Living the Questions

Dispatches From a Life Already in Progress

By:
Wade Tillett, University of Wisconsin

A volume in the series: Landscapes of Education. Editor(s): William H. Schubert, University of Illinois at Chicago. Ming Fang He, Georgia Southern University.

Published 2017

In Living the Questions: Dispatches From a Life Already in Progress, Wade Tillett takes up the question of how to live – not in some abstract sense, but in the urgent present. Tillett realizes that how to live is a question that each of us is already asking – and answering – moment-by-moment. These texts offer surprising discoveries of how we are already inventing solutions to living in multiple and discontinuous worlds through our daily actions. By examining small specific pieces of daily life, Tillett explores how we navigate through tentative, multiple, and often contradictory positions. Among the many situations artistically explored are visiting a church, narrating a family movie, exposing students to a nearby school, re-working a found sculpture, taking a licensure exam, attending a protest, and waiting for the El. By juxtaposing multiple voices and images, he attempts to see how, in both method and content, the texts themselves act on the worlds and lives they describe.

Tillett narrates from many perspectives: teacher, researcher, writer, artist, architect, activist, parent, theorist, and struggling protagonist of his own life. As such, many readers sharing such roles will immediately find connections within the book. For researchers struggling to find workable qualitative methodologies after poststructuralism, the experimental methods employed here may provide welcome inspiration. However, the book seems aimed not so much at particular disciplines but at anyone who, like Tillett, is actively searching for how to live. Anyone involved in such a search will likely find hope and ways forward in his methods that look at life as we are already living it.

CONTENTS
Series Foreword: Landscapes of Education, William H. Schubert and Ming Fang He. Guest Foreword, Patrick Roberts. Acknowledgments. Preface. Displacing (An Introduction). PART I: SELECTING CHAPTER 1:Leaving(s). CHAPTER 2: Things I Found in My Lawn. CHAPTER 3: Everyday Practices. CHAPTER 4: Paths and Prescriptions. CHAPTER 5: Forsaking. CHAPTER 6: Creating The Real. CHAPTER 7: Stairwell. CHAPTER 8: Landscape Modifications. PART II: POSITIONING CHAPTER 9: The Examination as Mechanism. CHAPTER 10: Failing The Tests. CHAPTER 11: We Don’t Want Your Big Mac. We Just Want Our Schools Back. CHAPTER 12: Boone School Funding. CHAPTER 13: Schoolyard Phantoms. CHAPTER 14: Negotiating Positions. PART III: EXTENDING CHAPTER 15: CHA Demolition List. CHAPTER 16: Fulfilling The Program. CHAPTER 17: Home. CHAPTER 18: Encompassing The Movement. CHAPTER 19: A Trash Brigade. CHAPTER 20: Office Space. CHAPTER 21: The Plan Abandoned. CHAPTER 22: Real, Only Better. CHAPTER 23: Mapping. CHAPTER 24: Here, We Are Never Here. PART IV: MULTIPLYING CHAPTER 25: Create-A-Sculpture. CHAPTER 26: Textual Explorations Book. CHAPTER 27: We Do Not Believe, But We Have To. CHAPTER 28: And Here We Are. CHAPTER 29: Living Hymns and Iterations. CHAPTER 30: The Gathering. CHAPTER 31: The Crime of Suspicious Circumstances. CHAPTER 32: Beyond Surveillance. CHAPTER 33: Re-membering Home Movies. CHAPTER 34: Durée. Postface. Author Biography.