Seeking Care: Youth’s Counterstories Within the Context of Mental Health
In this article, we draw on a narrative inquiry into the experiences of children, youth, and families waiting for mental health support during the COVID-19 pandemic in Western Canada. We foreground two youths’ experiences (Gillian, who self-identifies as transgender, and Malek, who self-identifies as racialized) to highlight the complex barriers and supports each encountered while attempting to secure appropriate care as they navigated moments of crisis within their worlds of home, school, and communities. By inquiring into their mental health stories, we foreground the unique ways these youth enacted counterstories to disrupt hegemonic constructions of their identities, build agency, and support their wellbeing.
An Early Childhood Educator’s Learning Story in the Time of COVID
While it began with a variety of narrative representations of writing personal experiences, since Ellis (2004; Bochner & Ellis, 2016), evocative, performative, and creative nonfiction forms of storying have coalesced to form contemporary autoethnography. For over a decade, Canadian arts education researchers have blazed trails to employ those forms of autoethnography as “learning stories” (Carr, 2001; Carr & Lee, 2012) to study teaching and learning practices in a variety of school and community educational contexts. Learning stories enable educators to reveal teaching and learning experiences that cannot be represented by, or communicated through, other research forms. The present inquiry, which begins with the story of an early childhood educator, is rooted in the fusion of evocative autoethnography and learning stories with arts-based research, particularly a/r/tography.
Reflexive Inquiry’s Impact on Mindful Teaching for Student Wellbeing
This inquiry investigates the effects of trauma on students by analyzing personal experiences and teaching methods. Through the lens of autoethnography, a nonfictional storytelling approach, I reflect on my learning journey to identify compassionate and mindful teaching practices, aiming to foster a trauma‑sensitive classroom environment. Emphasizing the significance of teachers sharing their stories through autoethnography, this exploration contributes valuable insights to the ongoing discourse on trauma-informed pedagogy for student wellbeing.
School Sport for All: An Inclusive Developmental Framework to Improve Participation
Recognizing the contributions that school sport can make to the wellbeing of students, this paper proposes a “re-imagined” school sport framework. School Sport for All (SS4A) places students at the center of building a program where development and wellbeing are prioritized. The SS4A framework fully integrates and promotes key aspects from comprehensive school health, whole-child education, and long-term athlete development throughout all its features. As a whole, SS4A aims to ensure the benefits of sport can be experienced by all, within a school system where teaching and learning are prioritized in the classroom and in the school community.
Maintaining Playground Relationships Through Music During a Pandemic: An Action Research Inquiry
The COVID-19 pandemic’s restrictions for schools and playgrounds threatened children’s social and emotional wellbeing. In response, Grade 4/5 students created music-based activities through action research to sustain playground interactions. This study explored the crucial yet fragile playground relationships and the children’s determination to maintain them. Findings indicate that the student‑initiated projects were not only a medium for self-expression and maintaining friendships, but also served as an important tool for reinforcing the inherent social fabric of the playground setting. Notably, this study underscores the significance of collaborative learning, interpersonal skill development, and intrinsic motivation in fostering social skills and enhancing self-confidence.
Editorial for Learning Landscapes Issue 29, Transitions: The messiness of just being human.
Navigating Curiosity: Dialogic Practices and the Learning Cycle
This paper presents a reflective exploration of my eight-year journey studying philosophy at a central university in India. I have found philosophy intriguing, challenging, and profound, though my interest has been inconsistent. This experiential account is not only about experiences I could identify but also about those that are more difficult to pinpoint and delineate. As a learner, I have always asked questions; however, school discouraged dialogue and inquiry, leading me to question my learning style. This tension between curiosity and conformity persisted until I encountered the Dialogic Method during my Master of Education (MEd) course, which provided a framework for curiosity and wonder, making dialogic practices fundamental to my understanding of dialogue, learning, and philosophy.
