Becoming an intersubjective self, teacher knowing through Chinese women immigrants' knotting of language, poetry, and culture

grantor: University of TorontoThis research work explores my narrative in the making by a self-reflective study of teacher knowing in my cross-cultural experiences. The inquiry originated in my teacher self and led to my students who upheld the strongest knots in my web of relationships. In conjunction with an autobiographical study, conversations and interviews with five women immigrants (including four former ESL students and my mother) and journals and life- writings from them, were collected in three years that overlapped four years of analyzing, interpreting, and writing. Thus, the work combined autobiographical and biographical research methods. The women immigrants in my research were found to have experienced social and cultural vicissitudes in China and Canada from various perspectives. A value learned through such experiences is to persistently improvise a life worth living in the ever changing situations with whatever we were given. This threaded and gave ethical meaning to the thesis. One of my co-researchers, back in China, belonged to a social group which at times oppressed my social group. Nevertheless, our equal teacher-student relationship evolved into a reciprocal friendship and a way of learning and knowing. I called it intersubjective knowing and simulated it in the metonymy of splicing Chinese knotwork. Such knowing was to understand oneself as a center of experience, at the same time to respect and validate other's experience as one's own. Connections were made in a pattern of symmetrical turn-taking of leading and following. Splicing happened when our story-telling touched commonly experienced historical moments and/or interested topics. I traced the cultural epistemological roots for such intersubjective knowing back to ancient Chinese ideograms, syntax, and the Taoist philosophy. And the roots found a rich soil in Deweyian democracy of valuing common life experiences. Intersubjective knowing breached the horizons and enriched both parties. It is a Taoist interplay between teacher and student, researcher and participant, self and other, self and self, Western and Oriental, I and Thou, an inexhaustible multiplication of opposites and a transcending intersubjective WE.Ph.D