured my

"internal dialogue” around data (Leavy, 2015a, p. 269). Journaling, in other words, enhanced my immersion in the data generation process through also housing questions, speculations, and memos about the data. Keeping a journal proved to be invaluable when

I engaged in the later analysis of the data.

During my time in the Genealogy and Local History Department of the library, the public archive portion of the journal functioned in part as a record keeping tool. One

175 way this was done was through my researcher’s log. The log kept track of materials I surveyed and logged three details: 1) the resource was reviewed, 2) date done, and 3) brief notes on the degree of relevance. Another function of journaling was to house the abstracts, key points, and quotations I wrote down from the informative literature I read about Wayne County and Wooster, Ohio. A third way the journal kept a record was through the dates and names tied to place, which were found in the microfilm volumes of deeds, wills, court records as well as maps.

In terms of the early analysis of public archive data, journaling was priceless. As resources related to place emerged, they were accompanied by attempts to make sense of and weave together the details discovered. The process of interpreting data was informed by pragmatism’s feature of abductive reasoning (McCalsin, 2008; Rosiek, 2013a). Such logic is not seeking a linear causality rather is more akin to a spiraling pattern through which hermeneutics, interpretations create explanatory postulates. Unlike deductive reasoning that begins with a hypothesis that is tested or inductive reasoning that works from a particular instance to advance general laws, abductive reasoning is not after such universals, fixed laws, or final results. Abductive reasoning, instead, is a way of drawing interpretations from data through abducing potential meanings. Meanings are generated using multiple details from the data that a researcher makes inferences from, or plausible explanations. These interpretations are considered to be best guesses that can be true but are also situated as fallible and incomplete. As more applicable data emerges, what was considered true can and should continuously shift. The data and truths interpreted from it are never considered to be absolute, finished, and generalizable.

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Embedded in the abductive processing of archival materials were using questions and imagining. The use of questioning enabled me to pose questions ranging from simple ones such as, “What does this document have to say?” to more specific questions around the whos, whats, whens, and hows related to place. Asking questions helped me think about and “become more acquainted with the data” (Corbin & Strauss, 2008, p. 69).

Understanding place through historical documents also involved imagining (Macdonald,

1995). Early analysis, in other words, absorbed me in cultivating my “perceptual power” and “ability to picture in the mind what is not present to the senses” (pp. 92–93), and such action is never, as Rosiek (2013a) noted, “projected onto a blank screen” but tangled in the knowing-known of inquiry (p. 698). The private archival portion of the journal came to life through the imagination, memos, questions, notes, and maps I created as I attuned more to the data through journaling.

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Figure 20. A raw page from the public archive portion of my journal.

Two outgrowths from the early analysis done through journaling were the creation of a timeline and brief biographical sketches of past owners. The creation of a place-centric timeline was done by sewing together what was uncovered through deeds and court records, wills, taxes, and maps. Because of the sheer amount of time and owners discovered, the timeline was split into two: one focused on early years (pre-1795–

1890s) and other the later years (1900s–present). The second outgrowth was the creation of biographical sketches about the various landowners. This was inspired in part by what had emerged during my early analyzing efforts while doing the interviews with my family members. The key difference with archival sketches, however, was they were

178 somewhat skeletal in nature. I ended up with sparser information about some of their lives than I did with others; thus, sketches varied in detail.

Contrasting the journal’s portion created from the public archive was the portion created through exploring private archive’s materials. While the public archival section took formed more or less through my chasing and tracing of historical details, the private archival section was freer in form as it was not driven the same sort of archive. The content within this section of my researcher’s journal was created while working with three groupings of objects: reading Earl’s letters, exploring pre-existing photographs, and cataloging the everyday material objects found around the place. An example of private archival journaling can be seen when I was in the basement of my grandparents’ home exploring my grandmother’s canning cupboard.

Figure 21. A raw page from private archive portion of my journal.

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Although the private archive was rather unstructured and its journaling freer, the private portion of the journal was akin to journal entries with dates followed by descriptive and/or reflective passages. The descriptive elements captured qualities of the private archival object(s) that I was engaged with at a given time. I wrote about what has gathered there, to whom the objects belonged, and what was their purposes. The reflective component of the journaling was grounded in “meditative thinking”

(Macdonald, 1995). Recall that meditative thinking is about posing questions but not "in a functional, utilitarian way, a problem-solving process” rather in “releasement toward things and an openness to the mystery” (p. 92). The private portion of the research journal was about documenting what objects gathered over time in the place along with my experiences and thoughts surrounding objects.

Familial Domain

Aesthetic experience unfurls through living in the world (Dewey, 1934/2005;

Shusterman, 2000), and understanding place aesthetically, then, naturally necessitated exploring the experiences of those who live with the place. The familial domain, therefore, was designed to do just that through inviting my family members to share experiential recounting of living in the research context. My relationship with them and our shared context helped “breed content” for my inquiry into place (Wong, 2013, p. 97).

Worth noting too is that prior to inviting any of my family members to participant in this research project, I completed CITI Program, received IRB approval, and obtained informed consent. Interviewing was the primary method for generating data within the familial domain. The interview process was also coupled with the method of keeping

180 researcher’s journal. Interviews were imagined as a space for my family to share their thoughts, stories, descriptions, feelings, memories, objects, and photographs related to place. The interviews were inspired by an oral history approach because it honors the voices, lives, experiences, and remembrances of ordinary people and encourages a co- creative, open-ended spirit throughout the interview process (Leavy, 2011b). After all, all the individuals involved in a research project can "affect the course of our work and the many turns it takes" (Attarian, 2013, p. 77).

Oral history interviewing. Oral history research, according to Abrams (2010), carries a quality of “permeability,” which means oral history is not isolated to just historical studies, but it is a method for generating data that can be used various fields (p.

1). Said differently, oral history carries an interdisciplinary quality (Leavy, 2011b;

Ritchie, 2003; Sheftel & Zembrzycki, 2013). Oral history also embraces of the emergent, collaborative nature of qualitative research and positions the self as interlaced within the social, temporal, and contextual dimensions of living (Leavy, 2011b). Take for example the oral history projects such as large–scale, socio–historical events like the Holocaust

(Lewin, 1991) and the upheaval in South Africa (Denis & Ntsimane, 2008) or other localized projects on southern famers in American (Walker, 2006) or American steel workers (Wymard, 2007).

Although this dissertation was not an oral history project, the core tenets of oral history interviewing were useful guides for thinking through how to frame my interviews with living family members about our shared place. The core tenets aligned nicely with the intention of generating data via the familial domain. Leavy (2011b) offered valuable

181 descriptions to encourage my oral history interviews, and six distinct features guided my efforts.

1. Holistic understanding of life experiences: Acknowledges that “experiences are

viewed and understood contextually” as well as exploring “how and why…critical

experiences” were experienced as such (pp. 15-16).

2. Micro-macro linkages: Acknowledges the importance of exploring links between

“biographical experience [e.g., mirco]” with the factors that “shape and contain

those experiences [e.g., macro]” of the individuals’ lives (p. 16).

3. Comprehensive understanding: Acknowledges that interviews “cover long

periods of time and a range of related life experience” (p. 17).

4. Bearing witness and filling in historical record: Acknowledges that “firsthand

accounts” give “depth and complexity” to the experiences of a phenomena (p.

17).

5. Collaboration in the meaning-making process: Acknowledges that the as

interview a collaborative process that generates meanings.

6. Participants’ perspectives: Acknowledges participants each have a different

narrative style; participants are the “authorities on their knowledge;” participants

shape how interviews unfold and their content (p. 18).

These six features above are general statements about oral history interviewing and require further elaboration couched within the purpose of this inquiry.

Oral history interviewing places tremendous care for and value on the subjective, that is, on an individual’s lived experiences (Abrams, 2010; Leavy, 2011b; Ritchie,

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2003). The interviewing process of oral history often emphasizes a specific “aspect of a person’s life” such as a place, an issue, an event, or a topic and explores what that person remembers, feelings, and meanings surrounding it (Atkinson, 1998, p. 8). Research participants are experiential experts and as such can share “valuable knowledge” about their experiences as well as “behaviors, rituals, attitudes, values and beliefs” with reference to the aspect of life being explored (Leavy, 2011b, p. 11). Oral history’s emphasis on participants’ expertise and on an aspect of experience aligned with the familial domain’s intention to honor the subjective experiences of family members with living in our shared place. I strove to keep interviews as opened–ended and flexible as possible and remained an active listener to what each participant shared.

Oral history attends to the intersection of local community and documenting overlooked voices in our local communities (Leavy, 2011b; Ritchie, 2003; Sommer &

Quinlan, 2002), and this bearing witness feature was also a point of resonance with my study. This dissertation study in an extremely small way contributes to the local history of Wayne County, Ohio through the experiences of those who live there. Through speaking with my family about their experiences—alongside additional forms of data— this dissertation research sought to weave together “previously undocumented information” about the place and the lives of those who were part of its history as well as present (Sommer & Quinlan, 2002, p. 3). When such experiences are shared, it can be a powerful experience for others because “everyone has a story…to tell about their lives”

(Atkinson, 1998, p. 3). According to Leavy (2011b) as well as Sommer and Quinlan

(2002), the stories and voices of everyday people often get glossed over and left out of

183 historical records, and this dissertation was a way to acknowledge the lives of ordinary people in academic research and writing. Our lives and stories matter and so too do places.

Leavy’s (2011b) features of collaborative meaning-making and participants’ perspectives capture the co-creative relationship between a researcher and participants, and this was an additional reason why I borrowed from oral history. The relationship between researcher and participant is one in which the researcher is an active listener and the participants are experts, speakers, narrators, or storytellers (Leavy, 2011b; Sheftel &

Zembrzycki, 2013). Recognition of such a relationship was beautifully captured in

Portelli’s (1991) reflections on oral history interviews, “two persons meeting on a ground of equality to bring together their different types of knowledge to achieve a new synthesis from which both will be changed” (p. xii). Such a vision for interviewing between the two parties evokes a certain amount of vulnerability, familiarity, and connectedness

(Leavy, 2011b; Norkunas, 2013; Wong, 2013). Attarian’s (2013) phrases of “vulnerable telling, vulnerable listening, [and] vulnerable storying” helped me frame my vision for the interview process from my vantagepoint as the researcher (p. 78). Vulnerability and familiarity of the listener-speaker relationship particularly powerful for my study because of the close relationship I already have with many of the participants. We shared in place, people, memories, and bloodlines.

Preparations and enactment. Transitioning from guiding tenets, a general discussion of interview preparations and how they unfolded is needed. Interviews were done with eight family members and focused on their experiences living in the place.

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The interviews occurred over a period of time and “cover[ed] an extensive part of [each] participant's life” (Leavy, 2011b, p. 10; Sommer & Quinlan, 2002). Several interviews between three to four were done with each person who had experiences with living on the land. Keeping with oral history’s desire of a depth of conversation (Leavy, 2011b), interviews did not have a strict time limit but ranged between one to two hours in length.

The length of time varied from interview to interview and participant to participant. As of cases when follow-up questions arose, they were enfolded into future interviews, or I used either an email, phone call, or in-person chat to ask questions noting responses either in my researcher’s journal or as an audio recording on my cellphone.

To schedule interviews, I worked one-on-one with family members to find convenient times for both myself and them. The interviews were held at locations where my participants felt the most comfortable, which ended up being at their homes (Leavy,

2011b; Sommer & Quinlan, 2002). Traveling became part of generating data about place for the familial domain. Three participants (i.e., my mother, father, and bother) live in the research context, and I simply walked to their residences for interviews. Another three (i.e., my aunt, uncle, brother) lived in different regions of Ohio, and I drove to their homes to do interviews. My drives to and from interviews always gave me time to mediate on what arose. Two participants lived outside of Ohio and required much larger trips. I flew to visit with my first cousin once removed, Tom who lived over 800 miles away in Lincoln, Nebraska. His mother, Margaret was one of my grandfather’s older sisters. I also traveled over 1,000 miles to Fairview, Texas to visit the last of the seven

Barnes children still living, and my great uncle, Allen who I had never met before in

185 person. Unlike my jaunt to Nebraska, my visit to Texas was not done alone. Both my mother, Peggy and aunt, Connie accompanied me because their uncle was in his mid- eighties and knowing the unpredictability of life, they wanted to visit with him too.

Although the conversations participants and I had during interviews could have be similar to those at prior family picnics, vacation visits, or holiday gatherings, my being a researcher brought a different dimension to our interactions and conversations. With

Leavy (2011b), Rubin and Rubin (2005), and Sheftel and Zembrzycki (2013) in mind, I was aware that the interview experience is never the same for the researcher and participants. Interviews can often be associated with certain degree with rigidity, formality, and/or judgement none of which were characteristics informing my oral history approach. As a researcher, I also aware that I would be documenting and using our interactions with a particular purpose and sharing aspects of their lives and family histories with other people. With all this in mind, then, engaging in some rapport building was anticipated (Leavy, 2011b; Sommer & Quinlan, 2002).

To build rapport, I strove to not pressure participation and being as upfront as possible regarding my intentions for the study and interviews. When I extended the initial invitation to family member, I did most of them in-person, but several were done by phone. I explained my purpose and shared the IRB consent form via email or hardcopy. I wanted to give each person ample time to consider the invitation and ask questions before committing. None of them hesitated to participate. However, several expressed concerns regarding the nature of the interviews. The concerns were not about participating but mainly worry about feeling “put on the spot” as one individual noted

186 and “not having a very good memory about things” as another said. They were worried about not being able to remember experiences well enough to be able to tell me what I wanted to know or needed.

To reassure participants, I reinforced that the interviews were not about me trying to get correct/right answers from them as there were no right/wrong answers for the interview. Rather the intention of the interviews was for the two of us to engage in open- ended conversations about the experiences of living in the place. I emphasized my desire was hear about their experiences of living there and what was meaningful to them. The interviews were designed to be about the “evocation” (Leavy, 2015a) of feelings, memories, and stories connected to living in the place. Additionally, I attempted to ease minds by offering participants with a set of generic—a word I stressed—questions that included: 1) How do you understand the place in your life?, 2) What [was/is] living on the place like for you?, 3) What experiences did you have [there/here]?, 4) What do you remember doing and feeling?, 5) What do you think living in the place taught you?, and

6) How [did/does] living in the place influence you today? Several of them found it helpful to have these questions in advance of our first interview together, and these family members jotted down recollection notes. After the first interview, the initial uneasiness appeared to subside.

Through our life experiences we cultivate perceptions and beliefs about existence and relationships with others and ourselves, but working with a methodology that borrowed from pragmatism, my research pushed against our “nonreflective” (Ryan,

2011) existence in the world. And if places do fade into the nonreflective background

187 of our experiences as scholars suggest (e.g., Bowers, 1997, Casey, 1996, 2006;

Gruenewald, 2003a), then the potential exists for unexpected thoughts, feelings, and conflicts to emerge when we engage with what is taken–for–granted in our lives.

Norkunas (2013) reminded me that my research could have potential “emotional consequences” for both participants and me. In terms of my participants’ well-being during interviews, I reminded them that they could retract their involvement in the study at any time without consequences. Embracing Leavy’s (2011b) point that participants are

“authorities on their knowledge,” I also reinforced that they had equal control in the interviews and were the experts, and I reminded them of this at our first interviews (p.

18). If they did not want to answer certain questions I asked or follow threads that emerged during our chats, that was perfectly fine. None of my participants expressed discomfort during or after their experiential recounting of place. At some point in the process, all the participants mentioned enjoying our conversations about place, and their responses were reassuring in terms of my desire to be respectful of their lives and voices throughout our interactions.

Each interview transpired one-on-one between a family member and me. We sat together, at times, around kitchen tables with beverages and food. Other times, we plopped down on comfy sofas in living rooms, sat on patios, or went on walks together.

From the setting to length of time and directions of our conversations, I maintained an openness for the process that was inspired by qualities of being “fluid, adaptable, and malleable” (Leavy, 2011b, p. 8). All consent materials were collected from each participant at the first interview session before any interviewing took place. Doing this

188 first gave me the opportunity to field any lingering questions/concerns. Audio recording and photography were used during interviews, and at the beginning of each meeting, I checked with participants to make sure they were still comfortable with the use of these tools. As Sommer’s and Quinlan’s (2002) suggested, I began each audio recoded interview by mentioning the interviewer, interviewee, place, date, time, and interview number. Using a combination of audio and visual tools provided a record of the interview experience.

Since the interviews were designed to be open-ended explorations of participants’ experiences of living in the research context, there was no imposed standardized form for the interviews. Holding the interview space in such a way focused on “what…[a participant] wishes to tell, rather than what the researcher wants to hear, saving any unanswered questioned for later or for another interview” (Portelli, 1991, p. 54). Leavy’s

(2011b) and Sommer’s and Quinlan’s (2002) tips for refraining from judgments and avoiding interrupting the interviewee were borrowed. The individualized nature of the interview process was employed in order to explore the depth of knowledge about place from each participant’s perspective (Attarian, 2013; Leavy, 2011b; Sheftel &

Zembrzycki, 2013). Doing the interviews both individually and over a period of time allowed me to become “familiar with each participant's narrative style” or voice (Leavy,

2011b, p. 39). Maintaining openness also enabled interviews to become spaces for different conversational formats to organically emerge based on the participants narrative style. At times, the interviews took on a “topical” (Leavy, 2011b) format focused on a particularity of place, for example, a garden, an object, an area within place, a person, a

189 moment(s), or an animal(s). In other instances, interviews emerged in more of a

“chorological” (Leavy, 2011b) form, for example, when participants spoke of certain years or sequential events in their lives.

Throughout the interview process I relied upon a variety of ques both verbal and nonverbal. The nonverbal cues on my radar as a researcher included body language, e.g., nodding, facial expressions, and demeanor (Leavy, 2011b). Verbal cues were of equal importance while interviewing. To encourage participants to steer our discussions, I always acknowledged what was being shared and encouraged more conversation about the experience at hand. Some of the basic verbal cues included ones such as: “Please, do continue. I’m curious to know more.” “Really? I didn’t know that.” “I remember that too.” “That’s really interesting. Why do you think that is?”. Beyond the more general verbal cues, there were points during interviews when I posed more specific questions to participants.

The questions I posed were often for further clarification or richer details on what participants shared about living with place. Some of the questions were, at times, inspired by van Manen’s (2014) notion of “lived experience descriptions”. This concept encouraged me to ask not only about participants’ experiences of living in the place but to share what they could about the “experiences [of place as] lived through" (p. 315).

Examples of questions influence by this were, “Can you tell me a little more about what that was like for you?”, “What did it feel like for you then verse now?”, and “What did that mean to you then?”. Other questions I posed were influenced by oral history’s desire for “holistic understanding” (Leavy, 2011b) of a participant’s life experience with place.

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Working holistically meant giving attention to the “critical experiences” a participant expressed about place and exploring “how and why” those experiences were considered as such (p. 16). As examples, three critical experiences that arose for several of my participants were the death of my great grandfather, Earl, the State of Ohio’s use of eminent domain to build a highway through the land of the old farm, and the building of family member’s houses on the farmland. These three experiences, however, were not critical for all participants, with some not even mentioning them at all during interviews.

Acknowledging this reality leads to the other part of understanding experiences holistically, which is viewing place contextually through life experiences. Said differently, understanding my family member’s experiences living in place meant acknowledging the individual and contextual nature of place within each individual’s life story.

Having read Alexandar’s and Alistar’s (2011) and Atkinson’s (1998) writings on oral history interviewing, I anticipated the possibility that participants also share materials with me during their recollection of experiences with place. These scholars mentioned how objects hold a lot of potential for understanding details and meanings about an aspect of a person’s life. In my conversations with participants about experiences of living with place five of the eight relied upon more than words.

Photographs and other material objects became part of how participants recollected and shared their stories about place.

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Figure 22. Earl’s cow bell and likely worn by a heifer called, Bossy.3

The resources that were shared, either photographs and/or objects, were a part of my participants’ relationships to certain aspects of the place. The materials not only enriched participants’ anecdotes and added depth to understanding place through the aesthetics of everyday life (Dewey, 1934/2005; Shusterman, 2000). Part of what also happened with objects was that certain participants directed me to specific objects that I needed explore if I want to know more about place. The objects were ones I also considered to be a sort of private archival document. Two of the objects were ones that I was unaware of and had not encountered in my personal efforts to generate data in the private archival domain. A spiral bound notebook, which was a log of renters, kept by my grandmother

(Barnes, 1984-2003). From 1984 till 2003 various renters lived on-and-off in two of the

3 The bell, which resided on a shelf above a fireplace, was shared during an interview with my mother who brought the bell over from my grandparents’ home. “It meant something to me, so I had to bring it over. Because I remember it being on the cow” (personal communication, February 8, 2016).

192 homes on the land, and the log detailed the names, dates, costs, and other details about renters. I was directed to this notebook by my mother, “You might want to look through it. It’s part of the place’s history” (personal communication, July 18, 2016). The black and white composition book came from my youngest brother, Allen and was my grandmother’s gardening notebook (Barnes, n.d.). “She gave it to me before she died. She thought I might like it since I was into planets. You should check it out” (personal communication, August 15, 2016).

Figure 23. Two items from participants.4

In terms of other objects, two participants shared documents they had personally created such as family trees and memoir essays. They shared such materials with me because form their vantage point understanding place for them meant that I need to also in part

4 The spiral bound notebook is the log of renters, and the black-and-white composition noted is the gardening journal.

193 understand their immediate family histories. Per my family members’ suggestions, I examined and read through all the objects they shared with me.

With respects to the photographs shared, they were all either old polaroid’s or

35mm printed photos. Heeding Leavy’s (2015) advice about photos, I asked participants to share "any available information about their production," for example, they knew about the photos, e.g., who took them and when, whose they were, and who was in them

(p. 233). The details ascertained from family members were helpful in terms of providing valuable context for understanding the photos they shared related to place.

When participants shared photographs, the images were often couched within stories about their own lived experiences or the memories they had from/of others and the place.

Said differently, photos were used by participants to share their “stories of particular situations [persons,] or events" (van Manen, 2014, p. 317). Participants used the images to shared stories about their lived experiences with place. The advice from Leavy’s

(2015) and van Manen’s (2014) was extended to when participants brought other material objects into interviews, and I encouraged participants to talk about the objects in relationship to their lived experience. I, then, used photography to capture still-images of any photographs and material objects shared while interviewing, always with permissions of course.

To round out this section on the interview process, a succinct discussion about the initial phase of analysis within the familial domains needed. Akin to the archival domain, initial analysis within the familial domain occurred amidst data generation. Early analysis in the familial domain was a way of me to begin making sense of participants’

194 perspectives and my experience while being in the interviewing process. After the first couple interviews, a specific rhythm took shape in the form of rituals I did after interviews. Doing multiple interviews with eight participants over a six-month timeframe, I knew the amount of data and hours of audio recording piled up quickly and holding to an early analysis routine kept me on top of the data as it was being generated.

The rituals were also a way to plunge me into each participant’s perception of living in place.

Either the same day or the day immediately following an interview I listened to the audio recording and read through the journal notes I wrote. The intention of this was to re-experience the interview while the experience was still fresh inside me.

Immediately following that the transcription process began instead of waiting until all the interviews with participants were completed. This immediacy was vital for immersion in data generation and analysis. Keeping with the suggestion for rigor in the oral history literature, I transcribed all the interviews (Howarth, 1998; Leavy, 2011b), which totaled approximately 35 hours of audio. At the top of each transcript were also the details of the interview number, participant's name, location, day, time, and length. All of the transcripts were done verbatim because I wanted to have the “unedited,” and

“continuous” conversations between a participant and myself (Howarth, 1998, p. 10).

The verbatim transcripts included: pauses, incomplete sentences, incorrect grammar, emphasizes/explications, fragments, rephrasing idea, unfinished ideas, and questions.

Such details were left unedited because of their potential to aiding me in not overlooking or missing vital details from participants.

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Creating verbatim transcripts was considered part of the early phase of analysis because each participant’s experiences with place and her/his voice was given focused one-on-one attention. Transcribing was a recursive process that bounced between reading, writing, listening, proofing, and thinking about the interview at hand. At times, I would be listening to the audio recording and reading what I had written. Other times, all four happened simultaneously. During the transcription process, I began to develop preliminary understandings of what was expressed about place, but I also wrote down follow-up questions, ideas, and/or points to further clarify in my researcher’s journal.

These actions proved to be invaluable as preparation for the next interview session. It became abundantly clear, however, that understanding place through the aesthetics of everyday life (Dewey, 1934/2005; Shusterman, 2000) required me to remain “sensitive to the nuances” that arose from each participants’ vantage points (Norkunas, 2013, p. 82).

As I began juggling a growing number of interviews with participants, I allotted time to rereading transcripts as a way to engage in further analysis to familiarize myself with the data being generated about place.

In-between interviews with family members, the additional rituals of creating brief summary sheets and biographical sketches emerged. The summary sheets I created were made for each interview and two general questions guided them: 1) What were my impressions from the interview? and 2) What did this participant gravitate towards sharing about place? The summary sheets were done to capture what initially stood out to me in terms of what participants shared, and at times, I highlighted certain phrases or pulled out quotes. Based on what I knew about family members’ lives and what they

196 shared with me, brief biographical sketches were created for each individual. As Leavy

(2011b) noted oral history interviews can “cover long periods of time and a range of related life experience” (p. 17). The sketches captured details about participants’ life stories such as when they lived on the land, birthday and age, siblings, jobs, moves, relation in the Barnes’s family tree, important dates, pets, and so on. Naturally, this feature in oral history was significant because living in place was for all the participants a piece within their life stories. Crafting brief biographical sketches, then, supported me in understanding how place was, to varying degrees, woven into each one of their life stories.

