Feminist Aesthetics, Intertwined Indigenous and Immigrant Life Narratives and Teaching Practices

Abstract

As contributors to this book, we engage with how feminist aesthetics and creative practices are theorized and practised. This chapter was authored by two Canadian women educators who approach their teaching from lived traumas (an Arab Canadian refugee and a First Nations Sixties Scoop survivor). As women educators, we acknowledge and value the connections between the feminist aesthetic and our life narratives, as we use gender as a lens to interpret how artistic expression and beauty in life and nature can inform teaching and learning. We reflect on our experiences to examine how decolonizing education (in the classroom) can be accomplished in many ways, including the gentle and beautiful infusion of Indigenous ways of knowing and anti-oppressive practices—using home economics and family studies as a lens (foods and textile artistry). The chapter reflects a melding of several narrative-related constructs: displaced narratives, processual narrations, and performative narratives of hybrid identities. For each of these perspectives, we share our respective context and culminate in how we validated our narratives that arose from trauma in our lives, how we processed the stories emergent from our life journeys and then how we used them to inform our art-respectful connections with learners.