Vulnerable to possibilities : a journey of self-knowing through personal narrative

This study examines one man's experience of becoming an adult educator. Pausing to reflect after twenty-six years of teaching others how to teach, I set out to excavate the foundations of my professional practice, to crack open such questions as How did I become this teacher? and How does my lived experience inform my professional practice? Zooming between the personal and the professional, I layer autobiographical memories, critical incidents, narrative poetry, photographs, collages, and fictional dialogues into a multi-voiced narrative. Declining the security of traditional research tools (such as testing, measuring, classifying, generalizing, and theorizing), I turn instead to the Zen notion of Beginner's Mind, an approach that opens me to many possibilities. Rummaging amongst the messy fragments of lived experience, I encounter the slipperiness of language and the subjectivity of interpretation. I roam widely in the literature and invite colleagues to read and respond to work-in-progress. In due course I find that whole-hearted writing fosters self-transformation and that exposing such work to others triggers conversations about identity and integrity. I now present an open text—one that invites readers to locate their own stories between the lines, interrogate their own teacher persona, and awaken to their own experienceEducation, Faculty ofEducational Studies (EDST), Department ofGraduat