Living Love: Confessions of a Fearful Teacher

• In Event: Learning to Live Well: Developing, Deconstructing, and Sustaining an Aesthetic Way of Life With/in Arts-Based Curricula

Abstract

1. Objectives

As an education scholar and poet, I am constantly asking questions like: Who am I? Who am I in relation to the world? How should I live? What are the responsibilities of a human being in the contemporary world? In this research project, I investigate experiences of fearfulness in order to promote learning how to live with a commitment to love. As I learn to know myself as a subject-in-process, a person under construction, I also learn to live in relationship with others in daily experiences written with words of patience, hope, and affection, opening up possibilities for living with love.

2. Perspectives

R. Michael Fisher’s (2010) The World’s Fearlessness Teachings is essential reading for educators. Fisher calls out an erudite and energetic vision for an education of fearlessness. He knows that “Perfect Love, like perfect non-violence (i.e., non-revenge, non-hate, non-ego) is a highly demanding ethic and consciousness to attain” (pp. 161-162), but he sustains the hope that “if we look and trust radically and deeply enough” (p. 191), we can replace the “Law of Fear” with the “Law of Love” (p. xii). This is a timely and complex vision for education in our globalized and cosmopolitan world.

3. Modes of inquiry

The main modes of inquiry are autobiography, narrative inquiry, and poetic inquiry. As a poet and education researcher, I have been writing about personal experiences for a long time in several genre, including poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction.

4. Data sources

I returned to my own writing in order to examine the theme of fear in so much of my writing. When I review my writing, especially the poetry composed during a quarter of a century, I am struck by how much fear is recorded, narrated, represented, and evoked in the writing, and how seldom the fear is actually resolved. In addition to Fisher and my own writing, I lingered with philosopher Jean Vanier’s wise book Becoming human (1998).

5. Results

Based on Vanier’s (1998) insightful understanding of love, and the analysis of my own poetry, I promote the following seven themes regarding love: to love is to reveal; to love is to understand; to love is to communicate; to love is to celebrate; to love is to empower; to love is to be in communion with another; to love is to forgive.

6. Scholarly significance of this work

Vanier’s understanding of love offers an antidote to the pervasive dis-ease constructed and maintained by fearfulness in our schools, communities, and nations. I especially think that educators need to address experiences of love in their classrooms. Love is a commitment and a practice. We cannot learn to love by attending to the abstract and universal. We need a curriculum of love, and pedagogical opportunities to inquire about and learn about living love.

References

Fisher, R. M. (2010). The world’s fearlessness teachings. Lanham, MD: University Press
of America.
Vanier, J. (1998). Becoming human. Toronto: House of Anansi Press.

Author

• Carl Leggo, The University of British Columbia