What I Meant to Say about Love is an ever-differing interstitial text which has left open spaces for artists, researchers, and teachers, called a/r/tographers, to contest the curriculum and pedagogy of reduction and pragmatic means-ends orientations that monopolize schools. This text wanders, meanders, and digresses to places where, through poetic inquiry, the notion that there is no pedagogy without love can be explored. In a broad understanding of midrash, as it is performed poetically, three years of an English teacher's life are recorded fictionally. James, the main character, discovers that love is a physically potent force that structures and deconstructs, just as it connects and disconnects. His story considers how the professional emphasis in education compartmentalizes and separates the inner life from the outer life. In love with life, with learning, and with others, the James of this story writes poetry to acknowledge love's power, and to restore its credibility in the classroom—that the lovers' discourse might be trusted again. This un/authorized autobiography ruptures the predictable stories of what it means to be a successful teacher by considering one teacher's journey as a limit case, examining phenomenologically how he connects his life of love and poetry to his classroom practice and how his students respond to his poetically charged way of being. My hope is that it might be possible to offer here, in this place, one poet's understanding and celebration of difference in the world. Recognizing the relationship between what is original and what is shifting, I hope to keep complexity and diversity alive, to resist answers, to continue to converse and traverse and transgress. Thus, with careful attention to poetry as a way of knowing and unknowing, and by attending to the paradox, humour, and irony in one poet's lived experiences, both public professings and inner confessings, as they are understood in relations of difference, or as they are understood in relations of decomposition and fertility, it is possible to consider how powerful emotive experiences, oftentimes relegated to the personal and therefore insignificant, can and do have profound transformational effects on praxis.

What I Meant to Say about Love is an ever-differing interstitial text which has left open spaces for artists, researchers, and teachers, called a/r/tographers, to contest the curriculum and pedagogy of reduction and pragmatic means-ends orientations that monopolize schools. This text wanders, meanders, and digresses to places where, through poetic inquiry, the notion that there is no pedagogy without love can be explored. In a broad understanding of midrash, as it is performed poetically, three years of an English teacher's life are recorded fictionally. James, the main character, discovers that love is a physically potent force that structures and deconstructs, just as it connects and disconnects. His story considers how the professional emphasis in education compartmentalizes and separates the inner life from the outer life. In love with life, with learning, and with others, the James of this story writes poetry to acknowledge love's power, and to restore its credibility in the classroom—that the lovers' discourse might be trusted again. This un/authorized autobiography ruptures the predictable stories of what it means to be a successful teacher by considering one teacher's journey as a limit case, examining phenomenologically how he connects his life of love and poetry to his classroom practice and how his students respond to his poetically charged way of being. My hope is that it might be possible to offer here, in this place, one poet's understanding and celebration of difference in the world. Recognizing the relationship between what is original and what is shifting, I hope to keep complexity and diversity alive, to resist answers, to continue to converse and traverse and transgress. Thus, with careful attention to poetry as a way of knowing and unknowing, and by attending to the paradox, humour, and irony in one poet's lived experiences, both public professings and inner confessings, as they are understood in relations of difference, or as they are understood in relations of decomposition and fertility, it is possible to consider how powerful emotive experiences, oftentimes relegated to the personal and therefore insignificant, can and do have profound transformational effects on praxis.

What I Meant to Say about Love is an ever-differing interstitial text which has left open spaces for artists, researchers, and teachers, called a/r/tographers, to contest the curriculum and pedagogy of reduction and pragmatic means-ends orientations that monopolize schools. This text wanders, meanders, and digresses to places where, through poetic inquiry, the notion that there is no pedagogy without love can be explored. In a broad understanding of midrash, as it is performed poetically, three years of an English teacher's life are recorded fictionally. James, the main character, discovers that love is a physically potent force that structures and deconstructs, just as it connects and disconnects. His story considers how the professional emphasis in education compartmentalizes and separates the inner life from the outer life. In love with life, with learning, and with others, the James of this story writes poetry to acknowledge love's power, and to restore its credibility in the classroom—that the lovers' discourse might be trusted again. This un/authorized autobiography ruptures the predictable stories of what it means to be a successful teacher by considering one teacher's journey as a limit case, examining phenomenologically how he connects his life of love and poetry to his classroom practice and how his students respond to his poetically charged way of being. My hope is that it might be possible to offer here, in this place, one poet's understanding and celebration of difference in the world. Recognizing the relationship between what is original and what is shifting, I hope to keep complexity and diversity alive, to resist answers, to continue to converse and traverse and transgress. Thus, with careful attention to poetry as a way of knowing and unknowing, and by attending to the paradox, humour, and irony in one poet's lived experiences, both public professings and inner confessings, as they are understood in relations of difference, or as they are understood in relations of decomposition and fertility, it is possible to consider how powerful emotive experiences, oftentimes relegated to the personal and therefore insignificant, can and do have profound transformational effects on praxis. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate

This thesis is an autoethnographic exploration and articulation of aspects of my lived experience of the longterm impact of professional abuse. It is a context-dependent single case study written from a researcher-participant-counsellor perspective. In my review of the literature I demonstrate the challenges of researching and documenting the direct experiences of women who have been sexually exploited by male professionals. These challenges stem from our natural human tendency to deny traumatic experience, and from the prevailing culture of many social institutions which continues to have the effect of silencing women's voices and discrediting women's experience. The methodological approach I have taken in this thesis is evocative autoethnography. I have chosen this approach in order to document and analyse my present embodied experiences of remembering past abuse, continuing feelings of loss, and unfulfilled longing for resolution and release. I explore the relationship between my past and present selves in context, and consider the therapeutic possibilities of combining memory work, lifewriting, poetry, and imagination to create texts of remembering and re-remembering, to reclaim both what is and what might have been.

Authors over the last two decades have discussed the myriad of challenges present in managing college students with severe mental health disorders. During the same time period, Marsha Linehan developed dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) as an empirically sound intervention for individuals with suicidal and self-injurious behaviors and this treatment grew to be an evidence-based practice for a range of challenging clinical issues. I argue that one solution to continued increases in college students who present for treatment to their college counseling centers with difficult-to-treat mental health issues, including but not limited to, borderline personality disorder (BPD), is to implement DBT programs on college campuses. As such, the purpose of this dissertation is to address both practical and theoretical issues in the implementation of DBT in college counseling centers. In chapter two, I begin by presenting an overview of DBT as a comprehensive treatment model and a review of the research to date related to DBT in college counseling centers. In chapter three, I offer a detailed account of the program development and implementation process of the DBT program housed in the college counseling center at Florida Gulf Coast University. In chapter four, I present an investigation of current trends and barriers to implementation of DBT in college counseling centers. Finally, in chapter five, I present a qualitative inquiry of the experience of BPD as told by individuals who have been successfully treated with DBT. I argue that understanding client experiences and behaviors in context is critically important if one is to be able to respond empathically and compassionately. In essence, these chapters represent my attempt to synthesize two areas that I believe are required for successful implementation of DBT programs that provide good quality care: 1) Navigating the complexities of implementing DBT in college counseling centers as practice setting and 2) Appropriate management for clinician biases and tendencies to stigmatize BPD clients, which interferes with their ability to provide care that is both effective and compassionate.

The purpose of this study was to understand the life history of a female teacher by examining her beliefs about leaving a teaching legacy and by analyzing the narratives of four educational leaders as they reflect on the generative behaviors of this teacher. The research questions guiding this study were: (a) What elements of this teacher's life history contributed to creating a legacy of educational leaders? (b) What are the perspectives of the educational leaders impacted by this teacher as they relate to crafting an educational legacy? (c) How do the life stories of the teacher and educational leaders intersect to reveal narrative resonance - the ability of stories to interact in such a way that they influence other stories? A review of relevant literature examined legacy creation or generativity. In addition, this study critiqued scholarship that extends narrative research approaches, specifically, fictional research texts. Since fictional research products can be catalysts for reflection and discussion, the final chapter of this study is presented as a fictionalized research-narrative that emerged from analysis of the data. The data in this study included interview texts, participant artwork, reflections from the participant's journal, excerpts from the researcher's journal, and poetry written both by the participant and the researcher. The data were analyzed by using open and focused coding, employing the constant comparison process, and through artifact analysis. The data analysis of this qualitative study resulted in specific findings. First, the main participant demonstrated generative traits contributing to a legacy of educational leaders. Her compassion for all students, her passion for teaching/learning, her content knowledge, and her flexibility in the classroom all manifested themselves in the lives of the educational leaders participating in this study. Additionally, the narratives from the participant demonstrated narrative resonance, Stories, it seems, have their own legacies.

