This volume presents a scholarly investigation of the ways educators engage in artistic and contemplative practices - and why this matters in education. Arts-based learning and inquiry can function as a powerful catalyst for change by allowing spiritual practices to be present within educational settings, but too often the relationship between art, education and spirituality is ignored. Exploring artistic disciplines such as dance, drama, visual art, music, and writing, and forms such as writing-witnessing, freestyle rap, queer performative autoethnograph, and poetic imagination, this book develops a transformational educational paradigm. Its unique integration of spirituality in and through the arts addresses the contemplative needs of learners and educators in diverse educational and community settings.

This volume presents a scholarly investigation of the ways educators engage in artistic and contemplative practices and why this matters in education. Arts-based learning and inquiry can function as a powerful catalyst for change by allowing spiritual practices to be present within educational settings, but too often the relationship between art, education and spirituality is ignored. Exploring artistic disciplines such as dance, drama, visual art, music, and writing, and forms such as writing-witnessing, freestyle rap, queer performative autoethnograph, and poetic imagination, this book develops a transformational educational paradigm. Its unique integration of spirituality in and through the arts addresses the contemplative needs of learners and educators in diverse educational and community settings."

This anthology explores life writing as a mode of educational inquiry, one where students and teachers may get a "heart of wisdom" as they struggle with the tensions and complexities of learning and teaching in challenging contemporary circumstances. Contributors write first-person creative non-fiction in a variety of life-writing genres, such as memoir, poetry, personal essay, and various blended genres. Four sections entitled Memory Work, Place Work, Curriculum Work, and Social Work explore the struggles and joys of pedagogy where relationships are at the heart of teaching and learning. The essays address questions such as: What critical moments in learning and teaching change lives? What stories need to be told? What questions ache to be asked?

This book introduces literary metissage as a way to research, teach, and live ethically «with all our relations in our precarious times. The authors theorize and perform literary metissage through the praxis of life writing, braiding their autobiographical texts, in various (mixed) genres, into seven themes. Life Writing and Literary Metissage as an Ethos for Our Times explores this writing praxis, with its more inclusive and generative notions of knowledge and knowledge practices, as a tool for creating more just societies and schools.

This highly anticipated collection of 30 original essays and 21 invocations provokes the idea of curriculum studies as an interdisciplinary field across transitional contexts, with particular emphasis on Canadian educators' works. During the Biennial Provoking Curriculum Studies Conference (2015), co-editors Carl Leggo and Erika Hasebe-Ludt invited educators to provoke curriculum studies by attending to the multiple denotations of provoke, and to examine their convictions, commitments, and challenges with/in the field. In the spirit of curriculum elders, contributors ask bold and urgent questions about the complexity, culture, and characters of curriculum studies. The resulting collection weaves threads of the writing into three metissage strands, highlighting arts-based inquiry approaches as part of the creative, performative, interactive, and imaginative nature of this field. This rich text is well-suited to senior undergraduate and graduate courses in curriculum studies and qualitative educational research.

Teaching is a richly multifaceted endeavor. It isn't always easy to know just where we should focus our thinking and our dialogue. In Speaking of Teaching, six educators talk about their inner selves. They bring the inside out for their own self-exploration. And they bring the inside out for us to view and learn from. They also question the boundaries between the inner and the outer and whether existence can be dichotomized in this way. Gary Poole, Professor, Faculty of Medicine, The University of British Columbia, 3M Teaching Fellow. The authors of this collection explore the many ways to remain present in the midst of the trifling but perpetual swirl of events, thoughts, distractions, and how they, as they are at, what T. S. Eliot called, the still point of the turning world, find profound meaning in their work as educators. A deeply moving collection that allowed me too, while reading it, to rediscover that still point without which there would be no dance, and there is only the dance. Gerda Wever, PhD, editor and publisher, The Write Room Press