Researcher journaling. Accompanying the method of oral history interviewing, a researcher’s journal was also used in the familial domain to immerse myself in the data generation process. The researcher’s journal, which began at my very first interview, was kept throughout the interview process and held separate sections for the interviews with each participant. The journal became a living document devoted to my interactions with participant as well as my reflections during around this area of data generation. More specifically, the purpose journaling throughout the interviewing process was threefold.

Of importance was that journaling helped document insights shared by participants in real-time. In addition, journaling was a method to document my reflective thoughts, questions, reactions, and feelings as a novice researcher (Schram, 2006). As the journal’s content grew over time, it also began to house initial analysis because the journal documented my "internal dialogue” (Leavy, 2015a) in relationship to interview data.

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In terms of usage during the interviews with family members, the journal was a location where I jotted down quick notes in real-time. Since they were written as the interviews unfolded, my notes were typically not complete sentences or flawless flowing prose but instead were clusters of words, brief phrases, questions, and sketches. As a researcher, I was simply trying to capture my impressions during interviews. The impressions ranged from the notes about the interview location to my interactions with participants along with their insights. Keeping notes was also done in case unexpected circumstances disrupted the audio recording, which never occurred.

After an interview when I re-read my notes, listened to the audio recording, and transcribed, I developed the habit of creating guides for the next interview in the journal.

This habit was inspired by suggestions from the oral history literature (e.g., Leavy,

2011b; Sommer & Quinlan, 2002). The guides were by no means an attempt to dictate a specific direction for the next interview; rather, the guides were a way to ground myself after each interview and prepare for the up-coming one. Since each interview with a participant was different, creating guides helped me keep track of past interviews, my thoughts, and critical questions all while serving as a visual reminder when immersed in conversations at future interviews. The guides’ contents varied, but they were relatively brief and contained any follow–up questions, ideas, and/or points to further clarify based on the emerging interview data (Leavy, 2011b). Per Sommer’s and Quinlan’s (2002) advice, the guides also contained other important piece of information I need to remember as the interviewer such as: keywords, names, dates, moments, and so on.

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Another purpose of the researcher’s journal was to have a location for my ritual of reflective writing both after and before interviews. Journaling was a way for me to do my best to embody the qualities vulnerability, respect, and connectedness with respects to interviewing participants and the data we created (Leavy, 2011b; Norkunas, 2013; Wong,

2013). As Schram (2006) alluded, journaling is a way for a researcher to engage in reflectivity by cultivating one’s self–awareness through examining what she/he knows and how she/he knows it. The methodological influence of pragmatism supported this too. All epistemological claims carry fallibility, and we must embrace the potential that we might be wrong in what we think we know; revision and criticism are inevitable consequences of seeking understanding (Ryan, 2011; Rosiek, 2013a, 2013b; McCaslin,

2008).

My reflective writings were anchored in what I was learning from participants’ experiences with place and how their understandings of place stretched my awareness of it. Moreover, reflective writing attended to the “emotional consequences” (Norkunas,

2013) of my inquiry through documenting how I was affected by what participants shared. The emotions I experienced ranged from ones of joy to longing to sadness, elation, frustration, doubt, wonder, interconnection, and more. While there are many examples of these emotions, one of interconnectedness can be found in my reflections after returning from my trip to Nebraska to visit with my first cousin once removed.

While sitting in my kitchen re-reading the transcripts of our interviews, I came to passages where he had shared memories of building the very house I was living in.

Mixing mortar and laying the bricks one-by-one for the wood burning fireplace. Picking

199 up nails and scraps of wood for the builder, Grant Sheets (personal communication,

March 21, 2016). I was surrounded by the outcome of energies he, and others, expended.

Through learning about my family members’ experiences of living in place and what it meant to them, they challenged me to understand place differently by putting my personal understanding of it in both connection and tension.

Autobiographical Domain

While the archival domain explored place through related documents and materials and the familial domain was dedicated to family members’ experiences, the autobiographical domain was designed to generate data from my stream of experience.

Since I live in the place at the heart of this dissertation project, the autobiographical domain provided the opportunity to sink into my experience of living with place. The place envelopes me every day; my ways of knowing and being marinate there. Daily routines are structured by the place from the foods grown and eaten to the pavement and grasses walked upon alone and with others. Ground that is also walked by domestic and wild creatures. Each day brings the opportunity to consciously attend to my experience of being in place. The primary aim of the autobiographical domain, then, was to attend to being in place through what I was noticing, feeling, and thinking. After all, to explore place aesthetically beckons that one takes seriously Shusterman’s (2006) claim that

“unless (or until) we consciously notice and attend to” a specific thing “we would not really say we are experiencing it aesthetically” (p. 219).

In the autobiographical domain, four methods were selected to generate data about place including: wandering, gathering, photographing, and artful journaling. Worth

200 noting here is that there were not a strict, fix protocols adhered to with the methods in terms of amount of the amount of time, order, or usage. For example, I did not mandate that photographing and gathering must happen each time I went wandering, nor did I always have to be wandering to use artful journaling and photographing. Predetermining the when and how too much with each method would have been disingenuous to the organic, openness, unpredictability of “environmental conditions and energies” Dewey

(1934/2005) spoke about with respects to aesthetic experiences (p. 67). The four methods, then, intermingled with each other in various ways at different times, and the descriptions to come strive to evoke a sense of how each method’s design and how data generation transpired in the autobiographical domain.

Wandering. Since the autobiographical domain focused my experience of living with place, moving around the land seemed a natural fit for generating data. The movement of one’s body through places as a method for inquiry is not new. In his final published essay, Walking, Henry David Thoreau (2005/1862) reflected on his self and social understandings gleaned through experiences of walking. More recently, walking has been gaining traction in qualitative research as method for generating data (e.g.,

Feinberg, 2006; Hurren & Hasebe-Ludt, 2011; Irwin, 2006; Middleton, 2010; Pink, 2009;

Springgay & Truman, 2016). Inspired by such inquiries, I sought to document my experiences with place through the feelings, insights, and questions that arose while walking, which was tied to the pragmatist’s attitudes for embracing “open-mindedness” and “whole-heartedness” in experience (Dewey, 1910/1933). I settled upon calling the sort of walking I did more akin to wandering because of the qualities it imbued.

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Wandering was designed to encourage physical movement around the research context but without adhering to pre-determined actions or a scripted checklist of intentions. Wandering was left open to the forces I encountered, that is, what ended up rousing my senses and catching my attention with respects to the place on any given day.

Living in the place made me incredibly familiar with the land’s flora and terrain like certain rocks, hills, wet and dry areas, fencerows, buildings, property lines, and so on.

Even with a sense of familiarity, there is always uncertainty. And such was the case when I went wandering, coming in contact with skulls, antlers, droppings, nests, feathers, mushrooms, pileated woodpeckers, wild turkeys, fallen trees/limbs, animal tracks, old shoes, rocks, trash, and more.

Variation existed too in terms of the lengths of time spent wandering and the distance I traveled in the natural, human-carved environment. Some wandering ventures were made through fields, grass-covered hills, creeks, and forests lasting a couple hour or an entire morning, afternoon, or evening. Other days I spent under an hour or so around houses, pastures, gardens, roads, fencerows, and barns. When setting out to wander, I frequently took a small rucksack with my digital camera and artful journal plus writing utensils (e.g., pencils, colored pencils, and fine tip markers) and water. These tools were taken so that I could write and sketch, take photographs, and gather objects. There were, however, spontaneous excursions around the place, and in these cases, I often did not have the rucksack of tools. Instead, I relied upon my cell phone that had both audio and visual capacities for generating wandering data.

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In terms of the additional qualities to wandering, it involved generating data through a mixture of being compelled and idle accompanied with relaxation and curiosity. As examples, I found myself summoned to stroll along the banks of the

Killbuck Creek or through a freshly tilled field in springtime wearing boots or going bare foot. In these instances, there was a desire to explore a specific area, and it was acknowledged and followed up with wandering. Wandering did not involve constant movement, however, and idleness was interlaced intermittently. Time was spent relaxing and sitting in the middle of a field or barn or laying under/in trees, on hillsides, or in yards. Noteworthy here is Thoreau’s (2005/1862) observation that humans have the tendency to become excessively tied up in societal demands and routines disconnecting from ourselves and the natural world.

I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily,

without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my

morning occupations and my obligations to Society. But it sometimes happens

that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in

my head and I am not where my body is—I am out of my senses. (p. 46)

Speaking from his experience, Thoreau is stressing how we often move within, towards, around, and through places but do so without being wholly present in our experiences.

Our minds, senses, and spirits get pulled elsewhere.

Given this, wandering was about being as fully present as possible to my experience with place. Wandering was both a multisensory and contemplative method and involved settling into my skin and mind within land. Photographing and artful

203 journaling were tools used to record the moments when place caught me through sounds that hit my ears, sights that pulled my eyes, scents that tickled my nose, textures that brushed my skin, and the sweet, bitter, and sour notes that danced on my tongue. Also, I chronicled the thoughts, questions, insights, inspirations, and images that surfaced while wandering. I logged personal memories that flooded in and through me and also traced the moments when I pondered my existence with place and why questions about it, moments of “meditative thinking” (Macdonald, 1995). On occasions these were also moments when I was coming to understandings through the data in the archival and familial domains. For example, finding the remains of the ram row (i.e., the old pipe that pumped water from a natural spring to my great grandparents’ farmhouse) covered in grass and imaging what it must have been like to get water in such a way. Wandering around place, in other words, was not solely about my experience. My family members retellings, their stories of living with the place, enmeshed in my movement.

Gathering. Gathering was a method used in the autobiographical domain for generating data to understand place aesthetically through my experience. While wandering, there were moments when I was struck by particular objects I encountered and gathering was the act of accumulating these objects from around the research context.

The sorts of objects I was spontaneously attracted to included natural materials such as stones, pine cones/needles, flowers, bones, twigs, cobs, husks, seedpods, fungi, mosses, bark, leaves, acorns, grasses, insect carcasses, empty nests, egg shells, feathers, roots, and more. Human-made objects I encountered also caught my attention such as old horseshoes, twine, arrowheads, shingles, wire, bricks, pieces of old metal, old boards,

204 litter, and so on. As a method, gathering was about the immersion of myself in the objects of the place, that is, giving them my sensory proximity and attention. The gathering of objects allowed me to touch and be touched by the place’s data through creative undertakings.

The creative, analytical actions I took with the objects I gathered unfolded in one of two ways. One of the approaches was done in the moment while on my wandering excursions. With focused attention on objects that caught my attention, I played with them and documented my interactions through photographing and artful journaling. On my mind were artists from my background in the visual arts such as: Robert Smithson,

Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy, Nils-Udo, and Nancy Holt who created site-specific earthworks, in which the land and art fuse. The media used to create artworks were derived from the sites’ nature materials, which were gathered and arranged. The final artworks were meant to be ephemeral and disrupt elitists and institutional constructions we put on an artwork’s value.

Trees around the land, for example, became a source of inspiration and data generation. In autumn months, leaves set the sky ablaze with brilliant colors as the variations of green that burst into existence in spring transform to vibrant yellows, oranges, reds, and browns.

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Figure 24. Trying to track time.

As time takes its toll, the colors let go, and depending on weather conditions some years they fall quicker than others. As I gathered leaves, I fashioned arrangements and photographed them.

Figure 25. Play with leaves.

When taking the photographs of leave, I also journaled about the two sugar maples they came from and how I have not known my life without them. I reflected on

206 their smell in moist autumn mornings with dew-drenched grass and the giving of way to sunny afternoons only to return to the crisp of nights. Games played around their trunks.

Being shaded by their foliage. Hugging them. Shimming up into the branches.

Watching insects traverse their trunks. Using their leaves in compost piles and flowerbeds for insolation from winter’s chill and snow. Raking their leaves into hug piles, running through and diving in. Dogs playing the piles, or cats chasing leaves and scaling their trucks. The texture of their smooth, leathery surfaces and crunchiness.

Using dry ones as a feeder to start bonfires. My grandpa or father using the orange and black, gas-powered, pull-start push blowers to blow leaves from the yards over the hills into the trees and fence rows behind our houses. Meditating on the sugar maples took my recollections to other trees: an old hackberry, sour cherry, plum, and apples trees I once knew as well as current locust, walnut, chestnut, oak, pine, fur, buckeye, mulberry, peach, apple, and pear trees.

The second approach I undertook creative activity with the objects I gathered was to bring them home and put them around my office. Bringing objects into my office was a way to continue generating data after wandering. Small, fragile objects were stored in vessels like boxes and clear plastic bags or containers. The more perishable objects such as leaves, grasses, and flowers were folded in sheets of wax paper, pressed between stakes of books, and left to dry. Larger objects (e.g., branches, wood chunks, rocks, slate shingles, horseshoes, skulls) were positioned on bookshelves. When studying and creating with the objects, I selected what I was drawn to and sat with them either strewn across my desk or clusters on the floor. I examined their details (e.g., textures, colors,

207 forms, lines, and shapes), photographed, and journaled about the objects and my relationship with place.

After finishing creative activities with the gathered objects, I kept some of them, but many were eventually returned to the land. Objects like chestnuts or sunflower seeds were roasted and eaten. Others were returned outdoors put back in landscape of forest, fence rows, and pastures. Returning them to land was so they could continue their existence be that blowing away in the wind, settling into the dirt, decaying to nourish the soil, or helping to sustain or create new lives by nourishing the animals living on the land.

The fragility of the objects was part of the why they were returned but so too was their place in the ecosystem itself. Acorns, for example, become a food source for the deer, squirrels, and wild turkeys were just some of the creatures who relied upon them for nourishment. The creatures and ecosystem were part of my reasoning for returning them to the natural environment as well. In terms of the objects that were kept, they were ones that were not perishable such as rocks, horns, nests, bones, skulls, and so forth.

Photographing. Although touched on briefly in the domain’s prior sections, more details regarding how photographing was utilized can provide a fuller account of the method’s usage. The photographs generated within the autobiographical domain were taken by the researcher while wandering and throughout her daily life immersed in the place. All of the photographs were taken using either my digital camera or iPhone’s built-in camera. After photographing and manipulating images, which will be described shortly, the images were backed up as soon as possible to several locations including a personal cloud server, external hard drive, and laptop. Diligence with respects to doing

208 this was important because of the unpredictability of technology and potential loss of visual data.

Photography as a method for qualitative research is well-established (Emme,

2008; Holm, 2014; Keegan, 2008; Langmann & Pick, 2018; Pink, 2007; Rose, 2012), and using photos has also been recognized as part of the creative, art-making repertoire for arts–based researchers (e.g., Herman, 2005; Holm, Sahlström, & Zilliacus, 2018;

Suominen, 2003, 2006 2007b; Ricardo & Ioaqun, 2010; Scotti & Chilton, 2018).

Photographing my experience within place blurred the lines between documentation and making artworks. Photographing was used as a way to create visual data about my relationship with place, and the use of photography was motived by Dewey’s

(1934/2005) observation that to understand aesthetics we “must begin with it in the raw; in the events and scenes that hold the attentive eye and ear of man[woman], arousing his[her] interest” (p. 3). Photographing, in other words, was a tool used to generate data during the spontaneous events and scenes that caught my attention within the place.

Often accompanying photographing was the use of my artful journaling, which provided space for written details, memories, and poetic passages surrounding my image-making.

Photographs were reviewed following my unknowable, unpredictable aesthetic encounters with place, and this process was done in order to discard unappealing images and retain others. The decision used to either delete or keep an image was the degree to which I felt it still resonated with the aesthetic encounter. Worth noting too is that enfolded in the creative activities were photos generated during the familial and archival domains. As the trove of photographic grew, I began creatively manipulating and

209 transforming individual images as well as putting the together with each other in various ways.

With respects to the creative process with the images, a wide variety of techniques were explored depending on what moved me about images as a looked through and thought them. Some of the time I played with zoom-in properties as a way of cutting up and cropping images to focus on specific details. Other times, flipping them in all sorts of directions happened. Experimentation took place with the photographs’ tones, colors, and transparencies. Filters were used to modify, enhance, and distort original image or emphasize certain aspects. Duplicating, juxtaposing, overlapping, and collaging images became an artful practice for reorganizing and recomposing images to created new ones.

Figure 26. Spongy bodies.

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Figure 27. Missing parts.

Figure 28. Milkweed, spreading seeds.

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Figure 29. The sky’s songs, looking west.

All of the actions taken with the photographs were, for me, a sort of artmaking around my experience of living with place. As Elliot Eisner (1971) argued, the act of doing and creating art involves “the ability to perceive things, not merely to recognize them” (p. 5).

Through taking and reassembling images, I was not seeking to only examine the content in my photos, but I was also becoming aware and interpreting my experience of living within place. Photographing place and then playing with images became a way for me to begin engaging in meaning-making through photographic artmaking. Photos were a way of exploring the external nature of place and telling the stories my internal state.

Artful journaling. Similar to the familial and archival domains, journaling was a method employed in the autobiographical domain too, and the journal was dedicated to generating data in tandem with the methods of wandering, gathering, and photographing.

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Engaging in artful journaling, however, differed slightly from how the familial and archival journals were utilized. Hence, the use of artful to describe the nature of journaling in the autobiographical domain. While the researcher journals focused on tracing and processing data alongside my experience as a novice researcher, this journal was a mixed-media sketchbook for my artful explorations of place. The journal’s paper allowed for writing passages and visual markings with various types of pencils, pens, colored pencils, watercolor pencils, crayons, and markers.

The act of artful journaling was informed by and sensitive to Blumenfeld-Jones’s

(2012) concerns about aesthetics and artmaking getting overtaken by instrumentalist drives. The observation of Blumenfeld-Jones was coupled with Macdonald’s (1995) support of “meditative thinking,” which is thinking not done "in a functional, utilitarian way” rather in a pondering way and practicing a “releasement toward things and an openness to the mystery” (p. 92). Utilitarian and instrumentalist drives would have positioned journaling as only having usefulness and value in so much as it could help achieve an aim or solve a problem. Instead, artful journaling was deliberately understood and approached as open-ended and emergent, a creative process for the purpose of simply making a document through my flow of experience within place. My journal was a space to generate and creatively create and process data from my experiences of living with place.

The creation of my journal’s substance happened through the flow of my sensations, thoughts, questions, and feelings related to place. The visual and written data included a mixture of qualities such as the corporeal, material, temporal, relational, and

213 imaginative. The corporeal was sensory data (e.g., sketches, textures, chilly and warm patches of air, stillness of my breath watching or listening to creatures, scent of potato chips floating in the north breeze from the factory in town, and more). The material was data on human-made and natural matter around the place (e.g., barns, gardens, homes, fencerows, sheds, woodpiles, chickens, animal graves, creeks, springs, trees, and more).

The temporal was data related to time and events (e.g., my recollections of living in the place as a child, returning for weekend during college, and more). The relational was data on webbed with other human and more than human (e.g., siblings, horses, peacocks, barns, renters, grandparents, and more). Lastly, the imaginative was data from my inspirations and intuitions felt from within place (e.g., maps, poetic words, impressions, or phrases). The artful journal, in sum, became a collection visual and narrative data created from my aesthetics experiences living within place, and journaling was a way of cultivating awareness around myself and place.

The Analysis of Data

The corpus of data generated within the archival, familial, and autobiographical domains was enormous. The public and private archival data encompassed: one researcher journal, 43 maps, roughly 1,400 carbon copies of typed letters, three family photo albums and 300 loose photos, and 100 photographs documenting everyday objects around the place taken by the researcher. The familial domain generated: 35 hours of recorded interviews, 100 photographs from living participants, a log of renters, a gardening journal, two family trees, two memoir essays, and one researcher journal.

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Finally, data from the autobiographical domain consisted of approximately 6,000 photographs taken by the artist-researcher and one artful journal.

Given the sheer amount of data produced, analysis efforts were utilized early on and emmeshed in the thick of data generation with each domain. To recap, early analysis undertaken in the archival domain resulted in: a timeline of the place’s ownerships and significant local events, biographical sketches of owners, summaries from reading literature (Leavy, 2015a) related to the land, summary sheets of my great grandfather’s letters, photo clusters, and reflective journal entries about everyday objects I photographed around the land. Meanwhile, early analysis in efforts in the familial domain involved included: making verbatim transcripts of all interviews, interview summary sheets, eight biographical sketches of participants, descriptive and reflective notes in my researcher journal made throughout the interview process. In the autobiographical domain, early analysis of my experiences and memories with the land involved creative artmaking through photo manipulation and artful journaling. All of the early analysis efforts were not determined before data generation rather they organically emerged as ways for me to begin the necessary process of making sense of data as it was coming forth.

All research projects require a researcher to complete multiple readings of the data corpus. Therefore, in order to be transparent and explicit with respect the systematic ways data was analyzed, I must describe what was done beyond the early analysis efforts just described. Leavy (2015) explained the analysis process as “cycles” in which the researcher sinks deeper and deeper into the data. A similar sentiment is echoed by Rubin

215 and Rubin (2005) and Schwartz-Shea and Yanow (2012). Accompanying this deepening, a researcher must also be awareness of how data analysis will always be partial, a recognition made decades ago by Geertz (1973)—any analysis will always be

“intrinsically incomplete” (p. 29). To further immerse myself into the data, a later phase of analysis unfolded once the generation of place-based data adjourned. Much like the emergence of my early analysis effort, the later phase was also not predetermined nor a linear, step-by-step process. Instead, it was far more cyclical as Leavy (2015) suggested and informed by the hermeneutic and interpretive subtexts inherent in working with pragmatism (Rosiek, 2013a; Ryan, 2011). The later phase of analysis proceeded through two cycles. The first cycle involved a further analysis within each one of the domains, while the second cycle attended to aesthetic qualities across the domains.

Frist Cycle: Attending to the Domains

Engaging in further analysis within each domain, encouraged me to explore place simultaneously from different angles. With respects to unpacking the familial domain’s data, analysis was done to the transcribed interviews with the intentions of: 1) immersing myself in the totality of what each participant shared about his/her experience of living in the research context, and 2) developing more understanding around what place means to each person. Before beginning, I printed all the transcripts in order to create a packet for each individual participant. Analysis began by picking one packet and giving all its content read-through. Reading the pack in its entirety was a way to give my full attention to the participant at hand. After doing a thoughtful first read, I began the process of rereading of the packet but with the added intention of making marks and notations using

216 colored pencils, pens, and sticky notes. Rereading involved searching for and underlining “meaning units” (Patterson & Williams, 2002), which were statements or sentences expressed by a participant about his/her experience of living in the research context. Said differently, a meaning unit is a chunk of data from an interview “that expresses an idea…and [is] coherent enough that it can be focused on separately” (p. 47).

While identifying meaning units, I also wrote on sticky notes the phrases/words that came to my mind while reading and stuck them to the pages of the packet.

Following the process of combing through a packet, I then proceeded to working with the printed transcripts’ corresponding electronic files. The transition to working digitally was purposeful because of the ease with which I could copy, paste, and move around the meaning units in a fresh Word document. Per Patterson’s and Williams’s

(2002) advice, I created a simple indexing system in which a tag was given to each meaning unit for the sole purpose of referencing the participant and interview number

(e.g., Adam_1; Connie_3). Once the meaning units from the transcripts were put into a new document, I proceeded to generate thematic labels as anchors. Creating thematic labels was my attempt at interpreting what the meaning units revealed about a participant’s experience with place. When interpreting, my thinking about the labels was informed by the phrases/words jotted down on sticky notes as well as my researcher’s journal that housed my "internal dialogue” (Leavy, 2015a) in relationship to interview data as it was emerging. Worth mentioning too is that I considered “disconfirming evidence” (Erikson, 1986) within interviews in order to interrogate my interpretive declarations. Once I finished processing an entire transcript packet, I continued onward

217 to the next participant’s packet identifying meaning units and formulating thematic labels. These same systematic practices were employed until all the transcripts were processed, and fresh documents existed for each participant that catalogued my initial interpretive efforts.

Turning from the familial domain, deeper analysis in the archival domain was also a part of the first cycle. During my time in the archives, I was absorbed in trailing specific details I unearthed through names, dates, and documents related to research context. Because of this, I came to the later phase of analysis with several objects created about the land (i.e., place-based timeline, owner biographical sketches, photo clusters, letter summary sheets, and reflective journal entries about everyday objects around the research). To continue with analysis, I reacquainted myself with these objects. The summary sheets I made from my great grandfather’s (Earl) letters contained verbatim quotes I had typed up electronically, and I reread them applying the analysis technique of

“theming” (Saldaña, 2016), which gave phrase(s) or sentence(s) to the passages I have pulled out. Theming, in other words, “identifies what a unit of data is about" (p. 199).

Memo writing also became the analytical tool I employed with the other archive objects I made. As Saldaña (2011b) pointed out, “since writing is analysis, analytic memos expand on the inferential meanings…into a more coherent narrative” (p. 102).

Said differently, memoing became “a ‘think piece’ of reflexive freewriting” that allowed me to put into words my “interpretations of the data,” especially around what relationships and stories I saw present in the archival data and how I personally related to place the light of what the archives provided (p. 98).

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Turning finally to the autobiographical domain data, which also underwent additional analysis through the first cycle. Analytical memoing was the primary analysis tool I used to capture in writing interpretations about my autobiographical data.

Memoing was a tool that allowed me to, as Leavy (2015a) pointed out, tap into my

“emotional carnal, psychological, and intellectual indicators” that were present when reviewing my creative efforts (p. 269). As explored the content in my artful journal and flipped through my photographs—those manipulated and untouched—I wrote reflectively around what I had been drawn to in my experience of living with place, what moved me, what my relationships were, and what was educative about place for me.

Second Cycle: Feeling and Seeing Together

After engaging in further analysis within each domain, the second cycle of analysis unfolded as an effort to think outside of the structure of the domains. To ground the second cycle of analysis, I returned my attention on the overarching question guiding my inquiry: How can place be understood through the aesthetics of everyday life?, and in doing so, reconnected with the quality that aesthetic understanding involves the subjective in that “it is distinctly felt…by the experiencing subject rather than simply being registered in an unconscious inattentive way” (Shusterman, 2006, p. 219). The use of “feeling” in the subheading is meant to capture the aesthetic, while “seeing together” was deliberately borrowed from Frank Ryan’s (2011) writing because it captures how I approached the second cycle of analysis, which was seeing together “the individual… within a set of relations…an entire organism-environment system,” all the while knowing the one can never account for entirety (p. 35).

