Pedagogy of embodied voice: reflective arts performance in special needs and teacher education

Abstract Embodied voice emerges through narratives of many texts including performance of reflective, vulnerable pedagogy of aesthetics in daily living and learning. In this thesis, I share my fictional and non-fictional autobiographical narratives while questioning teaching practices and re-viewing blurred borders between self-made definitions of educator, learner, and researcher. With undergraduate university education students, I share narratives of my work with special needs children as I explore invested reflective silent spaces in re-listening and re-hearing beyond fringes of the teacher/student relationship. These silent spaces evoke from the students more narratives of vulnerability, self-reflective re-hearing with image and sound, multi-layered storytelling performed in separate and shared living landscapes. I (re)search through musical forms and non-forms in landscapes at my ocean home accessing nuances of motion and emotion through embodied rhythms of breathing while absorbed in photographic imagery, flute playing, swimming, and writing. As I demonstrate processes of reflective arts practices, I invite my students to assume responsibility for their positioning in aesthetic spaces, in expected and unexpected sources of voice, in silence between embodied sounds and sound imagery of many layered texts in our separate and shared landscape. I invite critical reflection in sources of embodied voice in moments of creating and performing where students risk new portals of aesthetic expression in vulnerable, often discomforting, and always unresolved processes of learning, knowing, and feeling.