Foreword Conversations
Dr. Carl Leggo
Professor of Language and Literacy Education
University of British Columbia
Poetry of Love & Love of Poetry
In Seeing Red Pauline Sameshima exemplifies what Paulo Freire calls “aesthetic curiosity” (p. 95) and “epistemological curiosity” (p. 97). She writes about love, romance, desire, passion, eros, and hope—the familiar dynamics that animate the tangled relationships lived every day by teachers and learners in and out of classrooms. Pauline holds fast to the exhilaration and the danger of love, as well as the integral necessity of acknowledging love in all our relationships. Her convictions resonate with bell hooks who claims that “to open our hearts more fully to love's power and grace we must dare to acknowledge how little we know of love in both theory and practice” (xxix). hooks is concerned that because we have been “taught to believe that the mind, not the heart, is the seat of learning, many of us believe that to speak of love with any emotional intensity means we will be perceived as weak and irrational” (xxvii). Like hooks, Pauline questions love