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Because this dissertation project was prompted by “experiential incitements”

(Rosiek, 2013a) that disrupted to my “nonreflective” (Ryan, 2011) state of living within place, there was a need to return to my subjective vantage point. After all, the subjective vantage for pragmatism is “a necessary ground of contingent knowledge” (Rosiek,

2013b, p. 165), and “knowledge is ultimately grounded in and must return for its validation to the course of personal experience” (Rosiek & Pratt, 2013, p. 586). For the second cycle of analysis then, I decided that I need to refresh and recreate a space in which to nest myself in the data and prior analysis.

The first step I took in the second cycle of analysis was to create a space in which

I could sit within and contemplate place. To establish my data cocoon, several actions were taken. I decided to adorn the walls and floor of my office space with documents and images. For example, I pulled together all the thematic labels I made from the interviews and wrote them out across large sheets of newsprint paper using eight different colors, one color for each participant as a way see each individual of my family. I also wrote out all the thematic labels I came to through the analysis of my great grandfather’s letters on another scroll of newsprint. I printed out the timeline I had created from the archives and tapped it to my office’s wall along with printed copies of the many maps of the place—a sort of archival ‘collage.’ As for photographs, I printed the list of themes I noticed when I clustered family photographs, and I also laid 12 or so of them out at a time across my desk, later trading them out for other images.

Once my office was liberally wrapped in documents and arranged items, I inhabited the space as a sort of art studio, a data studio. I sat spending several hours a

220 day within the data and treated this time as a full-bodied activity. My body moved around the office regularly sitting standing, pausing, and walking interacting with the data. At times, I talked outload to myself about the data and what I was seeing and feeling. Other times, I listened to music as I read and reread the themes and my journals and sang aloud as I looked at family pictures. I looked at and make marks on the maps, and other times used sticky notes to write thoughts and stuck them to printed documents.

During my studio time, I also make mind maps on paper to document my webbed relationships with the data. The maps I created were from what I felt and knew about place with the data generated at that given point in time, and I was striving see myself within sets of relationships. All the while, as I felt and saw my relationships in the data, I kept a running list in a Word document.

Pragmatism offered a continuous caution that I took seriously during the second cycle of analysis, which was to get lost in subjectivism. As Ryan (2011) stressed, I needed the analysis within my problem-solving to not yield to “subjectivism” (p. 44).

“Experience...must be converted from the subjective domain of the knower into a whole inclusive of knower and known” (p. 44). Given this cautionary advice, I wanted to not yield to my subjectivity by get lost within what I felt about the data. Blessed with living in the research context alongside many of my family members/participants, my circumstance afforded me many opportunities to enact the strategy of “talking shop”

(Saldaña, 2016) during the second cycle of analysis. Talking shop was a way to engage in a “post-coding” activity (p. 212), which involved talking about the feelings, relationships, dilemmas, and thoughts I had about data with family members. Talking

221 shop was a way for me share and dialogue with family members relationships in the place-based data I was keeping as in the Word document. Our conversations were helpful in confirming my insights as well as pushing me to returning to the data and pursue more nuance to what I was thinking and feeling in the data.

Guided by the aesthetically rooted research question and methodological principles borrowed from arts-based research and pragmatism, I did not want to get lost in creating a static, hierarchical structure or some ranked thematic organization as a form through which to represent the study’s data and findings. Because I have a natural proclivity to gravitate toward visual thinking and making, I returned to Figure 2 (see page

136) as a way to begin illustrating the compelling relationships that emerged from the data. Once I drafted the visual anew with the early sets of relationships I saw and felt in the data, I extended an offer to participants to review my interpretative efforts about our shared place.

Sharing the illustration and sets of relationships was again an effort made in

“talk[ing] shop” (Saldaña, 2016) with family members, and I shared with them how the interpretations enfolded data not only from our open-ended interviews but also archival and autobiographical domain data. Based on conversations and participant input, I returned again to the illustration and continued to contemplate my understandings of the relationships alive in the place. I made refinements to the sets of relationships as well as the verbiage used for them, and I subsequently worked through iterations refreshing the illustration. All the while I maintained attention to what I thought and felt were the significant place-based relationships within the data.

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Given the foundational influence of pragmatism to my inquiry, Figure 30 is an illustration of the place-based relationships I settled upon after their initial formation, sharing, and refinement. I decided to call these findings, experiential objectives in light of pragmatism (Ryan, 2011). The experiential objectives were the relational, aesthetic qualities that surfaced through my transactions with the data particularly during the later phase of analysis. Worth noting is that the later phase of analysis was never a separate exercise void of prior experience with the data but rather pulled upon and enfolded earlier analysis too. A critical point needs fleshed out here in terms of my usage of the word

“objective” in order to describe my study’s findings.

Objective was not applied in the traditional sense of how it is taken up through rationalism and empiricism with a designation of facts/laws, mind-independence, and sterilized from subjective influences. Nor did objective mean an existing aim or goal that has been achieved. Using the word objective to term my findings was rooted explicitly in transactional pragmatism (Ryan, 2011). Through pragmatism, experiential objectives were understood “not [as] some inaccessible mind-independent reality,” rather they were

“products of constructive problem-solving activities—the attained objectives of inquiry”

(p. 25 & 29). Recall too that Shusterman (2006) pointed out that aesthetic experience, from a pragmatist lens, is objective in that it “also implies some object of experience (the

‘what’ of experience)” (p. 219). And the object, or the what of experience, is “distinctly felt...by the experiencing subject,” which was the artist-researcher (p. 219). The five experiential objectives, then, are the ‘whats’ that emerged through inquiring into the aesthetics of a place.

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Said differently, the experiential objectives were the compelling aesthetic commitments that arose through my problem-solving focused on place, and as can be seen in Figure 30, the objectives from the hermeneutic, interpretative analysis included: past~present, living~dead, individual~collective, human~nonhuman, and material~immaterial. Always a caution in pragmatism though is that any objectives or objects of experience—including those derived from my dissertation project—are only ever temporary “explanations that are reliable and broadly applicable, yet eminently revisable” (Ryan, 2011, p. 60). The objectives of experience—as pragmatism always stresses—are always tied to more and more experience yet to coming. The objective of experience is more experience. The five experiential objectives, therefore, were not being treated as fix and absolute, rather they are outcomes that emerged from my immersion within the data generation and analysis processes and proved to have an enduring quality.

Figure 30. The experiential objectives.

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Portraying the objectives as hovering in and swirling around the data domains

(i.e., familial, archival, autobiographical) was a deliberate choice for two key reasons.

One reason was that all of the objectives were understood to be of equal importance to understanding the place aesthetically. Another reason for such depiction was to challenge tendencies for hierarchical, lineal structures. Worth mentioning too with respects to placement is also the use of tilde symbols (i.e., ~). This was done to characterize how the objectives carried both distinct differences but were understood as interconnected relationships with respects to the aesthetics of the place. As an example, the was a distinct past and present at play when “centering” (Macdonald, 1995) in the aesthetics of place, but the past and present were also interconnected, merging in terms of interpreting data.

Indicators of Rigor and Ethical Considerations

The prior sections in this chapter woven in some discussion surrounding ethics and rigor, but these are significant matters in qualitative research and thus deserve to be highlighted further because, as Hendry (2010) reminds us, “research cannot be separated from ethics or from life” (p. 79). Throughout the research process, I needed to remain attentive to ethical considerations when respects to participants, data, and representations.

Ethical considerations with respects to these are important give how knowledge is always tethered to concerns of “power, authority, and meaning-making” (Leavy, 2011b, p. 54).

Accordingly, advice and practices suggested in from the qualitative, ABR, and pragmatism literature supported my efforts in enacting research with a sense of respect and care for participants and appreciation for their experiences.

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First and foremost, I maintained an updated CITI certificate and submitted my research for IRB approval, essential steps taken prior to inviting family members to participate in my study of place. This formal peer-review process was part of thinking through how to present my study’s purpose, methods, benefits, and risks in an accessible way for my future participants as well as IRB members. Part of my IRB work also involved creating two consent forms one for informed consent and the other for audio/visual consent. These two forms were used to in tandem with my personal invitations to participants, and I fielded any questions related to my study with family members prior to data generation with them. An issue broached when inviting family to participate was honoring their confidentially and the use of pseudonyms in any form of reporting. All participants were appreciative of my concern to honor their confidentially but stated that using pseudonyms was not necessary. Given their decisions and my desire to honor oral history’s use of “firsthand accounts” for “bearing witness and filling in historical record,” I settled upon using family members first names when reporting

(Leavy, 2011b, p. 17). Over the course of my study, I also submitted progress reports to

IRB in order to guarantee my study adhered to their annual review, which was a chance to share updates along with any changes or concerns.

Although my research was considered minimal risk by IRB, I was sensitive to how human experience as enmeshed with subjective, emotional, social, and political realities (Leavy, 2015a, Norkunas, 2013; Rosiek, 2013a), and such realities were enfolded in my study because I drew upon persons’ lived experiences in order to generate data. Exploring place in a way that drew upon others’ lives was never going to be a

226 neutral, anesthetics affair, and working with participants came with the possibility unexpected reactions and potential uneasiness. I heeded Leavy’s (2011b) observation that participants at times may or may not choose to reveal deeply personal concerns, which I respected and accepted as a possibility. Of upmost importance to me was my participants’ comfort and emotional wellbeing. Throughout my engagement with family members, I made a conscious effort to reinforce shared power in our time together; they had control in our open-ended conversations to skip questions or change directions should they feel uneasy when sharing their feelings, memories, perceptions, and relationships to place. Altogether, I strove to not push participants into a state of discomfort and believe I was successful in doing so since none of them expressed nor visually seemed the slightest bit uncomfortable with their involvement throughout my engagement with them.

In terms of ethical considerations, it is worth mentioning too how I envisioned my role as a researcher because it grounded my project. The qualities of humility and reflectivity were central (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Rosiek, 2013a; Leavy, 2015a), and I made a concerted effort to embody these. Humility involved “recognizing the radical contingency of the experiences” that “inspired and informed” the inquiry and with the emergent, hermeneutic nature of pragmatic inquiry (Rosiek, 2013b, p. 175). Said otherwise, such humility “stands in contrast to the human arrogance and black-and-white thinking that are features of all forms of literalism, fundamentalism, and authoritarianism.” (Henderson, Castner, & Schneider, 2018, p. 19). Reflectivity, which is a commonplace in qualitative research, asked me to engage in regular examination of my

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“own position in the research endeavor, including your assumptions, feelings, and decisions (Leavy, 2015a, p. 282). I engaged in the practice of reflectivity by journaling throughout my immersion in data generation, analysis, and representation.

As I began making sense of interview data during early analysis, I took up the practice of member checking (Merriam, 2002; Riessman, 2008). Member checking was a practice utilized throughout the data generation process with my familial participants; it was “an ongoing process” rather than a “a separate procedure” (Sandelowski, 2008, p.

501). Riessman’s (2008) observation of member checking as the “act of making inquiry explicit” was relevant too (p. 186). This practice is invaluable for researchers because it helps with issues of coherence, persuasion, and presentation of the narratives collected.

Member checking, then, became a way to take two ethical actions on my behalf. One action was being transparent with participants regarding my in-progress interpretive efforts in understanding their relationship with place. The second action was giving them an opportunity to challenge, clarify, and confirm the interpretations I was coming to.

Engaging participants as such was a way of honoring the experiential, relative, and situational nature (McCalsin, 2008; Rosiek, 2013a; Ryan, 2011) of their truths with place.

All the while knowing full well that such truths are always slippery and fallible.

Member checking took on two dimensions, one I anticipated and the other not so much. The anticipated quality of member checking was for further clarification in terms of participants’ individualized understandings with place. I shared my emerging interpretations before and after interviews with all participants, and I shared these in a couple ways. I shared the interview summary sheets and biographical sketches I crafted

228 from data generated with each participant. Sharing these documents gave individuals a chance to read my notes and offer refinements they felt were needed per their realities with place. Member checking also unfolded during interviews with family members, and these moments were ones where I was seeking clarification of participants viewpoints.

Me: So, I’ve been thinking about what you’ve shared about growing up on the

land, and I'm wondering if you see it as home for you? Does home factors in is

part of your relationship with it? Or am I off in thinking that?

Tom: Yeah. ...I guess it would continue to be a home-place in a sense to me. If I

came to Wooster, I would probably go there. Or at least drive down the roads and

say, "Hello." And it's hard to separate that from the fact that there are some

people there that I know. …Um, but if the people weren't there, I'd probably still

go look at it. Just see how it's changed or whatever. I would be curious. Um...I

don't think it's a home-place in a romantic sense. Ya know, not like people think of

as a magnet that draws them back.

Me: So, it’s not some kind of nostalgia or longing really?

Tom: Yeah, I don't think it's that. Or, I don't feel that particular element. And that

might have to do to some degree with just the aesthetics of the boundaries of the

land. Or it wouldn't be that to me. I don't feel like I've gotta make

a pilgrimage back there every year, or every five years, or every ten years. If I

never go back there again, so be it. It's not that I feel I'm lost. But that doesn't

mean that I'm not curious about, if a Walmart going to go up in the triangle, I'd

be curious. Ya know, how come? So, uh...it doesn't have a mythic pull. … The

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nostalgia element, I think, for most people is pretty weak, if you include the

extended Barnes lineage. Certainly, people who own it or have a vested interested

in it would naturally have a greater interest in it. And I respect that, but it isn't

universal.

This passage illustrates a moment of member checking amidst on my behalf in an interview session with Tom. I began getting an impression of ‘home’ from what he had shared through our conversations and photos, but member checking was a way for him clarify his experiential truth around the place. Place had a sense of “home” in its ties to his adolescences/young adult life living there and the extended family (i.e., first cousins) living in the place. The place a sort of home was interlaced with and “hard to separate that from” the extended family who live there. But was also not home in a sense of ownership or aesthetic appeal for Tom.

Member checking is typically done with participants who are living and involves the researcher’s emerging interpretations about data from participants, but the second unexpected—yet intriguing—dimension member checking took on in my research was that it involved the dead too. Generating data about place ended up involving the dead who had lived on the land from my immediate and extended family, but there were also those individuals with whom I had not familial connection (e.g., Thomas and Susan

McCracken, William Kelly, Michael and Hannah Miller, James and Hannah Donald,

Frank and Minnie Bishop, John and Lulu Jamison, and the Native Tribes of the

Delawares, Wyandots, and Shawnees). As I generated data through archives and interviews, I was struck by questions that arose: What does the past—now alive in the

230 through my experience—ask of me in the present?; How might I help myself better understanding the dead’s connection to place in a more layered way?

In an attempt to address my quandaries around the dead, I utilized living participants as sounding boards for the interpretations I was forming about the deceased

Barnes’ family members’ lives and connections with land. Through pulling wisdom from the perceptions of the living, I was able to extend and push against my viewpoint of certain deceased persons. But I was and still am left with uncertainty around the dead that are beyond my bloodline kin. What is(are) my responsibility as a researcher and creative to those dead? Using member checking was a practice employed to extending opportunities to participants to have input on my initial interpretative efforts, but using it was not without a degree of limitation.

Representation: Creating a Geostory through Experiential Objectives

A traditional epistemological practice in research is to represent a study’s findings, and this is often done through the use of practices for reporting finding that support definitive conclusions, hierarchical themes or structures, and sequenced events.

Borrowing methodological principles from ABR and pragmatism, however, challenged and disrupted these traditional practices and formats. Utilizing more traditional data reporting practices works against the ABR’s tenets of crafting expressive forms in ways that are evocative and persuasive alongside inspiring deliberation and resonances within the researcher and percipients (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2015a, 2017). To add

ABR, also, encourages a researcher to avoid “pushing authoritative claims" (Leavy,

2015a, p. 26). Recall too that an inquiry framed through pragmatism does not get overly

231 preoccupied with finding truths or validity in ways that “privilege the findings”

(McCalsin, 2008, p. 673). Instead, pragmatism is more concerned with “ontological pluralism and a future oriented conception of meaning” (Rosiek, 2013b, p. 165).

Proclaiming dogmatic truths or being overly assured, commanding, or definitive when reporting what emerges from inquiry can shut down future problem-solving and the imaginative, hermeneutic possibilities yet to come, that is, for new or competing interpretations. Results from a pragmatic inquiry, then, should be presented in ways that avoid narrowing and embrace the reflective qualities of humility, open-minded, and whole-heartedness (Dewey, 1910/1933; Henderson, Castner, & Schneider, 2018).

With these underpinnings from ABR and pragmatism in mind, a purposeful decision was made to create an expressive form in order to represent my inquiry’s findings. Figure 30 (see page 223) showcased the five experiential objectives that emerged through my analysis of place-based data. These objectives served as the signposts for my artmaking process, and the most illustrative data around each of the objectives was used to create a “geostory” (Haraway, 2016). During the course of my inquiry, I read Haraway’s (2016) book challenging us to stay present amidst our contemporary challenges, and I was struck by her call for creating and sharing

“geostories." As a concept, geostories carried a sense of agency and creative potential for the representation phase of my dissertation. As a concept, geostory recognizes that our lives are always motion through webbed relationships that exist within the unresolvable tensions of knowing and living on Earth amidst the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011).

And while living amidst such unresolvable tensions, one had the power to take creative

232 actions. Creating a geostory held an inherent art-making potential of working in a reconstructive way with the study’s findings (i.e., the five experiential objectives) and to do so in a place-driven fashion.

Notwithstanding my desire to employ the concept of “geostory,” I had to acknowledge that my background was limited in terms of disciplined study and practice in the art of story writing. Much of my writing background has been in studying and teaching academic writing. Therefore, I took two measure to begin enriching my understanding and embracing the fact that becoming a creative writer is a journey that would not just happen overnight because of this dissertation. Firstly, I began by reading works from arts-based researchers who have embraced creative literary genres in their research such as poetry (Leggo, 2008; Prendergast, Leggo, & Sameshima, 2009;

Sameshima, Fidyk, James, & Leggo, 2017), fiction (Leavy, 2011a, 2013a, 2013b), and creative nonfiction (Barone, 2008; Sinner, Hasebe-Ludt, Leggo, 2018). Although not a substitute for courses or workshops, the second action I took to enrich myself was to seek out the counsel of two dear friends, Allison Templeton and Charity Gingrich both of whom have their Master of Fine Arts degrees in creative writing and are active writers.

Allison focuses more in fiction, while Charity is a poet (Gingrich, 2010, 2014, 2019).

One key piece of advice shared by both of them was to read, read, and keep on reading. Consequently, reading works of creative writing became a regular practice of mine while analyzing data and writing this dissertation (e.g., Adichie, 2006; Amos, 2016;

Harris, 1993; Hurston, 2018; Kidd, 2014; Jahren, 2016; Manning, 2004; Orange, 2018;

Westover, 2018). In addition, one should not only experience others’ writing but should

233 also make, make, and keep on making in order to enrich one’s understanding of creative writing. For working on my understanding of the process of making stories, I also reviewed several texts (e.g., Kramer & Call, 2007; Gutkind, 2012; Hart, 2011; Miller &

Paola, 2004) that offered guidance on the nature of and processes for doing creative nonfiction, and I took note of key elements touched upon by the authors. The book by

Miller and Paola (2004) was—for me as a novice—particularly instructive because of its combination of practical guidance coupled with activities and illustrative examples. The practices of both reading and making stressed by both Allison and Charity became exercises that I took up to begin educating myself in terms of creative writing.

Miller and Paola (2004) focused specifically on the art-making form of creative nonfiction. Such storytelling is appropriate for individuals who want “to tell the truth” but want to do so in ways that go beyond being a “mere transcriber of life’s factual experiences” (p. 2). Creative nonfiction enables an artist-researcher to generate artwork through making stories up that are in line with and embedded in what was found. In other words, it is a form of storytelling “rooted in the real world … [but] … might contain elements of fabrication, it’s directly connected to you as the author behind the text. (pp. 2-3). The decision to infuse the concept of geostory with guidance from creative nonfiction was because of my dissertation’s focus on exploring the real world through a real place with real people who lived real lives there. My inquiry’s resulting five experiential objectives revealed to me were aesthetic qualities about place and I wanted to share them with others but through an aesthetic form. Creative nonfiction was

234 a way to maintain a sense of continuity from the design portion of my inquiry through to representation.

With regards to specifics, creative nonfiction brought to my geostory writing serious considerations of six tenets frequently used in telling stories.

1. Scene: The elements present in a given location with particular attention given to

impressions, descriptions, sensory details, and relationships. A scene involves

giving readers “experiences, not lectures” so that they can “enter into events and

uncover their meanings” for themselves (p. 13). Showing not telling to evoke

readers’ senses, minds, and imaginations.

2. Character development: Carving out the essences of the individuals who will be a

part of the story. The essences should include the common characteristics but

also what gives each person a sense of individualization, that is, distinctive

qualities (e.g., mental, physical, moral, etc.).

3. Point of view: The position from which a story is being narrated (e.g.,

first/second/third person).

4. Dialogue: Embrace it. Conversations are not for “information dumping” rather

involve an unfolding between the story’s characters (p. 17). Crafting dialogue

asks a writer to consider matters of natural cadence and dialect. Flow in speaking

is also key because we rarely speaking full, compound complex sentences rather

more so in simple ones.

5. Sentence rhythm: Matters of sentence structure (e.g., word choice, clauses,

grammar, punctuation, etc.) are part of the creative writing process. Sentences

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make the proses and supply “the poetic line, the bass and rhythm” in a story (p.

21).

6. Image and metaphor: While working with image involves sense impressions in

the author’s and readers’ minds, metaphor is used for the purpose of comparisons.

In addition to advice borrowed from the realm of creative nonfiction, the process of creating a geostory was one in which I was concerned with the “incisiveness, concision, and coherence” of my final product (Leavy, 2015a, p. 278), while also striving for my output to be “believable” to others (p. 273). The challenge of working in such a way meant striking a balance between the spaces of being an artist and a researcher, and I looked to established arts-based scholars for support and guidance on this matter (e.g.,

Barone & Eisner, 2012; Blumenfeld-Jones, 2012; Leavy, 2015a). The ethical practices of

“artistic license” and “sensitive portrayals” (Leavy, 2015a) were thoughtfully considered and utilized when crafting the geostory.

The notion of artistic license acknowledges that a researcher has is an “ethical obligation to represent the data [and] to be truthful and faithful to the data,” while also using her/his sense of “artistry…[to] educate and to produce quality art” (p. 282). In addition to provoking the researcher-artist to be attentive to the quality of the art, artistic license also involves the fact that “tensions can emerge” when generating an arts-based artifact (p. 282). Writing in a creative nonfiction form, as Miller and Paola (2004) wrote, is caught up within the issue of artistic licenses. “No matter how meticulous your research or your notes, at some point you’ll need to rely on memory and imagination to go beyond what lies at your fingertips” (p. 30). Blumenfeld-Jones (2012) beautifully

236 captured the marriage of artistic licenses and artmaking when he wrote about his own process.

As the art piece unfolds, I project a finished work that is constantly modified by

the actual making process and the resultant and emerging form. The parts only

cohere as there is a whole within which they can cohere. This image is one of

oscillation, moving back and forth between the whole and that emerging work.

…[T]he art piece constantly present new wholes and new possibilities for new

parts. Where I begin and plan to go with the development of the art piece never

remain the same. New possibilities only emerge through the action of making and

meditating upon the making and the physicality of the art piece. (p. 36)

Crafting my geostory about place involved artistic license and Blumenfeld-Jones’ observation that artmaking is an oscillating between an imagined whole—a yet to be— and the pieces at hand in the moment. As much as possible while making the geostory, I drew upon and wove together the most pertinent textual and visual data to anchor and illuminate the findings (i.e., the five experiential objectives), but making the geostory also educed my imaginative, expressive sensibilities. Therefore, further explanation of my creative decision-making can elucidate how I utilized my artistic license alongside addressing concerns related to creating an expressive, representational form.

Artistic license unfolded in the overall narrative arc and the dramatic effects and scenes within the story. The primary setting—or main backdrop—of the geostory was the 65 acres of land (i.e., the research context), and smaller scenes were crafted around this setting in order to carry readers from the beginning through to the story’s closing.

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Play with a picnic and campfire as scenes, for example, began their formation one day while casually chatting with Allison about my dissertation writing. A picnic and campfire felt like they held potential as scenes because both showed up as shared experiences in the familial domain data. Such scenes felt aligned with how much of the data with my participants emerged, which was through the sharing of people’s experiences via open-ended conversations that embraced recollections and retellings of experiences with place. Creative decision-making informed the geostory’s overall narrative arc from the flow and sequencing of events to dialogues and transitions, and throughout the art-making process I strove to enfolded relevant data with of my own imaginative and expressive capacities.

Another illustration of artistic license can be seen in the viewpoint from which the geostory was narrated. Because the impetus of this dissertation’s problematic situation was stirred inside me through “experiential incitements” (Rosiek, 2013a) and the research process was propelled forward by my desire to explore place aesthetically, the decision was made to use a first-person point of view to narrate the geostory. Using first-person narration also aligned with pragmatism’s view that inquiry projects often have an inherent first-person quality to them (Rosiek & Pratt, 2013; Rosiek 2013a). Using myself as guiding character in the geostory, therefore, seemed like a logical approach given how

I was the individual who was most informed with respects to this research project’s aim.

