ABSTRACT
Educational assumptions from the past may cloud perceptions in the present. Although there is knowledge for a plethora of reasons surrounding the topic of bibliotherapy, there is little devoted to students in higher education in literacy courses. This absence may lie within the silence produced by assumptions that a student in higher education can handle the trauma of ongoing anxiety as part of life due to age and maturity. However, in a digital age, anxiety is becoming tethered to a weakening conception of self and place which crosses multicultural and social boundaries, becoming more acute during the COVID-19 learning period. Using bibliotherapy as a seed bed for visual journaling, I narrate how one Canadian professor uses andragogy (in higher education) to reawaken the child within to hope, a sense of self, and resilience. I navigate andragogy through the lens of seeing multicultural adulthood as the “new” classroom social community. Through the implementation of children’s literature in adult learning, andragogy becomes employed as a life act of presence across subject disciplines. The use of bibliotherapy uncovers questions concerning the rise of transhumanism in educational institutions as academic practices increasingly isolate the learner. Students in adulthood engage revisiting childhood again in early visual journal implementation, while bibliotherapy coupled with visual journaling processes explore voice and engagement within a safe space and place over time, intentionally forming a classroom community generating an embodied ontology of self within the learner and professor.
Key words: higher education; anxiety; pain; visual journal; bibliotherapy