Embracing the Messiness: A PhD Journey to an Embodied Academic Voice
To engage in academic work is to step into a space where transitions—between identities, ways of knowing, and academic expectations—are inevitable and necessary. This piece reflects my journey as a PhD candidate, singer, and educator, exploring the quest for an embodied academic voice. It examines how voice—both literal and metaphorical—shapes learning spaces and how performative and embodied knowledge contribute to inclusive academic environments and communities. This work is a revised version of my PhD oral defense, completed in 2023. I share it to inspire other PhD candidates and scholars to explore alternative ways of creating knowledge where embodied ways of knowing are central. Drawing from new materialisms and feminist theory, I argue that academic voices are relational, porous, and in flux rather than static or singular. Through storytelling, I reflect on moments of struggle, discovery, and transformation, engaging in dialogues with both theory and personal experience to encourage holistic and inclusive learning spaces.
The Messiness of Being Human: A Father-Daughter Performative Dialogue
The following conversation was enacted by email and text message (with the occasional inner monologue by Mark). Mark had been invited to reflect on this issue’s theme and thought a dialogue with his daughter Aidyn, an aspiring writer, would be apropos. Given separation, given all the complications of the parent–child dynamic (guilt, resentment, longing, umbrage, etc.) what better way to dive into “the messiness of being human”? Aidyn was travelling in Central America; Mark was at home in Sydney, Nova Scotia, anxiously trying to prompt her comments, while also trying to wrap up his time at Cape Breton University, with plans to move at the end of the term.
Using Picture Books to Enhance Meaningful, Inclusive, and Socially Just Relationships
This article explores spaces for transformation for teachers and learners using picture books, encouraging them to share their stories and have their voices heard through multiple forms of representation. We describe one teacher’s journey with her secondary school students. Classroom data show how reading and creating picture books provoke holistic and comprehensive discussions about topics of societal and personal importance such as equity and inclusion. Benefits for students to create and share their stories include (a) participating in meaningful, inclusive, and socially just discussions that promote interconnectedness and diversity; and (b) becoming positive role models through interactions and relationships with younger students.
Dear Sam, With Love: In Search of a Better Way to Live, Teach, and Parent on Stolen Lands
Framed as a letter to the author’s daughter, this essay explores what it means to live, parent, and teach as a Settler Canadian on stolen Indigenous Land. Through personal reflections and Indigenous scholarship, the author considers how love, accountability, and relational learning can guide us toward decolonial and reconciliatory futures. This essay invites readers into the ongoing work of (un)learning and imagining more just and joyful ways of being in relation.
Drawing on a narrative inquiry with students in an English course entitled Girlhood, this paper explores the ways in which the experiences of teaching the course, and inquiring into two girls’ experiences of the course, shaped the future practice of the teacher/author. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s writings on natality, we inquire into how the teacher’s stories have shifted and changed over time and place, and how they reveal the uncertainty and possibility that exists in all new beginnings. Being reborn is a messy business, filled with unexpectedness as we untangle old and new identities.
An Exploration of Self-Employed Arts Educators’ Work Patterns and Social Relationships
Many arts teachers are self-employed due to the lack of traditional forms of employment available. The purpose of this study was to understand the messiness of employment patterns of self-employed music, drama, dance, and visual arts teachers to support current and future educators. The overarching question that informed this study was: What is the nature of self-employed arts educators’ work and relationships? Elder’s life course perspective was used to analyze diverse lives in connection with social interconnectedness and transitions (Elder et al., 2003). Results of this study suggest that business training and social connections are vital to self-employed arts teachers’ success.
Propositions for Sustainable Relationalities
From November 2023 to June 2024, an a/r/tographic study group gathered to engage with the concept of sustainable relationality. With the methodology of a/r/tography and propositional thinking, the relational gathering became an experimental curricular uncommonplace, a messy yet nourishing place from which to envision different ways of working and being. After introducing the intentions and theoretical background of the study, two art-based engagements that emerged for two groups of master’s students are offered. Reflecting on the transitions undergone by these groups, we speculate on the conditions that might enable similar educational opportunities for human flourishing sustained by deep relational encounters.