As both the creator and narrator driving the storytelling, details and descriptions were created by me, and I also used a reflective present tone in my voice. Said differently, I used descriptions and relevant generated data along with in-action reflection to give nods

238 to the study’s findings. Although the geostory was narrated from my vantage point, it is worth reiterating that the story was not written as an autobiographical exposition nor a memoir but rather is a creative nonfiction that gives attention to Miller’s and Paola’s

(2004) six tenets for telling stories already touch upon.

Miller and Paola (2004) remarked that in storytelling readers will more often than not “recall voices not summaries,” and this piece of advice was heeded in my artistic license around character development (p. 16). Miller’s and Paola’s technique of characterizing characters in “a stroke or two” was helpful advice for distinguishing the individuality of each participant who became a character in the geostory (p. 281). All the while, I strove to acknowledge how each one is also “multidimensional” in nature

(Leavy, 2015a) and holds a different vantagepoint in terms of how she/he is relationally embedded with the place. As much as possible representations of characters and their voices were rooted the data generated from the familial and archival domains. With the characterization of living participants, I tried to the best of my ability to remain true to the participants’ experiences with place as anchored through data from the biographical sketches, interviews, and photographs. To craft characterizations and a presence for deceased familial characters, I relied upon the combination of the biographical sketches, interviews, archival materials, my first-hand experiences with deceased family member, and literature I read created impressions of persons relevant to place.

When molding characters and writing dialogues in the geostory, I relied heavily upon what was generated through interviewing family members. One way I drew upon this data was through the use of quotations, which were minorly edited to fit within the

239 context of the geostory and the flow of its storyline. Another way was through drawing upon participants’ specific remembrances of experiences about the place to illustrate characters’ perspectives and relationships with place. I also drew upon the biographical sketches I made of each participant to help situate their relationship with place. In doing these particular things, I attempted to honor their realities, voices, and viewpoints. That said, however, some of the characters were more ghostly, fading in and out of the geostory, and this required a touch more artistic license on my behalf as an artist.

As my archival efforts aided me in uncovering the names and details about prior land occupants and their lives, these people became more and more real to me. And I often thought about them while I went about living in the same place. Many of their names and lives were ghostly for me. Enigmas present in the place I could sense and feel but that others did not know. Characterizing the prior residents of the place became a way for me to acknowledge those who had relationships with the place but whose connections were lost but retraced. Moreover, having these ghostly impressions was a way for me play within the real and imagined while having them inhabit the present through a story. Real in the sense that they lived lives directly linked to the place and imagined in that while some details can be known about them but so much more is not.

In short, the ghostly impressions of characters enrich the geostory with presences that were deeply informed with the archival data and shape by my process of “centering”

(Macdonald, 1995) in place aesthetically.

Thoughtful consideration was given to the lives of my participants and how I went about characterizing them throughout my artmaking, which transitions to the second

240 ethical practice I took to heart. I tried to the best of my ability to apply the principle of

“sensitive portrayals” (Leavy, 2015a). I was aware that through utilizing memories, feelings, and relationships around place in my creative nonfiction writing I would be making “public what is more often…highly private, almost invisible,” and the “tricky business” of such writing is that “on the one hand there is the challenge—and the thrill— of turning real life into art. But on the other hand, we have to deal with all the issues that come attached to that ‘real life’” (Miller & Paola, 2004, p. 32 & 29). The hours I spent reading literature as well as sitting with and analyzing data in the archives provided historical details that were indispensable for imagining and reviving the lives who once inhabited the place. But as an artists-researcher tricky space arose, for example, in my considerations around reviving the dead for the geostory.

The challenge of working with the archival artifacts was that none of them—with the exception of my great grandfather’s letters—provided first-hand accounts of living with land. Thus, constructing characters from the archives relied upon primary and secondary resources none of which certain people’s first-hand accounts or recollections of experience. Artistic license was used in my decisions when working with characters pulled from archival work. To illustrate, at one point in my archival research I became preoccupied with reading about the Native American Tribes who occupied that land and in particular learning about Killbuck, a Delaware Chief who was mentioned in the literature on the Wayne County and Wooster area. Killbuck became a figure of intrigue, for me, because his namesake is tie to a creek, i.e., Killbuck Creek, which is a staple landmark to experiences with the place.

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Wanting to work with the Chieftain Killbuck as a character within the geostory, however, pushed me into murky waters haunted the grotesque past of the colonization of indigenous populations in North America and how colonization is still a very really, ever- present force. Pragmatism and aesthetics are always, as Cherryholmes (1999) reminds, tethered within concerns of power and politics. Moreover, Leavy’s (2015) cautionary advice around not “colonizing those we aim to portray” was critical advice I heeded (p.

281). When crafting the geostory, I knew fully well that I can never speak form nor for the indigenous people about their experiences with the place. My understanding of their experiences with the place is certainly rife with ignorance and bound by my own limitations of time, space, material circumstances, and personal psychology.

I grappled with how I might write about the indigenous people of the land and if I had any right to do so knowing I am apart of Western society’s colonizing force.

Encountering traces of indigenous tribes through my transactions with local archives and area-specific literature became a very real and visceral experience for me during the inquiry process. And the history of colonization in the area became, for me, an inescapable truth about the place that needed spoken. As the artist and narrator, I felt the

Delaware, Wyandots, and Shawnees needed recognition in the geostory, but I did not want to craft any of them as character for fear of exploitation. Instead, I tried to the best of my abilities to craft a portrayal in ways that were pensive, tactful, and truthful through utilizing the data that emerged coupled with artistic license.

Artistic license also became relevant with respects to the decisions made while crafting the exchanges, elaborations, tensions, pauses, omissions, and so throughout the

242 story. In his writing advice, Birkert’s (2008) referred to the challenge of “the demon of infinite regress,” especially when writing in genres like autobiography, memoir, or nonfiction which are dedicated to exploring experiences and facts tied to real events, people, places, objects, and so on (p. 60). The demon Birket was referring to is the compulsion a writer can have in which they feel a need to provide more and more details for readers. In other others, a writer feels that in order for readers to understand a certain point/meaning they must know this, that, and then some. But this impulse can unleash a potentially endless slew of details, an overload. An example from this where I combined member checking with a decision about descriptiveness and restraint can be seen in an exchange with my mom.

Me: Would it be inaccurate to say that Margaret’s move here was tied to two

sudden and shocking events of Earl’s stroke and Wendell’s suicide?

Mom: Wendall died when Marsha was 6 months old, so spring of 1953.

Margaret wanted to stay in Oklahoma, a little bitter about moving back home so

the clincher for the move was Earl’s death. Margaret had spent all of the life

insurance from Wendell’s death. So, she stayed there for 4 years.

Me: Ah, I see. So, it really was Earl’s death, then. Not sure I want to go down

the rabbit holes around suicide and money... feels like it’s getting too much into

backstories of psychology and life choices. Anchoring her arrival to Earl’s death

is more directly tied to why her house is here and how they ended up here too.

Mom: I agree.

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As an artist-researcher embracing artistic silence, I was not in the business of giving readers/percipients finalized, pre-made meanings or conclusions. Doing this would defeat ABR’s aim to use expressive forms that encourage percipients to experience an artwork for themselves and for the piece to evoke responses, generate conversations, and invite questions (Barone & Eisner, 2012). Art leaves open possibility and ambiguity for those who experience it. It involves opening up interpretations rather than shutting them down. As an artist, I strove to compose a geostory that honored this dissertation’s five experiential “objectives” (Ryan, 2011), but I also sought to create a story that encouraged readers to have their own experiences while reading and to consider their own lives, relationships, and meanings related to place(s). Hence, I added a prelude and postlude to topped and tailed the storytelling in reference to the research findings.

Arts-based work creates expressive forms through any blend of scenes, senses, stories, and images (Leavy, 2015); therefore, to round out the discussion on the geostory’s formation and the usage of artistic license, the role of images must not be overlooked. Because images—particularly photographs—became a significant form of data generated in this inquiry project, they naturally became meaningful and essential elements when composing the expressive form to represent this study’s resulting five experiential “objectives” (Ryan, 2011). Creating and thinking with images became as much a part my artmaking process as the tenets Miller and Paola (2004) offered for writing creative nonfiction. The images I played with and integrated into the geostory were photographs that I considered to be the relevant in terms of sharing an understanding place aesthetically.

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Regarding the visual dimension of the geostory, photographs were not given uniformed structure, rather images were applied because of the illustrative, expressive, and evocative qualities they brought to geostory. In some portions of the story, images stand by themselves without accompanying words or notations, while in other areas visuals are married within the storytelling. Ethical considerations articulated by Leavy

(2015) were extended to how I treated visuals while composing. The concern of ownership was given consideration. Throughout the geostory, all of the images used were either ones that I took during data generation in the autobiographical domain or were from the private archive, which were taken by decreased relatives and belong to the

Barnes.

Several additional artistic decisions were made regarding the use of image too in the geostory, as well as to the other found throughout this dissertation. Photographs that appear in the geostory in three different ways with soft edges, crisp edges, and overlapped with text. The soft-edging effect was applied to specific photographs to evoke a sense of seeing what the narrator (i.e., me) was experiencing at a given moment in the story. In other words, the soft edges were my attempt to let the reader have a sense of being in the present moment with me—a sort of seeing through the narrator’s eyes.

On the other hand, the images with crisp edges were more for illustrative purposes. The images crisp edges and those with overlapping text were not intended to evoke a sense of the present moment rather were intended to enhance the descriptions being shared at that point in the story by the narrator. These photographs offer readers an opportunity to explore visual that accompany descriptions about the place as it is and once was.

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Recapping the Chapter

This chapter outlined this dissertation's methodological commitments through recounting the study’s overall research design that was used to empirical explore a specific place by “centering” (Macdonald, 1995) in it aesthetically. The inquiry’s philosophical-aesthetic perspective was anchored qualitatively and strongly influenced by principles and practices borrowed from arts-based research and pragmatism. After opening with a general description of the study’s methodological foundations, a detailed account of the study’s design and enactment were given. Data generation was undertaken via three domains (i.e., archival, familial, autobiographical) each of which was equipped with corresponding methods including: public archive, private archive, researcher journaling, oral history interviewing, wandering, gatherings, artful journaling, and photographing.

Early efforts in data analysis were also undertaken amidst the data generation process. Additionally, a later phase of hermeneutic, interpretive analysis was undertaken after data generate creased, and a set of five experiential “objectives” (Ryan, 2011) emerged through analysis. Said differently, the experiential objectives were the results of my learning through experience (Dewey, 1938/1963) with respects to place. Indicators of rigor and ethical considerations with respect to the research process were also acknowledged in the later part of this chapter. This chapter drew to a close with commentary on the creation of a “geostory” (Haraway, 2016) as a form of representation for the resulting five experiential objectives.

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The geostory, which is found in Chapter Four coming, is the “expressive outcome” (Eisner, 1994a) from the research. The artwork offered takes the form of a visual, narrative creative nonfiction inspired by the concept of “geostory” (Haraway,

2016). Done with reference to the research findings, artmaking became the personal, imaginative, and reconstructive way for me to respond to the lingering educational problem of the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011) and its schism between mind, body, and environment. Artmaking also honored the tenet found within “centering”

(Macdonald, 1995), aesthetics (Dewey, 1934/2005; Shusterman, 2000), and pragmatism

(Rosiek, 2013a; Ryan, 2011) that stresses knowledge must return to the subjective to be meaningful.

Seeing how this entire inquiry emerged from and was propelled forward by challenges to my nonreflective state of knowing and being within a place, the findings could not be treated in a manner that positioned them as a set of external, independent objects separate from myself as a researcher-artists. Instead representing findings via a visual, narrative creative nonfiction was far better suited to support the creation of a

“material semiotic intervention” that is part of my “the continuing stream of experience” with place (Rosiek, 2013a, p. 699). When a research journey is propelled forward from inside, it is fitting for an artist to use their creative energies in the making a representation

(Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy 2015). In addition to the significance of the personal dimension, the geostory is an artwork intended to be shared with others as encouraged by arts-based researchers (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy 2015). The geostory, thus, is an

247 offering to others that is being shared in the hopes that the story might invite and stir feels and contemplates around our entangled, transactional living with places.

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CHAPTER IV

THE GEOSTORY

Prelude

You are about to enter a story. A story about a place. A story from a place. A story that enfolds real lives, real experiences, real things, real people, and real memories all of which were in part made in and shaped by the place. The story, thus, is a piece of creative nonfiction that takes form through visual and narrative elements woven together by a storyteller. The storyteller is a person living in the place, and as a reader, you will be experiencing a day in the life that person—a woman who calls the place home. You will be following her on a morning walk, a family gathering, and an evening campfire.

All of these happenings unfold in the place at the heart for the story.

Before you begin, however, it is necessary to share several pieces of advice with you in order to help situate your journey to come. Be advised that throughout this story the characters are many. Not all are alive, but many are. Some are human. Others are not. Some call the place home, while for others it is no longer that. But all the characters are linked together through their shared connection with a place. All of them are, to varying degrees, connected to the history of the place. They are part of what it was, what it is, and what it might become.

Worth knowing too is that many of the characters who make appearances in the story are from branches from a family tree created by the lives of two people, Earl Elmer

Barnes (1893-1957) and Florence Belle Marsh Barnes (1890-1962). This couple

249 purchased farmland in 1936 a little over a mile south of the city of Wooster, Ohio. Their farmland is part of the place you will be reading about in the narrator’s story.

The narrator is Earl’s and Florence’s great granddaughter, and many of those with whom she interacts are the children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren of Earl and

Florence.

Of importance too is that you are aware of a collection of aesthetic relationships that dwell within the story and perception of the storyteller. Specifically, five aesthetic relationships are significant because they inform what is known by the narrator and what she considers to be real. The aesthetic relationships, thus, anchor the narrator’s story because they are part of her current understanding of the living in the place. They are understanding that have taken shape through her sensations and reflections, her encounters with familial stories and artifacts, and her explorations of the place beyond

250 family. As you move through your encounter of the place’s story, please be mindful of the five interconnected relationships. Bare them in mind. The aesthetic relationships include: past~present, individual~collective, living~dead, human~nonhuman, material~immaterial.

The story is one in which the narrator explores how place is entangled with the past~present. This relationship identifies a distinction between past and present can exist, while simultaneously acknowledging a fusion of past and present can occur in experience.

The story is one in which the narrator explores how place is entangled with the individual~collective. This relationship acknowledges a person has an individualized experience of living, but that individual does not exist in isolation and is always tethered within some larger collective in experience.

The story is one in which the narrator explores how place is entangled with the living~dead. This relationship recognizes the distinction in between living beings and dead ones. One is in a body, while another is not. But this relationship seeks to capture the interconnectedness of living and dead in experience.

The story is one in which the narrator explores how place is entangled with the human~nonhuman. This relationship allows for a distinction to exist between humans and nonhumans, while also recognizing their coexistence in experience.

The story is one in which the narrator explores how place is entangled with the material~immaterial. This relationship acknowledges an interconnectedness between the

251 physical substances in the world and nonmaterial qualities (e.g., ideas/emotions) in experience.

A Morning Walk

A soft, balmy breeze pushes through sheer curtains as a familiar friend calls, the snooze button. Crumpling the blanket under my leg, I let out a sigh. Some people are naturally swift risers. As much as I would like to be, I struggle to be one of those people.

Sleep likes to hang in my flesh and bones, tethering me to dreams. Muffled crowing grabs me for a moment—cock-a-doodle-doo…cock-a-doodle-doo…cock-a-doodle-doo.

But the heaviness of sleep is too much to resist. It creeps slowly back into my limbs, and

I burrow my face into the pillow’s coolness in order to shield my eyes from the brightness. All the while, a soundtrack fills the room.

Big Ben, a white Brahma, and Little Jerry, a jet-black Australorp, are responsible for the crowing. They are greeting the day from inside their coops. Each has a slightly different tone to his voice. Jerry’s call starts out bold and crisp but has always had a slight turn downward at the end. It sounds almost like one of those rubbery toy chickens with the raspy wheeze. Ben’s voice is a touch higher, not too long, and has an uptick at its end. They and their horde of hens are waiting for me. Given last night’s rain, which was much needed, they will certainly have a lot of work to do foraging for worms and other insect treats. Not to mention, it is that time of year again when the road gets covered by fallen acorns and walnuts, and their shells get cracked open under the pressure of car tires. My chickens spend a lot of time sketching through the nut’s shards for exposed protein-packed flesh.

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The wind must be blowing in from the north slightly because there is a faint echo of cars and trucks traveling along Ohio’s State Route 30. State Route 3, on the other hand, always provides a more noticeable hum given its inescapable proximity. More pronounced though is the of rustling trees mixed with clicking crickets and crooning birds. A lonely cicada’s drone does chime in occasionally. These harmonies are always somehow soothing. Freeing. I can sink into their starts and stops, peeks and dips so easily. They are far more pleasant than the buzzing of pavement. COCK-A-DOODLE-

DOO. Piercing the air is a fourth round of crowing. Or was it a fifth? Sixth? Maybe seventh? Each round is a reminder that the morning is passing quickly. And there are still things that need taken care of before this afternoon when family starts arriving.

Opening my eyes fully reveals the same world but without definition, unresolved splashes of color. Once blurry shapes come into focus as I slide on my glasses. As if patiently awaiting this signal, two pairs of blue eyes with wet snouts are staring at me.

Their eyes lock with mine, and the howling, barking, and stretching ensue. I drag myself from bed, and my fingers dance through fur and curly tails as our pack makes its way to the stairs. Vinny, the eldest Husky at nine, goes first. Keke goes next but only after pausing for another stretch before descending. I bring up the rear.

Once to the bottom of the stairs, I open the front door welcoming in the morning through the screen. The dogs scamper about announcing that we have risen, and I suck in the moist, fresh air before shuffling off first to the restroom. I then make my way down the hallway to the kitchen for some water and to put the kettle on. With my fingers on the tin of loose-leaf Earl Grey tea, I pause. Maybe today it should be coffee instead. A

253 caffeine boost might be in order to shake off my sleep. With the water in, I click the kettle’s leaver.

Two heaping tablespoons of beans go into my coffee grinder. To call it mine though is questionable. What actually makes something belong to anyone anyways?

Sure, it is mine in the sense that I look after it. I use it and clean it out. But I did not make it or buy it. This simple grinder is a remnant from a relative. An item once used during the living of a life that is no longer. An object left behind. There is some truth to the saying that, “You can’t take things with you when you die.” So many objects around this house, and all around this place, are a testament to that saying. Simple, everyday objects that are reminds and reminders.

This grinder was my grandma’s and was neatly tucked away on a closet shelf when I dug it out a couple years ago. I am not certain when or why she stored it away.

But it had been there since her passing in 2009. It is not particularly nostalgic to me, nor anyone else in who knew her. Its design is not particularly stunning just a cylindrical base of tan plastic with a slightly translucent brown lid one removes in order to add in beans. It probably does not produce the most optimal grind quality for brewing. It is by no means a new appliance. Embossed writing on the bottom says that it was originally made in France. But I for some reason cannot bring myself to get rid of it. It still works perfectly well despite the cap with spider-wedded cracks my grandma reinforced with pieces of scotch tape.

The water gurgles and the leaver pops, my signal to assemble the grounds in the coffee press, pour over the boiled liquid, and stir. Four minutes should be enough wait

254 time. I walk over to the pantry and open the door. The familiar spicy scent of black pepper still lingers in this closet even though I emptied out all my grandma’s shakers several years ago. I run my finger along the striped, textured teal and white wallpaper with flecks of gold that lines the shelves.

This same wallpaper used to line the hallway entrance of this house, and my grandma used the extra to line shelving throughout the house. This paper is one thing, along with much of what is in this closet, that I cannot bring myself to change, yet. A cardboard box full of old cookbooks, cooking magazines, and recipes. Teaspoons and serving spoons. Large plastic bags with plastic spoons, knives, and forks some of which are probably from my adolescences, having been washed and reused. Saltshakers. Glass and ceramic containers. Pie and loaf pans. Cocktail and wine glasses etched with floral designs. Her china. There are teacups with saucers, a creamer and sugar set, big and small bowls, and serving plates all with a simple green pattern of forget-me-nots flowers.

Beeping from oven’s timer reminds me to grab a cup.

With mug in hand, I settle into a wooden glider chair located in almost the same spot where my grandpa’s old recliner was stationed. Here he would read, not books so much but other literature the Daily Record and the Akron Beacon Journal newspapers or magazines the US News and World Reports and National Geographic. Other times he watched television, faithfully tuning in for the news but most importantly the weather, which commanded silence and full attention for anyone in the room with him. He enjoyed other shows too. The Young and the Restless. Game shows like Wheel of

Fortune and The Price is Right. Westerns like Gun Smoke and Maverick. Comedies like

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Hee Haw, The Carol Burnet Show, and Laugh-In. Detective shows like Inspector Morris,

Murder She Wrote, and Perry Mason.

Actually, my whole living room is set up similarly to how I remember it most of my childhood with different furniture of course. Television is in the corner. A rug in the middle. Seating in front of the three closets, all of which still pretty much serve the same purpose housing an assortment of my grandparents’ items mixed in with mine. The one with kitchen supplies. Another is for cleaning supplies, while the other is a bit of a catch all for miscellaneous items like yardsticks, lightbulbs, wood glue, extension cords, flyswatters, grilling utensils, cleaner for the wood burning stove, and more random stuff.

Breathing in the nutty aroma of my coffee, I take in the first few sips. The warmth prickling my throat but feels good.

The view from the picture window next to me faces a hillside that is teaming with lives starting their day. Trills pour out from chickadees and a Baltimore oriole. Chirps snap from the beaks of sparrows, tufted titmice, Carolina wrens, and blue jays. Two pairs of cardinals take turns shelling sunflower seeds from the feeder hanging on an old metal post that once anchored a clothesline, and still could. Several male house finches with brown strips and red faces show up for a feeding opportunity too. With their young reared, this is time to fatten up before the cold of winter settles in. When I go to a feed supply store next time, I need to remember to restock supplies of suet and thistle seeds, two additional wintertime offerings on the table for my feathered friends.

Sharp chit-chit-chits from a red-bellied woodpecker float through the air.

Between its calls a rapid, succinct drumming echoes from somewhere near my great aunt

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Carol’s now dilapidated horse barn. The trees encircling this barn are home to many woodpeckers redheaded, downy, hairy, and pileated.

Carol’s barn was built in 1962 from remains around the old farmland that belonged to my great grandparents, Earl and Florence Barnes. The farmhouse’s three-stall garage—quite a luxury at the time—became the horses’ stalls. The portion still standing was made from the corrugated steel around the farm and was fashioned into an area for hay storage. I do wonder if my habit for salvaging, reclaiming, or repurposing items instead of buying new ones is somehow because of this same lineage.

The horses we had during my adolescence, Jeed, Sweed, and Andy always sought shelter in this barn when out grazing and wandering the pastures. So too did our two

257 sheep, Lambie and Camel Lips who roamed around with the horses. The structure was still stood tall then, but time and use have done what it does to all forms.

No horses use it now. The barn has become shelter for creature who pass through and roosting spot of turkey buzzard. The seasons keep eating away at it, and as trees fall down, portion of it come down with them. There are times when I see it as somewhat sad and trashy, but there are others when the barn is beautiful. The colors it has taken on with stained, rusting metal and greening wood and cracked boards. It is a marker of time.

A marker of what those who lived here before me did with and to the place.

The drumming begins again. But this it is time closer and louder. A pileated woodpecker is joining the morning conversations. A smile comes to my face.

My grandma, Ruth—who enjoyed watching the birds around here and taught me how to be still, look, and listen—was the last to see a pileated in the summer of 1996. It was in

258 the cluster of honey locust trees that once stood next to her house. But, in 2017, my mom and I hear and saw a mating pair return. They carved out territory and nested. Despite the hours I spend in stillness waiting and watching each spring, their nesting holes remain a secret kept by the trees and their shadows. A secret that keeps me wanting.

A ground hog waddles by and begins grazing on grass along the hillside. Robins hop nearby, and half a dozen or so Northern Flicker woodpeckers drill into the earth seeking insects. Yellow swallowtail butterflies bob through the air coming to rest on jewel weed near the pond. The pond is continuously feed by an all-weather spring. My grandfather, Bud used his work connections at Walter Jones Construction to borrow a backhoe to dig the pond. According to my mother as well as her younger sister and brother, grandpa actually dug the pond twice. The first time was in the mid-1960s to a depth of around three feet, and it was lined with gravel, but the ducks they had managed to make a mess of it. In 1972, it was dug again but that time bigger and deeper.

The pond’s water is tough to see this time of year though from my living room window. The pond and many of the old fence rows become surrounded by briar bushes, stinging nettles, grapevines, pokeberries, phlox, Queen Anne’s lace, thistles, and burdocks by summertime. The green walls are also splashed with dots of yellow from goldenrod and purple from ironweed. Both of these plants are welcome though and supply pollinators, including my aunt’s honeybees, with food. Some of them may become meals for the praying mantis standing and waiting like living statues. What might seem like an overgrown mess is actually a place teaming with life, and it will slowly die back, leaving roots waiting for spring.

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All sorts of creatures of use this pond. There are ground dwellers like the frogs, snakes, turtles, racoons, opossums, deer, rabbits, and wild turkeys. Mallard and wood ducks are winged occupants who frequent the water. Bats, dragonflies, and swallows can often be seen diving to-and-fro feasting on mosquitos and flies. The thickets are alive with the songs of warblers, wood-pewees, goldfinches, and grey cat birds. Occasionally, turkey buzzards, blue herons, bald eagles, and red-tailed hawks stop to rest in the treetops around the pond. This place, this land, is as much their home as it is mine. Without spaces like ponds, grassy fields, and forests, where would all these creatures go? Do they not have the right to thrive and die in environments that support life?

