Leggo, C. (2005). Pedagogy of the Heart: Ruminations on Living Poetically. The Journal of Educational Thought, 39(2), 175-195. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23767223
Header image: ﻼF
- “At the beginning of my teaching career, in my early 20’s, I learned an important lesson: I will never be able to hold enough facts and information in my head to know everything that might be useful to know as a teacher.”
Human beings are really human be(com)ings constituted in the play of language.
- “Too often we use language to declare, assert, prove, argue, convince, and proclaim notions of truth. But what happens when we emphasize the use of language to question and play with and savour and ruminate on notions of truth?”
- ﻼF: “Do not seek for the truth, only stop having an opinion.” – Seng-ts’an
- “We all need to be committed to writing and re-writing our stories together, and we need to be committed to hearing one another’s stories, too.”
- “By understanding language as performance, I am reminded that language does not empower me to nail down truth or truths. Instead, language is dynamic and energetic, and opens up possibilities for understanding our lives and experiences and relations.”
- “language is no simple tool for the clear expression of understanding. Instead, language is the creative medium by which we construct meaning collaboratively”
- “Student teachers need to acknowledge that in their teaching, in their interactions with students, they are not dispensing knowledge and facts and skills like a server at a fast food outlet. Instead, they are engaging learners in an endlessly complex process of language use, including conjecturing, questioning, reading, writing, talking, listening, viewing, and representing.”
“Teachers need to love the people they aspire to teach. Therefore, they need to know their pupils. They need to enter imaginatively into the lived experiences of others. They need to listen to others. They need to learn from others. They need to listen to the stories of others. It is not enough to know how to manage the dynamics of a classroom or prepare effective report cards or organize a busy timetable.”
- “I am not claiming that all teachers will, or even can, love all their students in the same ways.”
- “…love as essential to human well-being, I support the optimistic notion that teachers need to practice love which can be defined broadly to include respect, honour, caring, and attentiveness.”
GET: Vanier’s (1998) Becoming Human
RULE: “When a person is speaking, everyone else will be quiet and pay attention to the speaker.”
- “Last January I taught a doctoral seminar. For the first time, I checked the etymology of “seminar,” and learned that “seminar” is derived from “seminarium:” a seed plot or nursery or garden. And since then, I have been ruminating on gardens and backyards and even the experience of meadows of wildflowers. I am learning to breathe with the heart’s rhythms as I seek to disclose and know again my location situated in local geographical spaces that represent a location for locution in the bigger world.”
GET: Freire (1997) Pedagogy of the Heart
- Freire: “the more rooted I am in my location, the more I extend myself to other places so as to become a citizen of the world. No one becomes local from a universal location” (p. 39).”
IDEA: “I encouraged them to write the stories of personal objects and photos that held significance for them.”
- ﻼF: Toy Story
- “Melville observes that the success of the hunt requires that one person do nothing. The person is the harpooner who must sit quietly in the bow of the boat. Melville explains: “To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooners of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil” (p. 297)”
- “For six years I taught in a school in a small Newfoundland town with a principal who did not trust his colleagues or his students.
- “He never changed his mind. He had boundless confidence in his decisions. Fred was not a good administrator because he could not trust anyone. He needed to manage everything and everybody all the time. But the educator who lives poetically knows how to live trustfully.”
- “I am part of”a network of loners.” I am a loner, but I am not alone. I do not speak as part of a collective voice. As a researcher and educator and poet, my voice echoes other voices, but it does not seek to mimic or impersonate other voices, or to silence other voices, or to harmonize with other voices. Instead, I seek to cry out like trumpet calls an urgent invitation to listen to the light, to wake up, to know the world differently, outside the typical parameters and predictions. I am part of a network of loners who seek to give heart to one another, speaking to the heart of the other, hearing the heart of the other in our hearts.”