This is My Crossroads

In her book Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa writes of a "Borderlands," which she describes as "a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary....a constant state of transition" (1999, p. 25). In this paper, I explore my own borderlands, between the spaces of my classroom as a former high school chemistry teacher and my present world of graduate education in curriculum and instruction. In the three years since I left my classroom, I have had the opportunity to reflect deeply upon the multiple roles I have had as a teacher—with my students, my colleagues, and the curriculum. How did I negotiate each of these roles in my daily routine? How do I think differently about those roles now, as a graduate student in Education? In this paper, I explore the possibility that this idea of the "space between" is a worthy endeavor, and I wonder if there could be some value in the time-space continuum between classroom teacher and educational theorist.

I look to postcolonialist theory to help me traverse my own border crossing from a classroom teacher to education graduate student. In this journey, I explore such concepts as hybridity, in-betweenness, and fluidity to suggest that by valuing the complexities and multiplicities of these in-between spaces, one can partake in everything both spaces offer to authentically embody transformative learning. Through this inquiry into currere, I become more self-aware and work through my intellectual and emotional struggles in my experience of both loss and gain in this borderlands. And finally, I conclude this curriculum inquiry by proposing a different conceptualization of curriculum.