Final Reflections

How have your come to understand transformative learning, imagination, individuation and authenticity and what meaning does that hold for you in your personal and/or professional life?

I think the greatest thing I learned as a practicing artist, is that the arts can be a vehicle for facilitating a reflection on transformative experiences. While I (somewhat) inherently already knew this, it was extremely valuable to dip my toes in new experiences, outside of my comfort zone. 
During our Zoom session presentation(s), I noticed that many of us decided to go down unfamiliar avenues, work with mediums and tools that we have yet to master. Perhaps, this is what mirrors the transformative experience. The unknown, disorienting us, asking us to rise with it and move forward, and make meaning, and make something new. 

This course has introduced me to scholars and literature that will ultimately (and eventually) seep into my dissertation. I had mentioned in the very beginning of the course that my research deals with artist residencies within communities and how, if at all, a reciprocity of transformation occurs between the artist, working in their new, unknown, yet temporary space, and community, receiving and interacting with an artist from another place. What does this exchange mean? What can be learned? This course has pointed me towards a field I didn't know existed. 

It was also extremely eye opening to see different visual arts research methods being practiced within several of the readings and my choice book. Working the Margins of Community-Based Adult Learning: The Power of Arts-Making in Finding Voice and Creating Conditions for Seeing/Listening (International Issues in Adult Education. As a professional, both artist and scholar, I'd like to continue to challenge and ask myself to dive into the unknown and unfamiliar. Albeit, materials or research methods. 


I must admit, I've suffered from 'imposter syndrome' since my arrival to TC in 2015; often feeling like I'm in a world where I don't belong, doubting my own authenticity, intelligence, and agency. The dialogue that took place this semester within this course has given me a bit of room to breathe and trust the process, and try new processes along the way. Each and everyone of you in this course is amazing, unique, and so strong. This is why relationships is such a crucial theme in the transformative process--we get by with a little help from our friends. 

Transformative Learning Final Project

Metaphors allow us to connect the inner and outer, to make the implicit explicit, so that we can better understand, more deeply experience, and more eloquently express who we are and what we do.”(Campbell, 2009 p. 211).

This semester, I began my transformative learning final project hitting the ground running. I chose to focus my practice as a painter and writer in a way that revisits my sense of self and transformation through critical self-reflection and individuation. I started to think about moments of struggle, confusion, stress, and transformation in my life and how I can further dive into the transformative processes, guided by the readings throughout the semester. Ultimately, I sought authenticity within this journey, as Dirkx suggested,I began to “take note of our reaction to particular metaphors, symbols or images- what our attention is drawn to – and our emotional reaction to these images” (Dirkx, 2006 p. 35). 

In “Learning to think like an adult” Mezirow provides us an overview of transformative learning theory as a way of making meaning of our assumptions and experiences “to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, emotionally capable of change, and reflective so that they may generate beliefs and opinions that will provide more true or justified to guide action”. (p. 76). Mezirow believes critical reflection and constructive discourse are essential to this process. Transformation can be “epochal” as a result of a sudden event or “disorienting dilemma” or “incremental” as a result of a series of events over time. (From Module 1). 

Life consists of many waves, the ebb and flow of circumstance---destiny, crashing onto rocks or rolling it's sea-foam safely to shore. Water began to appear in a variety of ways, in dreams, meditations, and synchronicities. Rather than not reflecting or pushing away daily symbols, I dove into the water as a way of understanding my psyche. This led me to do further research on water, relying on my handy-dandy Book of Symbols: 

We are droplets in the vast liquidity of the sea, and just as the ocean can swallow whole our titanic ships and jumbo jets, so out little vessels of human consciousness are liable to engulfment by the deepest waters of psyche. It's vital energies can loom like mythical sea monsters: sucking us up, spitting us out, dismembering. The churning of its abyss can activate archetypal epicenters of potentially shattering force. (The Book of Symbols, p.36)

Eventually, I arrived at a specific memory. 

I remembered going to the beach as a little girl and making 'tamales' with sand and sticks. I believe this memory revealed itself to me as a way of providing me with a story to re-experience as an artist---I decided to paint about this memory and and reflect on how I felt getting lost within materials, the same way I was lost as a little girl in sand, and seashells, and sticks. I eventually incorporated actual sand and masa (used to make tamales) within the paintings. 

Attempting to incorporate more methods of processing critical self-reflection and individuation in a more concrete way, I began to write. The poem I wrote became a recantation of the memory but dove deeper into my struggle with identity. I always understood the ritual of tamale making to be continued on by the mother's side of the family. Because my mother's cultural background is European––and my father's side Mexican––I never was able to participate in this tradition. 

