Carl Leggo

Sailing in a Concrete Boat: A Teacher’s Journey is a novel-length narrative composed in a sequence of short fictions and poetry linked by recurring characters, themes, events, and setting. The narrative explores the experiences and emotions of a school teacher named Caleb Robinson. He teaches in a conservative church-administered school in a rural Newfoundland town called Morrow’s Cove. Caleb struggles to understand what it means to be a teacher, husband, lover, friend, father, Christian, and human being. Sailing in a Concrete Boat raises many questions about pedagogy as questioning, freedom of expression, conservative religious beliefs, breaking silences, and curriculum as cultural reproduction instead of cultural transformation. Above all, Sailing in a Concrete Boat seeks to narrate the complex lived experiences of a school teacher as he questions love, family, community, vocation, well-being, romance, spirituality, authority, silence, truth, and identity. In order to make sense of his tangled living experiences, Caleb is always remembering and researching his past in order to write and rewrite his future. Sailing in a Concrete Boat will be a valuable resource in both undergraduate and graduate courses in teacher education, curriculum and pedagogy, life writing, poetic inquiry, arts-based research, and narrative inquiry. Social Fictions Series Editorial Advisory Board Carl Bagley, University of Durham, UK Anna Banks, University of Idaho, USA Carolyn Ellis, University of South Florida, USA Rita Irwin, University of British Columbia, Canada J. Gary Knowles, University of Toronto, Canada Laurel Richardson, The Ohio State University (Emeritus), USA Carl Leggo is a poet and professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in writing and narrative inquiry. His books include: Growing Up Perpendicular on the Side of a Hill; View from My Mother’s House; Come-By-Chance; Teaching to Wonder: Responding to Poetry in the Secondary Classroom; Lifewriting as Literary Metissage and an Ethos for Our Times (co-authored with Erika Hasebe-Ludt and Cynthia Chambers); Being with A/r/tography (co-edited with Stephanie Springgay, Rita L. Irwin, and Peter Gouzouasis); Creative Expression, Creative Education (co-edited with Robert Kelly); Poetic Inquiry: Vibrant Voices in the Social Sciences (co-edited with Monica Prendergast and Pauline Sameshima); and Speaking of Teaching (co-authored with Avraham Cohen, Marion Porath, Anthony Clarke, Heesoon Bai, and Karen Meyer).

A Teacher’s Journey

Sailing in a Concrete Boat

Pauline Sameshima

Alexandra Fidyk

Kedrick James

In the tradition of a decade of bi-annual gatherings of the International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry, this volume serves as the fifth refereed symposium anthology. Enchantment of Place celebrates poetry and poetic voices—theorizing and exploring poetic inquiry as an approach, methodology, and/or method for use in contemporary research practices. Poetic inquiry has increased in prominence as a legitimate means by which to collect, assimilate, analyze, and share the results of research across many disciplines. With this collection, we hope to continue to lay the groundwork internationally, for researchers, scholars, graduate students, and the larger community to take up poetic inquiry as a way to approach knowledge generation, learning, and sharing. This volume specifically works to draw attention to the ancient connection between poetry and the natural world with attention to broadening the ecological scope and impact of the work of poetic inquirers.

Enchantment of Place

Poetic Inquiry

Susan Walsh

Barbara Bickel

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.

Honoring Presence

Arts-based and Contemplative Practices in Research and Teaching

Erika Hasebe-Ludt

This timely edited collection asks bold and urgent questions about the complexity, culture, and character of curriculum studies in Canada. Featuring 30 original chapters and 21 short invocations, this volume includes works by both established and new scholars, illustrating the wide range of cutting-edge writing in this area. Weaving together personal essays, poetry, life writing, and other arts-based inquiry modes, Canadian Curriculum Studies highlights the creative, performative, interactive, and imaginative nature of this field. The contributors were asked to provoke conceptions and understandings of curriculum studies by examining their convictions, commitments, and challenges with/in this discipline. By bringing together diverse indigenous and non-indigenous scholarship, the editors invoke the concept of métissage, which is finding a growing resonance both in Canada and abroad. Exploring the idea of curriculum studies as an interdisciplinary field across transnational contexts, this rich text is well-suited to senior undergraduate and graduate courses in curriculum studies and qualitative educational research.

Carl Leggo

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