Suddenly, a cackling cluster of starlings rises in unison into the trees as Neffy emerges from bushes walking up the hillside. Another one of my morning greeters has arrived, and I call out, “Hello, kitty kitty, Neffy.” She perks up searching for the sound’s source. She must have registered it as familiar because she meows, and what were leisurely strides speed up. Blue eyes are gazing at me again when I turn back from the window. “Okay, okay.” I mutter. “I’m moving. Let’s get ready.” There will be no breakfast for me right now. I am not overly hungry. And besides the animals need tending. For some reason, I feel rude eating before I have taken care of them. Swirling the mug, I gulp down lukewarm remains, and it is off to do chickens first.

It is that time of year when you can start to feel seasons shifting. Daylight begins to wane little by little each week. The air starts to carry a bit of a chill some day with hints of warmth. Shade of green start to move towards yellows, browns, reds, and oranges. Sunflowers become mums. Aromas change, too, from freshly cut grasses and

260 blooms to drying leaves. Once bare feet can require covering, and t-shirt are exchanged for longer sleeves and even light jackets. Summer is bowing out and giving way to fall.

Neffy, a calico, and Cookie, a tabby of sorts, meet me. Cookie was feral and around six months old when she showed up in the barn seeking shelter one particularly snowy, bitter winter. She became friendly with me after several bowls of chicken broth with meat, bones, and skin. And ever since, she has stuck around making herself at home. Neffy followed an old tomcat, Boots—now deceased—to my house. My husband saw her first. A skeleton with big ears and no more than six weeks old. All the cats I have known around here since childhood have a similar story, strays who wondered in

261 from somewhere else. Some are personable and stay to live out full lives. While others are less so and often do not hang around long.

These girls are regular company when opening and closing the coops, my supervisors of sorts. As we approach, a grey squirrel and a brown one stand on their hind legs and pause. We are being watched. Assessed. We must not be too much of a threat because they resume digging in the walnuts. When I return with dogs shortly, this will undoubtedly be a different sort of exchange.

After knocking slightly on the coop door, I open it and say, “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.” I know chickens do not comprehend the human language, but I do enjoy greeting them. I check their feeders and water levels, and everything seems plenty full for today. So, I pause for few minutes watching my forty chickens scurry out into freedom. Some of the hens go off different directions while other march across the road to the manure pile and the shelter of an old towering lilac bush towering well over

12 feet tall. This is one their favorite area to spend the day.

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There are two coops, one red and one white. The red coop was an addition form my aunt, which she brought along with several chickens. The white one, on the other hand, was originally a garage that my grandfather got in 1970 while doing urban renewal around Wooster. With a concert slab pour inside, it was used store my aunt’s first car, a

Ford Maverick. Actually, by the time I was born, the land as it currently existence with four houses, lawns sown, trees added, roads, and many sheds like this white one had all been established. Most of that was happened between 1952 through 1975.

After its life as a garage, the building took on a new purpose as a shed. The interior was storage for all kinds of items. Things that might someday be of used—but many of which never were—like old windows and doors also my grandpa’s doing from urban renewal jobs. Items for seasonal use were also stored inside like rototillers, plant pots, peat pots for starting seeds, push lawn mowers, pull-start leaf blowers, a wood splitter, sheets and planks of wood in all kinds of sizes, and 50-gallon drums full of wood chips and twigs to be used as kindling for fires. Corrugated sheet metal and wooden boards were added to the shed’s side to create an overhang for split wood. A log pile resides there. Chopping wood then splitting and staking is an annual task, and all the houses here often use woodburning fires help fight off winter’s chill and electric bills.

The garage turned shed was repurposed and this time it took on life as a coop. In the summer of 2017, when my aunt was moving back to the neighborhood after retiring as an equine veterinarian, a team of Amish men crafted a sliding door and added several windows to give the chickens more natural light. When making the coop, many items were move and saved but others were not. I wonder what my grandpa would think about

263 these changes and having chickens around again after not having them are since his youth on the farm. He always did like building things, which in turn resulted in developing the farmland. He is responsible for moving in a lot of the sheds around here from urban renewal and putting the concrete pads down. He even encouraged my mom to build a house here and his older sister, Margaret.

Back at the house, Cookie and Neffy crunch on chows while the dogs and I burst out the front door. Every morning and evening, at least, the dogs and I take a walk together. Right now, we will do two laps around the land on the roads here, which will amount to a little under a mile. At the end of my short driveway, we turn right by the old mill stone on which still hangs a wooden address plaque with Barnes and 1053 carved into it. It has been ten years since my grandparents passing. No one has yet taken it down.

We walk past the coops. Not a single squirrel is in sight. They must have heard or seen us coming. Vinny stops to sniff around the base of a tree. In the momentary pause, I notice a dead mouse left on the pavement and think to myself, “Hm, one of the cats must have been busy last night, but not hungry enough to eat.”

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Encountering the remains of creatures is not uncommon living here. Racoons.

Deer. Snakes. Rats. Birds. Bats. Opossum. Chipmunks. Turtles. Squirrels. Cats.

Groundhogs. Frogs. Grasshoppers. Cicadas. Caterpillars. Moths and butterflies.

Spiders. I have faced dead bodies, pieces of bodies, mangled parts, fur, and bones.

Startling, perhaps sometimes. Sad, on occasion. Living here though is not a sterilized environment. Other lives are being lived and lost. One will always have meetings with death here, if they look. Through living here, I teachers me that death is part of life. And encounters like a tiny fuzzy mouse remind me that we are all beings of impermanence.

Each day on my walks around this place I see the same structures. And to understand this place in part requires an understanding of the stuff that is here. Objects serve purposes, and knowing this place means in part knowing how and when buildings got here and by whom. Knowing this place, for me, is trying to re-image these structures as they once were amidst how they are currently. Knowing this place is trying to sense the paths of lives lived that are not my own.

Along our way the dogs and I pass, the tractor shed. True to its name, this is where tractors have been parked over the years, well at least since the early 1990s when

265 the building was constructed because my grandparents thought their new camper need covering—or at least my grandpa thought so.

“Big Blue”, an old, blue 1960s Ford 2000 tractor with the equally old brush hog used for mowing the pastures. There is a newer model John Deer, signature green of course. This tractor is for mowing around the houses, tilling gardens, and plowing snow. Maybe it is the containers of gasoline and oil or dried grass clipping and dirt that hit me each time I enter this building, but the shed’s smell, it is grandpa. He never leaves.

There are workbenches and tables butted against the walls. In between them old metal fence posts and post drivers. In here I can find two dozen or more screwdrivers, half a dozen sets of socket wrenches, tin cans full of any sized nail or screw you could ever possibly need. There are hammers in drawer and chainsaws on shelves. Shovels, rakes, and ladder hanging on nails alongside chains, sledgehammers, wire cutters, old pickaxes, asphalt squeegees. Some of the objects in this particular shed get used

266 regularly. Others not so much, hanging around waiting for the moment when they are taken up, dusted off, and used again. This building holds onto a legacy though. A heritage of individuals who grew up during The Great Depression where they learned to salvage everything, stockpile, and repurpose. Waste not, want not lives in this building.

Hanging among all the tools though on the back wall of the tractor shed is the most haunting thing, a large, wooden sign. With a bright red background and bold, white letters, the sign declares, “OPENING IN Fall ‘94 and Spring ‘95.” The sign is a remnant from when an outlet mall was going to be constructed on the land causing my grandparents and my family to rebuild elsewhere. Bud was excited about it because there was potential of great financial gain. But knots still form in my stomach recalling the experience of this possible reality. The same knots that were there when I was ten years old. The development project, of course, did not come to fruition but only because the purchaser died unexpectedly of a heart attack. My dad found the sign in the shed over a decade later and decided to hang it up. He thought it needed saved. It is a reminder of a future that could have been the now if the past would have unfolded otherwise.

Rounding the corner from the chicken coops and tractor shed, another staple feature of this place appears, a white house and barn now owned and inhabited by my aunt, Connie. Bark. Bark. Bark. She must be up and moving too cause Trooper’s voice echoes from behind the house. My suspicions are confirmed when I notice Falcon, a white and bay American Paint, and Marcus, a solid black Friesian and Thoroughbred mix, have with their noses deep into their feeding trough. A healthy horse can never say no to lure of a scoop of sweet feed or a few slices of good hay.

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I have not known this place without the sublet curve of this paved road or this house and its barn. To my left used to be a birch tree with curls of white bark and crabapple trees that would bloom vivid pink blossom in spring. All of which have been gone for years.

This home has stories to tell. Until recently, in 2009, when I return the land and

I lived here, this house had always been a duplex my grandparents rented. It has seen no fewer than 20 renters since 1984, many of which stayed for no more than a couple years before leaving. Much of this area, expect for the barn, carried a sense of being off limits during my childhood and youth for my brothers and me. The house belonged to a land I called home, but it occupied a mysterious space within the place. Playing near or around this house was not a common habit of neither myself nor my brothers. In between renters though we would sometimes get a glimpse of its unfamiliar interior, when we would go inside with my grandma and/or grandpa to clean or fix it up before new tenants.

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Long before the cycles of renters though, this house was conceived of and built in 1957 for Margaret, one of the seven children of my great grandparents, Earl and

Florence Barnes. The sudden and shocking event of Earl’s stroke and subsequent passing in 1957 put into motion changes to the farmland and how people lived here. In 1957,

Margaret made the decisions to move herself and her four children (Tom, Bill, Marsha, and Carol) to Wooster, Ohio from Oklahoma. An arrangement was made in the Barnes family that another new house was going to be built up on the hill southwest from the old farmhouse. One house was already built up in the middle of nowhere on this hill, which belonged to my grandparents, Bud and Ruth with their then two-year-old daughter,

Peggy, who would become my mother.

Being in the business of construction, Bud was committed to getting the house built and oversaw much of the construction process in terms of making the deals and the logistics of building it. Bud sourced the lumber from Carter Lumber in Wooster and hired Grant Sheetz, a local carpenter, who had a three-man crew. A gravel path was

269 made from his and Ruth’s house to the site of this house being built. The existing gas line forced the location Margaret’s house further to the north than she had wanted.

Originally, she wanted it build more in a line with Bud's house and a little more to the south.

The design for the house came from a plan that Margaret found and liked in, Better Homes and Gardens. She gave Grant the magazine clipping, and he nailed in up on a two-by-four piece of wood. According to her son, Tom’s recollection that piece of paper was the only plans there ever were for that house. Almost every morning, Tom and his brother, Bill were given jobs to do. Tom describes much of the work as being

“gopher stuff” like collecting wood scraps or getting hammers and nails. Tom did eventually help in more substantial ways thought like nailing in floorboards and hauling the bricks and mixing mortar for the fireplace. The home ended up costing around

$30,000 of which Florence paid half and Margaret the other half.

As years passed, the house and surrounding area took more shape. A front porch was added. Margaret later decided to screen it in to block the bugs, like mosquitos, so

270 she could sit out there and even sleep there on hot summer nights. In 1958, the one-car garage was added, which Bud had brought in from a job. Having an interest in animals too, Margaret had a white, four-stalled pull barn built by Amish men around 1963.

Being built in the middle of what was once the farmland’s fields, the landscaping was sparse. Early on a willow tree was planted in the wetter part of the yard and a Blue

Spruce, but either one lasted too long. Many of the trees planted around the White’s house were all starts from seeds, which came from George Bart a botanist and friend of

Margaret. I often thank George for the many of the oaks and beautiful cypress I enjoy seeing today. After her kids were grown, Margaret decided to move into town by the

College of Wooster where she worked, and she sold the house to Bud in 1981, a couple years before I was born in 1983.

The crackling of stones under shoes begins as the dogs and I turn the corner down what is regularly called, “the gravel”. Soybeans are the crop in rotation this year. Alfalfa

271 used to part of the rotation but has not been planted some time now. The agricultural farming here is not done by those of us living here anymore. A longtime friend of the family, Dave and Carol Maurer lease the land to plant. All spring and summer these soybeans have been adding nitrogen to the soil prepping it for corn, which will likely be planted next spring. After turning yellow, all these plants will lose their leaves, and a field of steams and pods will be left standing like little empresses dripping in jewels.

For as back as my memory can reach, this gravel road has been a feature of this place, but it has seen transformation too. The road itself was an addition my grandpa made in the 1982, which was around the same time that he finally bought out all of his siblings on the land. Along my right side used to be an old fence row that ran the entire length of the gravel road, a marker of a property line. This upper portion was cleared in

1999 by workers from Derby Oil and Gas as part of well project that my grandpa was involved in. But if you follow this line down through the horse pasture and into the forest toward Killbuck Creek, the borderline of ownership still lingers. Strands of rusting barbwire are woven through shrubs and attached to posts. Some of the posts are metal other are decaying wood. In some areas, the wire has melded into the trunks of trees as if the it is being eaten by them.

Losing the upper part of this fence row might have unappealing, but it also meant saying goodbye to trees like mulberry, cotton woods, and hickory along with overgrown shrubs and briars. Nothing exists now to lessen the sharp teeth of winter when walking along this road. The wildlife living here had to move on into new territory somewhere around here or elsewhere. No more gallon buckets of wild raspberry are picked here like

272 my younger brothers, mother, and I did in the summertime. A few scattered bushes do still exist around here though, hidden in other timeworn fence rows that were once used to hold horses.

The deep reddish, purple of the berries can still stain fingers, lips, and teeth. Learning how place is a provider of food. Practicing focus and patients when steadily navigating the brush’s tangled maze of thorny branches to pluck the tiny fruits.

Vinny’s snout pulls him, and my body, towards the tall grass. Digging up the underground cities of rodents has become a daily activity these days. Their smells seem amplified and far more tempting to track in the fall and spring. Keke, afraid she is missing out on the action, turns quickly darting to us. She glides through the grass like a dolphin leaping through water. As they sniff about, a faint hissing starts beside me.

Shaking my head, I glance over my shoulder glancing at what everyone living here now calls, “the hissing cobra.” These tan painted metal drums with their partner in neighbor’s field off in the distance are part of an oil well pumper system for natural gas.

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This is a more recent feature of the place that’s assemblage began in 1999, when I was a over a year away from going away to college. The owner of the neighboring farmland along with representatives from Derby Oil and Gas managed to convince grandpa about the potential profitability from natural gas. In order to build the system, however, the oil company needed more acreage to build, hence this place got dragged into the project.

Grandpa did not live too much longer after the hissing cobra was completed, passing away in 2009. I can say with certainty that those of us living here now do not see the value he saw this arrangement. There have been no long-term finical benefits. No free or reduced gas. The whole system is an eye sore, which we are trying to block by planting trees. It is an irritant, especially when gas line workers randomly show up check the system and walk the line. An irregularly working metal monument symbolizing short-term thinking and how places get tied to the possibilities of profit.

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Disgusted by the sound and site of the well, I move the dogs along down the gravel road. As we turn down the lane named, Earl Court, the fog is slowly lifting. But it certainly is still hanging thick in some areas. On less humid days at this point and at various ones around the houses, I can make out the faintest impressions of Wooster’s downtown, which sits much lower. It is downhill to the north, a small valley of sorts.

But that is not be happening today. Once the trees’ leaves drop, it is easy to glimpse blocks of color and court house’s bell tower.

Beyond the fence and trees to my right is an East Ohio Gas building, but in- between me and it, State Route 3 buzzes away with its 55 mile per hour speed limit.

Flying southbound is a red Chevy SUV, two Ford trucks an F150 and F250, and semi-

275 truck piled high with logs. Simultaneously, a flurry of red, blue, silver, green, and white sedans zip by in the northbound lanes. Following them go two Toyota mini vans, a U-

Haul moving truck, and a confederate flag flapping in the bed of rusty black truck with tires far too big for its frame. These vehicles are going north and will end up going one of three direction into town or turning onto U.S. Route 30 either west towards Ashland and Mansfield or east towards Dalton and Canton.

clip-clop…

Slowing trotting up the highway along the berm toward me is not an unfamiliar sight, an Amish horse and buggy. I nod and wave as our paths cross, and the man steering, along with the two young boys, wave back. How often do any of us moving from one location to another stop to consider how the roads we travel on came to be? Or how roads give way to the creation and/or loss of places? Or how roads acquire certain names? I know that I do not stop too often to consider it. But these roads will forever have ghosts walking along them for me. These two roads, Earl Court and Route 3, were the results of a massive change that happened to the land. These changes, which I never experienced directly, are a part of certain family member’s lived experiences, and their collective recollections have become part of my understanding of this place.

Only five years after Earl’s passing in 1957, State Route 3 reoriented the farmland, and other farms in the area, forever. My great grandma, Florence along with

Bud, Ruth, and my mom, Peggy, and Margaret with her four children experienced a

276 tremendous transformation to this place. The Barnes farm was pulled into the momentum created by Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency (1952-1961) and his push for the construction of the superhighway system across the United States of America. The State of Ohio’s government enacted eminent domain on the Barnes’ property—among others— because it wanted to develop the land for public use by creating a highway (Route 3) that would connect to U.S. Route 30.

Smack in the middle of the proposed plan for the highway and bridge that would cross Killbuck Creek was the old Barnes’ farmhouse, all the outbuildings, and some of the pastureland. According to officials, this path was considered to be most economical way to send a new highway. Because the land belonged to Florence then, she was compensated for all the buildings that were lost and part of the land. Since Earl’s death, however, she had been living with Margaret and her children while the farmhouse was rented to another family from 1957-1962. Prior to Earl’s death, however, talk had been conversations brewing about possibly having a highway project in the area. So, the final development about eminent domain were not unexpected to the Florence or other members of the Barnes family.

In 1962, construction began for Route 3 and the turnaround to competition relatively fast. One of the companies that had a major hand in moving the soil, grading land, and building the physical roads was Walter Jones Construction. My grandpa, who worked for the company as its civil engineer, was put in charge of many aspects of the project. He was responsible to much of the follow through in getting the highway built.

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Grandpa—along with the company’s owner, Walter—were the ones that submitted the bids for the job.

The Barnes’ farm was disassembled with its parts being rearranged or sold. Metal and the old garage were moved and repurposed in the making the now dilapidated horse barn I was thinking of earlier this morning. The farmhouse was bought by a neighbor who then sold it to another neighboring family. And that family planned to fix up the house but never did. The old farmhouse eventually disintegrated by the late 1960s.

According to the recollections of his children, grandpa was disappointed by this situation and would often remark that, “I wished I'd a just put a match to it." An understandable sentiment seeing how he was watching his childhood home rot away no more than a mile away from where it once stood, and he saw it on a regular basis.

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The Barnes’ white farmhouse (above) with its 66 acres of land was purchased in

1936 for $6,500 through a combination of Earl’s personal savings and help from a

Federal Farm Loan and Florence’s older brother, Charles Marsh, a businessman who dealt in newspapers and oil. The farmhouse had a side entrance and a front porch. On the main floor there was a dining room, pantry, big living room, fireplace, kitchen, and a half bath. Upstairs there were four rooms that were used as bedrooms. Two were big and the others smaller. There was a full bathroom too. Around the back of the house was a decent sized porch that was enclosed, screened in. This was also used as an entry way and where the family put their boots. Outside around the back of the house was the entryway down in the cellar.

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The farmhouse was equipped with electricity, indoor plumbing, and running water. Florence was adamant about having city conveniences, which was understandable given her role in maintaining the house. According to Allen, her youngest son, she “had an opinion” and expressed it. Florence, who was not short about 5 feet 6 inches or so, attended to everyday matters like cleaning the house and doing the family’s clothing washing, drying, ironing, folding, and mending it. Cloths were hung either outside on wire cloth lines or in the basement as dryers did not exist. She cooked the meals for a family of nine. She was known for going outside, grabbing a chicken either wring its head or chopping it off, plucking it, and then cooking it. Florence also admired flowers and had tulips, peonies, and roses around the farmhouse. The impact of the Great

Depression hung around the area of Wooster for some time, and Florence often feed individuals who traveled through asking for something to eat. Allen recalled a lot of those kinds of visitors in 1936 and 1937. They would often be willing to do work and offered to help out in turn for food.

The running water that supplied that farmhouse was pumped in from the all- weather spring that now feeds the pond I see from my kitchen windows. A hydraulic ram system fashioned before Earl and Florence bought the farm feed water to the farmhouse’s basement. The ram was essentially a pipe that carried water. The water for the whole house was stored in a big wooden tub. The ram was a chore to keep running and required tending often. In the basement was also a big coal furnace. Shelves along the walls held items canned in glass jars. Florence did canned food, often vegetables from the family’s garden. Canning meat was, according to Allen’s recollections, not commonplace.

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Florence’s canning of foods slowed around the early 1950s, which was around the time when the Barnes started storing vegetables and meat by freezing them. They rented a freezer unit on Columbus Avenue in Wooster, which was a short distance from their home.

Around the farmhouse there were several outbuildings. The big barn had stalls for animals and a loft area to store hay. There were corncribs to store and dry corn. Earl used horses to work the fields until around 1945 when he sold them and go a tractor.

The horses and tractor were used when working in the fields, which were planted with crops like corn, alfalfa, and wheat.

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Near the house was also a large garage. Inside the garage was a workshop area of sorts with shelves and on them were half a dozen or so old radios that Earl had once assembled from parts he had bought. Earl was also a bit of a musician, a decent fiddle player who played mostly by ear and enjoyed various sort of jigs. Another activity he enjoyed was going fishing either alone or with others.

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Chickens were an animal quite common on the farm. Near the barn was a chicken house and a shed for brooding baby chicks. Florence was involved a lot with the maintenance of chickens on the farm, but Earl did help too. They dealt with mainly hens for their eggs and not too many roosters. But one rooster in particular lives on in a photograph from one of my grandma’s albums. Apparently, this particular rooster

(below) was roaming around Earl and Florence’s back yard and became aggressive and was attacking people. This little problem has a simple remedy. Ruth and Allen caught him, butchered him, and cooked him. But the rooster never did get tender.

According to my great uncle, Allen there was also a second brooder house added that was not part of the original make-up of the farm. My grandpa, Bud had it brought in on a truck, and Earl wired the house with electricity so the inside heat would work.

Inside the house was a big stove that was anchored from the ceiling to warm the chicks up as they hatched and grew.

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Earl and Allen even built a range shelter too to use for Allen’s chickens. The range shelter was used to haul chickens out in the fields to eat clover and other things. The brooder that was brought in for Allen’s chicken was what he called his “little vicinity,” his “little brooder house.” He kept with chickens through high school. The family, of course, used some of the eggs, but collecting, clean, and selling them at the local egg auction done too.

Even though Earl worked as a researcher in agronomy at the Ohio State

Experiment Station, now called the Ohio State’s University’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, the farm provided food and income for the Barnes family. In addition to chickens, pigs were also a part of the farm. Among the various outbuildings was a pig pen. Not a large one but big enough for a small number of swine. Often a

284 female pig would be bought that was pregnant and going to have piglets. The family would feed and raise them and then either have the pigs sold or butchered.

Animals were plentiful on the farm, many were livestock, but some were pets such as dogs (Adlia, Terry, Stub, Pappy, Dusty, and Grouch), horses (Tom, Mac, Bob,

Cope, Victor, and Blacky), and cats (Costy, the only name recalled by my living family members). Earl also always had a least one cow, mainly Jerseys but at times a Guernsey or Holstein was in the mix. The cows were used for milk and the cream was both sold and used. Earl also used his cows to raise veal, which were also sold or butchered.

Outside around the farmhouse, the Barnes family kept a large garden too from which they grew and consumed early greens, onions, tomatoes, beans, corn, asparagus, greens, turnips, and carrots. While the seven children did help out with activities around the farm, they also played outside. In winter, building snowmen and sledding. Bud, my

285 grandpa, would make fires around the all-weather spring. The card game 500 was a family favorite to play. All three boys and four girls were also encouraged to get an education, which they did through attending public school. All of them eventually graduated from Wooster High School.

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Approaching the bottom of Earl Court—which my grandpa chose to name after his father and picked court because it was different—the dogs and I are coming towards the lane’s dead end. The gravel road and the lane which sandwich the field is my familiar terrain. They are how I know this place. My feet know the peaks, dips, and tilts of the pavement. My skin knows where there are cool spots that hang the air and what portions are windier than others. My body know this triangle as a playground for running, walking dogs, toughing bare feet, skinning knees, playing hide and seek, riding horses, and whizzing around on bikes.

All of what we just strolled around—the gravel road and lane—were never part of the original farmland. As much as I try in my imagination to see that place, I never will.

I cannot unknow this front field as part of my living here. I can know facts like it was

287 acquired in 1962 by grandpa, Bud and his sister, Margaret. The two of them purchased the nine acres of land from a neighboring framer who was selling it as a result of State

Route 3. The decisions to buy it was in part triggered by a suggestion from Walter Jones, a long-time neighbor to the Barnes and owner of Jones Construction where Bud worked.

Walter told Bud that he should buy the land because it was going to be a valuable land someday. My mind can only try to visualize this place as it once was through transposing onto it the maps, photographs, and stories shared by family. I am left to know that place—which is still this place—through the pieces from their lives. Part of me is sadden by this reality and by the loss of a farm that I never knew. Part of me longs to be able to know that place fuller. And part of me is grateful to even be here.

As the dogs and I turn past the white mailboxes with traces of green moss, the other three houses built here are peeking out from behind trees, two red brick ones and a sandy yellow brick one. All three of them sit up on the hill that used to overlook the long-gone Barnes’ farmhouse.

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The first house the dogs and I pass is a red brick one. After finishing pharmacy school at the Ohio State University, my mom returned to the land. She lived Margaret’s white house and took care of her animals for a stint. In part because my mom did not to live and work in a city like Columbus and because of my grandpa’s encouragement, she built this house here in 1977. She and my dad, John met working at Apple Creek

Development Center. They married. I was the firstborn then my two brothers, Adam and

Allen.

Even though I do not own it, I still think of this building as home. The walls and the people who were in them left me feeling safe and supported. Beside the house are several 25-year-old Macintosh apple trees my mom planted. Plum, pear, and sour cherry trees along with three tall Blue Spruce trees used to be around the house. There was a swing set, a sandbox made from an old tractor tire, and a tire swing out back. There was no yard per say. The field, gardens, barns, pastures, forest down back were my yard, and either with younger brothers or alone, innumerable hours were spent outside. Animals were ever-present. Bunnies and Gennie pigs. Fish and frogs. Geese of which Lucy

Goose, a male, was the friendliest and built nests around the dogs. Dogs: Jan, Margo,

Stain, J.R., Bear, Maggie, Duke, Leah, Juno, and Cody. Cats: Apollo/Pine Log, Boomer,

Pickle, Chris, Stinky, Heidi, Splinter, Lowie, Nermal, Susie-Q, Cheech, Cong, The

Mama, Cesil, Zeffy, Rush, Thor, and Oz.

Next along the dogs’ and my route comes the sandy yellow brick house. This house was the first of the four houses up on the hill to be built on the Barnes farmland. In

1953, Earl deeded Bud three acres of land to build a home looking down at the

289 farmhouse. When the house was built up here, it was on a hill in near the southwest border of the property. The home, then, had a long road that ran down through the field to the farmhouse’s drive. The house was built while Bud was in college, and his wife,

Ruth was finishing nursing school. Earl helped with building parts of this house specifically in wiring the eclectic and insulating the walls. He also regularly checked on the home’s progress, for example, making sure the heater was on for the plaster to dry.

In this modest two-bedroom house was where Bud and Ruth begin a family. My mother, Peggy was born in 1954 and my aunt, Connie was welcomed into the world several years later in 1957. However, after their third child, Raymond who was born in

1960, grandpa and grandma began considering what do to get more room. Grandpa could not figure out a good way to add on to the house in a way that was stratifying, and any addition he would have done to the house seemed to cost too much money. According to

290 his children and nephew, he loved the process of building and wanted to build another house.

As for what became of this first house, Bud and Ruth decided to rent it out for several decades to different people. One of the early renters was Bud’s oldest sister

Mary—also known as Mim, an affectionate nickname given by the oldest Barnes’ boy,

George. After Mim and her family left, individuals who were not from the Barnes family rented the home. That was how I always knew the house, a rental. Two years ago, though, my youngest brother, Allen moved in.

The same builder who did the white house, Grant Sheetz was hired to build Bud’s and Ruth’s new house. The new house was put adjacent to the yellow brick one. The construction took out the old apple and peach orchard that had been a part of the old farm. The trees in the orchard that had been planted before Earl and Florence acquired ownership. In 1962, Grant manning a crew of guys built the red brick home. Margaret’s oldest son, Tom was around 14 years old at the time and got involved in the process. He was paid a little bit of money to help in the construction through doing things like spreading loads of gravel or dig trenches. Bud, Ruth, and their three children moved in on a muddy spring day in 1963. The house provided ample room for the growing family, and it was where my grandparents lived out the rest of their lives.

Finishing our walk around the more developed portion of the property, the dogs and I are finally approaching my grandparents’ red brick house that has become my residence for the time being.

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But, in typical dog fashion there are still more spots that must be thoroughly sniffed before we venture inside. As they go about understanding things I cannot possibly sense,

I gaze at this year’s garden, which is slowly coming to an end. It’s a third of the size of the garden of my childhood, which spanned from more than three house lengths. The spot for the garden began after the front field was purchased, and my grandpa was the original person to disk up this area for a garden. I can feel faint impressions her and the gardens of my childhood.

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As the dogs and I slowly move along, I try imagining the old fence row I never saw that used to be the southern property line to Earl’s and Florence’s farm. I can kind of sense it because of the neat row of sunburst locusts and walnut trees my mother planted some 30 plus years ago. An enormous hackberry tree, now just the dip in the ground from decaying roots, was a part of that fencerow. I played around that tree. Touched its lumpy bark. Sat under its huge patch of shade, and watch piles of ladybugs around crawling around its base and up and down its trunk. I never knew it then, but that tree was a part of the fencerow, part of the farm.

Vinny and Keke pause after we re-enter the house because years training has taught them that wet paws must be wiped off before running through the house. I pull off their collars and put on the shelf, and they proceed to the kitchen to lap up water. My water is low in the kettle, so I add a little more and push the leaver down. It will be tea

293 this time. A cup, or maybe two, of Earl Grey with no sugar, no milk. With the dogs walked, it is time to feed them and myself, finally. My fogginess is starting to lift.

A Family Gathering

With noon approaching, people will be arriving soon. I should to do a final survey of the set up I put together last night with some assistance from my husband, Ali, who is away today racing down at the mid-Ohio track. Like most of the family gatherings we have around here this is not going to be an extravagant affair. There are no white linen tablecloths. No fine china neatly set on tables. No one will be wearing fancy attire either likely a mix of jeans, t-shirts, sneaks, flannels, hoodies, and ball caps. It a casual, come as you are, kind of gathering of people linked together because of this place.

Linked together because of their connection in the Barnes family. Part of what makes this place what it is are the ties to certain people who are here or were here.

Several months ago, my mom got word from Tom, her cousin and Margaret’s son, that he would be coming through Ohio at the same time my mom’s uncle, Allen and his wife, JoAnne were going to be up this way too. This particular Saturday was perfect timing because both parties would be near here. Given how this rarely happens these days with the Barnes relatives so spread out, it was a natural reason for a gathering. And

I offered to be the hostess. This will by no means rival the sorts of picnics that happened on the farmland when all seven of the Barnes siblings would gather with their families, or even the picnics from my childhood here. More of the Barnes were alive then. But it will still be nice to share this beautiful fall day and a meal with people. A time to catch up, remanence, and make some new memories.

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With the air finally warming up, I open the garage door letting in the sunlight. I have set up the area much like my grandma, Ruth used to do for family picnics. Along one side of the garage are two long, rectangular folding tables set up adorned with floral patterned tablecloths of hers that I found in an upstairs closet. One table will be for the food, which my mom, dad, and aunt will be contributing to. The other is where I put out napkins, plates, bowls, utensils, and cups. In the middle are two smaller card tables pushed together with eight or so folding chairs around them.

My personal touch is another smaller table draped with a tablecloth I got on a trip to Turkey to visit Ali’s family, and there I put out several photo albums that my grandma compiled during her life. Maybe some of the family coming today might like to flip through them. I also put out a deck of cards and a few board games checkers, dominos, and chess none of which I actually bought, but again things I have unearthed at various points rummaging around in the upstairs closets of the red brick house I live in.

Existing the garage, I grab a black five-gallon bucket full of mallets, balls, and metal wickets and walk through the front yard past several other plastic chairs near a small, red picnic table. The ground is painted with the most striking colors.

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For some entertainment today, I thought it would be nice to set up the old croquet set under the sugar maple trees in front of the sandy yellow brick house. The story goes that my grandpa—who really liked planting trees all around this place—actually dug up these two trees out of the ground from somewhere in Wooster, brought them here, and planted them because he thought they would be really nice trees someday. “You were right grandpa. These trees are spectacular, thank you.” I think to myself.

This crochet set will surely lure in some players, maybe ever a game between three different generations of Barnes relatives. A lot of croquet has been played right here in this spot during my childhood and even further back to when Bud and Ruth built their home up on this hill. The ground here is quite flat, which makes for a good grassy playing surface. No one knows anymore where this set came from. I like to imagine maybe Earl or Florence touch it at some point, but I know it is highly unlikely.

“Hello, Jenny.” my mom says as she parks the gator, a four-wheel drive utility vehicle we use around the place in various projects and daily activities. “I thought we could use a few more seat. And maybe a couple tables too.” she adds. My mom has lived here her entire life expect for when she went to college. Other than my grandpa, she is the one Barnes who has lived the longest on this land.

I let out a sigh of relief when I see the extras in the back of the gator, “Thanks, mom. I’ll be over in a minute. We can just put them anywhere for now.” There will now be enough seating for people to sit comfortably in the garage or outside under the shade of the trees. We are anticipating at least 15 people will be showing up for the picnic this afternoon. As I turn to walk and help her, Allen, my youngest brother, who lives in the

296 yellow brick house comes out. “Hey, Jen. Need any help setting up that croquet set?” he asks. “Sure, if ya want.” I respond, and he assumes the set-up duties.

Mom turns back home to get the food she is bringing today: a homemade sponge cake with my chicken’s eggs, baked beans, and a garden-fresh salad made from corn, peppers, garlic, onions, garlic, and tomatoes. My aunt, Connie will be bringing over a fruit salad, coleslaw from garden cabbages, and a pie made from the Jonathan apples trees behind my mom’s house. My dad, John is going to be covering the grill, and Allen will likely accompany him. Like my husband, Ali, my dad was transplanted into this place, by way of marriage. My dad has been living on this land now for 40 years and, for me, he is as much a figure in this place as my mom is or grandparents were.

I have not had much to prepare for this picnic. Other than offering up the space to host everyone. I am supplying all the sandwich fixings like bread, cheeses, lettuce, and condiments and also prepared two simple salads, one with tomatoes and basil from remains of the garden and the other a wild rice salad with almonds, fresh corn, dried cranberries and blueberries. Like always, there will be more than enough food to snout out on, and knowing this family, there is a likelihood someone might bring a dish or two.

At around half past noon, almost everyone has arrived. We are all engaged in the typical greetings of hellos, how was your drive, and how are you and yours doing. A couple cars are parked in my driveway, while two others in the grass as to not block in anyone. Present this afternoon are three different generations of branches of the Barnes family tree.

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My uncle Ray is here, the youngest of Bud’s and Ruth’s children and my mom’s and Connie’s brother. Ray does not live too far away from here about 45 minutes or so.

For a spell of his life, he lived in Georgia because of work but later returned to northeastern Ohio. Today, he came by himself because his wife and daughter had prior plans to meet with friends at Cedar Point. He brought along their dog, Luna.

My great uncle Allen is here with his wife, JoAnne, who was originally from

Louisiana. He was born here in Wooster in 1932, which makes him 86 years old. He spent almost his entire childhood and adolescence living on the family farm that was once here. For the first four years of his life, the Barnes family lived in Chester Township, one of the 16 townships in Wayne County and about seven miles from Wooster. He is the youngest and only remaining child of Earl’s and Florence’s seven, the last link to those who lived on the old farm and worked the land in ways it has not seen for decades.

Allen left the farm when he went to university and occasionally returned to visit.

He originally thought about becoming a farmer, like his father, but the encouragement to get an education from his mother influenced Allen’s career and lifepath. He ended up becoming a petroleum engineer and eventually got doctorate. His career in petroleum took him across that United States to Kentucky, Montana, Alaska and even abroad to

Venezuela and Colombia. Allen and JoAnne live in a suburb of Texas in proximity to the two daughters they raised who each have gone on to have families.

Tom is in from Nebraska, the plains region is aesthetically appealing to him, and he is my mom’s, Connie’s, and Ray’s cousin. Tom’s first connections to this place was through visiting Earl and Florence when the land was once the farm. He came from

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Oklahoma with his mom, Margaret and his brother and sisters in 1957. He lived here, in this place, for 11 years. Throughout his lifetime and career in newspapers though, he has lived in a lot of places: Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio, New Mexico, Tennessee,

Montana, and Wisconsin.

My brother, Adam along with his wife and two little boys are the last car to arrive.

Adam, like me, spent his whole childhood living in this place and left when he went to university but coming back on weekends occasionally. Ever since he graduated and started working, he has remained in cities around northeastern Ohio. Walking over to greet them, their older boy can hardly contain his excitement and races toward me with his arm stretched out. He is holding a golden toy that barely fits inside his tiny hand. “Look, look at my new Godzilla.” he shouts. “We have pumpkins in the car. You have to see them!”

“Wow, that’s a really cool gold ‘zilla!” I exclaim kneeling down to greet him.

“And I would love to see your pumpkins too. Maybe after you have some lunch, okay?”

Adam not far behind him approaches, “Hey, how’s it going? Nice day for a picnic.

Sorry we’re a little late. We stopped to get some pumpkins on the way here.”

“No worries, people have been slowly rolling in.” I respond. “Just glad you and the family could make it down. It’s good to see you. Come on get let’s get some food.

It’s in the garage.” I greet his wife too, who is carrying their other son just over a year old, and together we walk towards the garage.

While I was away greeting Adam, out of the corner of my eyes I saw Tom, Ray, and my dad moving the chairs and tables around. They managed to quickly rearrange the

299 set up with the extra tables my mom brought earlier. The new set up extends into the driveway and will be a much better set up so everyone can be within earshot of one another. Or at least close enough to hear and have good conversation with certain people.

With plates full of food everyone settles around the tables and the conversation meanders.

Morphing from between people sitting next one another to across the tables. I cannot keep track of everything or be involved in all of them.

For a moment I am draw into a conversation Tom and Ray are having when I overhear Ray exclaim, “There were hundreds of them. I mean hundreds! I’d never see so many praying mantises at once. It was so cool to see while I was brush hogging the pastures.” The two of them continue talking about how growing up in this place involved hard work. They frequently did a lot of mowing around here when they were younger. And they also got roped into helping out grandpa with various projects around the land whether it was working on the cars, building or painting something, landscaping projects, or taking the trash—which was handled at one point through using burn barrels—to the dump. The luxuries of particular infrastructures and services provided within city limits often do not extended to those living outside of them.

At one point in the meal, uncle Allen tosses out the question, “So, what do you have planted out there this year?” referencing to the slowly browning garden in the distance. The same garden that has found its way on to our plates in various forms.

My aunt chimes in, “Oh, well…we planted a little bit of everything. Ya know, the usual corn, peppers, green beans, winter squash, sunflowers, turnips, carrots, and red beats. Some greens too cabbage, chard, and spinach. We also put out some stuff like

300 okra, tomatillos, and eggplants. Everything has fared pretty well this year too, which is lucky.” My dad adds that he had a pretty nice garlic harvest in summer and is planning to plant next year’s crop in a few weeks. Allen, my younger brother adds, “Yeah, you never know what the season will bring. Gardening is always a gamble. Some years its good, others not so much.”

Uncle Allen’s question prompts further recall from the past about the gardening that has happened around this place. There is recollection for buying seeds from a local store I never know but heard of, the Gold Star Store. There is talk of how Bud was always up for prepping the garden by tilling, helping to plant, and eventually eating but that he was never the gardener, ever. Ruth, my grandma, was more into tending what was growing as well as canning and freezing the excess—still a tradition that is kept alive by those of us living here now. The taste is so much more delightful than store bought.

My brothers and I add into the conversations thoughts on our childhoods and helping in the garden too. As this conversation around fellowship through gardening begins to subside, great uncle Allen and JoAnne excuse themselves. They have to get back on the road in order to get to the airport for their late evening flight home.

After goodbyes are said, I suddenly realize the desserts still have not been touched. And I commence the eating of sweets by saying, “Who wants dessert? We have an apple pie that Connie made, and a sponge cake my mom did. And, oh yeah, ice cream too.” I proceed inside to get the large thermos of coffee my mom somehow managed to brew and store among all the eating and chatter. My dad follows me inside but to the basement freezer for the ice cream. When we both return, Connie is cutting the

301 pie and sponge cake calling out to see who wants what. And my dad begins scooping out either vanilla and/or chocolate ice cream for corresponding orders. People grab plates and return to their seats.

Having grown restless, Adam’s two boys run through the yard playing with leaves and Ray’s dog, Luna who is an older, gentle giant. Conversation begins to unfold about the Route 3 highway when it was not so busy, a reality not in existence today. In the summers, my mom biked across the highway to go pick strawberries at another farm owned by Dave and Carol Maurer, friends of the family. My aunt, Connie participated in 4-H each year with her horses, and she would ride them down to the Wayne County

Fair Grounds. The first horse was Chief. When she outgrew him, she road Betty and Jet for a couple years, and the last one was, Sweed. There were also plenty of other horses around like Tiny Tim and Cinnamon. Tom shares the story, I have hear many times, of how aunt Carol bought seven or eight horses at an auction, and afterward, she got them from the Wayne County Fair Grounds all the way up to here via the highway.

The conversation slides in and out of other childhood memories. Peggy, Connie,

Tom, and Ray talk about the geodes they use to find in the ravine between the houses.

Ray mentions snorkeling in the first pond and second. My brothers and I chime in sharing recollections mushroom hunting in the forest and pastures. While listening to meshing of childhood experiences across generations, I suddenly recall a letter I read of

Earl’s written in 1954, in which he wrote, “Twenty-five years ago I moved to Wooster.

We then had a family of 6 children, and I wanted to get out of the big city where the

302 children would have more freedom.”5 Part of me smiles, and I wonder if maybe we all have experienced a sort of freedom by living here. Maybe, Earl and Florence gave us all a gift through this land.

Tom, Ray, and Adam all took off maybe a half hour or so ago leaving only myself, my mom, and Connie. Although she lives just around the corner, with nightfall approaching sooner these days, Connie mentions wanting to get a walk in around the triangle before dark. “Uh, I feel so full. It’s making me want to be lazy. I need to get up and move before I fall asleep.” She also has a dogs, cats, and horses to tend to this evening. “Do you need any help cleaning up?” she asks me as she begins packing up the small amount leftovers from her coleslaw and fruit salad. The pie is nothing but an empty dish.

“No, I don’t think so. There’s not much left to do really.” I proclaim, which is true. We used paper plates, and they have all found their way to the garbage can next to the food station. Somehow most all the coffee mugs are together. None of this was my doing, but I am grateful it has occurred. And all plastic cups are near each other on a table along with all the plastic utensils. I sense grandma is living inside me. I am saving these plastic items to use again. Some warm water, soap, and a little bleach will make them good as new. My mom starts collecting her jack and bag, while my dad is putting their food containers in the back of the gator. “You sure you don’t need any help here with stuff, Jenny?” she asks. I give the same respond as I did to Connie.

5 Barnes, ca. 1935–1957.

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I am alone again as the gator disappears toward my parents’ house. I walk around pulling off table clothes and dragging all the folding chairs into the garage. All the while, my mind is recalling the picnics and family gathering of my childhood when my life intertwined with the Barnes siblings. Expect for Bud, many of them I saw every once in a while, and only really ever knew from perspective of child or young adult.

Mim, she used to make the best pies. Everyone always looked forward to them.

George would come with his wife, Edith and would bring a sense of companionship for grandpa. He was always fun and taught me Morse Code. Dorothy and her husband, Jim would come up from Delaware, Ohio and always show up with a van and at least two

Brittany Spaniels dogs and sometimes a delicious carrot cake. Carol, I never saw her much but know her as a strong presence through horses, the buyers of horses and colts.

Margaret would always bring along her little lap dogs. My grandpa, Bud would a homemade, hand-churned vanilla ice cream that made brain freezes I still can feel.

Someone should have learned how to make it from him.

With the all chairs taken down, I grab the tablecloths and walk through the garage towards the house. “After I put these down in the laundry, I’ll finish cleaning up rest of the garage.” I think to myself. I pass through garage’s entry door with red, flacking paint to make my way inside but suddenly I pause. Turning around looking back into the space I take it all in again. The two long, rectangular folding tables still standing with the smaller card tables in the chairs still around them. The photo albums next to an open deck of cards and untouched board game. Part of me does not want this gathering to end.

Part of me does not want our conversations to get lost. Part of me wishes we had more

304 time. My finger presses the garage door button and the door begins to descend. I decide to let this space stay like this for a while longer, for the rest of the night at least. For now, it is time to walk the dogs, again.

An Evening Campfire

Crickets have begun chirping again, and a train whistles in the distance from the

Killbuck Valley about a couple miles east of here. A light chill has been creeping in from

305 the north. The day is coming to a close. The sun is starting to kiss the western horizon. I look in the chicken coops. All my hens and roosters appear to be settled into their stops for the night. After closing both chicken coops for the day, I wonder over to a pile of branches everyone here has been collecting all summer. I fiddle with several of the branches snapping them with my fingers to test their dryness. Lighting bugs would be beginning their amazing spectacle by now. Alas, that show has eased for the time being but will return when warmer days return. A sudden urge to make a fire overcomes me, and I turn back to my house to grab some matches and a blanket to sit on.

Watching the matchsticks slowly dissolve into flames while the leaves start crackling, I am struck by the setting of the sun and how the sounds of the highways near here lessens. I can really sink into myself, and my mind begins to wander. In the twilight, time feels linear getting marked by the movement of the sun across the sky.

Time gets marked by the phases of the moon. Time seems to always be moving forward.

While I am still here in this place, I am not in the same time that I was five hours ago before my afternoon spent with family. Today is not yesterday or last week. Nor am I in the same time, or place, I was 15 years ago. Three months from now will different, even if I am going about similar daily routines and talking to some of the same people. Time gets marked clocks, calendars, and events. But might time also be marked by feelings?

Might time not be a line? Might time be a present here and now that coexists with what was and is yet to be?

Warmth of the fire starts to cut through the chilliness beginning to settle in around me. Flames are dancing stronger. The wood beings to hiss and pop. The slightest mist

306 begins twisting around the bases of trees like the ghosts of this place. The mist is as inexorable as this places’ history. A history of lives who experienced this place but who have been forgotten. Lost to time. Enigmas present in the place that I can sense and feel but that others may not know. I grab a twig, break in into pieces, and toss them one by one into the fire. I begin seeing silhouettes in my mind and decide to process them again.

Thomas McCracken had served in the War of 1812 from July through January as a Corporal in Captain Thomas Roland’s Company.6 After his service and on February 3,

1816, McCracken purchased 160 acres of land directly from the United State Federal

Government for $344.00.7 I am now sitting on a piece, 64 acres, of what used to be owned by him. McCracken’s purchase of land was part of the federal government’s

Harrison Land Act, which was enacted to encourage settlement of the Northwest

Territory.8 Thomas and his wife Susan McCracken were part of the movement of early pioneers into what was then Columbiana County, now Wayne County, and they eventually had a daughter born here named, Eliza. 9

By 1826, Thomas McCracken had sold half of the 160 acres (i.e., 60 acres) to

William M. Kelly.10 Through 1845, William Kelly seems to be associated with the land, but there is still a time range that I cannot puzzle out yet from mid-1850s through 1870s.

The boundaries through maps become blurry and tax records as well as deeds of sale are

6 The Adjutant General of Ohio, 1916, p. 64. 7 U.S. Bureau of Land Management, 1816; U.S. Bureau of Land Management, n.d. 8 Ohio History Connection, n.d. 9 Smith, 1988; The Wayne County Democratic 1887. 10 Smith, 1983.

307 not crystal clear. Several different names circulate around the place where I live currently, James Jacobs, Henry Sturgeon, James Knox, and Jacob Loop.11

I pause for a moment and think, “Geeze, discerning the constantly shifting property boundaries in the early formation of Wooster Township and around where I am will be an on-going endeavor.” Regrouping myself and refocusing, I grab another stick and a handful of dried leaves that have fallen in the piles before I sat here. I crack the new stick into several pieces and one by one pierce the leaves onto them. Looking at the fire again with focus, I toss the skewers into the flames. Watching them burn, I recollected myself and being considering more names and dates.

By the later 1800s, tracing out a history of this place is clearer because I have encountered more forms of documentation. By 1873, Michael Miller with his wife,

Hannah Miller have acquired 124 acres of land, which was almost all of the original 160 that McCracken bought. The Miller family actually lived inside the city limits of

Wooster and used the land out here as a homestead for farming, but out here there was actually a house on farm’s property too.12

Then, in 1893, James Donald, who was from Scotland originally and naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1890, was in Wooster, Ohio along with his wife, Hannah, and Donald bought the property form Miller for $3,003.75.13 The Donald’s had a house and barn, but the barn was unfortunately struck by lightning form a storm in July of 1900.14 The barn

11 Wayne County Genealogy Society, 1987. 12 The Genealogy Society, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1995a; The Wayne County Democrat, 1881. 13 Barnes, 1942; The Genealogy Society, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1995b. 14 The Wayne County Democrat, 1900, July.

308 was burnt to the ground with all its contents, hay and grain but was rebuilt by October.15

Eventually, the Donald’s sell the farm to Frank G. and Minnie E. Bishop in 1932.16

Before they bought the farm though, Donald hosted the sale of his items from around the farm including hay and corn, a cow, horses, poultry along with farming devices like a blacksmith forge, log chains, and slip scraper.17

The Bishops must have experienced some financial pressures during the Great

Depression because they lost the land pretty shortly after they were here. By Wednesday,

December 14, 1932 at two o’clock in the afternoon the farmland was sold at Public

Sale.18 The sale was held at the door of the Wayne County Court House, and the Wayne

County National Bank was the highest bidder at $2,500.00.19 The bank kept the land and sold it approximately a year later to John E. and Lulu L. Jamison in 1933 for $3,800.00.

John and Lulu remained on this land for a brief stint too, only three years. And in

1936 was when my great grandparents, Earl and Florence Barnes buy the property, and it has remained with descendants of the Barnes family since then. Earl and Florence are a piece of my connection with this place. My ability to sit here outside of city limits by the light a fire is in part because of them. Earl and Florence are part of my origin story with this place. And so too are my grandparents and how their choices lead them to living out their lives in this place. My origin is in part about how lives beget lives. I am here because of decisions others made and forces that existed before me.

15 The Wayne County Democrat, 1900, October. 16 Barnes, 1942. 17 The Wooster Daily News, 1919. 18 The Daily Record, 1932. 19 Barnes, 1942.

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Tracing through all of these names and dates in my mind, I somehow feel like I have gotten me closer to knowing some sort of foundation for place and myself. Names and dates found through legal documentation provide something tangible and real. But, then again, all of what I have trailed and tied to this place is only a way to understand a certain history here.

To think, craft, and share an origin story through only these people does something dishonest. It leaves out untold numbers of peoples. It leaves out voices, histories, and experiences that I still have yet to try to comprehend more deeply. The

Killbuck Creek runs through this place and around this area were Native American enclosures and villages sites.20 Before the early pioneers and later owners, there were the native peoples of the Delawares, Wyandots, and Shawnees.21 No more than a mile or so

20 Mills, 1914. 21 Kaufman, 1973; Farver, 1963; Locher, 2012b; Mills, 1914; Williams, 1983.

310 from where I am sitting three major, well-traveled trails converged just south of Wooster:

The Great Trail, The War Trail, and The Peace Trail.22 “All of these people, they are a part of this place’s history too. The people and forces that displaced and dehumanized them are a part of this place too. I really need to keep exploring this historical dimension for a deeper understanding of this place now.”