Masa

Que masa, que mas

jealous of the little chicana girls who make tamales with their abuelitas y tias

hermanas

their christmastime assembly line
their ring of aromas and laughter and song

my doughy fingers and toes grasping at sand on the beach
digging and kneading wet corn flour and stuffing my tamal with seashells and sticks

I do not know where I belong

and the waves, they crash into my little body and drag me beneath the surface of my deepest desires

in darkness,

and in darkness my breath sparkles to sky
and in darkness I am not asked where I am from

and in darkness, my mother and father reach out with wide open arms and


pull me back to shore. 

This process revealed to me that the arts can present multiple ways of unpacking those critical moments that help shape who we are. I think being trained as an artist gave me more confidence to enter these transformative atmospheres and pull from these reflections new ways of being, thinking, and doing. Inspired by this process, I convinced my co-collaborator to team up with me to host a weaving workshop as a closing celebration to our exhibition in Macy Gallery. See description Below: 

Join artists Arredondo and Onyewuchi for a dialogue about identity, process, and artistic exploration. Discussing their journey to Rehearsal Lines for 1000 Suns, the artists will lead a two-part mixed media and basket weaving workshop.

Drawing upon memories, music, and meditations, using a variety of mediums, participants will develop designs onto pliable materials, that will then be used for weaving together traditional Igbo baskets. All materials are provided, but participants are encouraged to bring objects and/or materials they would like to explore.

Processing

Relationship with Reading in Transformative Learning

Hello World, 

Life has been rather interesting lately, a struggle. I think right now I'm experiencing a fork in the road for many paths in my life. The question is what to act on. I've been journaling ALOT during this process: thinking about my past, examining the present, and preparing for the future. A few elements have stood out to me and have also percolated to the surface within A Novel Idea. 

Relationships

I think this is something we have learned from our exploration of the lives of our participants. It is helpful to seek out others for support, but it seems that it most often happens naturally when we let people into our lives. I also don’t think that relationships with others are necessary for transformative learning to occur—it depends on the individual (p.38). 

I am hesitant to say that critical self-reflection can occur without our being aware of it. I think, by definition, critical self-reflection is a cognitive activity (hence the many critiques of Mezirow’s work for being cognitive and rational). Becoming conscious through dreams, meditation, artwork, or physical activity occurs, for sure, but can we call it reflection? I don’t especially like the dualism created between reflection and intuition, and I see both of these processes as existing side by side rather than being either-or concepts. But this doesn’t mean they are synonymous, but rather complementary. I hope I am making sense here! (p.83).

For some reason, I have always thought of transformative learning being an individual journey, which yes, it is, but the relationships you foster with others can help/and/or/hinder this journey. 

When I initially began to reflect back on my life thus far, I always saw transformation coming from negative relationships I observed or experienced.

Growing up, my parents' relationship was quite abusive and traumatic, I ended up perpetuating this toxicity by inadvertently falling into abusive relationships myself. I could never figure out why this happened, because I knew it was not what I had strived for, but perhaps I stayed in these types of relationships for so long, because I was conditioned into thinking it was normal from such an early age.

I also grew up in an extremely low income household, and was motivated by my parents (who both have not graduated high school) to excel academically in order to create more opportunities for myself with a goal of becoming self sustaining. My teachers noticed this drive and encouraged me along the way, giving me the confidence to achieve my goal and attend college, fully funded.  

When I had moved out of state for school, at a small, wealthy liberal arts college, I felt completely isolated and unable to relate to my peers who came from more stable economic backgrounds. By fate, I was placed in a first year writing seminar with a Professor who had also too come from a complicated, and poor environment. During my four years at University, he became my mentor and encouraged me along the way when I experienced self doubt and 'imposter syndrome' at a school where I could not confide in or relate to my peers. 

As I began to cultivate my skills as an artist, and find my own artistic voice as a writer and painter, my work inherently began to reflect deep seeded thoughts and beliefs related to myself and identity.

When I think more about this, I agree that there is this relationship between reflection and intuition. They aren't entirely synonymous. Something that I have kept up with this semester is collaging as a form of meditation. In a way, it feels like reading auras--something a bit hokey, yet something a bit true--I've noticed that when I initially rip and paste images together, I do this from an aesthetic, visual perspective. After the fact, when I actually look at the images, they seem to reveal something more. Perhaps this is line we toe between reflection and intuition.