Carl Leggo

The heart of pedagogy: on poetic knowing and living

In this essay I offer a series of autobiographical ruminations and poems for inviting readers to reflect on poetic possibilities for conceiving and fostering the well‐being of teachers. As an educator, I am confronted daily with challenges. In order to sustain my spirit and energy, I turn to poetry, both reading and writing poetry, and I find in poetry a location of wisdom, sustenance and hope. One of my great concerns about teaching is that the demands are so relentless that even the most dedicated teachers often experience burnout, dissatisfaction, ennui, hopelessness and despair. Therefore, I claim that teachers, both beginning and experienced, should learn to know themselves as poets in order to foster living creatively in the pedagogic contexts of classrooms and the larger pedagogic contexts outside classrooms. I invite both new and experienced teachers to consider the significance of a phrase like ‘living poetically’. I seek to contextualize the more practical and pragmatic considerations of teaching in an understanding of pedagogy as a poetic, emotional, personal, spiritual commitment and experience. My claim is simply that transformative learning can be effectively promoted by giving attention to poetry and poetic knowing and poetic living. I am learning to live poetically, and I am learning that the heart of pedagogy is revitalized and sustained by poetic knowing, being and becoming. Poetry engages us with language, nurtures the inner life, acknowledges the particular and local, encourages us to listen to our hearts, fosters flexibility and trust, and invites creativity and creative living.

Narrative Inquiry: Attending to the Art of Discourse

At least once a year, I teach a graduate course titled Narrative Inquiry. At the beginning of the course I always inform students that they will not likely learn how to do narrative inquiry in the narrative inquiry course. Instead they will interrogate the strategies, purposes, practices, and challenges of narrative inquiry, and they will learn how complicated, even messy, the whole business of narrative inquiry really is. I organize the course around an investigation of three principal dynamics involved in narrative inquiry: story, interpretation, and discourse. I invite students to consider matters related to story and interpretation, but I encourage them especially to attend to the art of discourse.

A haiku suite: the importance of music making in the lives of secondary school students

This study offers an arts-based a/r/tographic inquiry using poetic transcription and representation of interviews conducted with a co-educational group of 14 students in a West Vancouver, British Columbia secondary school rhythm and blues band class. The decision to translate and analyse the interview transcripts into the Japanese poetry form of haiku is rooted in research literature in education and other fields, primarily health and nursing studies. Those studies demonstrate the efficacy of the highly condensed haiku to transmit meaning in a synthesised and creative form. While music education has a body of scholarship on students’ attitudes towards music and their music education, this kind of research has generally been presented in more traditional ways. Our contention here is that arts-based topics are complemented and illuminated when investigated through arts-based methods. As well, arts-based methods such as a/r/tography, offer multiple and complex perspectives of what the data ‘means’, thereby offering a welcome harmony of topic and method. This paper captures the depth and intensity of emotions, engagement and transformative affects that adolescents experience through music making – music matters to young people.

LIVING POETRY: FIVE RUMINATIONS

As a poet and language educator, I am often asked, Is this a good poem?, as if I carry some kind of standard measuring device for assessing the value of poems. But, perhaps the important question is not, Is this a good poem?, but instead, What is a poem good for? So, in this paper, I offer five reasons why poetry is important for living. Of course, there are many more reasons that could be discussed, but my goal is to contribute to an ongoing dialogue among language educators about the value of living poetry in our personal and professional lives.

Lingering in liminal spaces: a/r/tography as living inquiry in a language arts class

In this article, we explore how we live among students and teachers as a/r/tographers and how we become creatively immersed in the wholeness of the classroom experience as a result. This is in contrast to our initial intentions of using ethnographic techniques and qualitative methods. As we began our project, it became apparent that another lens would be more appropriate for our study: this lens was a/r/tography. Exploring our research processes and practices as relational acts and ruminating on our ways of being in the academy as a/r/tographers, we explore the liminal spaces between the use of a/r/tography as practice‐based research and the use of ethnographic techniques, as qualitative research, and consider how shifting amid these realms can re/shape research in new and innovative ways.

