Education is a human endeavor, yet its research often prioritizes empirical knowledge while marginalizing human aspects of the educative experience. Creating space for self has the capacity to foster wholeness where there is disconnectedness and, therein, challenge academic conventions that prioritize dehumanization. Situated within post-qualitative inquiry and drawing on autobiography, I invite students to explore with me premises gleaned from Palmer’s work on identity and integrity. While we explicitly seek to explore how including autobiographical tenets can overcome practices that limit integrated ways of knowing, we also implicitly seek to legitimate the element of selfhood in our education contexts.

Being physically and spiritually attuned to the world around us forms the loom on which we weave our curricular understandings. Here, we strive to find the extraordinary in the ordinary and make room for a poetic way of attending to the lived curriculum. More than a way of doing research, we regard this way of being as a deep and disciplined presence with/in the world we inhabit. Through our own individual practices of walking the earth, our physicality explores the relationships between flesh and stone, and rain and tears, and the immediacy of the poetic takes form. Our walking practices open up the space not only to mindfulness, but bodyfulness, where the present moment has the capacity for the infinite. This type of active contemplation invites us into an expansive place where we can consider the very nature of education and its potential to foster or impede holistic teaching, learning, living, and being. Through writing together, we lift ourselves and each other out of the metaphorical and literal containment of our current contexts and find an invitation to walk and write into wonder.

Teaching and learning are profoundly personal experiences, yet systems of education often prioritize ubiquitous agendas that alienate rather than engage. Creating space for individuals and their lived experiences has the capacity to transform the classroom from a place of containment to one of expansiveness. Resisting the tendency of education to think dichotomously about teaching/learning, theory/practice, and self/other, we engage here as two learners who happen to have shared a graduate program, one as teacher and one as student. Influenced by post-qualitative inquiry (St. Pierre, 2017a; St. Pierre, 2017b) and post academic writing (Badley, 2019), we engage reflexively to consider the experience of this shared learning journey.

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