Autogeography Assignment

The final assignment for my EPSE 308 class was an autogeography assignment meant to map the experiences in our development as adolescents that most affected our identity and determination to become educators. We were asked to create or find an artifact that best represented these experiences, and write a short paper that reflected our choice in objects for the assignment.
I chose to create a series of three drawings so that I could exercise a bit of long forgotten creativity and art skills. Although I had never worked with inks before or in an illustrative style of drawing, I had a really enjoyable time working on the assignment and am very happy with the way they turned out.
The illustrations were made to accompany a poem by Vancouver poet Amber Dawn titled “Whole Messy Thing” from her 2015 collection of glosas titled Where the Words End and My Body Begins. I discovered this book by accident a few weeks before I began the assignment, and immediately connected with the opening glosa that deals with the theme of Sadness. Mental illness was an obstacle to myself and many of my peers during high school and is something that really fuelled my interest to work with high school aged youth. I am very interested in Social Emotional Learning because of my own experiences and the experiences I observed in others I was close to, and the drawings below, in relation to the poem, reflect these experiences that have made me a more empathetic educator.