“Who are you out there talking to?” from behind me a voice punctures the focused thinking I had been immersed in.

Startled, I crane my neck backward to see my aunt, Connie walking my way. She is wearing comfy black pants with a grey hoodie, fleece vest, and knitted cap. Tucked under her arm is a blanket or two. Trailing her are her three cats Cy a slender Siamese with a quirky personality, Jack a friendly yellow male and golden eyes, and Kekerman hefty, tiger-striped male, who I lovely call Sneakerman because I catch him sneaking

Cookie’s and Neffy’s food even though he has plenty to eat at my aunt’s place. She must have seen me out here tinkering around over here and lighting the fire. I am not actually too far away from her house.

“Oh, it’s no one. I’m just talking to myself. Thinking about this place.” I reply with a slight laugh in my voice because of mild embarrassment. I did not realize that the names or linkages I was thinking had actually been coming out of my mouth. But I cannot be the only person in the world who talks outload to themselves in the dark about their life. I cannot be the only person who trying to navigate and make meaning of their

22 Locker, 2012b.

311 encounters with a past calling to the present. I cannot be the only person who sees faint mists of what once was and wants to understand them, wants to share them.

Connie spreads out her two blankets out next to mine. “You know I can’t resist a good fire. I’m such a pyro.” she says jokingly as she kneels down. We sit together with our backs against the trunk of a huge oak tree and stare into the dancing flames.

This oak was cut down when the Connie did an addition to Margert’s old barn, which now houses food and stalls Falcon and Marcus and is a shelter for the three cats who have settled in around us. The oak is a short distance from the wood pile next to the chicken coops. This particular oak was one of those that George Bart planted decades ago. Sadly, it had been slowly dying since I moved back. It was not as full of leaves as it once was, and it started having barer limbs and loosing branches more often. The trunk will eventually be split for firewood, but that is going to be a big job to tackle. I anticipate my dad, Connie, me, and maybe my brother, Allen will do this in the coming year.

Connie remarks, “Your mom said she was going to come over too. When she gets here, I’m sure she’d like to hear some of what you were talking about. You know how she loves history. I would like to know more, too.” A few moments later, off in the distance, a figure appears walking towards us, my mom. She too is dressed for the crispiness of this evening and appears to be carrying a bottle of wine and several mugs.

I feel full for a moment. If only my grandma were still around, we could pull her into this night too. Maybe we could even convince her to have a glass of wine and enjoy the sunset and this fire with us. We could talk about our days, our lives and living here.

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It would be nice to sit in that sort of matriarchal energy, three generation of women tied to a place. But two generation will have to do.

“Don’t you know a good fire is meant to be shared?” my mom says to me while handing the bottle of wine to Connie and mugs to me.

“I know, I know. I wasn’t planning to be out here. But I just kind of stumbled over here after closing the chickens. It felt like a fire kind of night, ya know.” I remark.

“The stillness out here is really peaceful. What a wonderful night to be communing with the nature here” says my mom.

Connie pulls a corkscrew from her vest pocket to uncork bottle of dry red, which came from Troutman Winery just south of here. I recognize the label and slide over readying a mug. All three of us with our backs against the trunk take a few sips sitting in silence.

Whoo, whoo, whoooooo. We pause. With mouths slightly opened, each one of us stairs wide-eyed at the others. And again, off in the distance—whooo, whooo, whooo.

We call remine silent until Connie exclaims, “Wow, how neat is that!”

“There must be a great horned owl around here somewhere.” my mom responds.

“Yup, that’s the call of one for sure. Maybe grandma is here with us after all.

She did love owls.” I add. We smile at each other.

“Yeah. It was all because of those screech owls Don Bogner brought over that he found in a pine tree he’d cut down. Raising them and releasing them was pretty neat.” my mom replied.

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“Yeah, it was. And mom would catch mice to feed them.” Connie nods in confirmation, “That was a pretty cool animal experience.”

I respond, “Their old screened in pen was still around when I was little, but it was falling apart.” I have heard recollection stories about these owls throughout my life and seen old photographs of them too. I have heard the story often enough that I could almost mistake it for happening in my own lifetime, but I know it did not.

Here we are, three women, sitting still and waiting for another round of calls from darkness. But nothing comes. Just a visitor passing through the night. My mom is the first to break the stillness, “Some people have a connection to creation by going to church. I have a connection to spiritualness when I do this kind of thing we’re doing.

Or when sit on my deck and drink a cup of tea and look over the pasture. It’s peace, a connection with nature.”

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“I get that feeling of connection too when I’m out in the dirt of the garden, grounding myself. Or if I’m walking around down in the pasture or along Killbuck. Or riding a horse.” Connie replies. “I’m enjoying getting a chance to relive my childhood being back here. Every day after school, I would come home, change my clothes, jump on a horse, and ride. I would be gone for hours. Sometimes alone, sometimes not”

My mom chimes in, “We had a lot of free play out as kids spending hours outside in nature alone and with each other. I’m grateful for that.” The warmth of a smile blooms on my face and in my heart, I respond, “That is a gift you also gave me mom, you and dad. And even grandma and grandpa when I stayed with them while you two worked.”

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The conversation shifts slightly as my mom comments, “One of the things I still wonder about every so often when I look off my porch or like behind your house, Jenny is what ever happened to all the soil around here. I mean, someone move a lot of earth from this landscape.”

“Yeah, the land should have a more gradual slop down to Killbuck Creek like it does to around my house.” Connie adds as she stands up and walks over to pick up a decent size stick that fell from one of the nearby walnut trees.

I follow up by saying, “Yeah, there really are steeps cuts up here that create the hillsides behind three of the houses. And right over there too in the ravine between

Connie’s and mine.”

Poking around the base of the fire with the stick, Connie prompts, “So, Jenny you were talking about something when I came out here. Something about this place.”

“Yeah. How’s that project going that you’re working on about this place? Have you learned anything interesting?” my mom follows up.

Taking another sip of wine, I nod a yes. For a few moments, I say nothing but am thinking and deciding what is the best way to respond. There is a knowing about our place inside me now and about how I am enmeshed in it all. A knowing about the land’s past that comes sometimes through flashes and sometimes as a timeline. A knowing that feels faint traces of ghosts walking through the houses and buildings, in the fields and pastures, over the hills and through the forest. Seemingly separate names and life stories linked together through this place. A knowing about how this place was before us. A knowing about how it will outlast us. A knowing that causes a relentless murmur to

316 share about that which is more than what is in front of us now. And so, I decide to begin with what I have learned so far. I begin with what I was mulling over in front of the fire before my mom and my aunt arrived.

Postlude

Welcome to the end, reader. You are now existing a story about a place, a story from a place, a story told by a woman entangled with that place. You were asked to remain aware of the five interconnected aesthetic relationships (i.e., past~present, individual~collective, living~dead, human~nonhuman, material~immaterial). Were you?

Did you bare them in mind as you read the words and explored the pictures presented in her story? My hope is that you did. The aesthetic relationships are important to understanding the place and the storyteller who shared a piece of her life and her world with you. But I also have another hope. A hope that sharing stories about places might aid in increasing a sense of place consciousness among human beings.

None of us are strangers to the world. And thus, none of us are strangers the places that make up the world. We come into being and into ways of knowing through our relationships with places. Everyone—including you, the narrator, and I—we are always entangled in places. We are bound up within places, and we cannot exist without them. But for so many of us for many different reasons, we become estranged to our experiences of living within places.

We are living in a time where displacement is running wild. People are trying to get out of places, while others want to get to/in places. For others, places become the backdrop of their lives, becoming what gets passed over and gone through. Places get

317 lost, melting behind the hustle and bustle of living. Places become ignored, and we sometimes know too little about them. We understand too little about the people that make places, the lives that live in places, and the things we do to places. We can often even be unaware of how we are making, remaking, and undoing places and too how they make and remaking us.

And so, here is where my hope enters. It is my hope that we become more attentive to places and being considering ways we might become more attentive to the meanings of place in our lives. Attentive in the sense that we become more aware of how we inhabit places, what we do to them, and their interconnectedness as a larger whole.

One place is always part of a much bigger configuration beyond your perception and beyond its one locality. So, I heed you, reader. How are you entangled within places?

What are your sets of experiences, relationships, thoughts, things, and remembrances of places? What might you reach for understandings that are beyond what you know to be?

Please try attuning to the meanings and rhythms of places and how you are living within them. Be moved by places. Become curious about how they feel to you and how they feel to others. Explore what places have to teach you about who you are, and what they might teach you about others. Find ways to share that knowing, express it. While this might be the end of our encounter, perhaps it is actually about new beginnings. What might be the aesthetics relationships you see unfolding in your own experience of living within place(s)?

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CHAPTER V

CONSIDERING EDUCATIVE CONSEQUENCES AND POSSIBILITIES

“Every experience is a moving force. Its value can be judged only on the ground of

what it moves towards and into. …Failure to take the moving force of experience

into account…means disloyalty to the principle of experience itself”

(Dewey, 1963/1938, p. 38).

The aim of this chapter is to bring the dissertation to a point of closure. To begin this effort, Figure 31 will prove helpful in recapping important elements in my empirical work. The diagram captures the study’s general flow from its genesis, on the left-hand side, through engagements with data and to the findings that emerged.

Figure 31. The dissertation’s flow.

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This dissertation was prompted by the convergence of several “experiential incitements”

(Rosiek, 2013a) that disrupted my “nonreflective” (Ryan, 2011) state of living in the world. Returning to live on the land I grew up on, the deaths of grandparents, keeping chickens, and disciplined study (Pinar, 2012) within the field of curriculum studies, brought into focus the problematic situation of the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011), and in particular the schisms it encourages between mind, body, and environment. The crisis is a pressing general education problem because of the displacing and disembodying effects it has in teaching and curriculum. Chapter Two clarified these concerns by weaving together literature from leading curriculum and pedagogy scholars and the particular veins of thought on aesthetics, place, and interiority.

Given the experiential incitements and the onset of the problematic situation, this dissertation sought not to resolve the crisis but rather to confront and reconstructively respond to it by “centering” (Macdonald, 1995) in a place through the aesthetics of everyday life (Dewey, 1934/2005; Shusterman, 2000). The guiding inquiry question was:

What can be discovered by attuning to place aesthetically? Archival, familial, and autobiographical data were generated using a variety of methods, and through cycles of hermeneutic, interpretive analysis five experiential “objectives” (Ryan, 2011) emerged as significant: past~present, living~dead, material~immaterial, human~nonhuman, and individual~collective. The five findings, which are on the left-hand side of Figure 31, served as empirical grounding for the creation of the artwork in Chapter Four, the narrative and visual piece of creative nonfiction.

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Chapter Four was dedicated to representing the five experiential objectives through an expressive form. Inspired by the concept of “geostory” (Haraway, 2016) and creative nonfiction (Miller, & Paola, 2004), an artwork was created using visual and narrative data. Artmaking became the personal, imaginative, and reconstructive way for me to respond to the lingering educational problem of the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan,

2011) and its schism between mind, body, and environment. The geostory was conceived during and birthed from the inquiry process and thus is steeped in my continuous experience of living with place (Macdonald, 1995; Rosiek, 2013a; Ryan, 2011;

Shusterman, 2000). It is a “material semiotic intervention” generated amidst my “the continuing stream of experience” of living with place (p. 699). The intention of crafting a geostory was twofold. First, the geostory was a way of representing the interpreted results with reference to the empirical work of data generation and analysis. Secondly, the geostory is not meant to be consumed as a “mere representations of independent objects,” but rather as an artwork (Rosiek, 2013a, p. 699). Therefore, it was crafted with the aim of being evocative and inviting percipients to engage in their imaginations and consider their relationships with places (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2015).

Given pragmatism’s overall methodological influence in this project and the sensibilities it encouraged for inquiry, pragmatism naturally remained a central guide for this chapter. Of assistance in both titling and writing this chapter were Rosiek’s (2013a) point that pragmatism must always address an inquiry’s consequences and possibilities for action and Dewey’s (1963/1938) notion of “educative experience” with its “active union” of interaction and continuity (p. 44). Continuity encapsulates how “every

321 experience both takes up something from those which have gone before and modifies in some way the quality of those which come after” (p. 35), while interaction denotes the

“going[s] on between an individual and objects and other persons. … experience is always what it is because of a transaction taking place between an individual and what, at the time, constitutes his[her/their] environment” (p. 43). Pragmatism, thus, supports an ontological attitude that asks an inquirer to consider how current experience exists within

“anticipations of the future” (Rosiek, 2013a, p. 696). In attending to those future consequences and possibilities, a hermeneutic sensibility is utilized to navigate what is known with imagining what is yet to become (Greene, 1995). A hermeneutic sensibility also involves an “open-ended assessment” when contemplating any projected consequences and possibilities from an inquiry (Rosiek, 2013a, p. 697). Such pragmatic qualities informed the careful consideration given to the educative consequences and possibilities that can came from my empirical, aesthetic exploration of place.

With such sensibilities in mind, this chapter opens by discussing possible ways my study can contribute to curriculum and pedagogy conversations specifically around the existential and aesthetic dimensions of deep reflexivity. I, then, transition to clarifying several consequences from this inquiry with reference to my self- understandings as a researcher and educator who is a curriculum studies generalist. The chapter, then, briefly acknowledges several inherent boundaries of my inquiry.

Following that is a discussion of several future possibilities that can follow from this project. Rounding out the chapter is a discussion the implications of “centering”

(Macdonald, 1995) aesthetically within place for educational professionals.

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Contributions to Curriculum and Pedagogy

A well-established tradition within the field of curriculum and teaching exists on cultivating prospective and practicing educators’ reflective capabilities. Brookfield

(1995), Grant (1984), Henderson, (2001), Schön (1984, 1987), and Simpson, Jackson, and Aycock (2004) are notable contributions in support of reflective pedagogy. Recently, too, reflectivity has taken form in fruitful ways through qualitative research approaches like practitioner inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Dana & Yendol-Hoppey, 2013) and self-study (Loughran, Hamilton, LaBoskey, & Russell, 2004; Pithouse-Morgan &

Samaras, 2015; Samaras & Freese, 2006). Autio (2009b) and Westbury, Hopmann, and

Riquarts (2000) offer insights into the European traditions of Bildung and Didaktik, which stress the interplay of self-formation and cultural growth through education.

Reflective practice is also considered relevant for educators’ leadership efforts.

Henderson, Castner, and Schneider (2018) speak to this through educational problem- solving that is deeply concerned for and committed to democratic ways of living. York-

Barr, Sommers, Ghere, and Montie (2016) offer reflective strategies for the classroom and with colleagues as ways of improving content learning. Shirley and Macdonald

(2016) propose grounding self-reflection in mindfulness practices, which can lead to professional renewal in teachers and schools. Given the mountainous literature surrounding reflective practice in education, it has been and continues to be a pertinent topic in curriculum and teaching, and my aesthetic exploration of place has the potential to contribute to this area of educational import.

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Nurturing educators’ deep reflectivity is not simple though, and shortcomings can exist within enthusiastic pushes for reflective practice. Limitations can arise in part because of the “beliefs and images” (Walker & Soltis, 2009) that inhabit interpretations of curriculum and teaching, which in turn are infused with how reflectivity is conceptualized and enacted. Macdonald’s and Purpel’s (1987) work on curriculum visions is helpful here because they suggest that how we understand curriculum and teaching is always fused with “who and what we are, where we come from, and where we are going” (p. 192). Trends dominating curriculum and teaching today seem propelled by a mash of tendencies anchored in neoliberalism, utilitarianism, essentialism, instrumentalism, and technical-rationalism with an accompanying logic that perpetuates competition, conformity, control, standardization, quantification, and top-down management (see Apple, 2006a; Blumenfeld-Jones, 2012; Eisner, 1997; Henderson,

Castner, & Schneider, 2018; Hendry, 2011; Kliebard, 2009; Macdonald, 1995; Noddings,

2013; Pinar 2012; Taubman, 2009; Tieken, 2017). The prevalence of such default, habituated ways of thinking-acting in curriculum and teaching can in turn influence on reflective practices and possibilities. Further, it is challenging for deep reflexivity to flourish in such trends because reflective thought can become vulnerable to forms of dogmatism (Henderson, Castner, & Schneider, 2018).

Reflectivity, for example, might be seen as having value only in so much as it focuses on and helps educators meet goals of improving students’ content learning. Or educators’ reflection might be perceived as beneficial when tied to external mandates initiated at the state, district, or school level. When reflectivity is linked only to “worth”

324 and “benefit,” we are doing what Blumenfeld-Jones (2012) called “rational calculations” and “continu[ing] to conceptualize the world as a place of technical concern” (p. 97).

Moreover, reflecting on instructional practices or students’ learning can be meaningful at times and in certain situations, as acknowledged by the eclectic stance found in

Henderson et al., (2015) and Henderson, Castner, and Schneider (2018), but concern surfaces when these are the sole tethers for reflectivity. In short, when conceptualization of curriculum and teaching are characteristically narrow, reductionistic, and even undemocratic, approaches to reflectivity could also to follow suit.

What gets terribly neglected in reductionistic view are explorations into one’s subjectivity, sense of existence, and relational experiences. Educators are teaching and living amidst challenging social problems like authoritarianism, xenophobia, bigotry, economic and political inequalities, violence, deaths, ecological destruction, and more.

Such concerns are far more complex than any technical approach to reflection can ever hope fully to address, let alone transform. My empirical exploration of place does not ignore the educational importance of deep reflexivity, existential understandings, or the complexities of being an educator living in the 21st century. My research is an illustration of how a deeply troubling educational problem—i.e., the pervasiveness of the mind, body, and environment split encouraged by the “crisis of modernity'” (Ryan, 2011)—can propel exploration into one’s subjectivity through aesthetics experience within place.

Places along with educators’ selves and experiences of living in the world can, unfortunately, be ignored or overlooked within educational discourse and courses of actions. And my arts-based, pragmatist inquiry shows how place is not only a way of

325 exploring one’s sense of self but also for examining one’s relationships and sense of existence. Curriculum and teaching should not shy away from questions of existential significance because education is not separate from life and living. Nor should curriculum and teaching shy away from places as they are woven into each human beings the fabric of living in the world. This dissertation adds to arguments that place needs to be given serious consideration in curriculum and teaching (e.g., Bowers, 2008; Casemore,

2008; Cutts, 2012; Gruenewald, 2003b & 2008; Kahn, 2010; Kincheloe & Pinar, 1991;

Seidel & Jardine, 2014). Moreover, my research supports conversations the seek to support “place-conscious education” as an aim of curriculum and pedagogy (Gruenewald,

2003a).

Cultivating and deepening reflexivity involves in part addressing the existential dimensions of knowing and becoming. Blumenfeld-Jones (2012) pointed toward the importance of self-building in education when he wrote,

…we tend to ignore questions of existence and ‘self-building,’ focusing purely on

the epistemological. We rarely address questions of existential import that…are at

the base of most people’s concerns in life (not questions of how): of what am I

afraid of, what and/or who have I lost that I cannot find, about who do I care, how

can I make a world that will attend to my need and the needs of others? (p. 97)

Fowler (2006) too encourages deepening reflectivity by exploring one’s “teacher being” through questions like, “Who in the world am I by now? Where am I and how did I get here? How do I go on from here?” (p. 17). Pinar’s (2012) argument for self-formation through study has resonance here too. Studying subjectivity, self-formation, and agency

326 are paramount for education, because without them education is undemocratic and

“evaporates, replaced by the conformity” (p. 43). What rings clear from these scholars is that deep questioning of the existential sort should not be outside of the scope of classrooms nor should it be separated from schools. Educators, along with others like their students, should be encouraged to explore their sense of selves, and my dissertation encourages “centering” (Macdonald, 1995) to be a part of such explorations. If places and existential dimensions of existence absent in education, there is a risk of silencing and forgetting the complexities of living in the world as educational stakeholders.

Exploring questions of existential significance, then, should be just as much a part of reflectivity in education, schools, and teaching as is thinking about the hows and whats of curriculum and teaching. Evident, then, is that supporting prospective and practicing educators’ deep reflexivity requires an eclectic embrace as encouraged by the likes of

Eisner (1994), Flinders and Thorton (2009), Henderson and Gornik (2007), Henderson et. al. (2015), and Henderson, Castner, and Schneider (2018). Reflective practice should not solely focus educators’ attention on technical reflection, which can certainly be valuable at times and in particular situations. Rather reflexivity should also be balanced and encompass more existentially rooted questionings around existence, states of living, and reality(ies).

Awareness of and support for the existential dimension of human understandings readily exists within the curriculum studies field, and my dissertation project on the aesthetics of a place contributes to this area. James Macdonald’s (1995) curriculum theorizing created space for the reconceptualization of curriculum studies, and through

327 his grasp of hermeneutics— the art of interpretations—settled upon “centering” as a concept for cultivating self-understandings and challenging the dominance of technical rationality. Macdonald believed centering should be an educational aim. Centering can be a way of studying educational experiences through the linkage of one’s life with education. My dissertation pushes in the direction of existential understandings in curriculum and teaching and contributes to this area in an interesting way through centering within place aesthetically.

Existential sensibilities in curriculum have been supported since the reconceptualization of the curriculum studies field. Pinar and Grumet (1976) and Grumet

(1988) began breaking ground on interiority through psychoanalytical lenses, while

Miller (1990) and Pinar (1994) brought in the autobiographical. Blumenfeld-Jones

(2012), Fowler (2006), Miller (2005), and Wang (2004) among others are more recent efforts in self-understandings. Schneider, School, Griest, and Stagliano (2015) is a co- authored expression from my collaborative efforts with three teacher leaders on their own self-examination through a holistic understanding of curriculum and teaching. The annual Currere Exchange held at the University of Miami in Ohio is another timely example of educators studying the existential qualities of curriculum and pedagogy (The

Currere Exchange, 2019). My research contributes to such conversations through offering an illustration of how exploring place can be a way for educators to enter into the process of “centering” (Macdonald, 1995).

Deliberations around aesthetics are not a new to the field of curriculum (see

Barone, 2000; Blumenfeld-Jones, 2012; Bresler, 2004; Doll, 2000; Eisner, 2002,

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Garrison, 2010; Greene, 2001; jagodzinski, 1992; Uhrmacher, 2009), and aesthetics goes hand in hand with the existential dimension of reflexivity. An interrelated implication of my research, therefore, is that it contributes to conversations around aesthetics but does so in a particular way, that is, though the aesthetics of everyday life (Dewey, 1934/2005;

Shusterman, 2000). The aesthetics of everyday life is an underexamined in curriculum studies. Such an aesthetics emerges from and is energized by individuals’ everyday lives, has implications for deep reflexivity. The aesthetics of everyday life beckons for an acknowledgment and awareness of sensations and movement towards the “discovering personal meaning” (Blumenfeld-Jones, 2012, p 30). This particular interpretation of aesthetics can encourage educators to feel out and study their lives and local place(s) as possible ways of enacting deep reflexivity and cultivating place-based consciousness.

The aesthetics of everyday life is also not bound to looking at or making artworks nor visiting galleries, although those are not excluded. Rather, it is an aesthetics emerging the rawness of educators’ experiences of living in the world, or as Blumenfeld-

Jones (2012) suggested “being sensitive to the environments” in which we are living (p

31). Such “active participation in the world through one’s senses” is a way into understandings of existence, states of living, and reality(ies) (p. 30). Moreover, it

“carries information and value for us as dimension of our humanness” (p. 43). This dissertation encourages curriculum and pedagogy to not shy away from sensations and thoughts that arise. They can prove to be inspiring, insightful, and transformational in terms of the many ways. Education is, after all, never separate from living and making meaning.

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The aesthetics of everyday life, like the existential, can challenge tendencies for the certainty, standardization, narrowness, and reductionism of curriculum and pedagogy.

Supporting, rekindling, and cultivating prospective and practicing educators’ “aesthetic consciousness” (Blumenfeld-Jones, 2012) has the potential to enrich, and even be a way into, the existential dimension of and meaning-making in deep reflexivity. Aesthetic consciousness encourages “an awareness of, focus upon and exercise of judgment about our senses as a human capacity that connections us to the world around us directly” (p.

43). Aesthetics birthed through everyday living offers openings for individuals to explore their senses of living in the world along with an accompanying a sense of agency through judgments, creativity, and expression. This dissertation offers an example of how life and the stuff of existence is ripe for educational exploration, and how such an exploration can deepen self and social understandings of living in the world. Moreover, this dissertation is an example of how education might use aesthetics in everyday life as a source of empirical, creative, expressive, and invitational possibilities.

Knowing-Being as a Researcher and Educator

The methodological practices inherent in pragmatism—along with arts-based research—recognize the centrality of the subjective dimension in the research process.

And the act of doing any research necessitates that one must consider how the inquiry process has had an “affect…continuing experience” (Rosiek, 2013a, p. 697). With this methodological perimeter in mind, I offer thoughts with respects to how this research project was influential in terms of my self-understanding as a both a researcher and educator. Note too that I do not see these two identity categories as dispersed, rather they

330 are interconnected akin to other arts-based researchers who see being researchers as more holistically in relation to being teachers and artists (e.g., Irwin & de Cosson, 2004;

Springgay& Irwin, 2005; Springgay, Irwin, Leggo, & Gouzouasis, 2008). In the reflections, I highlight specific aspects of self-understandings provoked during the research process, and the reflections also briefly touch upon the possible implications of such learning.

