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.