The Needed Messy Practice Ground for Curricular Un/Decolonizing and Indigenizing
In this five-year co-curricular-making project, participants individually and collectively engage in the messiness of ongoing meaning-making. Such curricular terrain acknowledges the particulars of individuals and place to provide the needed context as 100+ practicing and 140+ prospective educators seek un/decolonized and Indigenized co-curricular pathways. The documentation of educators’ increasing cognizance of the relational interdependency of seeing with acting in classrooms reorients and furthers learners and learning. Modes of being with associated habits and practices emerge, revealing potential within the capacity of reciprocity for education’s reparation and renewal, forming the necessary messy practice ground for long-term investment in curricular un/decolonization and Indigenization.
Islamophobia and Pedagogical Complexities: Developing Inclusive Learning Spaces
Islamophobia presents complex challenges in Western societies, leading to racial discrimination and violence against Muslims. This paper explores the interconnectedness and interactions between racism and Islamophobia, as Islamophobia is conceptualized as a form of racism in the literature. Specifically, it explicates racism and its different manifestations. It also deals with the intricate complexities of racism and Islamophobia in school settings and presents effective pedagogical approaches that teachers can incorporate into their curricula to develop students’ social and political awareness through critical media literacy while fostering positive relationships among them based on mutual respect and appreciation of their cultures.
Autism Assessment Referral: A Mother’s Experience
In this paper I engage in an autobiographical inquiry into my experience of my son’s autism assessment referral and how this experience has continued to guide me in my learning journey as a mother, educator, friend, and family member. Thinking about how a parent’s greatest gift in this world is their children, I inquire into the messiness of life-making that occurs when parents are informed by a school specialist that their child should undergo an autism assessment. I share my experiences as a parent receiving information.
Art-Based Autobiographical Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) in an Urban School
This article examines a classroom-based implementation of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) that integrates art-based autobiographical methods to support student reflection, identity exploration, and voice. Grounded in a year-long collaboration between a ninth-grade English teacher and Project HighKEY at Cleveland State University, the study documents how over 100 students engaged in storytelling through collage, poetry, and narrative writing. Drawing on student work, survey and interview data, and a teacher interview, the article highlights how creative expression served as both data and action—positioning reflection as a foundational phase of YPAR. By centering teacher and student perspectives, this work contributes to the growing field of arts-integrated YPAR and offers a developmentally responsive model for embedding participatory research in K–12 classrooms.
Engaging with/in the Messiness of Curriculum Alongside Educators in a Trauma-Informed Microcertificate
To attend to educators’ experiences as they work in the midst of competing demands, increased classroom complexity, and a growing understanding of the importance of well-being, a group of stakeholders from across Saskatchewan co-developed a microcertificate entitled Trauma-Informed/Sensitive Pedagogies and Practices. The microcertificate was piloted in 2023, and we used community-based action research to better understand the experiences of participants. From their feedback, experiential themes arose drawing our attention to the messiness—of time, of delivery, and of beginning and becoming—in relation to an understanding of curriculum as the dynamic interaction between teacher, student, subject matter, and milieu.
You Cannot Find the Calm Without the Storm: Creating Spaces for Embracing Change
Educators need to provide students with opportunities for experiential learning, inquiry-based exploration, and collaborative discussion. Students bring an amalgam of diverse ideas to the classroom; knowledge-building principles provide a framework for inclusive learning experiences that strengthen engagement, content retention, and positive well-being. In this article, we explore how educators can use knowledge building and holistic pedagogy to create scintillating learning spaces. Such environments help students develop a deep sense of personal and social accountability. To illustrate our reflections, we accompany our conclusions with vivid collage art that captures the beauty of complex human experiences.