Humility was a noteworthy teaching that arose through the research journey, and my transactions with familial participants and objects were reminders that being a researcher and doing qualitative research involves relinquishing one’s tendencies for control as well as challenging egoic impulses. Regarding engagement with participants, the experience of preparing for and undertaking interviews as well as understanding participants’ viewpoints about place pushed me to hold their multiple realities in my mind. Participants’ memories and meanings shared through different personalities and styles punctuated that place is indeed many different and changing things to persons who themselves are different and changing as they live lives. Working in the archives was also equally humbling but in another way. My academic socialization has coached me in being thorough when seeking and reviewing literature/materials on a topic, a skill I have come to take pride in. Humility arose when my desire to be find more and be exhaustive were confronted by dead ends in the materials. Being exhaustive, I came to realize, was at times tethered to a kind of greediness for more information, a greediness for more leads and documents to read. Somehow, I felt if these would illuminate more details about the place. But standstills are still something. Encountering and living with them

331 became a practice in both acknowledging and loosening the grip on my wants and drive related to the place.

In their discussion of intellectual virtues, Roberts and Wood (2007) wrote about humility as “a disposition not to make unwarranted intellectual entitlement claims on the basis of one’s (supposed) superiority or excellence” (p. 250). Moving forward, I do not see humility so much as an acquired disposition or thing rather more so like a practice for living, a way of understanding one’s self in transactional relationships. Humility is not a practice isolated to the research process but is also folded with being an educator who embraces democratic, critical pragmatism, which is a quality Henderson, Castner, and

Schneider (2018) highlight for curriculum leaders. A humble stance to knowing and being in the world is a quality embedded within democratic curriculum wisdom and educational leadership.

Humility asks me to embrace of a practice of acknowledging my role in relationships along with observing and carefully considering my actions, behaviors, and motivations. An openness to many realities for what experiences can mean and transacting with them. An openness to imagination, transformation, not knowing, the enigmatic, and the existential (Greene, 1998). “The contrast…would be actions that are based on the dogmatic, unquestioning assertion of values” (p. 4). Humility is a practice that extends beyond the scope of doing research but will also influence me into future roles as an educator in classrooms and other leadership roles.

The second powerful, palpable teaching that surfaced during the research journey connects to what Behar (1996) eloquently captured with her notion that a researcher can

332 be a “vulnerable observer” in the research journey. Through her anthropological efforts,

Behar shared how emotions, intellect, and autobiography are forces that researchers experience, and when explored, vulnerability can enter into research journeys. Prior to starting my place-based inquiry, I thought in the more traditional way about vulnerability akin to what Behar pointed out, that is, how participants are always thought about in terms of being vulnerable in empirical work. Thinking as such was reinforced through my completions of the initial IRB process and its annual reviews. I did not, however, give much thought to how exploring place might potentially puncture my being with disequilibrium and powerlessness. Researching place hurt my heart, left nasty tastes in my mouth, brought tears in my eyes, and made knots in my stomach. Doing research can make a researcher vulnerable to themselves being moved by what is witnessed and sense.

One of the ways vulnerability emerged was through what I witnessed when doing autobiographical work when wandering and artful journaling about place. There were visceral flashes around the ways place was not separate from what I and others human beings are doing to land. Human generated litter flowing downstream in the Killbuck

Creek towards other waterways. Trash tossed out alongside the highway and bridges laying bare in the muddiness of spring but buried in wintery snow piles and tall summer greenery. Living with an eyesore, the “hissing cobra” a natural gas gathering system, which is remnant of my grandpa’s actions and belief that the land was a resource of gains and profit. Loosing stars to light pollution from development around the city of Wooster and sound population from the highways. Reliving personal memories of the place with people and creatures. Revisiting creatures’ gravesites. Such moments were ones in

333 which I was exposed to my own relationship within a much bigger whole and my powerlessness to control and change so much of what has happened and is happening around the land.

Another way vulnerability transpired during the during data generation was when autobiographical work collided with what I was coming to know through my archival efforts. Sharing two pieces of data can help in showcasing one such moment of vulnerability: an artful journal entry and a photocollage. The excerpt from an artful journal entry is indented and italicized. The collage juxtaposes photographs I took during an experience wandering the land (on the right side) with two archival maps (on the left side). I cropped and overlaid the two archival maps. The black lined map is from the

2013 plat book (Great Mid-Western, 2013). The map with reddish lines was from Mills

(1914), a book that documented archeological remains across Ohio and is the portion of land owned by my family. I added green overlay and text to denote the place at the heart of my research as well as the indigenous traces once present.

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5/27/2017—A sunny afternoon walking barefoot through decaying

cornstalks and recently planted soybeans. Grayness in the dirt exposed by rain

catches my eyes. Finding a full one is rare. I’m excitement. I pick up the

arrowhead and press the point into the palm of my hand watching an indentation

form. I’m going to take it home, try to identify it, wash it, and place with others

I’ve found before. Questions flood me about the arrow tip in my hand. Did its

stone come from Flint Ridge, Ohio? Whose hands crafted it Delaware, Wyandot,

Shawnee, or someone else? When was it made, and how long did it take? Who

touched it last? Was it used hunt or kill? How did it end up here? Was it

dropped? How many years has it been here in waiting the dirt? If I take it, does

it now an artifact or stolen?

Something starts crawling through me like a snake slipping from her hole

sliding through the grass. It starts to crawl over my feet then glides up my legs.

It encircles my guts and stomach. It presses on my heart and my lungs. It

squeezes my eyes. Its strength causes me to kneel and sit down in the dirt. What

is it…angry, pain, sorrow, shame, frustration? Shaking my head, I apologies

aloud to nobody. I apologies from my present to a past full of brutalities. This

piece of stone belongs to those from whom so much was taken and destroyed.

How do we, as individuals and as a nation, confront and heal the dehumanization

that built—even sustains—so much of modern American life?

My time in the field stands out as a particularly vivid moment in my experience of place-based, aesthetic “centering” (Macdonald, 1995). It was unpredictable and raw. It

335 stirred me into sensing the past within the present in a way that slit me open. Before exploring the land, I was aware of colonization and knew some about the unjust treatment of America’s indigenous population by the federal government in the formation of the

United States. My understanding of this reality was intellectually constructed more or less from experiences of reading books and other media, going to museums, and visiting national monuments. As I held history in my hand—an arrow tip no bigger than an inch—my intellectual knowing morph.

My mind began to superimpose on the land what I had been tracing and weaving together through archive work. So much of what I learned flooded through me, and the place became more than what was visible to my eyes. I tacitly felt a story of colonization and my unwitting participation in that story by living on the land now. All of the names, individuals, dates, roads, and property lines were there, a part of that heritage of colonization. All of it, tethers to a structure of controls and laws created and upheld by people. Controls and laws calcified through the passing of time. Controls and laws used for profit. Controls and laws that carved literal and inviable lines into dirt. Controls and laws that took people’s lives and displaced them. Meshed in this was also a flash of knowing, which I learned through interviewing family, that my great grandmother,

Florence—before she lived on the land, before she had kids, before she ever met Earl at the Ohio State University and they married, before she got her college degree—taught in an school for Native American in either Oklahoma or California. The moment I had the field touched a space in me that I cannot even pinpoint. Perhaps it was a confrontation with my privilege and/or maybe not. But I do know that I cannot undo that touch, nor

336 can I fully articulate it. And I still do not know what to do with the experience and vulnerability I felt.

The implications from my experiences with vulnerability are not currently fully known. Vulnerability made me aware of my own powerlessness and power. Powerless in regard to controlling, changing, or stopping the pulse of so much in our modern lives and what is happening to places. Haraway (2016) seems right, I am forced to “stay with the trouble” of Ryan’s (2012) “crisis of modernity”. But what I can do is be a vehicle for creating from my experiences of vulnerability artworks—expressive offerings form/for the world— which might, as Baron and Eisner (2012) wrote, “raise significant questions and engender conversations rather than to proffer final meanings” (p. 166). My self- understanding on vulnerability as a researcher have also put it on my radar as an important topic. Following my experience from this research, I anticipate delving into literature that exists around researcher vulnerability.

While predicting if/how vulnerability may surface is challenging, the fact that it can become a reality warrants giving it consideration in any future research as well as when in teaching future students. Vulnerability taps into the inner space of the researcher, the consequences of which can be personal and/or professional. Vulnerability too could involve addressing concerns around power structures which a researcher can be entangled. What this could mean for myself in the future—and for others engaging in research—is that contemplating and even imagining ways in which a researcher may become vulnerable is an important part of designing research and the reflective practices during enactment. Such reflection might even continue after the research project ends.

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As researchers, we should not overlook vulnerability as a reality that can arise and having methods for documenting and processing such feelings and thoughts could prove advantageous.

Locating Boundaries

As is the case with all educational research, this study’s conception, enactment, and creative process to explore place aesthetically do not happen without specific boundaries. The methodological influence of pragmatism is helpful in this area too because it stresses that within any inquiry a researcher needs to acknowledge constraints and in particular with reference to their current “social and cultural locations” (Rosiek,

2013a, p. 699). While the discussion of research design in Chapter Three touched upon such perimeters, in this section I continue by highlighting additional boundaries of this research project.

One boundary to this study came from the public archive from which I accumulated and analyzed data and later kept in mind when crafting the geostory. The decision to restrict my efforts to the Wayne County Public Library’s Genealogy and

Local History Department was because initial efforts proved fruitful in enabling me to explore the place’s history. Despite its richness, I recall Hill’s (1993) reflections on archive work that “we know not where it leads" (p. 7). And I know that choosing to work in one archive had shaped the research journey and the resulting five “experiential objectives” (Ryan, 2011). Therefore, digging into and thinking with other archives’ available resources could further clarify insights, disrupt understandings, and further enrich my contextualization of place. As for one, the Wayne County Historical Society

338 could house documents that might enrich understandings of the place in terms of its connection with the greater development of Wayne County. Also, visiting the Ohio’s

History Connection in Columbus, Ohio likely houses potentially helpful records on

Ohio’s state history, activities, governmental, laws, persons, politics, and state-wide events. My efforts in one archive yielded substantial data, but I am well aware that I encountered the tiniest glimpse of potential place-based resources and records. Doing more research and study on the local history of Wooster, Wayne County, and even Ohio could bring me into contact with unexpected materials that could deepen understandings on the place and its nested relationships.

Another notable boundary within this research was the ever-present, inescapable dimensions of time in one’s experience of living. Said differently, my existence in time—specifically how I feel it and am located within it at any given present moment— provided edges to my knowing-known process in this inquiry (Ryan, 2011). As a woman in her mid-thirties, I have experienced place through only a sliver of time in my life during my youth and then moving back as an adult. Aging is the movement of one’s mind-body through time and experience, and if I am lucky enough to continue this movement meeting older ages, I will continue to experience my research context in ways beyond the data generated for this project. Time might offer unexpected rediscovers in terms of family-history documents like was the case with my great grandfather’s trove of letters. Unforeseen encounters and conversations with family members, or other persons, might shift my impressions of the place and/or of the events and people in relationship to it. Time might also open space for stories to be told that were once too difficult to share

339 until the living become dead. Beginning to understand place as both past~present showed me that the stories of place are still unfolding through the passing of days, weeks, and years. The coming and going of seasons, events, and lives. Time will offer me a chance for further contemplation and reconstruction around what I think I know and how

I make meaning about place.

Future Possibilities

Future possibilities that could emerge from this dissertation is another an area that needs attention. The possibilities I envision for my work are ones currently brewing inside me as an artist, researcher, and educator. The future possibilities are also tied to my aspiration of continuing to be a “student of educational experience” (Pinar, 2012, p.

43). A student educational experience means that one continues “accept[ing] that at any given moment…[they are] located in history and culture, always in a singularly meaningful way, a situation to be express autobiographically through curriculum” (p. 43).

The possibilities I have chosen to highlight emphasize potential theoretical, empirical, and creative routes.

James Macdonald’s key question for curriculum and pedagogy studies of “How shall we live together?” is deeply compelling and still offers much to be explore in terms of theoretical possibilities within curriculum and teaching studies (Brubaker &

Brookbank,1986, p. 215, emphasis in original). Macdonald's probing question is provoking classic ontological questioning around what a good life is and how do we live good lives. The question Macdonald is posing can be interpreted as asking educators to deeply mediate on and explore what living together means so that we contend with

340 questions of not only knowledge but of existence too. Such questioning can serve as prompts for asking educators to examine deeply how we have been, how we are, and how we might exist. Given the interpretations I have around an arts-based pragmatist methodology—along with always keeping in mind the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011) and how it might be challenged—this dissertation offers an empirical way of proceeding with Macdonald’s question, through exploring our aesthetic experiences with places. In light of my empirical and creative efforts, the question might be recast as, How shall we live together in a centered way?

While absorbed in this dissertation project, I also co-authored a book with James

Henderson and Daniel Castner that focused on democratic curriculum leadership, which can be understood as a response to Macdonald’s question. Henderson, Castner, and

Schneider (2018) offered an open, malleable problem-solving approach consisting of fourfolds (i.e., professional awakening, holistic teaching, generative lead-learning, participatory evaluating) in order to support educators’ critical awareness and pragmatic artistry with respects to curriculum, teaching, and leadership. Principal to our argument was the importance of democratic morality in education, a linkage with a strong history in curriculum and teaching (Dewey 1916; Noddings, 2013; Greene, 1988).

For cultivating democratic morality, we argued that the value of pluralistic humanism is of particular significance. Pluralistic humanism asks a person to cultivate a sensitivity to pluralistic meaning making. Said differently, the “valuing of others’ diverse journeys of understanding as much as one values one’s own journey of understanding”

(Henderson, Castner, & Schneider, 2018, p. 5). In practicing democratic morality,

341 pluralism is necessary but requires a balancing of being “informed by a deep humanism” that is guided “by a respectful pluralism” (p. 6). Deprived of such balancing undemocratic qualities arise such as “identity tribalism and politics” and “liberal arts elitism” (p. 6).

What is particularly intriguing is that within democratic morality and pluralistic humanism there is “aesthetic consciousness” (Blumenfeld-Jones, 2012) at play. Dewey

(1984/1930) was hinting at a similar matter in the early 20th century in his observations regarding “old individualism” and “new individualism.” What he termed old individualism refers to social structures and individuals who embody qualities of selfishness and profit along with social tendencies towards systematization, quantification, and standardization. Contrastively, new individualism refers to individuals and cultures that are sensitive towards and believe in the social, relational, critical, freeing dimensions of robust democratic living. I am curious to probe deeper into the linkage of democracy, aesthetics, and ethics and the consequences of this for curriculum, teaching, and educational experience. One avenue I foresee is digging further in existing literature around aesthetics and democracy. At the moment, the work of contemporary philosopher, Luc Ferry (1993) could provide an in road. His work could be helpful given his thorough tracing democratic individualism and aesthetics. Studying his work—an others yet to be encountered—might have potential for thinking more deeply about the educational significance of aesthetics and democracy.

In addition to theoretical possibilities, I foresee future empirical ventures in traveling along two paths. Firstly, this dissertation was a beginning, for me, in thinking

342 with and enacting an inquiry at the methodological intersection of arts-based research and pragmatism. These two veins are not often explicitly brought together in dialogue, but there are trace of them blending through scholars like Barone and Eisner (2012), Barone

(2001), and Greene (1995, 2001). I anticipate continuing to engage with the intersection of these methodological veins of thought. Firstly, my research into place provides a methodological application that explicitly situates itself at this intersection of pragmatism and art-based research. By in doing this, my research’s methodological is worth sharing in peer-reviewed circles such as in presentations at qualitative research conferences and through possible publication in qualitative journals. In terms of continuing to investigate the parallels between pragmatism and art-based research, further thinking and applications of these approaches in future research designs could refine insights and yield new understandings.

With respects to the second path for possible empirical work, much more can be done in terms of place-based research. Place and its educational significance is still a topic of continued interest for me, particularly given new understandings of my own place as well as the rising concerns recognizing the impact of the Capitalocene and

Anthropocene on our collective well-being as a species linked with other species on Earth

(Kolbert, 2014, 2015; Haraway, 2016). Empirical ventures worth mulling over in the future could include exploring other people’s experiences with places, their relationships with them, and the meanings of places in their lives. I hope to continue with research that connect us, remind us, and jar us into exploring the significant ways place shapes our

343 own lives and our educational institutions, and how we might imagine and possibly enact democracy with places in our hearts and minds.

Another area of empirical intrigue I am drawn to springs from the research finding of human~nonhuman relationships within place. In his anthropological work in forests and with indigenous populations of the Runa of Ecuador, Kohn (2013) argues that there are a “myriad of ways in which people are connected to a broader world of life” and understanding “this fundamental connection changes what it means to be human.” (p. 6).

Education, curriculum, and teaching have—as O’Loughlin's (2006) gestured towards—a tendency to encourage autonomous individualism and anthropocentrism. Further explorations into human relationships with nonhumans could provide meaningful insights that challenge such tendencies. Moreover, investigating the educational qualities of human and nonhuman relationships could possibly broaden and enrich understandings of the educational experiences.

Artful and creative work will without doubt be important in my future ventures that I foresee engaging of inside academia but also outside. Doing arts-based research and being an arts-based researcher frequently leads to sharing the artworks, or renditions of them, with others. And the expressive forms vary just like the medium used. For some, the form lives in performances (Salvatore, 2018; Saldaña, 2005) or films (Harris,

2018; Hearing & Jones, 2018) or poetry (Jardine, 2000; Leggo, 2008). Artmaking can encourage emplaced engagement and meaning making in academia because it supports

“the ability to perceive things, not merely to recognize them” (Eisner, 1971, p. 5). But being a maker of art also raises questions around the usefulness of one’s research and

344 public access to scholarship. Sharing from her experiences in research and publish within academia, Leavy (2015a) questions the impact of her work.

I had a persistent, nagging feeling of frustration…the articles were so sterile,

jargon-filled, and formulaic. …What's worse, virtually no one would ever read

them. Years of work and, more importantly, many people's stories were in effect

useless to others. The average academic article is read by only a few people, and

those folks also have highly specialized education. What was the point of this? It

felt like a waste of resources. (pp. 1-2)

Leavy’s concern on the inaccessibility of academic work for people is one I share as well.

And she has been passionately working on this concern, which can be seen through her arts-based novel writing (e.g., 2011a, 2013b, 2015b, 2019). Leavy is making a way for her academic work to be accessible to the public through art and embodying the spirit of a creative, public scholar. Leavy’s writing and scholarship are deeply inspiring for me as a newcomer to the arts-based community.

In light of this dissertation, I desire to explore creative avenues to share my research and study of curriculum with others through exploring possibilities for public scholarship. Although for this research I applied creative nonfiction to guide my artmaking and will continue working with this for publication(s), there is still place-based data that were not utilized. For example, ample photographs I took as well as an artful journal that contains the beginnings for future poems, short-stories, sketches, and other creative impulses. These were impressions and creative impulses for the yet to be created. I anticipate making future visual and narrative artworks around the theme of

345 place. Another avenue I anticipated in the future will take the form of collaborative projects. One possibility on the horizon is with my dear friend and published poet,

Charity Gingrich (2010, 2014, 2019). For several years now, she and I have discussed collaborating, and we are currently considering a project that can blend our artistries of imagery and words as ways to explore place alongside understandings of selves and society.

Parting Thoughts: Implications of Centering

When theorizing “centering” as an educational aim, Macdonald (1995) did not have in mind an abstract, esoteric concept detached from everyday life. Nor did he, from my understanding of his writing, want centering to ignore connections to and the realities of educators and students in educational institutions. When considering the implications of my dissertation project for educators—especially in an educational climate like the present that is entrapped by the “crisis of modernity” (Ryan, 2011)—I am cautious of caving into the pressures for standardized protocols or best-practice prescriptions for curriculum and teaching. The reductionist tendencies supported by the crisis do not resonate well with the existential, phenomenological, creative, and infinite qualities that centering embraces.

Therefore, in this closing dedicated to the implications of how educators might engage themselves with centering, I am not putting forth a set of predetermined rules, prescribed steps, or linear scaffolding. Such artifacts would continue to support the crisis’s disembodiment and displacement of educational professionals. Centering must avoid such tendencies because a human being’s “interior experience cannot [and should

346 not] be systematized” (Willis, 1974, p. 152). As Macdonald (1995) noted too, centering

“throughout history and the contemporary world” has taken and can take various forms

(p. 87). What Macdonald was pointing towards is that centering can take many forms for different individuals in various times and places other than mine and acknowledging that in my implications for educators is important.

One important implication of my inquiry is that an educator be pulled to centering for themselves. Said differently, an educator must be the one willing to immerse themselves in their own processes “through contact with [their own] culture and society, bringing as much of their whole selves as they can to bear upon the process” (p. 96).

What this means is that centering cannot be used or seen as an imposition nor does someone need to seek permission to begin centering. The aspiration of the centering— engaging oneself “in the art of living” amidst relationships with self, other beings, and the world—would fall apart if used in enforcing, controlling ways (p. 96). An educator must want to begin the process for and from within themselves. They must be the one to open themselves up to engaging with their own centering along with making and navigating the process from its challenges to its possibilities.

Working aesthetically through place was my way of entering into my own centering process. Place became a focal point through which I could begin to address the troubling problem I was sensing in education (i.e., crisis of modernity’s separation of the mind, body, and environment) and found within my own lived experience. Exploring place, in other words, was my way to personally and empirically engage with centering.

Even though place is important to me of my self-understanding, place is only one

347 possible avenue from which to active and advance centering. Even though places matter and our relationships with them are often outright ignored or overlooked within educational discourse and courses of action, I am hesitant to push for place as best way for all educators to engage with centering. Although, I hope to invite and inspire such exploration through sharing about my own experience with centering. Moreover, the thinking and empirical work I did to create my dissertation was a done from a place of privilege, and I acknowledge the time and the space I had to sink deeply into and analyze my experiences with a place may not be afforded to everyone. It is for these reasons that attuning to places could be one way for an educator to begin centering but it need not be.

I am aware that amidst the current pressures many educators face in educational systems centering could be perceived as another ‘to-do’ atop of an already overflowing pile calling of their attention. Centering might even be perceived as disconnected and unhelpful in terms of creating lesson plans for next week or preparing for the upcoming standardized tests in a few months. In considering these realities educators face, insights do come to mind based on my experience of working with centering. The insights to come might help an educator, who is intrigued by the concept of centering, activate their own process. What I am offering, then, are some initial reflective thoughts based on a fusion of my empirical work with centering and Macdonald’s in-progress insights left to the field of curriculum and teaching regarding centering. The hope is that these thoughts can be illustrative and inviting for educators interested in their own journeys of centering.

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Centering is not the sort of process that has an ending. There is not a finish line to cross, a final box to check, or an award to hand out that indicates you are done and has achieved centeredness. But this also does not mean that centering happens 24 hours a day 365 days a year. It is personally activated and attended to by you in your own time and space. Maybe during your morning train ride or for ten minutes in the morning before work. Maybe in an exchange with a colleague in the teachers’ lounge or by the copy machine. Maybe with some students on the playground or quietly at home before you sleep. There can be even be pauses or disconnects from centering. An educator interested in working on their centering can do so in any moment or through their interactions with others. Key is the conscious awareness of that you are commitment to your own centering. You have to want to engage centering, no one can force you or do it for you. You have to want to do it for you.

Centering might involve rekindling your curiosity as well as your “aesthetic consciousness” (Blumenfeld-Jones, 2012). Become curious about the sorts of experiences in your life that are what pragmatist call “experiential incitements” (Rosiek,

2013a). Tune into your experience of living in the world, the aesthetics of your everyday life (Dewey, 1934/2005; Shusterman, 2000). Tune into sensations and thoughts that give you pause. What are they? Why are they? When are they? Know beforehand though that through centering discomfort and frustration have the potential to arise. Centering is not a making meaning process that always feels good, and it can challenge you and make you aware of your own ignorance, demons, and ego.

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Delete the possibility of perfection. Centering is not about your self-actualization or finding enlightenment. The aim is not finally finding or making a perfect you nor is centering about reaching Truth. Rather centering is to engage in making meaning and the making of yourselves throughout a lifetime in a way that honors humility, “open- mindedness,” and “whole-heartedness” (Dewey, 1910/1933). The process of centering involves a turning inward into yourself along with an understanding of yours and others’ experiences of living as “infinitely varied and unknowable in any finite sense” (p. 91).

Centering will challenge you to let go of desires to control in terms of your own understandings as well as those of others. But centering can also tap into a sense of agency through finding personally meaningful ways to process your centering experience. For me, this took shape through working artfully via creative nonfiction, which will likely evolve into new expressive forms in the future through more experience.

Perhaps through the practice of centering ourselves, we as educators might be able to support and fashion the sorts of educational communities Greene (1995) envisioned. Communities that encourage learners “to become different, to find their voices, and to play participatory and articulate parts in a community in the making” (p.

132). Maybe centering can encourage us as individuals to expand ourselves in ways that embrace changes, complexities, and differences, which might in turn have a rippling effect on the ways of knowing and being we bring to bear on the educational communities we make? Centering, after all, is about immersing “oneself in the process of living with others in a creative and spontaneous manner” (Macdonald, 1995, p. 96).

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Maybe through centering we can build educational communities that respond to not only questions around knowledge but also questions of being in the world—like Macdonald’s question of “How shall we live together?” (Brubaker & Brookbank,1986, p. 215, emphasis in original)?

To conclude, if there is an objective of this dissertation, the objective is not one in the traditional sense. This dissertation does not offer any predetermined end points, or whats, that have to be learned and accomplished by others. Rather the objective of this dissertation is informed by the tradition of pragmatism, meaning that what has become known through inquiry is left open to more experience. Those experiences will be one’s of my own as well as the experiences others bring to my work. As I envision it, the objective of this dissertation, then, is threefold. The objective is to invite and possibly inspire other educators: 1) to engage in their own centering process, 2) to wonder about the places they inhabit and encounter, and 3) to consider ways the crisis of modernity is alive in their own experiences of living in the world both inside and outside of schools.

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