It is important for instructors to reflect on and develop their teaching practices and pedagogy. Using a poetic inquiry method, this article offers an alternative model for reflecting on academic writing and teaching practices using a found poetry cluster. My example focuses on graduate academic writing instruction. I create found poems from my…

Black teachers only make up six percent of the profession according to the National Center for Education Statistics. A critical lens is needed to scrutinize disparities which create barriers within teacher education. How might Afrofuturism help us imagine pathways for Black girls/women to navigate through/around structural inequities to teacher…

In this essay, we critically reflect upon the ephemeral nature of theatre. Such a reflection becomes particularly important in participatory refugee theatre, since the process of participants' bearing witness to experiences of trauma and violence is emphasised as the core impetus. To this end, we investigate the experiences of Syrian young adults…

Sanah Ahsan is an award-winning poet and a qualified clinical psychologist. Ahsan has a growing profile in the public conversation about mental health. She is currently building anti-racism as a core competence into clinical psychology training. Her work has been featured by the BBC, Channel 4, Shakespeare's Globe and Southbank's WoW festival. She…

An oxymoron is a self-contradicting or incongruous word or group of words as in Lord Byron's (1788-1824) line from his satirical epic poem Don Juan; "melancholy merriment", An oxymoron is a rhetorical and epigrammatic device for effect, often revealing paradox. The effect I aim for here is the actualization of affect; affect made…

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…

By embedding narrative theory within the practice of storied forms, there can be pedagogical movement from difficulty to insight. This piece explores scholarly personal narrative as a creative and critical method for attaining academic understanding. The ideas of three narrative scholars (Nash, Fowler, and Luce-Kapler) surface within two writing…

Poets Laura Purdie Salas and Janet Wong have known each other for several years, but mostly in an online, task-driven environment, for example, serving on the board of the Children's Literature Assembly (CLA) and cochairing the 2014 CLA Master Class on Poetry Across the Curriculum (Salas et al., 2015). They strengthened their bond by interviewing…

Love and loss is facing the truth behind the facts that bears deep in our hearts. A child is not born a racist. Racism is something taught through words and actions. The fight against hate begins by demonstrating love and acts of kindness. The difference between love and hate is within the context of the idea of inherent expression conducted…

In "Excellent Sheep," William Deresiewicz describes 'elite' higher education as one in which students perform excellently, but only in a spirit of compliance with assigned tasks. The depth of this problem -- which has a long pedigree in philosophy -- is such that an advantage might be found in non-'elite' and even manifestly lame…

In this article the authors argue that Donald Trump is not simply a presidential figure, but the embodiment of white supremacy, capitalism, racism, neoliberalism, patriarchy, xenophobia, Islamaphobia, homophobia, and more. It is our belief that historically marginalized communities are in a state of constant terror as we try to make sense of how…

Reverend Father Professor Amechi Nicholas Akwanya is one of the towering scholars of literature in Nigeria and elsewhere in the world. For decades, and still counting, Fr. Prof. Akwanya has worked arduously, professing literature by way of teaching, researching, and writing in the Department of English and Literary Studies of the University of…

This article offers a conversation with Dr. Jane Piirto, author, and professor at Ashland University, where she teaches in the Department of Inclusive Services & Exceptional Learners and the Doctoral Program in Leadership Studies. Here she discusses what she is currently working on, how the five dimensions of overexcitability relate to ADHD,…

Wiljan van den Akker is a university professor, a respected academic administrator, and a published poet and writer. From a base at the Utrecht University, in the Netherlands, his three-decade long career spans three continents and includes one-on-one associations with Berkeley, UCLA and Oxford. Currently, he is the Vice-Rector for Research at…

Spoken word poetry is a means of engaging young people with a genre that has often been much maligned in classrooms all over the world. This interview with the Australian spoken word poet Luka Lesson explores issues that are of pressing concern to poetry education. These include the idea that engagement with poetry in schools can be enhanced by…