Poetry, Method and Education Research

Doing Critical, Decolonising and Political Inquiry

Esther Fitzpatrick, Katie Fitzpatrick, Esther Fitzpatrick, Katie Fitzpatrick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367193881
• eBook ISBN: 9781000092554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Poetry can be both political and pedagogical. It is utilised in a variety of ways in research to enhance, critique, analyse, and express different voices.

Poetry, Method and Education Research brings together international scholars to explore issues as diverse as neoliberalism, culture, decolonising education, health, and teacher identities. A key strength of the book is its attention to poetry as a research method, including discussions of "how to" engage with poetry in research, as well as including a range of research poems. Poetry is thus framed as both a method and performance. Authors in this book address a wide variety of questions from different perspectives including how to use poetry to think about complex issues in education, where poetry belongs in a research project, how to write poetry to generate and analyse "data", and how poetry can represent these findings.

This book is an essential resource for students and researchers in education programmes, and those who teach in graduate research methods courses.

1What poetry does for us in education and research

Esther Fitzpatrick and Katie Fitzpatrick

KATIE: poetry is, actually, one of the things that keeps me alive in the academy. Not in the biological sense, but in the sense of having life, inside, in keeping alight and alive; staying alive to what is important and what holds.

ESTHER: poetry enables me to get to the essence of the matter, to the embodied response that I have to a particular thing under investigation and, through the writing of poetry, to make sense of it in a new way.

Imagine you are in our poetry and writing workshop at a conference in Chile (November, 2018). We have brought along roasted coffee beans. We open the bag and scatter the beans on the table; they clatter as they bounce and then become still. Imagine these small dark brown beans on the table in front of you. You can smell the chocolatey bitter aroma (a word that goes with coffee) and touch the smooth surface of the beans. You might roll them around in the palm of your hand, bring them up to your cheek, your nose … you begin to write, popping a coffee bean inside your mouth, tasting the bitterness, and writing some more. You choose words and phrases that describe this sensuous encounter with the coffee bean. The smell and taste conjure up embodied memories and we ask you to record these … you write. The room is mostly quiet except for gentle breathing, the scratch of pen on paper, and the crackling of a bean in the mouth of a writer. Immersed in your own memories of coffee, we then bring out the coffee packet and wonder ‘where does this coffee come from? Who picked, processed, and roasted this coffee? Whose labour was spent in this production? Whose brand does this coffee carry? Where is the money going?’ We ask you to focus on the how the politics of coffee intertwine with your sensory experiences and memories … you write.

Throughout this encounter with the coffee bean, we asked the participants in the workshop to ‘surrender’ to the sensuous embodied provocation, and to generate words and phrases. These words and phrases were the poetic research material. Prendergast (2015) describes the action of ‘surrender’ – where the researcher encounters the field with total involvement and lets it ‘wash over’ – as synonymous with the ‘experience of being’ (p. 5). Wolff (1972) earlier described surrender as:

cognitive love: whatever other meanings it may have flow from it. Among them are total involvement, suspension of received notion, pertinence of everything, identification, and risk of being hurt. [And] … to meet it as much as possible in its originality, its itself-ness. (p. 453)

When working with embodied arts-based practice, the notion of surrender is understood as giving ourselves over fully (as much as this is possible) to make sense of the materials with all of our ‘senses'. Through the encounter with the coffee bean, we asked participants to pay attention to the smell, the feel, the taste, and the sounds to evoke memories and engage with its ‘itself-ness'. And in doing so not to anticipate or hypothesize the outcome. Inside this experience, of surrender, Prendergast (2015) offers a set of guiding characteristics or qualities to scaffold the researcher:

• Aesthetic power
• Imagery, metaphor
• Capturing a moment
• Truthtelling, bravery, vulnerability
• Critical insight, often through empathy
• Surprise and the unexpected (Prendergast, p. 683)

As scholar poets, we write, paying attention to these guiding characteristics, to ‘catch’ words, phrases, and images that unfold through the encounter. We understand ‘catch’ as a process wherein the writer comprehends, conceives, and conceptualizes things anew. It is an intellectual, existential awakening to a new kind of being-in-the-world (Prendergast, 2015, p. 6). Importantly for this work, “… its result may not be a concept in the everyday or scientific sense of the word but, for instance, a decision, a poem, a painting, the clarification or origin of an existential question a change in a person” (Wolff, 1972, p. 454). Feminist poet Adrienne Rich (2003, p. 12) suggests that poetry can, indeed, reawaken the senses so that:

you listen, if you do, not simply to the poem, but to a part of you reawakened by the poem, momentarily made aware, a need both emotional and physical, that can for a moment be affirmed there.

