This study is an exploration of the lived experiences of three secondary teachers who have developed innovative approaches to English education in response to the needs of diverse, multi-literate urban students. The research marries multiliteracies pedagogy with narrative inquiry, and explores themes and discourses in the teachers’ narrations of their practices. From the new perspective developed from this pairing emerge two significant findings. First, the study contributes to teacher development by synthesizing concepts of design in multiliteracies pedagogy and personal practical knowledge in narrative inquiry. From this synthesis arises the notion of the intentional design of personal practical knowledge occurring through self-directed professional learning that leads to innovation in teaching. Second, the study develops the concepts of interacting narratives and professional knowledge landscape, offering a method of analyzing the multifaceted interactions of Self and Other narratives in the context of a professional knowledge ecosystem. This method provides a specific framework for contextualizing interacting narratives and provides a new clarity of focus in narrative research texts.

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.

This research explores how individuals make sense of their own lived experiences of health through the sharing of their stories and how the collectively shared meaning can be used to identify core values fundamental to sustaining a flourishing Canadian health care system. This study considers health care to be a complex system with inherent unpredictability where ideas for values-based sustainability must be given freedom to emerge. At the Kelowna Dialogue on Health, 29 individuals with diverse health care experiences and perspectives participated in a one-day Appreciative Inquiry (AI) conversation. During the seven-hour dialogue, the affirmative topics of compassion, collaboration, and personal responsibility emerged and a full AI 4-D cycle of discovery, dream, design, and destiny was performed. The delivery of these affirmative topics into actionable ideas that will be communicated in the public sphere through digital media will hopefully empower the participants, both health care providers and recipients, to strive for personalized compassionate health care

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The key postulation of the research is: learning an additional language should go together with learning its culture. Through personal experience as an EAL learner and EFL teacher, the researcher examines the interconnected system of the learner’s motivations, premising that language cognition could engage a meta-cognitive search for L, as a symbol of the researcher’s inner world, and arising from L such concepts as Language, Learning, Life, Love, and Led Zeppelin. Quest and examination of those concepts analyze sense-data, the researcher’s short literary works written in Russian and translated into English. The canvas of the author’s writing is presented in a symbolic form of literary and musical Islands with which she creates her arts-informed research of new learning-teaching interactions with the learning component as dominating in this interaction. The researcher looks for new perspectives on education as a lifelong process that takes place between I-world and They-world through internalization-externalization.