Editorial
Patrick Lewis
University of Regina
Spring has crept its way across the prairie and with it comes our seventh issue of in education as an online, open-access journal. Interest in the journal continues to grow with our readership still growing and a steady increase in submissions to our regular and theme issues. With this growth more challenges emerge with respect to the peer review process, the concomitant workload, and time commitments. We have been very fortunate to have wide and varied contributions from reviewers across the country and around the world supporting us, and from the many authors who submit to the journal. This issue is another fine example of the interesting variety of work that scholars in the teaching and learning research context continue to contribute to the field.
Fittingly for this time of year, when the waters of the rivers and lakes are swollen with the spring runoff, we begin with an essay by Herman Michell, “The Canoe Trip: A Northern Cree Metaphor for Conducting Research.” Michell uses not only the canoe and the paddle, but also all that must go into and all that may emerge on the research journey to guide the researcher. However, everything must be framed with respect for the land, the research, and the people—pedagogy of the land. Around the first bend in this issue the canoeist will encounter the ruminations of Carl Leggo as he challenges the hierarchy of educational leadership, offering, through poetic inquiry and narrative reflection, a more rhizomatic approach to education, one that embodies a pedagogy of heart, humility, health, and hope. As we pull ashore to make camp we are greeted by Tim Molnar and his discussion of responsibility as the welcoming of difference in school, through the experience of a teacher and some of Levinas’s ideas.
No matter how many times one may journey up or down the research river there is always something new, around the bend, past the rapids, or on the portage. Sean Wiebe and Indrani Margolin remind the canoeist of the importance of relationship in the pursuit of living with poetic consciousness not just in teaching, but also in life, every moment of it. Working together they find that poetic consciousness in pedagogy can be simultaneously integrative and disruptive. Patricia Elliot reminds the canoeist of the history of the research river and the importance of remembering that the way things are is not how they have always been. In her piece she takes up the story of school consolidation and how the role of local schools has changed under the aegis of "progress” but in stark contrast to the desires of local school community members. Finally, as we approach the end of the research river we come toward the seemingly placid waters of the lake, but skirting its ambit is Robert Regnier’s discussion of leadership through integral development and the need to continue to move toward SchoolPLUS in Saskatchewan.