Grains of Truth: A Rumination and Poem for Roger Simon

Abstract

As a young teacher in a small town in Newfoundland where everybody claimed to know everything worth knowing, where fundamentalism raised its voracious, even rapacious, head with violent hunger, I needed wise voices who could call me to other possibilities, visions, and stories. Roger Simon was one of the most important wise voices I heard. As a graduate scholar I gravitated to a circle of scholars I knew as the critical pedagogues, the romantic radicals, a club of apparently cool scholars who questioned everything (and I was on a tireless quest of questioning), but in the midst of that often cacophonous circle, the two scholars I most admired were Paulo Freire and Roger Simon.