Cheonggyecheon: Streaming Currere

Abstract

In this paper I share my personal journey into rhizomatic thinking. Here I illustrate how a rhizome opened new possibilites to my previously confusing learning process. As a vehicle I ask the question, when considering the pedagogical nature of place, how does the new facilitate currere? I am also taking the opportunity to write in a way that is new and unfamiliar to me because the conventional and acceptable have been unable to help me understand the meanings I am seeking. I felt uninspired among traditional styles of academic writing until I encountered the doctoral thesis of Warren Sellers where another way of seeing and writing is explored. This generative experience gave me the momentum to link past learnings in new rhizomatic ways and begin a discussion within this journal about how place and pedagogy connect. My visit to Cheonggyecheon Stream in Seoul provided me the place and my reading of the texts of Warren Sellers, Noel Gough, Chaim Soutine, Margaret Sommerville and Lloyd Rees gave me examples of others who have searched. As I remember my physical experience of this new place, the stream becomes the search, the bridges spanning it, the new understandings and scattered along the banks, the rhizomes grow. A new place facilitates currere. This journal provides a forum where possibilities are viewed as exciting (Doll, 2009, p. 71). Tentative steps into new spaces are welcomed. Above all, conversation oils the machine, here I can share my thoughts with others who are exploring learning in diverse ways and from non linear perspectives.