Writing the Self for Reconciliation and Global Citizenship: The Inner Dialogue and Creative Voices for Cultural Healing

This chapter provides a theoretically based and practical way of initiating cultural healing and global citizenship in (higher) education through creative, expressive, and reflective writing (i.e., writing the self). The Dialogical Self theory sheds light on the way in which particular self-narratives are I-prisons that can be re-storied to create third positions and the democratization of society through the democratization of selves. Two stories, one by an Aboriginal woman and one by a white woman who works with Aboriginal students, illustrate the process and show its potential for reconciliation in the Canadian context. A more general argument is made that cultural healing requires the cultivation of an internal dialogue within educational contexts, something that is hitherto underrepresented in curricula. Finally the work argues that reconciliation on a societal level begins with the questioning and creating of new narratives on an individual level; it is a process to be undertaken by both the “colonized” and the “colonizer.”.