Even More

If you could start your academic career over again, what would you do differently?

I am now near the end of my academic career. I began a tenure-track position in the Department of Language Education at the University of British Columbia on July 1, 1990. I am sixty-four years old, and I might continue at UBC for another four or five years, but I might not. My academic life has been a delight, full of wonderful colleagues and brilliant students. When I consider what I would do differently if I were to start my academic career over again, my first response is: nothing. I would do nothing differently. I have reached an age when I have learned to acknowledge privileges and blessings in the current moment. When I was interviewed for the position at UBC, I was frank and honest in my explanation of who I was and who I hoped to become if I was invited to join the Faculty of Education. I explained that I was keenly interested in studying issues of desire and love in pedagogy and curriculum. I pointed out that I was enamoured with the theoretical perspectives of French philosophers even if I still needed a lifetime to translate their work into education. I declared that I was a poet looking for a community who would support me as a poet. I disclosed that I was not much interested in the kind of traditional empirical research many colleagues pursued in the social sciences. My background was English literature and creative writing, and I wanted to promote language and literacy education from arts-based perspectives. I am not sure I even used the language of arts-based education research in 1990, but I definitely presented myself as a poet, scholar, and educator who was enthusiastically committed to creative approaches to research and teaching.

When I was offered the position of assistant professor, I accepted eagerly and gratefully. In many ways, I have continued to live my academic career with eagerness and gratitude. I have never lost my enthusiasm for innovation, creativity, and risk-taking. I have never lost my commitment to speaking frankly, even boldly. I have never abandoned my conviction that an academic life needs to attend to the whole person-heart, mind, spirit, imagination, and body. And I have never forgotten that an academic life is a vocation, a calling. I have been called to a life of productive collaboration, vibrant conversation, creative criticality, and loving care. So, when I consider what I would do differently if I were starting my academic career over, I realize I would do nothing differently, except I would do what I did with even more courage and conviction and conscientious resolve. In other words, I would speak up even more in department and faculty meetings. I would listen even more acutely, even with the ears of the heart, to my colleagues and students, and I would offer more lively hope, especially to colleagues and students who are hurt, curmudgeonly, impolite, and unkind. I would write even more poems and stories. I would profess and defend the value of creative writing with even more performative and persuasive energy. I would write even more personally, autobiographically, confessionally, subjectively, and emotionally. I would live poetically with even more indefatigable zeal. I would love every moment of every day as if I had just been startled by the scent of cherry blossoms. I would lean into the strong gales of peer reviewers’ evaluations with even more stalwart confidence. I would discern the wisdom of administrators with even more perspicacious intuition. I would enjoy even more sabbaticals without e-mail. I would celebrate, grieve, praise, forgive, and forget even more. If I could start my academic career over again, I would continue adding to the following poem, always more:

Perplexing Pedagogy: Pensées

if lost in mystery
something emerges

a time you learned something almost
always begins with letting go

at the end of the day, writing is about desire
the heart, breathing and not breathing

I will learn to live attentively in tentative times
I will learn to live the tenuous in tensile times

under the sky where possibilities defy calculus
I am a radical rooted in earth, heart, and wind

I attend to the familiar with unfamiliar words
I attend to the unfamiliar with familiar words

if we don’t see the value in our lived stories
we won’t see the value in others’ stories

seek words infused with the heart’s rhythms
efficacious, capacious, effervescent words

I come alive in my writing where
I see, hear, know promises

no day is complete without
reading and writing poetry!

I am in process
I am content

 

Carl Leggo
University of British Columbia
carl.leggo@ubc.ca[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]