Thriving: Weaving professional and personal narratives as an educator

This practitioner inquiry explores the diversity of practices that I have held collectively during my doctoral journey and how they have informed my wellbeing both within my professional and personal life. This inquiry also explores what can be learned from my personal narratives and reflections through life writing and from reciprocal writing between my father and myself. Ultimately, I seek to triangulate and crystalize meaning making among and between various practices, knowledges, perspectives, and understandings of thriving and ways of cultivating wellbeing. Through life writing, memoir, and métissage, I recount personal narratives of teaching, learning, fishing and flourishing, bereavement, and how these experiences shape, inform, and converge within ecological sites of practice. I examine my own experiences with land practice, with photography, and with life writing while enacting my current role as a public educator in relation to the experiences of other educators. This inquiry situates life writing and memoir as modes of response to the lived complexity of my professional contexts and its implications on my personal lived experiences. The intention of this inquiry is to contribute to educators' knowledge and practice regarding the complexities of being an educator. This inquiry has particular interest for those dwelling within diverse educational contexts and facing challenging institutional complexities while actively creating new ecologies of potential thriving and flourishing. I call upon educators to deeply consider their own professional and personal contexts with the hope that they will seek life-giving affinities within their own lives and experiences as sites of potential transformation.