Dissertation topics emerge, move to the fore, sink back, and are always a process. Mine is no different. I found material this week on the way K-12 curriculum comes to be. One of the books is about a post-modernist perspective on curriculum. Teachers and students co-create the learning within a matrix or frame provided. There is no expectation of clear and definable products at the beginning. Learning is messy. It is a rich conversation.
Robert Herrick, an 18th English poet, provided a metaphor for learning with a rushed dressing of a person, in this case a young woman. Learning is an art, an imprecise art which requires mistakes along the way and continuous refining that is never quite finished. It seems to get better with time. In that disorder, learners and teachers merge.
A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction,
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher,
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly,
A winning wave (deserving note)
In the tempestuous petticoat,
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see wild civility,
Do more bewitch me, then when art is
Is too precise in very part.
About ivonprefontaine
In keeping with bell hooks and Noam Chomsky, I consider myself a public and dissident intellectual. Part of my work is to move beyond (transcend) institutional dogmas that bind me to defend freedom, raising my voice to be heard on behalf of those who seek equity and justice in all their forms.
I completed my PhD in Philosophy of Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA. My dissertation and research was how teachers experience becoming teachers and their role as leaders.
I focus on leading, communicating, and innovating in organizations. This includes mindfuful servant-leadership, World Cafe events, Appreciative Inquiry, and expressing one's self through creativity. I offer retreats, workshops, and presentations that can be tailored to your organzations specific needs.
I published peer reviewed articles about schools as learning organizations, currere as an ethical pursuit, and hope as an essential element of adult eductaion. I published three poems and am currently preparing my poetry to publish as an anthology of poetry.
I present on mindful leadership, servant leadership, schools as learning organizations, how teachers experience becoming teachers, assessement, and critical thinking. I facilitate mindfulness, hospitality retreats. and World Cafe Events using Appreciative Inquiry.
I am writing and researching about various forms of leadership, how teachers inform and form their identity as a particular teacher, schools as learning organizations, hope, nonviolence and its anticipatory relationship with the future, as essential elements to teaching and learning.
Academic publications can be found at Ivon Gile Prefontaine on ResearchGate
ivonprefontaine
Teacher as Transformer 
An inspired poem. I used this for the title of my spiritual memoir about battling bipolar – “Delight in Disorder: Ministry, Madness, Mission.” I doubt Herrick had mental illness in mind when he wrote the poem, but it works so well.
I don’t think I have any mental illness, but this describes what I loved most about teaching. The joy of co-creating learning with my students. We are all ever learning. Kids get excited when you are doing it together. There is a need to be knowledgeable, but a greater need is to be able to learn something new with your students as they learn for themselves. 🙂
There is something ‘uncanny’ in that. One can just not fully explain the aura around it.
That’s true. I’m not sure everyone experienced it. 🙂
‘Learning is messy’ – what a great reminder as I finish a hectic week!
Sometimes, when we take the deep breath at the end of hectic, we find something.
Messy is creativity…
It is. We need it to grow.
Inspiring.
Thank you Lvsrao.
Chaos is a part of life, and a factor in personal growth.
It truly is. It gets us out of ruts and thinking.
Ah, yes how the dissertation topics ebb and flow. Students as co-creators reminds me of Neill and Summerhill, the student-centered experiment in learning. Still a great book about student empowerment. I have to go and look but I think there is still a Summerhill School.
I am going to have to look into that book.
I heartily agree. Imperfections are approachable, unique, adorable…perfection illusory at best.
His writing is like tatting–so intricate and fine and other-era…
Thank you for the comments. The poet has a compelling way of drawing us into the poem and his story.
Thank you for this lovely post, and for introducing me to this poet! Where have I been? This poem is a marvel, and I also appreciate your tying it in with the fact that ‘learning is messy’. Wonderfully put, Ivon! Blessings, Gina
When I read his biography, he was considered a bit of a charlatan in his times, the Victorian era, and wrote about inappropriate things.
This is beautiful! Taking time to read slowly it brings me back to my petticoats and crenolines of days gone by. 🙂
One has to read it carefully. The poet was from the Victorian era where he was not overly appreciated for his racy topics,