Editorial Statement

Brené Brown (2012) begins her book, Daring greatly: How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead, with an all too familiar story. Sitting in a therapy session, she is asked to talk about vulnerability and she says, “I frickin’ hate vulnerability… I hate uncertainty. I hate not knowing. I can’t stand opening myself to getting hurt or being disappointed. It’s excruciating. Vulnerability is complicated. And it’s excruciating” (p. 5). Her therapist smilingly responds, “Yes, I know vulnerability. I know it well. It’s an exquisite emotion” (p. 5). Frustrated, Brown, like all good academics, desperate for something to hold on to asks, “Can you give me some homework or something? Should I review the data?” (p. 6). And her therapist answers, “No data and no homework. No assignments and no gold stars in here. Less thinking. More feeling” (p. 6).

We wholeheartedly agree with Brown’s therapist even though we recognize how hard it is to be vulnerable as educators and researchers and we are well aware that uncertainty and vulnerability never get easier. Scholars are taught to seek knowledge and truth, to build from uncertainty to certainty, and to construct meanings that can be passed on to others. As teacher educators we are expected to hold knowledge—to know when others do not. How do we engage in counter narratives and why might we want to and need to? These are the questions we explore in this very special issue.

We both recall moments of unexpected vulnerability in our teaching, whether in K–12 settings or beyond, which invited us to share of our whole selves in the classroom. An early memory that Monica has was in her first year of teaching at an alternative middle school in New York City. Tragically, one of her 7^th grade students, Edwin, collapsed on the basketball court, and later passed away in the hospital from an untreated lung infection. Her entire school went into crisis mode and she found herself so vulnerable, grieving alongside her students. She did not know what the proper protocol was or whether she should or should not show her emotions to her students and Edwin’s family. No one had prepared her for that moment, and yet she had no choice but to feel with her students. She was hurting and they were hurting and they needed to connect in a deep way to the sadness they were experiencing. She spent the next several months working through this grief with them, preparing a tribute, attending the funeral, and even visiting the grave site months later.

It is both hard to imagine she had this experience in her very first year of teaching and not so hard to imagine, as wholehearted teaching continues to be an important part of her practice. Both of us have gained confidence about the place of vulnerability in our teaching and research. Inviting vulnerability into our work has been a process, a commitment that we return to over and over again. Monica’s first edited book was called: Whole language teaching: Whole-Hearted practice (2007), and in it she explored how teachers promote critical literacy as a means of wholehearted activism. Within another aspect of her scholarship in self-study, Monica has written extensively with Lesley Coia about the importance of vulnerability in co/autoethnography, a research methodology they developed. They emphasized that their “caring collaboration” relied on mutual risk and trust: “We found the ways in which we care for each other, listen to one another, provide a space for vulnerability and for risk-taking as a strength, not a criticism…. It seems that for a collaboration, as with good teaching, there has to be risk and trust” (2006, p. 63).

Similarly, we both see the ways in which vulnerability has strengthened our personal/professional relationship with one another. Writing and teaching are both inherently vulnerable activities, ones that are traditionally done in isolation (while teaching, of course, is done with students, traditionally classrooms are closed off to other adults and peers). The blurring of the personal and the professional pushes us to go deeply into the analysis of our scholarship. As we wrote, “vulnerability allows us to be curious, caring, and connect to those questions and concerns that are of primary significance to our lives” (Taylor & Klein, in press, p. 12). In an earlier piece, we wrote about the need as feminist scholars to “engage as full humans” (Taylor & Klein, 2018, p. 109) and to do that well involves bringing the whole self to the table, including personal experiences, feelings, and insecurities too.

That is what we asked the authors of this issue to do. We invited them to consider, “How do we cultivate wholehearted teaching and learning in our schools and classrooms?” We suggested they draw on the work of Brené Brown (2012) and the following guideposts for “wholehearted living”:

