Of Books Barns And Boardrooms

“Of Books, Barns, and Boardrooms: Exploring Praxis through Reflexive Inquiry is an engaging and accessible book that is at once scholarly and personal. Ellyn Lyle explores how self intersects with pedagogy and education in three separate but connected contexts: formal education, horse training (joining-up), and workplace learning. She begins with a narrative of how she learned about reflexive inquiry; from that foundation, she questions how educational systems can both debilitate and inspire, using her own life story and explaining how theories relate to practice. In so doing, Lyle is informative and invitational, providing a model for educators to problematize their own contexts. Most interesting is how she uses the concept of joining-up, not training, when exploring her work with horses. This transferable concept requires educators and learners to communicate, build reciprocal relationships, work towards understanding, engage in meaning-making, and interact with others through mutual respect. Educators in all contexts would benefit from reading this book, and I will be recommending it to my students.” – Nancy Taber, Brock University “Ellyn Lyle uses the successful, deep communication with horses, a process called ‘Join-Up,’ as a lyrical and practical metaphor for negotiating learning in multiple contexts. A fascinating personal story, Of Books, Barns, and Boardrooms is also an invaluable guidebook for learning, teaching, and questioning: for parents, teachers, students, administrators, and entrepreneurs. I am urged to consider where learning and systems fail and, also, to celebrate how ‘life is my classroom, and all encounters, my teachers.’ I wish I had had these insights and inspiring analogies at hand when I was a university professor and president.” – Elizabeth R. Epperly, Professor Emerita and Past President, University of Prince Edward Island, author of Power Notes: Leadership by Analogy “When I ‘Join-Up’ with Ellyn Lyle’s philosophical inquiry, I experience a process of deep trust and listening that she suggests is the basis of authentic learning. Of Books, Barns, and Boardrooms, about learners and learning, is a critical and creative inquiry that questions and challenges practices that prevent learning. It is a way of doing philosophy, a method of (re)constructing narrative to examine some of the metaphors that shape and inform concepts, biases, and assumptions. Using her understanding of join-up to identify problems that prohibit growth, the author constructs a compelling story of change and invites readers to do the same.” – Anne-Louise Brookes, author of Feminist Pedagogy: An Autobiographical Approach “Ellyn Lyle takes readers on an inspirational journey celebrating learning and teaching as a shared and respectful partnership—one that values the breadth of life’s experiences as sources of knowledge.” – Debra Manning, Federation University Australia

Of Books, Barns, and Boardrooms: Exploring Praxis through Reflexive Inquiry is at once scholarly and deeply personal. A rich weave of learning moments across multiple contexts— formal education, workplace learning, relationships with horses—this text explores the various ways that pedagogy and practice emerge with and through our lived experiences. Centring the metaphor of join-up, a relational approach to starting new horses, the book intertwines educational theory with storied experience to uncover opportunities for cultivating collaborative spaces born of trust, deep communication, agency, and relationality. A highly readable text, Of Books, Barns, and Boardrooms models reflexive inquiry as a way of being while inviting us to imagine possibilities for re/humanizing teaching and learning.

An account of a teacher's journey across three unique learning environments in search of pedagogical meaning in a world where education too often is left to the convenience of prepackaged, low-maintenance products pretty much void of a more meaningful exchange process. With an engaging mix of scholarly and pragmatic perspectives, Of Books, Barns, and Boardrooms follows an in-depth reflection on the very nature and purpose of teaching. It is a powerful narrative containing passionate views on the responsibilities of teaching. With a style as captivating as it is informative, a reasoned learning alternative is unfolded as a dynamic, reciprocal process enlisting student-teacher partnerships of shared authority and meaningful engagement. A must-read for aspiring educators, and a shot of inspiration for the more experienced.

The Academic Sabbatical: A Voyage of Discovery is a collection of narratives that reveals how important sabbaticals are to faculty and, by extension, to higher education. This in-depth look at the diverse experiences and perspectives provides a wealth of evidence that sabbaticals are instrumental in increasing productivity in terms of research and knowledge dissemination. These periods of self-directed and focused work enable scholars to restore their academic energies, leading to enhanced engagement with their programs, graduate students, and intellectual exchange among peers. Although not without challenges and tensions, sabbaticals help academics build stronger and deeper connections. While this book stands alone in promoting the richness and potential of the sabbatical as a structural feature of the academy, it is a great follow-up to The Academic Gateway and Beyond the Academic Gateway, which respectively discuss the tenure-track and tenure experience. This book is the third in the Lives in the Canadian Academic Landscape triptych.

Through critical, qualitative, creative, and arts-integrated approaches, this collection seeks to advance teacher self-study and, through it, transformative praxis.

This collection includes critical, qualitative, creative, and arts-integrated chapters attentive to the ways in which reflexive inquiry supports explorations of teacher identity. The explicit aim of this manuscript is to advance teacher self-study and, through it, the teaching and learning experience.

This book brings together Indigenous, Third World and Settler perspectives on the theory and practice of decolonizing law. Colonialism, imperialism, and settler colonialism continue to affect the lives of racialized communities and Indigenous Peoples around the world. Law, in its many iterations, has played an active role in the dispossession and disenfranchisement of colonized peoples. Law and its various institutions are the means by which colonial, imperial, and settler colonial programs and policies continue to be reinforced and sustained. There are, however, recent and historical examples in which law has played a significant role in dismantling colonial and imperial structures set up during the process of colonization. This book combines usually distinct Indigenous, Third World and Settler perspectives in order to take up the effort of decolonizing law: both in practice and in the concern to distance and to liberate the foundational theories of legal knowledge and academic engagement from the manifestations of colonialism, imperialism and settler colonialism. Including work by scholars from the Global South and North, this book will be of interest to academics, students and others interested in the legacy of colonial and settler law, and its overcoming.

Through critical, qualitative, creative, and arts-integrated approaches, this collection explores the co-curricular capacity of lived experience to re/centre human being in education.