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.

“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

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.

Teacher identity resides in the foundational beliefs and assumptions educators have about teaching and learning. These beliefs and assumptions develop both inside and outside of the classroom, blurring the lines between the professional and the personal. Examining the development of teacher identity at this intersection requires a unique reflexive capacity. Reflexive inquiry is both established and continually emerging. At its most basic, reflexivity refers to researchers’ consciousness of their role in and effect on both the act of doing research and arriving at research findings. In making central the role of the researcher in the research process, reflexive inquiry interrogates agency while examining philosophical notions about the nature of knowledge. While advancements have been made in investigating the relationship between teacher knowledge and teacher practice, the research often fails to connect this meaning with self-knowledge and issues of identity. Through a consideration of these tenets, the authors in this collection embrace critical, qualitative, creative, and arts-integrated approaches to examine ways that reflexive inquiry supports studies in teacher identity. Moving between theory and lived experience, the authors individually and collectively lay bare teacher identity as negotiated while evidencing the epistemological merits of reflexive inquiry.

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.

It has long been established that teaching and learning are autobiographical endeavours, so it follows that self-study is central to sound practice. As a framework, self-study allows researchers to use their experiences to examine self-in-practice with the aim of both personal and professional growth. By its very design, it makes transparent personal processes of inquiry by offering them up for public critique. This type of public inquiry of the personal happens in at least two ways: first, through the inclusion of trusted others who can provide different perspectives on our closely held discourses; and, second, through making our research publicly available so that others might learn from our inquiries. Self-study, then, requires openness to vulnerability as we continuously re/negotiate who we are as teachers. Approaching inquiry from this perspective has at its core deepened self-knowledge coupled with intent to transform praxis. This transformation is sought through integrated ways of being and teaching that support embodied wholeness of teachers and learners. Through critical, qualitative, creative, and arts-integrated approaches, this collection seeks to advance teacher self-study and, through it, transformative praxis. Contributors are: Willow S. Allen, Charity Becker, Yue Bian, Abby Boehm-Turner, Diane Burt, Vy Dao, Lee C. Fisher, Teresa Anne Fowler, Deborah Graham, Cher Hill, Chinwe H. Ikpeze, David Jardine, Elizabeth Kenyon, Jodi Latremouille, Carl Leggo, Ellyn Lyle, Sepideh Mahani, Jennifer Markides, Sherry Martens, Kate McCabe, Laura Piersol, Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, Amanda C. Shopa, Timothy Sibbald, Sara K. Sterner, and Aaron Zimmerman.

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.