Conceptualizing Literacy Engagement: The Interconnectedness of Teacher Beliefs and Enacted Practices
This article presents the findings of a full-day professional learning workshop where K-3 educators explored student engagement during literacy learning. Drawing on a narrative approach, the authors discuss the conceptualizations of literacy engagement from initial to shifting to deepened. Data sources include literacy engagement artifacts shared by the educators as well as multimodal representations of engaged learners/engaged educators. Educators’ (re)thinking highlighted the complex, and sometimes messy nature of literacy engagement and illuminated the importance of active educator engagement.
Relationality and Learning: Insights from Undergraduate Student Research Assistant Experiences
This study examines the experiences of Emirati undergraduate research assistants in the United Arab Emirates through journal reflections to understand their motivations, challenges, and the role of mentorship in their growth. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we explain how mentorship, relationships, and team dynamics influence identity and confidence. Findings indicate the importance of culturally responsive mentorship, inclusive environments, and leadership opportunities in fostering resilience, critical thinking, and career readiness. By embedding research assistantships and culturally aligned mentorship into university programs, institutions can create supportive environments that empower students and enhance skills, inclusivity, and academic success.
Going in Circles: Transitions, Connections, and Identity-Building through Venn Diagrams
Through a doctoral experience that altered my personal and professional identities, I developed an unexpected fondness for Venn diagrams. They meaningfully transformed my ideation, self-reflection, and research processes. More than logical figures, Venn diagrams are inspiring, embracing, and empathetic zones that offer room to grow and space to think, and where commonalities and differences can be celebrated. This paper is an homage to the inspirational circular shapes of the Venn diagram; not only have they transformed me, but they can ignite ideation, nurture connections, and foster growth for all teachers, students, and scholars out there.
Editorial introducing this issue's theme, "Towards new futures of youth development: Critical and sustainable approaches to youth wellbeing in complex times," and the authors featured.
Faith in the Unexpected: The Event of Obligation in Teaching
In the face of standardization and rationalization, the language of the expected, the predictable and the planned has enveloped teaching and teacher education worldwide. However, in a recent study about the emotional toll of teaching in two Canadian provinces, teachers’ stories overflowed with allusions to the unexpected, the unplanned, and the unforeseeable. We explore those stories, and in the company of John Caputo’s writing about teaching and ethics, we speculate what they suggest about a life lived in teaching. We posit that obligation is the insistent ghost that haunts teaching in the midst of the machinery of schooling.
Students Engaged in Reflection and Practical Problem Solving: Exploring Colour Theory
This paper explores how students connect meaningfully with theory through the aesthetic experiences of problem solving together in the context of a workshop. It can be challenging for students studying design in university programs to understand how theory is relevant, when applied in practical design studio activities. In the colour workshop presented, students participate in brainstorming exercises to create proposals. Theory is made meaningful through learning activities, including a creative brainstorming session animated by both teachers and industry guests. The experience described was enthusiastically received, with the academia-industry collaboration providing a valuable platform for knowledge exchange both among students and teachers.
Collage as a Pedagogical Practice to Support Teacher Candidate Reflection
This article reports on collage as a pedagogical practice to support teacher candidate reflection. We outline a multi-step collage-based reflection workshop that was part of a required course on “Inquiries Into Learning.” The summative collage project was designed to help teacher candidates reflect on their vision of learning (hope) and their fears and doubts as beginning teachers. The process and product of their final integrated collage led students to interrogate how their hopes and fears mingle together in practice. Six teacher candidates share their series of collages and GIFs, along with their reflective personal statements. We conclude by highlighting lessons learned through collaging from the perspective of students.
Remaking Science Teaching: Border Crossing Between Home and School
In this case study, we explore ways to prepare preservice teachers to translate theory into practice and make science curriculum accessible through familial curriculum. Using her “Family Science Lesson Planning” assignment sequence, Sumer taught preservice teachers the theory of transformative curriculum making (Seiki, 2016), and guided them to recognize, articulate, and translate their own familial curriculum into science lessons. As a result, the three participant preservice teachers’ own histories and familial knowledge were repositioned and valued alongside science. Our findings show how to use science curriculum and instruction to border cross between home and school, thereby making science more accessible.