Mutant methodologies : intuitive mixed-media autoethnographic approaches toward transformative education

This dissertation argues for the value of intuitive mixed-media autoethnographic approaches toward transformative education. It argues that new critical insights across all fields can be gained from embracing intuition and creativity in education that disrupts traditional unbalanced approaches. It examines how an interplay between the creative and the critical can be advantageous in regard to expanding educational development in the modern/colonial world. The first section focuses on the barriers that prevent intuitive mixed-media autoethnographic approaches toward transformative education from being widely accepted and adopted, focusing on how particular historical and social forces have established an atmosphere that devalues such approaches. The second section of this dissertation focuses explicitly on methods that fall under the term mixed-media that is applied here, examining how poetry, visual art, and music can be valuable to learning. It considers how they can deconstruct the hegemony of solely prioritizing the analytical or rational approach in education. The third section focuses on the application of such methods when incorporated together in an autoethnographic form by drawing from my own personal experience exploring these mediums intuitively. It does so through following and reflecting on how such methods can be temporally entwined together in the first example “Bullet Holes of Gender,” and then how they can be spatially entwined in the second example “The Earthling Dream.” The latter of which itself directly comments on the importance of validating an Earthling education that focuses on our interrelationality. These applications are included with the intention of demonstrating how mixed-media approaches can produce works that disrupt traditional modern/colonial forms. It proposes that intuitive mixed-media autoethnographic methods can be used in educational spaces to expand one’s learning horizons of themselves and the world around them. Through such an openness, it hopes to inspire visions of decolonial futurity through transforming individuals toward interrelationality within a global community of Earthlings. It therefore positions Earthling unity as the ultimate objective of transformative education, indicating how such methodologies in education can guide us toward sustaining ourselves in the modern/colonial world and dreaming beyond it.