Pedagogy of the Heart: Ruminations on Living Poetically

Abstract

Each year I teach several dozen more student-teachers as they complete their Bachelor of Education degrees and prepare to be teachers. By the end of the second week in the Bachelor of Education program, the student-teachers are always overwhelmed with how much they need to learn in order to be effective teachers. Like a drumming chorus that punctuates their days, they are overwhelmed by the proliferating facts, skills, and strategies that are all equally clamoring for attention, all equally essential. In my work with pre-service teachers I constantly live a dilemma. Student-teachers express a pressing practical agenda: What do I need to know in order to succeed as a teacher? While I do not diminish my professional responsibility to prepare student-teachers with practical strategies and experiences, my main response is to encourage student-teachers to know themselves as poets, to live creatively in the pedagogic world of students and teachers.