John J. Guiney Yallop

From the Edges of Lateness

In a conversation a few years ago about our work as academics we discovered that we had both been told at more than one point in our current careers that we had arrived late to the academy. We were puzzled by this concept. What does it mean to arrive late in one’s life? What did we miss? How do we create/live our lives as academics when it appears that we are to understand that we are lacking? What accounts for our late arrival? What do we bring late to the academy? Where is lateness located in the curriculum? Where do those (of us) who arrive late find them(our)selves? What can we learn/teach from/about being late? We explore in this chapter the impact of labels and judgements on (our) identities and how we are continuously exploring, and also determining, the places of our identities in the curriculum.

What if I Don’t Get It Right?

“Echoes never die,” I write in this vignette. “Once heard, they keep repeating across space and across time.” Sharing some of my own echoes that haunt me, even after many years of success as an educator and as a writer, and now, after some years as an academic, I describe how I have learned, and am still learning, to talk back to the echoes. My writing is research. Fictionalized narratives and lived experiences become the field for my data. I engage in poetic explorations, and create poetic renderings, of place and memory, of identities and communities, of emotional landscapes. I invite readers into journeys of loss, of recovery, of forgiveness, and, ultimately, of gratitude.

The Art of Teaching Rests in Connection

Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.

A Book Review of Arts-Based and Contemplative Practices in Research and Teaching: Honoring Presence Edited by Susan Walsh, Barbara Bickel, and Carl Leggo, Published by Routledge, 2015

This book review of Arts-Based and Contemplative Practices in Research and Teaching: Honoring Presence is both a review of the work as well as a contemplation on the work. The reader is invited into the book through witnessing the impact reading the book had on this reviewer. Attention is given to each author’s contributions to the publication, noting how each chapter and each Lectio Divina (opportunities for contemplation between chapters) calls us to pay attention.