Dr. Kathryn Ricketts

Contact Info

Research Interests

I explore spectatorship and the culturally-inscripted body within our ever-growing world of fluid borders and hybrid identities with a focus on inclusive education.  While critiquing text centred educative strategies I strives to cultivate dynamic and imaginative spaces whereby the body at play, including all abilities and challenges, becomes the most critical tool for transformative learning across all subject areas. I move education onto a horizontal plane of exchange and empathy rather than a vertical plane of transmission. The reciprocal nature of this approach allows for vibrant explorations with self invested learners who become connected to and responsible for their immediate, local and global community.

Teaching Philosophy and Listening Lab

Teaching Philosophy

I am asking questions such as, "If I am a museum of lived experiences what are my artifacts?"; "What is embodied literacy in the curriculum of the world?"; "How can co-authoring personal stories cultivate compassion within a community of practice and further a global community?"  I am exploring spectatorship, the culturally-inscripted body within our ever-growing world of fluid borders and hybrid identities.  I am critiquing text centred learning strategies as a primary factor in forcing the body into silence as well as examining the notion of self and other within an autobiographical and collective storying process.  I trouble our privileged position of naming objects in relation to the everydayness of their use and finally, I explore the interpretive voice by examining readings of embodied acts. Embodied Poetic Narrative is a triangulation of body, story, and object in creative and shared play as a way to surface new understandings of self and other.  This curriculum model carries multiple entry points whereby the teacher/participant can enter from creative writing and/or movement in combination with shared stories developed from objects of value.  With these imaginative explorations, I invite the body’s centre of gravity to shift and thereby provoke the axis of knowing to be disrupted.  This process results in lived experiences re-interpreted, re-storied, and then re-imagined with others.  When fracturing the signifiers of our everyday(ness) participants come to shared understandings and create intersections of commonalities thereby cultivating spaces of reciprocity where a community is formed. Embodied Poetic Narratives presents a tool to create powerful, dynamic pedagogic environments whereby forgotten or suppressed memories, can activate personal agency and self politicized action towards transformative learning.

The Listening Lab

The Listening Lab, my research 'container', explores experimental art practices integrated with best practices in inclusive pedagogy. The artists, teachers, programmers and cultural workers, both National and International, who work through this series of Lab Residencies, reflect any of the following areas of my research:

• Narratives., movements and artefacts as portals to playful and imaginative methods towards empowering disenfranchised communities such as youth at risk, mixed abilities, elders and new comers.
• Dynamic and embodied methods toward literacy enhancement with inner city youth.
• Exploring breadth and scope of embodied epistemologies within a performative context.
• Radical and innovative approaches to curriculum design delivery and assessment
• Developing accessible languages in support of integrated communities with cultural , physical and cognitive differences.

Grants Received and in Process

Difference and the Arts: Finding new language for curriculum design – 2016/2017
 University of Regina President’s Research Seed Grant SHHRC

Difference and the Arts: Finding new language for curriculum design – 2016/2017
 University of Regina Humanities Research Fellowship

Reconceptualizing Teachers' Roles for Canada's Creative Economy – 2016/2020
 SSHRC – insight

Art for social change: and integrated research program in teaching, evaluation and capacity building – (collaborator) 2012/2016

Embodied multimodal mathematics learning for students with sensory impairments  (collaborator) 2015/2018
 SSHRC Insight

Creative and Cultural Ecosystems on the Prairies: Visioning, Realizing and Valuing a Creative Society on the Prairies(collaborator) 2016 /2024
 SSHRC Partnership (in process)

The International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (collaborator) 2014/ 2020
 SSHRC Partnership (in process)

Voices from the Land: our shared history, our shared future (collaborator) 2016/2017
 Faculty of Education, Indigenous Advisory Circle Fund (submitted)  

Land(ing) (collaborator) 2016 /2017
 Saskatchewan Arts Board – Multi Disciplinary Award (submitted)  

Mapping the discard: Eliciting and reclaiming stories of loss and re/discovery in Windsor  (collaborator) 2017
 The 2017 Art Gallery of Windsor Triennial of Contemporary Art, Downtown/s: Urban Renewal Today for Tomorrow (submitted)

Identity | Heritage | Communities (Partner) 2106 - ongoing
 University of Regina Research Cluster

Selected Publications

Ricketts, K. and McLeod, H. (2013), In-Between the Fireflies: Working with Senior Women of Chinese Heritage Around Issues of Language, Culture and the Arts. International Journal of Education through Art Volume 9 Number 1 pp 23 -39 Intellect Ltd.

Ricketts, K. and Fels, L. (2012). Poetics of Technology: Performing technology in poetic spaces surveillance, encounter, and intimacy
. The Art of Poetic Inquiry, the fifth volume of the Arts-informed Inquiry Series published by Backalong Books. (book chapter)

Ricketts, K., Irwin, R. Leggo, C, Gouzouasis, P & Grauer, K. (2008) Cultural Silencing Drama Australia Journal, Melbourne, Volume 31, Issue 2

Link to Autobiographical Footsteps - http://web.education.unimelb.edu.au/UNESCO/ejournal/ejournal_vol3iss2.html