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Alan Doyle (2017), formerly the frontman of Great Big Sea, and now more simply Alan Doyle, extraordinary musician, writer, and Newfoundland ambassador, concluded his recent memoir with the resonant testimony: “I am a Canadian from Newfoundland” and “I am a Newfoundlander in Canada” (p. 240). Me, too! In chronicling his initiation into the music scene of Canada, Doyle notes that “for every pat on the back, there’s ten boots in the arse” (p. 56). I like Doyle’s rough, homespun humor, resonant with the voices of many Newfoundlanders, but now that I have read Fostering a Relational Pedagogy: Self-Study Transformative Praxis, edited by Ellyn Lyle, I am going to offer only pats on the back! In Educated: A Memoir. Tara Westover (2018) notes how “we are all more complicated than the roles we are assigned in stories” (p. 334). Last year I wrote an article about the death of my brother who was diagnosed with cancer in early summer and died before the end of August. One peer reviewer commented that the article was “sentimental and self-indulgent.” My first thoughts were simple: How can you write about a brother’s death without being sentimental? Why is writing about a brother’s death self-indulgent? In Poetry David Constantine (2013) promotes “the power of particularities” (p. 14), and he reminds us that the personal is paradigmatic. He explains that “out of the interplay, or it may be the fighting, of the personal and the exemplary comes a unique self-identity” (p. 26). Fostering a Relational Pedagogy is a collection of nineteen lively narratives and ruminations on lived and living experiences, on the art and heart of learning to live well in words and the world. Constantine is eager to ask about “what it is like being human now; what the truth of our condition is, what responsibilities that truth entails” (p. 95). Because “most people most of the time live in a state much closer to total unconsciousness than to any degree of consciousness even half-ways adequate to our real situation” (p. 96), Constantine is keen “to quicken us to the condition of being human” (p. 99).
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Twenty-six Synonyms
autobiography
blog
confession
drama
epic
gag
history
journal
knowledge
letter
memoir
narrative
obituary
photograph
question
record
story
tale
ululation
vita
wit
X-ray
yearbook
zodiac
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In Place, being, resonance: A critical ecohermeneutic approach to education Michael W. Derby (2015) notes that “ambiguity is the world’s condition” (p. 36), and he invites all teachers and learners to “think intensely and beautifully” (p. 55), especially because “attentiveness is an active, conscious and intentional discipline” (p. 38). Instead of experiencing school as “fundamentally prosaic” and “characterized by fragmentation” (p. 25), Derby recommends that we find ways to invite students to challenge and change the current experience of “mass distraction” (p. 27). Derby understands that education is “storytelling: where chatter, laughter, conversations, stories, songs and dreams are as continuous as breathing” (p. 14). In a like-minded way, bell hooks (2013) reminds us that “we must dare to love” (p. 194). For hooks, love is necessary for “ending domination” (p. 1) as we commit ourselves to “the development of critical thinking and critical consciousness” (p. 18) because “decolonizing the mind lays a groundwork for healthy self-actualization” (p. 23). The spirit of hooks is infused throughout the chapters in Fostering a Relational Pedagogy: “Diversity is the reality of all our lives. It is the very essence of our planetary survival. Organically, human survival as a species relies on the interdependence of all life” (p. 26).
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Abecedarian
(one among many)
Aoki
Bochner
Cole
Denzin
Ellis
Freire
Gadamer
hooks
Irving
Jardine
Kohl
Lincoln
Makaiau
Noddings
Oliver
Pinar
Quinn
Richardson
Snyder
Tsong-kha-pa
Unwin
van Manen
Wang
Xavier
Yolen
Zeichner
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Sensational Sentences
(found poem)
Ellyn Lyle
Sometimes we face uncomfortable renderings of self that leave us feeling fractured, our identities in crisis.
David W. Jardine
Language is something I and others find ourselves in, not something we find in us and at our beck and call.
Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan
I offer my professional learning story and my poetic research practice as an invitation to other teacher educators and teachers who wish to never fall asleep.
Jennifer Markides
I navigate both settler and Indigenous lineages, and bring my complex identity into the classroom, wondering how I will be received.
Timothy M. Sibbald
The transformation of my praxis began in earnest when some students arrived to class very upset that their patterns did not work.
Cher Hill & Laura Piersol
As with diffractive reading, when listening for subtle energies, the goal is not to ascertain Truth but rather to uncover one of the many potential existing realities within the human and more-than-human entanglement that create openings and allow for something new to occur.
Elizabeth Kenyon
The challenge of whiteness is that it is so present, persistent, and pervasive.
Sepideh Mahani
It is essential for educators to create a learning environment in which students are inspired to make sense of new ideas and form their own understandings by using their personal experiences.
Sherry Martens
We have been exposed to a variety of teachers, philosophies, and school experiences that have helped shape not only who we are as individuals, but also who we may be as teachers.
Chinwe H. Ikpeze
Self-study opened a way for me to interrogate, construct, and reconstruct my identity to align with the realities of my new cultural context, thereby transforming my practice.
Kate McCabe
Life, like the cherry blossom, is fleeting and precarious. Impermanent. Beautiful.
Deborah Graham
Undoubtedly, in teacher education programs, there must be room for stories.
Vy Dao & Yue Bian
These pedagogical strategies combined the traits of student autonomy and freedom of expression – which we had learned to value in the U.S. – and the attentiveness and caring that we had each acquired from our home country cultures.
Sara K. Sterner, Amanda C. Shopa, Lee C. Fisher, & Abby Boehm-Turner
Collective memory work draws on the knowledge and experiences of its members, and the line between the personal and the professional is erased.
Teresa Anne Fowler & Willow S. Allen
We do not have the answers, but we continue to ask the questions.
Aaron Zimmerman
Relationships in the teacher education classroom create moments of vulnerability and frustration as well as moments of affirmation and fulfilment.
Charity Becker
Through writing, I have come to view the world differently. I am more attentive to details, to colours, to patterns. I see beauty in brokenness and decay, in transitions and juxtapositions.
Diane Burt
I intend to develop a collaborative learning group or community of practice with colleagues who are also interested in exploring the potential of looking in and leading out.
Jodi Latremouille
Each time I return to a story, I am changed, too, and thus the work is never completely, neatly bound up and finished.
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In her searing memoir Gently to Nagasaki Joy Kogawa (2016) writes about how she sees “the world as an open book embedded with stories. We hear them if we have ears to hear” (p. 149). May we hear the stories of Fostering a Relational Pedagogy!
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Teasing Titles
(found poem)
Engaging Self-Study
(Lyle)
Too Late
(Jardine)
Became a Gift
(Pithouse-Morgan)
Impossible and Imperative
(Markides)
Transform
(Sibbald)
Becomings
(Hill & Piersol)
Negotiating
(Kenyon)
Culturally Relevant
(Mahani)
Seeing Ourselves
(Martens)
Relational Pedagogy
(Ikpeze)
Opening
(McCabe)
Navigating
(Graham)
Transitional Sel(ves)
(Dao & Bian)
Finding Layers
(Sterner, Shopa, Fisher, & Boehm-Turner)
Eavesdropping
(Fowler & Allen)
Illuminating
(Zimmerman)
Always
(Becker)
Looking
(Burt)
Cultivating Not-Knowing
(Latremouille)
References
Constantine, D. (2013). Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Derby, M. W. (2015). Place, being, resonance: A critical ecohermeneutic approach to education. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Doyle, A. (2017). A Newfoundlander in Canada. Toronto: Doubleday Canada.
hooks, b. (2013). Writing beyond race: Living theory and practice. New York, NY: Routledge.
Kogawa, J. (2016). Gently to Nagasaki. Half Moon Bay, CA: Caitlin Press.
Westover, T. (2018). Educated: A memoir. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers.