Learning • teaching • leading: A patchwork of stories from a non-traditional life.

摘要

This autoethnographic research explores learning, teaching, and leading from the perspective of an adult woman who is both a non-traditional student and a non-traditional worker in the academy. Because she returned to school at the age of forty to earn a bachelor's degree, and is currently an associate professor of education following more than twenty years of work in the private sector with an additional seven as a high school teacher, she focuses this personal exploration on academia, seeking to better understand her place in an evolving educational culture in which she is both insider and outsider, learner and teacher. By providing insight into her learning processes and products, she also provides opportunities for readers to reflect on the ways in which they learn as well as to better understand learner diversity.; In the process of articulating the ways in which she learns and linking them to her passion for teaching, the author began to formulate a theory, Home•Makers of the Academy: The Valuing-and Devaluing-of Teaching, that proposes a connection between the historical role of the homemaker in the American family and the academic home•making evidenced in caring, connective teaching. This developing theory is illustrated through pages that also represent her learning processes which she calls connectivity , or the linking of disparate sources to create new meaning. Connectivity is also used by the author to refer to the intertwining of activities within a life of creative integration where multiple facets of a person's life interconnect rather than compete. These intersections are discussed as the author comes to understandings about her work as an artist and poet and writer and its significance in her roles as learner, teacher, and leader. These understandings gain significance in light of her nascent theorizing which also addresses issues related to the defining of academic scholarship for the twenty-first century.