Who Am I...? Who Am I Now…? Creating Identity Through Quilting

EDEL 595 Inquiry Project


Shirley Jorgensen



Who Am I...? Who Am I Now…? Creating Identity Through Quilting



It is the chatter that that draws you into the room, punctuated by the squeak of a baby, the laughter of a grandma and the whir of the sewing machines. There is a fresh pot of tea in a faded blue cozy and boxes of juice sit on the desk that houses the newest computer. A plate of fresh fruit and teething biscuits wait by the teapot and the tables have been gathered into a square, their surfaces invisible under towers of bright, soft, cotton, flannel squares. Each table hosts two women, one at the beginning of her parenting career, the other one at the end of hers. Her purple hair and shoulder tattoo speaks of a shifting identity. Her sensible shoes and bifocals speak of a shifting identity. Her story is punctuated with, What the hell? and Oh shit! as she explains the difficulty of getting cheap housing and how her boyfriend makes too much money to qualify for a low-income subsidy. And how she hates living with her mom and her mom’s stupid boyfriend “cause there's no room and we just fight all the time”. The grandma nods sympathetically and shares her own story of not having the faintest clue as to what to get her granddaughter for her birthdays anymore. “Do you have any ideas?” she asks as she leans over to rethread the needle on the sewing machine. A dark hired girl across the table breaks her concentration on sewing a straight seams and sympathizes, “Don’t you just hate it when the thread breaks!” And as I watch and listen, I marvel that there is a thread being woven at all…



What were we thinking?

Take eight pregnant and parenting teen girls and two boyfriends who have never touched a sewing machine in their lives. Pair each one up with a quilting grandma and promise them that in eight weeks they would have a lovely homemade baby quilt, a community grandma-mentor and a couple of sewing credits. Over pots of tea and the freedom of conversations that are loosened by the busyness of hands, I had hoped they would articulate shades of their identities and grasp the literacy of a shared task within community. Would it be too much to ask if they could glean some life literacy as well?



Rationale

The intersection of literacy and identity has become a focus for research informed by a soci-cultural framework. “Literacy practices provide an arena for constructing and performing identities; in fact the very process of becoming literate involves taking up new positions and becoming a different sort of person” (Merchant & Carrington, 2009). It is within this framework that I began this inquiry of exploring pregnant and parenting students’ construction of identity within a community of mentoring quilters.



The idea of legitimatizing knowledge systems of at risk students is grounded in Castellano’s (2000) framework for exploring Aboriginal knowledge systems. Similarity, my pregnant and parenting teens’ knowledge is “personal, oral, experiential, holistic, and conveyed in narrative or metaphorical language” (p. 25.)



My inquiry project took shape around this guiding question: To what extent could a quilting mentorship project contribute to identity and literacy in at risk students?



What I Know/Review of the Literature



• Individuals and society can be transformed by identifying and reaffirming language processes based on subjective experiences (Ermine, 1995, in Castellano, 2000)

• Connecting with students’ experiences creates the potential for building respectful and reciprocal relationships with them (Wishart, 2006)

• Working on a communal project creates a sense of community

• Working with the hands loosens the heart and narratives unfold

• Mentors allow students to “practice” ideas and emotions on adults



Questions for the Inquiry Project

• Could the community being built through quilting become a vehicle for building participant identity and literacy?

• What role does narrative play in shaping student/mentor identity?

• How does a completed project inform identity?



What I Learned

1. What is Knowledge?

Our constructivist approach to quilting brought grandma quilters and at risk students to the table with the perspective that collectively we knew a lot about quilting. While none of the students had ever operated a sewing machine, they knew how to shop! The students’ choices of patterns and colours were discussed on the trip to Fabricland and with babies in tow, they selected their fabrics, revealing aspects of their identities.



With guidance from my quilting expert assistant, students navigated the store and learned how to readjust their initial fabric visions according to what was actually available. The shared experience of hunting, sharing, and confirming choices brought the students collectively to a new understanding of the literacies of fabric measurement, cost estimation as well as navigating a busy food court with babies in shopping carts. Triumphant and confident, the students approached the quilting table with new knowledge that they could share with their experienced grandma quilting mentors. Now the students had something to offer from their experience and the knowledge/power balance was less uneven.



2. Identity Shift

Compton-Lilly (2006) determined that identities are formed within relationships and are constantly subject to the influences of other people and institutions. I was curious to see if I could observe an evolution of the identities of the participants of the quilting project. As in the FRESA project, we “learned to trust that the process of dialogue would take students into a deeper understanding of the process of building community and identity” (Cummins, Brown & Sayers, 2006).

