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.