1. Cultivating Authenticity and Letting Go of What Other People Think

2. Cultivating Self-Compassion and Letting Go of Perfectionism

3. Cultivating Your Resilient Spirit and Letting Go of Numbing and Powerlessness

4. Cultivating Gratitude and Joy and Letting go of Scarcity and Fear of the Dark

5. Cultivating Intuition and Trusting Faith and Letting Go of the Need for Certainty

6. Cultivating Creativity and Letting Go of Comparison

7. Cultivating Play and Rest and Letting Go of Exhaustion as a Status Symbol and Productivity as Self-Worth

8. Cultivating Calm and Stillness and Letting Go of Anxiety as a Lifestyle

9. Cultivating Meaningful Work and Letting Go of Self-Doubt and Supposed-To

10. Cultivating Laughter, Song, and Dance. And Letting Go of Cool and Always in Control (p. 9)

We are so humbled by the ways in which our authors inventively described their wholehearted teaching with K-12 students, preservice teachers, as well as with their colleagues and peers. Our first set of papers focus on wholehearted teaching and learning with K-12 students. Venezia begins by sharing her own personal and authentic story of being a student in, what she calls, a “nonnormative” alternative high school setting. Her narratives demonstrate the concepts of wholehearted teaching and learning and the ways that this school both saved and altered her life and education. Her article provides the readers with a glimpse of what it is like to actually experience wholehearted learning and the lasting impact of these practices. Next Sheeler describes the concrete ways of inviting joy and play into classrooms when she helped to develop a partnership between Writopia Lab, a nonprofit program which offers creative writing in school and after school workshops to youth, and PS 89, a K–8 Title 1 School in the Bronx. In her piece, she narrates the complexities of teaching writing in wholehearted ways with an emphasis on play, authenticity, and active listening within a school context that has a heavy emphasis on student success on standardized tests. Her article highlights the tensions between developing a love of writing and honing the skills necessary to perform well on required assessments. Gillespie and Thompson also write about the tensions that they encounter as white women teachers within schools governed by the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Examining their teaching practices through Brown’s notion of cultivating authenticity and hooks (2001) “love ethic,” they reflect on their experiences of trauma as women teachers and offer examples of their attempts to implement a pedagogy of authenticity within their classrooms. Finally, Nguyen et al., recognizing the persistent impact of violence, abuse, and social injustice on the development of young children, illustrate the value and importance of cultivating compassion in early childhood classrooms. They emphasize that in order to make compassion a tangible practice for children, early childhood educators need to include real life experiences of such concepts as kindness and respect in their daily instruction.

The next section of the issue highlights the experiences of teacher educators and women academics and how they have taken up wholehearted teaching in their lives. Cunningham wholeheartedly crafts her autoethnography centered around the question: How do I live, love, and teach wholeheartedly with an unspeakable hole in my heart? She recounts the difficulties in returning to her teacher education practice during COVID-19, after her younger brother lost his battle with addiction. Her article does not attempt to provide a “prescriptive blueprint for others teaching and living through grief” but rather offers other teacher educators some points of connections for “hope and healing after the inevitability of loss.” Then, Yomantas offers an interactive conceptual essay that uses Glennon Doyle’s memoir Untamed (2020) to provide hope for self-transformation and wholehearted living in educational spaces that are currently struggling to be spaces of joy and possibility. Her article, as she advises in the abstract, is meant to be read “alongside a trusted educator ally” who will help to foster “new understandings, open new dialogues, and unlock new possibilities for wholehearted teaching and learning through a radical togetherness in educational spaces and beyond.” Similarly, Lemon and McDonough acknowledge the heaviness of the COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters, and political and social movements and encourage us to pause. Using poetic representation, they invite us to consider what matters most through a series of provocation for readers to consider the role of wholeheartedness and wellbeing in education. Finally, Samaras and Pithouse-Morgan demonstrate the value of co-creative play spaces for faculty professional learning and development through examples of arts-inspired data generation modes such as rich pictures, poetry, and dialogue taken from their coauthored publications. They draw parallels between their polyvocal self-study design elements and Brown’s guideposts and ultimately offer implications for faculty’s wholehearted professional living.

We believe that now more than ever it is essential that we bring our whole selves into our teaching and scholarship. We see this practice as one way that we can enact our commitment to what hooks (1994) called “teaching to transgress.” As she wrote, “when education is the practice of freedom, students are not the only ones who are asked to share, to confess … Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process. That empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks” (p. 21). We are grateful for the willingness of our authors to share of themselves and we hope that they will inspire others to teach and live wholeheartedly too.

References

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emily J. Klein

Emily J. Klein is a professor at Montclair State University in the Department of Teaching and Learning and additionally teaches in the Teacher Education and Teacher Development Doctoral program as well as the department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. She is also Academic Co-Editor of The Educational Forum, the journal of Kappa Delta Pi. The author of several articles and books on teacher professional learning, teacher leadership, and gender and feminism, she is currently working on her third book, Our Bodies Tell the Story: Using Co/autoethnography to Disrupt the Patriarchy in Our Lives and in Our Classrooms.

Monica Taylor

Monica Taylor is a feminist professor and social justice advocate in the Department of Educational Foundations at Montclair State University, and Academic Co-Editor of The Educational Forum. She writes about feminist pedagogy, self-study, LGBTQ+ inclusive practices, teaching for social justice, and teacher leadership. She recently co-edited The 2nd International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices and is currently writing a book, Our bodies tell the story: Using co/autoethnography to disrupt the patriarchy in our lives and in our classroom. She serves on the Board of Planned Parenthood of Metro NJ and volunteers as an advocate for asylum seekers as well as for voter protection. Her commitments to fighting sexism, heteronormativity, and racism manifest in all aspects of her life.