After days of quilting with their mentors, students who had previously been unable to articulate their identities were able to share their personal lives within the safe and comfortable setting of the quilting community. We learned that firefighters found Jenna (who was then 4 years old) hiding with her twin sister in the toy box in the basement after her little brother had turned on the gas stove and started their house on fire. Sienna has moved 11 times in her 17 years and has no clue where her extended family lives other than “in BC”. Yet she remembers last visiting her dad when she was 8 years old. “What kind of a father has drugs lying around his apartment when his 8 year old kid is staying there?” she blurted out one day while sewing. She has no idea where she is from, but one day she shared, “For some reason I know the Cree word for rabbit”. Yesterday, three months after the project was completed, she told the other students while we were weeding our Park Garden, that she didn’t burn because she was Métis.



For some students the pattern of identity revelation was often hostility-anger-shock that was revealed to the mentors through venting. As the relationships and the quilts grew however, the students were able to ask questions of their mentors. Finally, comfort levels were revealed as the mentors were finally able to ask questions of the students. Wishart’s ideal of respectful and reciprocal relationships was observable.



3. Validation of Knowledge

Ultimately, for the students it was all about their pride in their final finished product, the quilt. The students now see themselves as being goal setters, time managers and constructive producers of something creative, unique, and personal. Finally, we celebrated this project by hosting a Spring Tea for all our volunteers. The project was published in the local paper and a group quilt was made with the scraps. It is on the wall in our room today, evidence of the constructed and co-constructed identities as revealed through this inquiry process.



Implications for Teaching and Learning

As identities are continually evolving, this uneven process was full of contradictions: a parenting student inhabits many roles. She may be a girlfriend who just wants to party on the weekends because she is 17, a peer to her own mother, a mother, a student and fellow learner. But by engaging in the quilting project she may also see herself as one who has been affirmed in her legitimate literacies of building community, her increased capacity for accessing a support group while navigating academic standards and a job. But this process will be neither smooth nor linear.



Identities are multiple and tightly woven to the social situations that people occupy. Perhaps now my students see themselves as capable learners who have acquired new skills and produced tangible, useful products that eight weeks ago did not seem possible. I hope they are reminded of their enhanced capacity every time they reach for their flannel quilts to tuck around their babies when they load up their strollers for the long walk to school. Like the quilts they have constructed, my students’ capacity for an expanded vision of their identity and their life’s purpose may have grown through the shared narratives, a square at a time. Indeed, since the quilting project has been completed, two of my students were asked to speak at our upcoming graduation and one has been accepted to an academy of hair design.



A final challenge for me was how to support the structure of a quilting community and the sharing of parenting knowledge while at the same time acknowledging the gender roles and economic positioning that inform my students’ ways of understanding the world.



Further Questions:

1. “The ultimate test of the validity of knowledge is whether it enhances the capacity of people to live well” (Castellano, p. 33). How might we determine what effect this project has had on students’ lived experiences particularly if they continue to face gender, class, race, and poverty barriers within their living environments? Are they living well?



2. "A participatory culture has relatively low barriers to engagement, strong support for creating and sharing, some type of informal mentorship, a degree of social connection and the importance that members believe their contributions matter."
 (Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education in the 21st Century, 2006) Henry Jenkins on Participatory Culture



How might we translate this project into a participatory culture, for example, through a project that is not confined to gender roles or limited by funding constraints?



Perhaps we can talk about these questions over a pot of tea?



References





Castellano, M. (2000). Indigenous knowledges in global contexts: Multiple readings of our world.



G. Dei, B. Hall, & D. Rosenberg, (Eds.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.



Compton-Lilly, C. (2006). Identity, childhood culture, and literacy learning: A case study.



Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 6(1), 57-76.



Cummins, J., Brown, K., & Sayers, D. (2007). Literacy, technology, and diversity: Teaching



success in changing times. Boston: Springer.



Merchant, G. & Carrington, V. (2009). Editorial. Literacy and identity, Literacy, 43(2).



Wishart D. & Lashua, B. (2006). Popular media, critical pedagogy, and inner city youth.



Canadian Journal of Education 29(1), 244-262.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXgSjxZnM-g Mentors for Teen Moms



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEjiM0sESus&feature=related MTV Teen Mom Trailer



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIoO7PiChDA&feature=related Youth for Christ Young Moms Support



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5gJpqH5yww Building Bridges: Joining Generations



http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/7/1/0/7/pages171079/p171079-1.php Hawaiian Quilt



http://www.researchgate.net/publication/8118447_Quilting_as_age_identity_expression_in_traditional_women