Open Collections

Good Winds chronicle : creativity, metaphor, and life writing

University of British Columbia

This dissertation explores a range of metaphors that can be used to understand the concept of creativity. Each metaphor presents a different way of imagining what creativity means and what it means to be creative. Based on my doctoral fieldwork of interviewing fiction writers in Buenos Aires, Argentina, I emphasize the search for metaphors as a foundational literacy tool that allows the learner to consider multiple perspectives of a single concept. Drawing on Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) seminal work in Metaphors we live by and merging it with Paulo Freire’s (1970) notions of praxis and critical literacy, I use personal narratives to explore how considering diverse metaphors for creativity opens new possibilities for meaning-making and understanding. Situated in the dynamic tradition of life writing, I use these narrative accounts, or chronicles, to explore and examine the complexity of the concept of creativity. The result is a polyphonic account of fieldwork that blends content and form, combining research on metaphor and creativity with creative writing about metaphor. I conclude that metaphor offers unique possibilities for thinking creatively about creativity, and emphasize that knowledge is an experience of context whereby the greatest learning often happens at the margins of curriculum.

Text

2014-02-28

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/46115

Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/