This study investigates the resilience of children living at Sundara, a home in North India, which serves destitute and/or orphaned youth who live and are educated on site. Despite the adversity my participants have encountered they are thriving spiritually, emotionally, physically, and mentally. My research examines this phenomenon and the holistic education practices that support the children in engaging the process of resilience. I employ two theoretical frameworks to illuminate both what is occurring (resilience) and how it is occurring (holistic education). As resilience is understood as largely an external phenomenon, it then follows that the children of Sundara do not necessarily arise from families with the correct genetic disposition to allow them to engage this process (although this can definitely be a factor). Rather, they are educated and raised in such a way to make resilience a possibility. I seek to understand the role holistic education plays in the resilience process at work in Sundara. To this effect, two questions central to my study are: What constellation of factors is present at Sundara that enables children to participate in a community of resilience? What kinds of holistic educational practices support the children’s participation in this community? To perform this research in a way that honours the relational and holistic way of life at Sundara, I utilize a method inspired by photovoice and I draw upon poetic inquiry as a part of my exploration. My findings indicate that the holistic practices of the home create abundant opportunities for resilience. The three key themes that emerged were: reciprocal relationships, the holistic curriculum (moral and spiritual), and resilience enabling space. In addition, the home fosters a certain being-ness, a mode that the children and staff abide in that allows for greater resilience in their community. My participants appeared to be distinctly rich in spirit. It may be that out of such spiritual consciousness comes a greater ability to connect and engage the relationships at the core of the resilience process. / Graduate / 0515 / 0527

The purpose of this study was to examine the ways in which the academic and professional experiences of Black people in American music therapy reflect current attitudes within the field towards diversity and cultural awareness, and how understanding those experiences can lead to enhanced, culturally sensitive practice. An arts-based narrative inquiry methodology using poetry was employed as a means to understand the experiences of Black people in the field through artistic forms that invite readers to enter the affective worlds of the participants. A total of 10 music therapy students, clinicians and educators participated in open-ended, semi-structured interviews. Transcripts of these interviews were analyzed for thematic material as well as to provide content for poems in the participants’ voices that described their experiences. Additionally, the researcher created poems responding to each participant that reflected on aspects of the interactions, content and sub-text of the interviews. All poems were analyzed for thematic material. That material was compared with previously derived themes out of which seven main themes emerged. Those themes are: things and people are not as they seem; being the only one/one of a few; self-definition versus being defined by others; adding value to the field; dealing with the status quo; calling for greater cultural awareness, acceptance and equality; and importance of support. Findings indicated that participants did not feel as if they fully belonged in the profession and that the music therapy community inconsistently recognized and addressed the need for diversity, cultural awareness and cultural sensitivity. Implications for music therapy training and practice, along with recommendations for the field and future research are also presented. / Music Therapy

<p>The purpose of this study is to explore intersectionality of Religion/Spirituality and immigration in the experience of Romanian evangelicals in Canada from a Critical Realist perspective. In the first two chapters I provide background information outlining the interconnection between spirituality/religion, social work and immigration and examine the existing body of knowledge of present literature on ways of utilizing relevant concepts, methods, emerging themes and I address some of the implications and critiques pertaining to the literature perused. In the following two chapters I present the theoretical framework of Critical Realism, the methodological approach utilized -Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, and the dual gathering methods employed, semi-structured interviews and poetic inquiry. In the main part of the theses I review the findings and discuss them from a theoretical and practical perspective, concluding with a number of recommendations and observations which, if implemented, would in my opinion effect a more spiritually sensitive practice in working with specific ethno-religious groups.</p> / Master of Social Work (MSW)

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