This book contains a collection of different chapters from authors all around the world. They each show and tell how they use poetry and poetic representation in their research in the field of education. They draw on educational issues and politics, as well as on the sensory and lived experience of being educators and poets. We are honoured to include the work of many academic poets here, including one of the final writings of Carl Leggo, as he faded from this world, raging, like all good poets, against the dying of the light; raging with intense grace and writing to the very end. Poetry is in this sense both personal and political, both sensory and rebellious, both hopeful and deeply present.

We began with the story about coffee which tells of a poetry writing workshop we facilitated during the CEAD conference (Contemporary Ethnography Across the Disciplines) in Chile in 2018. During that workshop, our intention was to show how to enter poetic writing in different ways: first from the sensory, and then from the political. We used coffee as a stimulus because it has strong sensory, relational, and political contexts. Working across and between the sensory and the political is a key theme of this book. As authors, we each came to use poetry in our work in different ways. These personal histories – which we reflect on next – are important, and are something many of the authors in the book also include in their chapters.

Esther

There is a tattered red poetry book on my bookshelf. As a child, I cherished this book, reading it over and over again, alone, and with my three sisters. Dreaming myself into the words, in between the lines, and inside the poem. These poems danced me into imaginary worlds. The world of Edward Lear's ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’ still has me dancing under a moon and eating with a ‘runcible’ spoon. I forever imagine where the Jumblies lived and wonder if I'll meet a ‘Quangle-Wangle’. His ‘nonsense’ opened doors. Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem, ‘The Mermaid’, summoned up images of watery palaces and long, golden, flowing hair – as I tugged my knotted mass of golden girl curls into a flowing fountain. The ‘Raggle Taggle Gypsy O’ often travel with me in my encounters with social justice, and William Roscoe's ‘The Butterfly's Ball and The Grasshopper's Feast’ capture the essence of celebrating diversity. These are only a few of the poems of my childhood that continue to haunt me today.

My ‘writing’ of poetry began on long car trips, where our mother taught us how to change the lyrics of popular songs. There were four of us, wee blonde girls, sitting on the back seat of the large Holden, making up words and singing loudly our adapted ‘songs'. Adapted often into religious songs. She would then take us, her travelling band, into some church with her ukulele or piano accordion to sing our repertoire of popular ‘sounding’ songs. We were a Pentecostal family, visiting churches in people's homes and local community halls, and prayers, psalms, and gospel songs were our language.

Perhaps, thinking back, I was always playing with writing, playing with words to create and communicate my feelings, ideas, and stories. Much like Laurel Richardson's (1994) ‘writing as a method of inquiry’, playing with words through poetry made sense to me. Hence, when I started reading complicated theoretical academic writing, I used a form of ‘found poetry’ to get to the essence of what the author was saying. It worked. Later, through the process of doing my master's and doctoral studies, I again returned to poetry. Poetry became a significant way for me to respond to my encounters with the historical and lived data, and the arts-based methods I employed. I learnt how to listen to my body, to all my senses to (as Carl Leggo would say) let poetry breathe.

our first poem is the heart's beat, breathing

Is the ancient language we must always hear

(Leggo, C., Nov, 2018, np)

At first, I would argue that I am not a poet, I just write poetry. But this is not true. Poetry is part of who I am, I see, hear, feel, and taste words. I have been privileged over the past few years to interact with, hear, and read the work of many fabulous scholar poets. Poets who perform on the page and on the stage. I will never forget A.B. (Ashley Beard's) poetic performance at the Critical Autoethnography Conference in 2016. Her stunning performance took me right back to my childhood. I have been privileged to collaborate and write with poets. I have been privileged with my undergraduate and postgraduate students who have written poetry and performed poetry. We are continually disrupting the boundaries of what traditional social research looks like, sounds like, and feels like. We...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• 1 What poetry does for us in education and research
• SECTION I Poetry and poetic methodologies
• SECTION II Poetry, politics, and educational issues
• SECTION III Decolonising education and indigenous poetry
• SECTION IV Poetry and critical pedagogical research
• Index