Living Un/Grammatically in a Grammatical World: The Pedagogic World of Teachers and Students

In my work with preservice teachers I face daily a dilemma. My student-teachers come to me with an urgent practical agenda: What do I need to know in order to survive in the world of school? In effect they want me to tell them how to fit into a world that they assume is structured like a grammar, with traditions and conventions and rules and patterns. They are seeking ways to conform to the pedagogic world as it has been written, but I hope they will seek ways to transform the pedagogic world, always written and always in the process of being written. I hope my student-teachers will seek ways to write, actively and deliberately and imaginatively, the pedagogic world of students and teachers. I want them to learn to live un/grammatically, to challenge the ways in which the world has been written for them, to know that they are not only written by the world, but that they also write the world. I invite my students to write the unwritten sentences, the sentences that interrogate and subvert syntax and semantics, the sentences that create spaces where my students can live un/grammatically.

Open(ing) texts: Deconstruction and responding to poetry

about deconstruction. For years, insults have been hurled at scholars who are considered supporters of deconstruction. The insults have been steeped in righteous condemnation and steeled with dismissive swipes. Deconstruction has been denounced as unethical, apolitical, antihumanist, and nihilistic. The death of deconstuction has been proclaimed (Johnson, 1994; Lehman, 1991; Martin, 1995). The whole fuss seems bizarre in light of the actual practice and influence of deconstruction. Perhaps deconstruction has fired fear in people because it is difficult to define, and what cannot be defined, cannot be pinned down and labeled; yet here lies the productive energy of deconstruction. In the very difficulty of naming and defining deconstruction, in the slipperiness of language that refuses to be pinned easily, deconstruction demonstrates and represents an understanding of language as vibrant and creative, opening up possibilities for meaning making. My interest in deconstruction as a way to read poetry is motivated by my experiences as a student and teacher, in both school and university classrooms, as well as by my experiences as a poet. I first heard about deconstruction when I was in

Startling Stories: Fiction and Reality in Education Research

Fiction (with its etymological connections to the Latin fingere, to make) is a significant way for researching and representing lived and living experiences. As fiction writers, poets, and education researchers, we promote connections between fictional knowing and inquiry in educational research. We need to compose and tell our stories as creative ways of growing in humanness. We need to question our understanding of who we are in the world. We need opportunities to consider other versions of identity. This is ultimately a pedagogic work, the work of growing in wisdom through education, learning, research, and writing. The real purpose of telling our stories is to tell them in ways that open up new possibilities for understanding and wisdom and transformation. So, our stories need to be told in creative ways that hold our attention, that call out to us, that startle us.

Dancing with Desire: a meditation on psychoanalysis, politics, and pedagogy

Abstract I want to transform schooling by celebrating the desire of students and teachers, the desire which is as natural to human beings as breathing, the desire that manifests its dynamic energy in the discursive practices of human be/com/ings. We are all born into language; we know ourselves and others in language; we word our worlds; we weave our worlds as we weave our words. Therefore, schooling must be centered on the discursive practices that constitute the people we are and are becoming as we dance with desire for one another in this world.

Impact of Mental Health Services on Resilience in Youth with First Episode Psychosis: A Qualitative Study

Abstract The purpose of this qualitative study is to understand how mental health and related services support and hinder resilience in young people diagnosed with first-episode psychosis. Seventeen youth between the ages of 18–24 were recruited and 31 in-depth interviews were conducted. Findings illustrated that informational and meaning making, instrumental, and emotional supports were experienced positively (i.e., resilience-enhancing); whereas services with ghettoizing, engulfing, regulating, and out of tune practices were experienced negatively (i.e., resilience-hindering). These results demonstrate how various types of service-related practices influence resilience in youth and can inform future planning of services for psychosis.