These Tensioned Places of Teaching: Life Writing in Precarious Cosmopolitan Times

Abstract

This article features the creative collaborative research of university researchers and practicing teachers who are engaged in an ongoing inquiry concerned with rewriting literacy and pedagogy in Canadian cosmopolitan educational contexts. Individual life writing texts are juxtaposed to create print-based and digital stories that embody and resonate with narrative and poetic expressions of pedagogical experiences of living and teaching in tensioned and often precarious places and times. In this research, the authors strive to create dialogues between and across different educational sites and discourses about issues of identity, language and literacy, and the teaching life, with the aim to become more knowledgeable and more empathetic about each other's words and worlds.