Borderzone Pedagogy: A Rhizomatic Curriculum as Life

This dissertation is a call for a new pedagogy, one that teaches to new ideas about learning and knowing, called Borderzone Pedagogy. This work incorporates autobiography, narrative, and visual and structural creativity alongside conventional academic content, tone and form in an acknowledgment of the relevance of different types and forms of the visual and written text. The autobiographic first chapter provides an insight into the author's movement through time and space; theory and ideas, to arrive at Borderzone Pedagogy. Chapters two and three, which adhere more to conventional academic writing, detail the author's position on research and paradigms and provides the theoretical framework for Borderzone Pedagogy, which is found in Indigenous ways of knowing, rhizomatic inquiry, border studies, postmodernism, postreconstructionism and public pedagogy/outside curriculum. The last section of this work breaks through the boundaries and barriers of academicese by creating a rhizomatic text, which is a multilayered narrative told through bike rides from the perspective of the author as teacher, mother and woman of these times. The data for this section come from notes taken during reflections while on bike riding commutes. Much of the reflection relates to my teaching a sociology class during a Spring semester, but as lives are multi-faceted, the themes expand in many directions. By including links, pictures, poems, and other nonacademic text, each reader contributes to the structuring of the work by focusing in some places and not in others, creating his or her own unique experience. The content of the narrative illuminates Borderzone Pedagogy by bringing the reader into the classroom, on the street and in the head of the author as she passes in and out of her multifaceted identity.