This article draws on data from a larger project that is founded on four narrative case studies that examine the ways in which Black activists in Toronto mobilize their cultural production--namely, spoken word poetry and rapping--in support of their activism, community education, and community organizing work. This particular article is founded on…

For the South Asian diasporic, questions about (be)longing and identity are almost undeniable. Through a personal reflection, I contour these experiences by way of poetic inquiry, specifically interrogating "performing" Canadian-ness (Alvi, 2020) and the meaning of "home" (Badruddoja, 2006) that are a part of the living…

Cultural and faith-based narratives live in our skins and personal lives. Each body is tied to the stories that are written on it, and thus the body and the soul within it are central to our coming to know of tears, wounds, pain, and suffering. Using autobiographical narrative inquiry and poetry, I share my lived experiences and encounters with…

My PhD supervisor and lifetime mentor, Carl Leggo, was diagnosed with cancer in 2018 and died March 7, 2019. The prospect of a shortened life brings a sense of urgency to the central existential questions of love, fear, joy, and loss--four prominent themes in Leggo's work. In this essay, I reflect on how his mentorship has transformed my…

The curriculum of public systems of education should include opportunities for fostering a deeper relationship with the places in which learners live. In this paper I work through a ecopoetic inquiry lens to investigate how poetic writing can become a space for investigating ecoliteracy and ecojustice education. My research includes visiting and…

In this article we explore the work of two after-school programs in Toronto, Ontario. Our Youth Success (OYS) is a community-based mentoring program dedicated to lowering the push-out rates of students of Spanish and/or Portuguese-speaking descent. In the Youth Speak Program (YSP), community activists use spoken word poetry and rapping as a…

Educational spaces, both formal and informal, are not always welcoming to queer Métis youth, especially to those youth who connect more to hip-hop cultures than those activities like jigging and beading which are often held up as pillars of Métis culture. This article draws on conversations with youth, conducted as part of doctoral research using…

This short essay uses James Thompson's aesthetics of care to examine 'Memory in Two Voices', a multi-vocal poetry performance about dementia by long-time lesbian partners Chris Morrissey and Bridget Coll. Noting how Chris and Bridget's years-long tenure in the Queer Imaging and Riting Kollective for Elders, an arts and performance group based in…

This autoethnographic essay describes an ambulatory workshop with fellow graduate students, a walking tour to remote parts of campus where we paused to consider writing prompts and to create short performative sketches highlighting the nature of our relationships to the land around us. In this reflection on our "walk and talk," I…

In this visual essay, drawing on worlding as method evokes attunement to being, becoming, and belonging through ordinary experiences and affects, where we tell multimodal stories framed by theories and practices that offer reconsiderations of the arts, pedagogy, and scholarship as praxis. Contextualized by youth subcultures, porous visual…

In this article, we chronicle the development and implementation of a multilingual drama workshop for teacher candidates within the framework of a course titled "Supporting English Language Learners," as part of the Master of Teaching Program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. This course takes a decidedly critical…

Instructors teaching an Indigenous education course face the challenges of shifting students' understanding and inviting them into the work of decolonizing education. Indigenous instructors take on the embodied and emotional work of highlighting diverse representations of Indigenous peoples, histories, and perspectives in scholarship in order to…

Amongst a group of poet-scholar friends, all of us students of the American poet Robert Bly, we often speak of our "gratitude to old teachers," the title from one of Bly's (1999) poems. We cherish a meditative awareness of deeply rooted presences holding us up, buoying us as we stride across "Water that once could take no human…

In this article I discuss the ways in which writing poetry and reflecting on its meanings may be a valuable tool for promoting an educator's reflexivity surrounding issues of reconciliation. As Canada embarks on the work of healing the difficulties its colonial past has caused its original inhabitants (i.e. Indigenous peoples), educators must…

This auto ethnographic poetic inquiry is fashioned as a dialogue between Kristin Heavey and Kessey Jemmott, on topics of race and embodiment. Heavey is a white mother of a bi racial daughter in the United States of America; Jemmott is a Black Trinbagonian, living in Canada. These vignettes emerged from a collaborative performance piece, drawing…