Naming Ourselves as Popular Educators: An Appreciative Inquiry into West Coast Canadian Artists' Identity

Abstract

This multimedia essay combines words and images in a creative performance drawn from our 2009 cross-Canada Whistlestop Project, a study of the diverse art practices of Canadian popular educators involved in the women’s movement. We focus on the Tofino Whistlestop on Vancouver Island on the Pacific Coast, the most westerly point on this research-by-rail journey, which began on the Atlantic coast. The eight participants at The Common Loaf Bake Shop in Tofino represented diverse art forms: arts-re-searcher Dorothy; arts-researcher and photographer Anita; baker-designer Maureen; painter-collagist-muralist Marla; flamenco dancer Thérèse; baker-mosaic artist Stephanie; poet-writer Chris; and, poet-writer-videographer John. This essay unfolds as a show and tell of the research participants’ art practices as they constitute popular education in the context of arts-based action research methodology of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) to generate personal and collective stories of life-affirming experiences of art as popular education. This video essay highlights the relational art of story-telling and story-receiving through gesture, performance, and symbol.