Microsoft Word - Sameshima and Irwin03.doc Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 5 (2) 2008 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci Responding to Pauline Sameshima and Rita Irwin’s ‘Rendering dimensions of liminal currere’ Warren Sellers Ako Aotearoa National Centre for Tertiary Teaching Excellence, Wellington, New Zealand Marg Sellers The University of Queensland, Australia, and Whitireia Community Polytechnic, New Zealand Sameshima and Irwin, in Rendering dimensions of liminal currere, draw on Daignault to critique curriculum and explore expressions of complexity in artful scholarship research towards liminal currere through visual examples of personal practice… The picturings and texts that follow are Warren Sellers’ and Marg Sellers’ responses to reading Rendering dimensions of liminal currere. In our own currereing work we use a rhizomatic approach to reading, seeing, writing, picturing, thinking and re-reading to move towards ways of understanding, conceptualising and expressing our interpretations of complex notions, such as Sameshima and Irwin’s liminality. In this instance, we envision our approach as responding to an invitation to make opportunistic interconnections with the reinforcing rods that extend liminally from the plateau edges in Pauline Sameshima’s photograph ‘Edges 5’. Or, plainly put, a chance for us to join with Pauline and Rita in elaborating their ideas. "Edges 5" Sameshima (2005) http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci Sellers and Sellers: Responding to Sameshima and Irwin Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 5 (2) 2008 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 70 For some readers this may seem a strange way to review, but our poststructural reading of reviewing calls on us to be excessive, rather than intercessive, and to contribute more than critique. That is, we choose to be both celebratory with and salutary to our colleagues… From Warren My approach to reading and rendering uses picturing to express ideas as they emerge and coalesce and flux. The following sketch is a two-dimensional rendering of a five-dimensional (including spissitude1 and time) synthesis of my reading. To help understand how I see this, imagine my drawing as being like a hologram – a plane from which thresholds of spatial dimensions can be projected. 1 Spissitude: a fourth (orthogonal) spatial dimension (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_dimension) http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_dimension Sellers and Sellers: Responding to Sameshima and Irwin Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 5 (2) 2008 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 71 Following that allusion, my image below projects and re-visions the reading by locating dimensionally (by placement) and liminally (by overlapping) examples of Rita’s, Pauline’s and my images. In doing so, I am picturing the reading more literally and illustrating how I see rhizomatic growth breaching and broaching and rending and rendering plateaus of liminal currere through interconnecting diverse ideas that call for more readings, engendering other diverse ideas… http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci Sellers and Sellers: Responding to Sameshima and Irwin Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 5 (2) 2008 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 72 and, in the image below – picturing word patterns – I explore another notional dimension for accreting ideas and pointing to networks and nodes of thinking, expressing and rendering some of the concepts and titles and terms interconnecting Pauline and Rita’s text with my sources and interpretations of liminal currere to nurture and grow the rhizome… From Marg I look at Warren’s picturing (of words) and I am intrigued with what he pictures~says and the way he ‘says’ it. He asks me what I think and I ask him why he is expecting me to respond in words. I actually don’t know what to say – I think because it is not appropriate to say anything; the picturing is there to speak for itself. But, I want to say something as I like creating word~pictures. So, I return to the article, to re-fresh my reading and for inspiration. We have both made notes (words, lines, pictures) on the article so his reading becomes mine, our reading~picturing becomes multidimensional and inter-twined across space and time (Sameshima and Irwin, p.12), as I add my rendering to his rend(er)ing of Rendering dimensions of a liminal currere. What I see in Warren’s response is more of the ‘individual art-making processes as living inquiries’ (p.3) that Pauline and Rita discuss as he ‘travel[s] between and along the edges of here [Rita’s photographic spaces] and there [Pauline’s photographic edges] in the unsettled liminal space’ (p.4) of his own creation; as he depicts what happens for him as he pass(ag)es along this gap(ing) of in-between-ness, play-fully including his/other dimension/s through "A path in walking" Picturing currere (Sellers, 2003) cloudsculpting Synecdoche chiasmus "&" series (Irwin, 2005) lines of flight Metonymy drift "Edges" series (Sameshima, 2005) planes to plateaux Irony layering "Auto-pugilism" (Sellers, 1999) Knowledge violence "L o re n z a tt ra ct o r" M e ta p h o r "Rhizomatic Roots" Meme http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci Sellers and Sellers: Responding to Sameshima and Irwin Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 5 (2) 2008 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 73 inter-ing/entering the dimension of a liminal currere. His trope has formed other pictorial~textual layers for (his, our, your) ideas to ripple through understandings of the text and from liminal spaces around and with/in it (pp.10-11). Our picturing~words are ‘prepositional’, that is, in in-between spaces, as we attempt to ‘move the words and ideas beside them to new spaces’ (p.13), as we attempt ‘becoming and transforming from what is to something anew’ (p.13). By picturing~wording our reading, we also are ‘traveling rhizomatically through multidimensional spaces of knowing’ (p.13). We accompany Pauline and Rita in recognising that these ‘liminal spaces are dynamic spaces of possibility…open[ing] up possibilities for different insights and thus expand[ing] notions of scholarly inquiry’ (p.15). As I look at the contrasting photographs in the article, I sense there is more anew awaiting within liminal spaces between the shadows and light captured by Rita and along the edges of Pauline’s perspective(s). Perhaps not within their article (for me at the moment anyway) but rather as I take the word~pictures their imagery evokes in me into my own research, which (perhaps not) incidentally involves young children’s picturing of their understandings of currere-ing through a multidimensional curriculum, as they negotiate ‘curricula of currere...[or] paths of running’ (Sameshima, 2006, p.51, emphasis in original). But, in response to Warren’s picturing of Rita and Pauline’s article, I (re)turn to Sameshima’s (2006) explanation of the curricular inter-play amongst learners (and scholars) as my response to Warren’s picturing, in itself and as a review response, and to the article under review. In Rendering dimensions of liminal currere, Rita and Pauline (and Warren’s response) have created ‘shape shifting figures which speak to the mobile identities, contiguity, reverberating complexities, and entanglements of learning in the dynamic space of relationality (p.53). References Sameshima, Pauline (2006). Household at the shore: A Marshall McLuhan metaphor. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 4(1), 51-58. Retrieved from http://www.csse.ca/CACS/JCACS/V4N1/PDFcontent/JCACS_4_1_f_Sameshima.pdf Sellers, Warren (2003). Picturing currere: Envisioning-experiences within learning. Paper presented at the 10th Biennial Conference of the Australian Association of Curriculum Studies. Adelaide, South Australia. Available at http://acsainc.com.au/content/sellers- _picturing_currere.pdf Reviewers Warren Sellers is a Research Associate with the Ako Aotearoa National Centre for Tertiary Teaching Excellence, Wellington, New Zealand. Email: w.sellers@paradise.net.nz Marg Sellers is a doctoral candidate at The University of Queensland and is Programme Leader for the early childhood teacher education programmes at Whitireia Community Polytechnic, New Zealand. Email: m.sellers@paradise.net.nz http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci http://www.csse.ca/CACS/JCACS/V4N1/PDFcontent/JCACS_4_1_f_Sameshima.pdf http://acsainc.com.au/content/sellers-_picturing_currere.pdf http://acsainc.com.au/content/sellers-_picturing_currere.pdf mailto:sellers@paradise.net.nz mailto:sellers@paradise.net.nz