Poetry, Method and Education Research; Doing Critical, Decolonising and Political Inquiry 9780367193881, 9780367516222, 9780429202117

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Poetry, Method and Education Research

Poetry can be both political and pedagogical. It is utilised in a variety of ways in research to enhance, critique, analyse, and express diferent 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 diferent 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 fndings. This book is an essential resource for students and researchers in education programmes, and those who teach in graduate research methods courses. Esther Fitzpatrick is a Senior Lecturer at The University of Auckland. Her current research includes critical arts-based methodologies to explore emerging in-between identities, culturally responsive practice, and the impact of neoliberal ideologies on academic identities. She has several publications employing creative methods in educational research. Katie Fitzpatrick is an Associate Professor at The University of Auckland. Her research focuses on health education, physical education, sexuality education, critical pedagogy, and critical ethnographic and poetic research methods. Katie has published numerous articles and book chapters, and six books in these areas, including an international award-winning book.

“This book is terrifc. It covers the wide-ranging power of poetic inquiry across disciplines and continents. Bringing together in one place a collection of creative and diverse ways of writing poetry as a method of inquiry. I am in awe!” Laurel Richardson, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Ohio State University, USA

“This book ofers an exciting approach to critical and decolonizing methods in education research. Poetry is often the super-power that can reach and engage learners in ways that connect their feelings and thoughts, their bodies and experiences, their dreams and voices. In the hands of critical educators and researchers it can open up new possibilities and insights. The authors in this book approach this super-power with respect, awareness and hopefulness.” Professor Linda Tuhiwai Smith, The University of Waikato, New Zealand

“Pushes the felds of poetic inquiry and education forward, beautifully documenting how poetry may be used to subvert dominant ideologies and collaborate with indigenous partners. Every researcher and creative writer should have this on their bookshelf – makes a wonderful addition to courses that deal with pedagogy, education, methodology, and social justice.” Patricia Leavy, Ph.D., author of Method Meets Art and Spark

“An extraordinary and important book. This is a text that sings to the reader. Its poetry, and its writing about poetry, lifts us, transports us; and it calls us, too, to see poetry’s capacity for subversion and resistance. It makes us want to write poetry, and to bring poetry into our inquiries. What a gift.” Professor Jonathan Wyatt, The University of Edinburgh, UK

“Reading this collection of poetic, personal, and inspiring essays reminds us why creating space for poetry and imagination in the academy is vital. The editors have gathered authors from around the world that breathe life into research, lean on uncertainty, and challenge the status quo in beautiful, convincing ways. A must read for educators and researchers in all felds!” Professor George Belliveau, University of British Columbia, Canada

Poetry, Method and Education Research Doing Critical, Decolonising and Political Inquiry Edited by Esther Fitzpatrick and Katie Fitzpatrick

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park,Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Esther Fitzpatrick and Katie Fitzpatrick; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Esther Fitzpatrick and Katie Fitzpatrick to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fitzpatrick, Esther, editor. | Fitzpatrick, Katie, 1975- editor. Title: Poetry, method and education research : doing critical, decolonising and political inquiry / edited by Esther Fitzpatrick and Katie Fitzpatrick. Description:Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020009759 (print) | LCCN 2020009760 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367193881 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367516222 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429202117 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Education--Research--Methodology. | Poetry in education | Poetry--Study and teaching. | Education students--Biography. Classification: LCC LB1028 .P5735 2020 (print) | LCC LB1028 (ebook) | DDC 370.72--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009759 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009760 ISBN: 978-0-367-19388-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-20211-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Cenveo® Publisher Services

Contents

List of figures Foreword 1 What poetry does for us in education and research

viii ix 1

ESTHER FITZPATRICK AND KATIE FITZPATRICK

SECTION I

Poetry and poetic methodologies 2 Poetic inquiry

19 21

LYNN BUTLER-KISBER

3 Poetic representations, not-quite poetry and poemish: Some methodological reflections

41

ANDREW C. SPARKES

4 Education and/as art: A found poetry suite

51

MONICA PRENDERGAST

5 Sensible poets and the poetic sensibility: Mitigating neoliberal/audit culture in education through arts-based research

61

ROBERT E. RINEHART

SECTION II

Poetry, politics, and educational issues

83

6 Poetry and cancer: Six ruminations

85

CARL LEGGO

vi

Contents

7 Writing the university through poetry: The pleasure of scholarship against the spike of neoliberalism

97

KATIE FITZPATRICK

8 My middle-aged rage burns the template in front of the Provost’s office after the assessment meeting

104

SANDRA L. FAULKNER

9 Community and belonging: An international student’s journey in North America

106

FRANK C. WORRELL

10 The Munchkin and the medicine man: Poetry’s place in a “hard” world

121

LAURA HOPE-GILL

11 Becoming a first-time mother as an international graduate student: A poetic ethnography

132

KUO ZHANG

SECTION III

Decolonising education and indigenous poetry

153

12 Cultivating resonant images through poetic meditation: A de/colonial approach to educational research

155

KAKALI BHATTACHARYA

13 Making the invisible visible: Poetic explorations of a cross-cultural researcher

172

PAULINE ADAMS

14 The tukutuku panel is never bare: Weaving bicultural relationships through poetic performances

183

VIRGINIA TAMANUI AND ESTHER FITZPATRICK

15 Traversing Pacific identities in Aotearoa/ New Zealand: Blood, ink, lives JACOBA MATAPO AND JEAN M. ALLEN

207

Contents vii SECTION IV

Poetry and critical pedagogical research

221

16 Why I use a poem in every single classroom

223

SELINA TUSITALA MARSH

17 Re/turning the world into poetry [an alternative education portfolio]

226

ADRIAN SCHOONE

18 Creasing and folding language in dance education research

238

ALYS LONGLEY

19 Poetry drops a plumbline into meaning: Findings from an inquiry into teacher creativity

254

SHELLEY TRACEY

20 Memory, poetry, art, and children: Understanding the past from the present

268

MARÍA ESPERANZA ROCK NÚÑEZ

Index

284

Figures

14.1 14.2 20.1 20.2 20.3 20.4 20.5 20.6

Tukutuku panel in workshop.Virginia Tamanui photo files. Weaving of tukutuku panel.Virginia. Drawing of the centenary school. Drawing of the sea with fish, a fisherman with a net and an oar in a boat. Drawing of a shovel and a pillory. Drawing of a woman folding clothes at home. Drawing of the church of the rooster. Drawing of the poor miner.

190 191 273 274 276 278 280 281

Foreword Writing a foreword and looking back: An homage to poetry teachers and poetic inquirers past and present Maria Cahnmann-Taylor

University of Georgia, USA

When asked to write the foreword to the Fitzpatricks’ new book, Poetry, Method and Education Research, I can’t help but also look, or rather listen, backward. Behind me I hear the words of so many poetry teachers layered into my own understanding of what poetry can and cannot do in the environment of educational inquiry. I can’t help but imagine this volume’s contributors in a seminar room together with poem drafts in front of us, taking turns responding to one another’s work, bringing our many diferent poetry teachers’ voices into the room. Patti Lather, William Wordsworth, Wallace Stegnar, and so on – how many diferent poets and scholars would guide our responses to one another’s work, defning what makes a poem and then what makes a poem good? I’ve elbowed on many such workshop tables with other poets and teachers but never in a textual room like this one, convening scholars in many diferent felds, from so many diferent continents and contexts, bearing witness to urgent matters of our time. From concerns about the neoliberal, audit culture overtaking universities (e.g. Robert Rinehart, Katie Fitzpatrick, Sandra Faulkner) to displacement and de/colonization, and dialogic revoicing projects (e.g. Frank C. Worrell, Kakali Bhattacharya, Virginia Tamanui and Esther Fitzpatrick, and Kuo Zhang); to medical leave, medical stories, and medical care (Carl Leggo and Laura Hope-Gill) – each of these and other contributors turned to poetry to transform what was often painful and pressured to be scientifc, evaluative, and objective into something beautiful and often personal and full of feeling. As I read this volume’s contents, I heard my poetry teacher, Maxine Kumin’s voice (may she rest in peace), reminding me to ask if the poems held enough “geography, chronology, and furniture” to help ground the reader in the poem’s sense of place and time, furnished with sufcient sensory detail to convey the poet’s intentions. Another recently departed poetry teacher’s voice, that of Thomas Lux, asked me if I’d put on my “verb hat” – to consider

Foreword

x

whether the poems presented here were making the best use of verbs, what he considered to be the most important muscle in the English language; or my “strong line ending/beginning hat” to evaluate the poet-scholar’s diction choices and if I could “feel and then think” about the metaphors being used. I realized these and so many other poetry teachers’ wisdom (Alicia Ostriker, Michael Waters, Gerald Stern, Ann Waldman, Jane Hirshfeld, Marilyn Nelson, Paula McLain, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and many others) accompany me as I consider the ways in which I carry out poetic inquiry myself, often on the subject of second language and culture acquisition. However, none of my beloved poetry teachers, whose classes I often took while straying from ethnography courses, were much less concerned with sustained inquiry than with teaching sustained craft. Scholars of poetic inquiry methods must, then, become our own teachers, gifting one another with poems that move readers to consider subjects such as workplace bullying or international graduate student identity with greater nuance and clarity. When teaching a course entitled “Poetry for Creative Educators”, I am often working with newer writers of verse and interpreting what I understand to be best craft practices and how these can apply to working with students of English and other world languages. I often begin classes with fxed verse structures (e.g. the sonnet or villanelle) or by providing very specifc constraints to their frst drafts – encouraging them to accept my “invitation” (assignment) but to fearlessly break rules to honour their poem’s intentions and demands. Unlike research designs and inquiry subjects, writers seldom control their poems. However, I advocate “creativity within constraint” as a best practice essential for teachers as well as artists, all of whom learn to trust themselves and their creative instincts when working within (and having practiced navigation of ) any given structure (rubric or benchmark for success). The poem I share below emerged from looking back at one of my formal class invitations, in this case to write a complicated, old verse structure called the sestina. A sestina consists of 39 lines broken up into six stanzas and a three-line envoi. The end words of the frst stanza get repeated in diferent patterns throughout the next fve stanzas and the three-line envoi. The form is as follows, where each numeral indicates the stanza position and the letters represent end words: (123456) (615243), etc. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

ABCDEF FAEBDC CFDABE ECBFAD DEACFB BDFECA (envoi) ECA or ACE

The envoi, sometimes known as the tornada, must also include the remaining three end words, BDF, in the course of the three lines so that all six recurring

Foreword

xi

words appear in the fnal three lines. In place of a rhyme scheme, the sestina relies on end word repetition to efect a sort of rhyme. The sestina, invented, or so it is said, by a 13th-century poet and mathematician named Arnault Daniel, is one of those forms that people admire but don’t attempt casually, the way they would a haiku or limerick. While I don’t always write in formal or metered verse, I consider it good practice for any writer, educator, or poetic inquirer. Recycling words and reviving them in new contexts is resonant for poetic inquiry methods that often recycle interviews and theories, presenting them with new effect. I am delighted to be reading the poetry and poetic inquiry of these global colleagues interested in poetry’s power for documentation and representation, insight and connection. If poetic inquiry is the “guru”, then my advice is to keep it in, keeping as many poem models and poetry teachers voices within us as we refne and research the human, organic, and inorganic subjects of our obsessions to imagine a better educative tomorrow. Workshop advice: take the guru out He’s too hocus pocus for an American poem. Orange cloth, brown fesh, another continent enters the room when he’s there, part naked, crystal eyes, white hair, encircled by women who eat brewers yeast for breakfast. No, the guru has to go. Too East, the peaceful guru, a re-potted banana plant in American soil. Choose a fnancial planner, a womanrabbi—anything but his bald patience smothering the line. He hovers like a fock of white birds over lovers on the coast, their picnic lunch of fried chicken lying there hopelessly exposed. Just the sound of it, “guru” sounds too fru-fru, archaic, a white lie for what you really want in American art: Chinese take-out glare, sidewalk smothered in butts, chewed gum. Hairy women hang his picture by the birthing bed, women who pray in private or chant their musty breath in airport entourage; mothers with babies in arms begging the dead guru

xii

Foreword

to bless them, inject India in American souls. A replica swami hangs on white walls in the ashram next to black and white portraits: Mother Teresa, the only woman; Martin Luther King, the only American. His hippie dippie image belongs there, not in your poem. Kudzu and gurus, aurora borealis scarves and grandmothers— big no-no’s. Americans make ourselves other holy fgures: they’re invisible or male and white. Girl, here’s our advice: lose the guru. ~Reprinted with permission from Cahnmann-Taylor (2016) Imperfect Tense (p. 80). San Pedro, CA: Whitepoint Press.

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What poetry does for us in education and research Esther Fitzpatrick and Katie Fitzpatrick

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. KATIE:

Imagine you are in our poetry and writing workshop at a conference in Chile (November, 2018). We have brought along roasted cofee 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 cofee) 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 cofee bean inside your mouth, tasting the bitterness, and writing some more. You choose words and phrases that describe this sensuous encounter with the cofee 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 cofee, we then bring out the cofee packet and wonder ‘where does this cofee come from? Who picked, processed, and roasted this cofee? Whose labour was spent in this production? Whose brand does this cofee carry? Where is the money going?’ We ask you to focus on the how the politics of cofee intertwine with your sensory experiences and memories … you write. Throughout this encounter with the cofee 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 feld with total involvement and lets

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it ‘wash over’ – as synonymous with the ‘experience of being’ (p. 5). Wolf (1972) earlier described surrender as: cognitive love: whatever other meanings it may have fow from it. Among them are total involvement, suspension of received notion, pertinence of everything, identifcation, 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 cofee 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) ofers a set of guiding characteristics or qualities to scafold 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 scientifc sense of the word but, for instance, a decision, a poem, a painting, the clarifcation or origin of an existential question a change in a person” (Wolf, 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 afrmed there. This book contains a collection of diferent chapters from authors all around the world. They each show and tell how they use poetry and poetic representation in their research in the feld 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 fnal writings of Carl Leggo, as he

What poetry does for us in education and research

3

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 cofee 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 diferent ways: frst from the sensory, and then from the political. We used cofee 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 diferent ways. These personal histories – which we refect 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, fowing hair – as I tugged my knotted mass of golden girl curls into a fowing fountain. The ‘Raggle Taggle Gypsy O’ often travel with me in my encounters with social justice, and William Roscoe’s ‘The Butterfy’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

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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 signifcant 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 frst poem is the heart’s beat, breathing Is the ancient language we must always hear (Leggo, C., Nov, 2018, np) At frst, 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 are reaching into and expressing the language of our bodies, our minds, and the world we live and engage with. I am thankful for the work of Tami Spry who frst opened my eyes to performance poetry. I have found performing poetry does something diferent with the words and the meanings inherent in the words. It awakens us and others to an embodied response. As Spry (2011b) argued, “embodied knowledge is the somatic (the body’s interaction with culture) represented through the semantic (language), a linguistic articulation, a telling, of what does and does not go into the body, and why” (p. 502). Performance poetry, she tells us … … starts with a body, in a place, and in a time. The investigators analyze the body for evidence, the body as evidence, the body of evidence. But evidence, like experience, is not itself knowledge; like evidence, experience means nothing until it is interpreted, until we interpret the body as evidence … [hence the] body [can be understood] as raw data of a critical cultural story. (Spry, 2011b, p. 19) Performance poetry engages both reader and audience through a … Dialogic performance … the interpretation of the complex interaction between performer (self ), text [poem], and sociocultural context; it is

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what allows/invites/motivates an audience to engage the performance, to communicate with the persona, to exist in the world of the story. (Spry, 2011a, p. 188) Performing my poetry with others has also been a learning experience. Madison (2014) describes how performance in research magnifes and puts into action sensory experience, thus becoming an act of interpreting through the senses. It is always with trepidation that I step out onto the stage to present my work. I position myself in a place of vulnerability by opening up my stories and my art for critique. The performing of my stories, my works of art for others, has been another level of interpreting and opening up of self. I select and graft the pieces, I knit them together with paint and wire. Sew words into a poem. I perform the poem In the presence of others. I dig down deep, Secret forgotten places, in muscle and fesh. I draw out memories, Fragmented and frayed. (Fitzpatrick, E. M., 2015b, p. 50) I am thankful to my many poetic collaborators, Katie Fitzpatrick, Frank Worrell, Mohamed Alansari, and Alex Li, for writing poetry as conversation in various projects. Poetic conversations to disrupt traditional practices that bind us into troublesome power relations (Fitzpatrick & Fitzpatrick, 2014, 2015), poetic conversations to enable a shared response and protest against violence (Fitzpatrick, Worrell, Alansari, & Li, 2017), and a poetic conversation as a critical method to bring justice, in this project, to doctoral bodies in the neoliberal university (Fitzpatrick & Alansari, 2018, p. 224). We cannot change the industrial, neo-liberal, university But we can learn how to live with it Forgetting that a man once said We cannot change the democratic, public, university But we can learn how to deal with it (Fitzpatrick & Alansari, 2018, p. 224). I now sit on trains, in the corner of a cafe, in a boring meeting, in a captivating seminar, writing, writing poems. I am a teacher, an academic

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researcher, a supervisor, a friend. I write poems to make sense of my world, to teach, to engage others, to communicate, to live …. Poets are not scared to know the sacred, each Day brings blessings like disguised challenges Learn to lean on uncertainty, Know the journey is a mystery. (Leggo, C., Nov 2018, np)

Katie My father is an avid reader of poetry and knows parts of old ballads by heart. He would recite and read poetry to us as children. I came to love the tragic romance of Alfred Noyse’s ‘The Highwayman’, the tragic irony of Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, and the mysteries of Emily Dickinson’s poetic world. At school, we had to keep a poetry journal, and I began as a teenager to make my own poetic writings. I discovered it as a safe way to express my deepest feelings in ways no one else could decipher. Metaphor, I found, can be powerful in both revealing and hiding meaning. I continued to write my own secret poems until, encouraged by my teachers’ judgement of my school journal poems, I began to share them with others, attend poetry readings, and so forth. I still only very rarely sent my own poems to any publications until I embarked on a PhD. While writing about my participants, poetry forced its way into my writing and refused to be ignored. I found new freedom in expressing academic ideas, politics, and empirical materials in poetic ways. Since then, I have incorporated poetic writing into my academic writing (e.g. Fitzpatrick, K., 2012, 2017, 2018a, 2018b) and have begun sending my work to literary journals (e.g. Fitzpatrick, K., 2019). I feel a freedom in this, as if writing poetry is somehow an act of rebellion in my usual academic world; a challenge to prose and to neoliberalism. It gives me a diferent voice to express the social justice concerns I explore in my work. It helps me to explore the emotional and embodied edges of scholarship unapologetically, although I continue to refect about the criss-crossing of genres in my work: I wonder whether THE Poets Laugh at our (hesitant, apologetic) understanding of poetry as RESEARCH when they have always known it as the only kind of truth that matters that we can ever hope to know (Fitzpatrick, K., 2012, p. 10)

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I currently use poetry to communicate aspects of my research that (my own) academic prose doesn’t do justice to. This includes exploring issues of health and physicality through poetic expression (Fitzpatrick, K., 2018a, 2018b), and challenging body norms: The other places The other places are the ones I imagine Lost in between gendering The place where body isn’t The place where body is everything already And complete Where the secrets of norm Unravel Where a beard is welcome with stilettos1 and the meanings of movements shift are unintelligible unrecognisable And we shed the accumulated skins of history in low light (Fitzpatrick, K., 2018a, pp. 23–24)

Research poetry The work we both do to incorporate poetry into our research is, of course, built on the work of many others over time (many of whom are in this book). In the last 30 years, qualitative research methods have changed a great deal and gained signifcant status (Denzin & Lincoln, 1999, 2000, 2011). In this, the feld of qualitative inquiry and the study of research methods have been recognized as signifcant felds of study in and of themselves. Part of this sea change is the growing recognition that there are a diversity of ways to approach and represent qualitative research projects. In this, Denzin (1994, 1999), Denzin and Lincoln (2000), among others (Leavy, 2016; Richardson, 1994, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2008), have urged researchers to fnd alternative ways to inquire and represent research texts (Finley, 2011). Arts-based methods have thus emerged as one response to demands for more complex, nuanced, community-centred, and creative approaches to research. As a result, researchers are now employing a wide range of creative research methods, including narrative (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Webster & Mertova, 2007), dramatic performance (Spry, 2011a, 2011b), visual methods (Gauntlett & Holzwarth, 2006), and dance (Longley, 2016, 2017), as well as poetry (e.g. Cahnmann, 2003; Faulkner, 2009, 2016; Furman, Lietz, & Langer, 2006; Glesne, 1997; Lahman & Richard, 2014). Such forms of expression are, of course, age-old, and indigenous scholars, elders, and artists have always known the power of poetic expressions of knowledge; although these are rarely valued in academic texts. One age-old poetic strategy being

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increasingly used is that of Ekphrasis, traditionally a Greek practice of transforming visual art into verbal forms (Craven, 2018). Ekphrasis engages scholars to write poetic responses to an aesthetic form through interpretive practices (Bruhn, 2000; Craven, 2018; MaddisonMacFayden, 2013). Prendergast (2004) defnes Ekphrasis as a method to “draw out or make clear” (p. 3). Ekphrasis in research can be used as a poetic interplay between visual, textual, and performative works (see Fitzpatrick, E. M., 2015a; and Schoone, Reilly, Losefo, Faulkner, and Burford in Fitzpatrick & Reilly, 2019, pp. 420–438). The poet explores the artwork poetically and provides a response to refect deeper meaning. There are many excellent texts that give an in-depth exploration of the history and method of poetic inquiry, for example, see Vincent (2018), Sandra Faulkner (2009, 2017), and Kathleen Galvin and Monica Prendergast (2012, 2015). Faulkner (2017) provides a thoughtful synthesis of current literature on Poetic Inquiry as/in/for Social Research. Therein she draws on key scholar poets to articulate some of the signifcant work on poetic inquiry. The poem below uses the method of found poetry to provide, in essence, a summary of Faulkner’s chapter and to highlight her argument that “[t]he power of poetic inquiry can be realized if we ride the dialectic between aesthetic and epistemic concerns”. The writing of the poem attends to Laurel Richardson’s (1994) ‘writing as a method of inquiry’ to play with the words/phrases with font, italics, bolding, tabbing to create space, to create a visually evocative poem. Poetry can be both political and pedagogical. It is utilized in research in a variety of ways to enhance, critique, analyze, and express diferent voices in qualitative research projects. A pioneer of this method, Laurel Richardson (1993), described research poetry as a “practical and powerful means for reconstitution of worlds … a way out of the numbing and deadening, disafective, disembodied, schizoid sensibilities characteristic of phallocentric social science” (p. 705). Reinertsen, Ben-Horin, and Borgenvik (2014) argue, “[a] focus on poetics … makes both research and conversations less preoccupied with certain activities and more directed toward principles, dilemmas, paradoxes, and possibilities” (p. 476). Poetry can be employed in multiple ways throughout a project, or as the sole method of inquiry. It can serve a range of purposes in a study, and consequentially become embedded in nearly all phases of the research process (Furman et al., 2006). It has been employed as the overarching research methodology, as an analytic tool, as a method of inquiry, and as a way to represent data and connect with audiences. This work is often solo, but can be collaborative (e.g. see Faulkner 2018; Fitzpatrick & Fitzpatrick, 2014, 2015). While writers employ a range of labels for this work, Faulkner (2009) argues that the term ‘research poetry’ includes a diversity of applications and modes of inquiry. Sparkes and Smith (2014) note that poetic expression has several purposes, including honouring and highlighting the rhythms of speech, touching “both the cognitive and the sensory” (p. 162) and providing a diferent lens with

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which to view the world. Faulkner (2009), likewise, contends that research poetry can achieve a range of ends, including evoking emotion, condensing data, communicating cultural nuance, and compelling the reader. Poetry can also enable researchers to be more refexive, to acknowledge their own subjectivities, and to write themselves into the text (Brkich & Barko, 2013). In relation to impact, Sparkes and Smith (2014) argue that “people respond diferently to poetry than they do to prose” (p. 162) and poetry, indeed, evokes embodied responses, which Faulkner observes is “about showing, not telling, our (in)humanity and all of its mysteries” (2016, p. 222). Rinehart (2012) argues research poetry encourages one to “creatively apply their own imagination and memory to profound problems that both touch on and are implicit within [a study]” (p. 197). Writing poetry enables the researcher to “interrogate the self, within the social and political” (Fitzpatrick, K., 2012). As Leavy (2010, p. 243) contends, many researchers in the “ivory tower” look to create an embodied more just approach: for ivory is cold so I carved myself a poetic path Poetic inquirers are thus scholars who employ poetry and poetic techniques to construct, analyze, and/or represent research fndings (ButlerKisber, 2010; Prendergast, Leggo, & Sameshima, 2009; Thomas, Cole, & Stewart, 2012; Yallop, Wiebe, & Faulkner, 2014). So, why does poetry matter in educational research?

Poetic representation and education research As evident from the above discussion, poetry is increasingly being taken up in the feld of qualitative research, and many scholars writing in this feld work in education. It is important to note that (almost) all of these scholars are also teachers; at the very least, they are engaging in educational contexts within their universities. Poetry matters for education because it teaches us to attend to aesthetic knowledges; it disrupts the usual prose-laden academic voice, and it introduces emotion into academic writing. Glesne (2010) notes that poetic sensibility can be a way of listening: Poets listen carefully to what is said and how it is said – to rhythms, refrains, and internal rhymes. They hear spaces between the words, pick up on words unsaid, and fnd meanings beneath the words. With such a mindset, poetry appears every-where. (p. 51) Poetry is unapologetically emotive and evocative. It speaks to what is at the heart of education: connections between people, places, and things. Poetry surprises and engages, and it can enable learning and spark curiosity. T. S. Eliot (1957)

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argues that the purpose of poetry is, in part, to give pleasure. He also asserts that poetry functions to extend speech, comment on, and refect culture; to communicate emotion and knowledge; and to challenge and critique. These are all central to educational endeavours. Using poetry then to communicate educational research necessarily extends the registers of research communication; it enables academics to reach diferent audiences, to say diferent kinds of things, and to express ideas and emotional landscapes in ways that academic prose cannot. The chapters in this book draw on the scholarship of poetic inquiry and exemplify it as a signifcant method for educational research. The authors each explain how they use poetic inquiry as a method in educational research, and they discuss poetry as a way to grapple with and understand educational issues. They argue for poetry as both indigenous and decolonising methodology, and they demonstrate that poetic inquiry can align with critical pedagogical research. In Section I, each chapter speaks to ‘Poetry and poetic methodologies’ and authors provide a theoretical and personal interrogation of poetry as a method in their practice as educators. Lynn Butler-Kisber provides a narrative on the development of ‘Poetic inquiry’ as a research methodology in education. Through narrative, she provides accessible strategies and examples of ‘found poetry’, ‘generated poetry’, ‘poetry clusters’, and ends with a discussion on ‘rigor and quality issues’. In Chapter 3, Andrew Sparkes discusses ‘Poetic representations, not-quite-poetry and poemish: some methodological refections’. Therein he provides us with an autoethnographic account of fnding his way from ‘proper’ poetry to poetry as a “practical and powerful method for analysing social worlds”. Drawing on his own experiences and those of others in the feld, he provides key strategies for the thinking about and employing poetry as a method. Importantly, he argues that “[t]he possibilities of the poetic are now available to me to be used for certain purposes and in ways that I feel comfortable with as a poemish or not-quite poet”. In ‘Education and/as art: a found poetry suite’, Monica Prendergast posits that metaphor as a method is a key characteristic of thinking poetically and doing poetic inquiry. Through a suite of found poem, she explores the question ‘How has education been conceived as artful over time?’ Robert Rinehart in ‘Sensible poets and the poetic sensibility: mitigating neoliberal/audit culture in education through arts-based research’ argues for poetic sensibilities as a counter to the neoliberal audit culture. “What comprises this ‘poetic sensibility’?” he asks, “It is fundamentally a worldview, a way of viewing and experiencing the world that yearns for novelty, that hungers for metaphors that link disparate elements together in new ways”. In Section II, ‘Poetry, politics, and educational issues’, authors demonstrate their use of poetry as a method to disrupt neoliberalism, as activism, and as critical autoethnography. In ‘Poetry and cancer: six ruminations’ Carl Leggo gifts us a selection of ruminations and poems; we are privileged to hear about

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his life, his love/s, his work as a teacher/poet, and his dreams of one day driving a Spider. He wrote to us while we were pulling this book together: In the spirit of poetry, I have attached a short article that you might want to consider (even perhaps a part of the article) for your book. With bountiful hope. I am delighted that you are happy to receive my words. In September sunlight, I trust poetry will guide me. Carl Leggo, in the midst of struggling with cancer treatment, sent us his heart-warming and critical chapter. In the chapter he remembers that, at the beginning of his career, he described himself as “a poet, scholar, and educator who was enthusiastically committed to creative approaches to research and teaching”. He then noted that: love is saying good-bye to family and friends moving from one ocean to another, new stories In ‘Writing the university through poetry: the pleasure of scholarship against the spike of neoliberalism’ Katie Fitzpatrick uses poetry to interrogate the neoliberal edges of working in the university. She suggests that writing poetically can help us to embrace and explore the pleasure of academic work, while also refocusing scholarship on subversive productivities. Likewise, Sandra Faulkner in ‘My middle-aged rage burns the template in front of the provost’s ofce after the assessment meeting’ writes a poem to speak back to and lament the way universities turn the richness of education into ‘measurable outcomes’. Frank Worrell draws on his own poetry, written across the years, in ‘Community and belonging: an international student’s journey in North America’ to provide a critical autoethnographic tale of a character called Clay, and his journey from student to Professor in the United States. He draws on psychosocial theory to explain the issues and adjustments international students make in their academic trajectories: I am Black in a land where Many Forget that Black, Brown, Red, White, and Yellow are Equivalent members of the human race. Laura Hope-Gill in ‘The munchkin and the medicine man: poetry’s place in a “hard” world’ speaks to the importance of engaging in creative writing. In teaching future physicians, she draws on Keats’ description of his creative process (“poems should come like leaves to a tree”).

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She argues that poetry is the language of change, that poetry softens the language of science. Hope-Gill also suggests “there is a soul to things. This is what poets have long taught us”. In ‘Becoming a frst-time mother as an international graduate student: a poetic ethnography’, Kuo Zhang uses poetry as a method in her ethnographic study to provide an evocative interpretation of the lived experiences of f irst-time international student mothers in the United States. She intends that her poetry should “capture the depth of human experience and create an afective and evocative analysis”. I am non-native to English, just like I am non-native to childbirth, but I say “Oh, my God!!!” when they told me “Push!” In Section III, the chapters focus on ‘Decolonising education and indigenous poetry’. This section begins with the visual poetic work of Kakali Bhattacharya ‘Cultivating resonant images through poetic meditation: a de/colonial approach to educational research’. Bhattacharya invites the reader to engage in her dialogue with Indian poet Sharanya Manivannan as she traces her decolonial/colonial journey in educational research. She argues that “poetry as a method and meditation to disrupt colonial agendas in educational research is an area that warrants attention”. In ‘Making the invisible visible: poetic explorations of a cross-cultural researcher’, Pauline Adams explores her sense of place as an educational researcher at the cross-cultural intersections of her M ā ori (indigenous) and P ā keh ā (settler) worlds. Her autoethnographic research poems express her experiences of “being both seen and unseen and explore the dichotomy of belonging and un-belonging”. Adams argues that as a “M āori researcher, poetry as methodology encourages me to re-engage with traditional expressions of knowledge in an academic space”. Virginia Tamanui and Esther Fitzpatrick in ‘The tukutuku panel is never bare: weaving bicultural relationships through poetic performances’ engage in a poetic conversation to speak to bicultural performances in education. Drawing on the metaphor of a ‘tukutuku’ weaver’s panel, they demonstrate the weaving of words, sitting opposite each other “To story a friendship of becoming. Haunted by the past”. In ‘Traversing Pacifc identities in Aotearoa/New Zealand: blood, ink, lives’, Jacoba Matapo and Jean Allen use poetry to explore their experiences of identity negotiations as indigenous Pacifc people living in New Zealand. In keeping with this negotiation, they engage in Pacifc methodologies of talanoa and tauhi vā , and with poetry as an expressive and embodied act. In Section IV, ‘Poetry and critical pedagogical research’, we begin with New Zealand poet laureate and academic, Selina Tusitala Marsh. Her poem,

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‘Why I use a poem in every single classroom’, provides a range of diferent metaphors to argue for the importance of poetry in educational work: A poem is a galaxy infnitely interpretable from every vantage point as we asteroid along its lines. In ‘Re/turning the world into poetry [an alternative education portfolio]’, Adrian Schoone stories his use of poetry as a method to engage with disenfranchised young people. He argues that “[r]e/turning the world into poetry is a hopeful act for transformation”. His engagement with ‘voices’ related to alternative education is presented through a portfolio of poems. In chapter ‘Creasing and folding language in dance education research’, Alys Longley illustrates how creative practices can initiate idiosyncratic forms of writing. As a dance educator, Alys argues that “[t]hrough poetry, I can move beyond explanatory, descriptive accounts of research to develop writing that opens up room for considering sense, space, force and world in the scale (from the glimpse of a moment to the frame of a generation) most suited to the work”. She observes: as the small bones in your walking feet tell stories to each other of great trust and enormous smallness Shelley Tracey works with teachers to explore their understanding of creativity and their creative identities in ‘Poetry drops a plumbline into meaning: fndings from an inquiry into teacher creativity’. This research was a response to curriculum changes requiring teachers to teach creativity and creative thinking. Tracey uses poetry throughout the inquiry to refect and make sense of the project and she notes that “the process of writing the research poems revealed an awareness of the complexity of teacher creativity”. María Esperanza Rock Núñez investigates children’s memories perspectives of local history in a mining town in ‘Memory, poetry, art, and children: understanding the past from the present’. Poetry writing as a method was employed as a method for social investigation and she argues that “to ask a child about memory, history, or a particular event, is really to observe from the present a past that is already settling in society”. We ofer this book then as a kind of collective poetic artefact. We hope it demonstrates the diversity and power of using poetic forms to connect with and articulate educational research of all kinds. We end here with a poetic homage to poetic inquiry. This poem uses the method of found poetry to provide, in essence, a summary of Faulkner’s (2017) chapter and to highlight her argument that “[t]he power of poetic inquiry can be realized if we ride the dialectic between aesthetic and epistemic concerns”.

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She draws here on key scholar poets to articulate some of the signifcant work on poetic inquiry and provides a thoughtful synthesis of current literature. The ideas presented in the found poem are signifcant to our work as poets in educational research. The writing of this poem also attends to Laurel Richardson’s (1994) ‘writing as a method of inquiry’ by playing with words and phrases, with font, italics bolding, and tabbing to create space, to create a visually evocative poem. Poetic inquiry via Sandra Faulkner (2017) Sandra provides a guide (p. 208) to poetic inquiry arguing although tricky to defne, provides a strategy for researchers through Its slipperiness and ambiguity, Its precision and distinctiveness (pp. 209–210). Poetic Inquiry requires “improvisation not recitation” where Carl Leggo (2008b) muses poetry “creates or makes the world in words” (pp. 166–167). A form of qualitative inquiry and/or A form of arts-based research. Monica Prendergast (2009) gives us 29 ways Of looking at poetic inquiry. A diversity of forms and labels. Yallop, Wieb, and Faulkner (2014, pp. 210–211) ask “What does poetic inquiry mean to you?” • • • •

Becoming a researcher means Reawakening the poet. Finding ways to (re)present data, To analyze and create understanding of Human experiences. Inviting me into the in-between spaces Between creative and critical scholarship. Embodies experience.

Resonant with “ethical research practice” (Denzin, 2014) Poetic inquiry is a refexive method Acknowledging bias and expectations. Can ensure “anonymity” (González, 2002) And “build bridges” to diference (Faulkner, 2009). Monica Prendergast describes the: core mandate for critical poetic inquirers whose work is in support of equity, human rights, and justice worldwide. Critical poetic inquiry invites us to engage as active witnesses within our research sites, as

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witnesses standing beside participants in their search for justice, recognition, healing, a better life. (Prendergast, 2015, p. 683) How to inquire poetically? “Being present and dwelling with” (Walsh, S., 2012, p. 273) understanding “The poet is a human scientist” (Leggo, 2008b, p. 165). “We ground ourselves in poetic language as a way of grounding ourselves in physicality and the connection between mind and body, matter and spirit. Using poetic language allows a poet to articulate human concerns so that they become concrete and immediate”. (Faulkner, 2017, p. 226)

Note 1. This line references and honours the story of Alok Vaid-Menon shared as part of Style Like You’s, ‘The What’s underneath project’. Available on YouTube: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7Gh2n9kPuA&feature=youtu.be

References Brkich, C., & Barko, T. (2013). Fictive reality: Troubling notions of truth and data in Iambic pentameter. Cultural studies – Critical methodologies. 13(4). pp. 246–251. 10.1177/1532708613487869 Bruhn, S. (2000). Musical Ekphrasis: Composers responding to poetry and painting. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press. Butler-Kisber, L. (2010). Qualitative inquiry: Thematic, narrative and art-informed perspectives. London: Sage Cahnmann, M. (2003). The craft, practice and possibility of poetry in educational research. Educational Researcher, 32, 29–36. doi: 10.3102/0013189X032003029. Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Craven, J. (2018). What is ekphrastic poetry? Literature, ThoughtCo. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/ekphrastic-poetry-defnition-examples-417469 Denzin, N. K. (1994). Romancing the text: The qualitative researcher-writer-as-bricoleur. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 122, 15–30. Denzin, N. K. (1999). Two-stepping in the 90s. Qualitative Inquiry, 6, 256–265. Denzin, N. K. (2014). Interpretive autoethnography (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Denzin, N. K., & Giardina, M. D. (Eds.). (2011). Qualitative inquiry and global crises. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press Inc. Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (Eds.). (1994). Handbook of qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (1999). The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3 ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2000). Introduction: The discipline and practice of qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin, & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Retrieved from http://www.sagepub. com/upm-data/17670_Chapter1.pdf

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Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (Eds.). (2011). The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (4 ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage publications. Eliot, T. S. (1957). On poetry and poets. Russell Square, London: Faber and Faber. Faulkner, S. L. (2009). Poetry as method: Reporting research through verse. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press Inc. Faulkner, S. L. (2016). The art of criteria: Ars Criteria as demonstration of vigor in poetic inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry. doi: 10.1177/1077800416634739 Faulkner, S. L. (2017). Poetic Inquiry: Poetry as/in/for Social Research. In P. Leavy (Ed.), The handbook of arts-based research (pp. 208–230).New York: Guilford Press. Faulkner, S. L. (2018). Crank up the feminism: Poetic inquiry as feminist methodology. Humanities, 7(85). doi: 10.3390/h7030085. Finley, S. (2011). Critical arts-based inquiry: The pedagogy and performance of a radical ethical aesthetic. In N. K. Denzin, & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (4 ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Fitzpatrick, E. M. (2015a). It’s a tricky business performing poetry with the ghost. In P. O’Connor & M. Anderson (Eds.), Applied theatre research: Critical departures (pp. 207–225). Sydney, Australia: Methuen Bloomsbury. Fitzpatrick, E. M. (2015b). Learning to live. Journal of Educational Enquiry, 14(1), 49–51. Fitzpatrick, E. M., & Alansari, M. (2018). Creating a warmth against the chill: Poetry for the doctoral body. Art/Research international: A transdisciplinary Journal, 3(1). Fitzpatrick, E. M., & Fitzpatrick, K. (2014). Disturbing the divide: Poetry as improvisation to disorder power relationships in research supervision. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(1), 50–58. doi: 10.1177/1077800414542692. Fitzpatrick, E. M., & Reilly, R. C. (2019). Making as method: Reimagining traditional indigenous notions of “craft” in research practice [Special Issue]. Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, 4(1), 420–438. Fitzpatrick, E. M., Worrell, F., Alansari, M., & Lee, A. (2017). Let us dance [Special issue] Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies. Fitzpatrick, K. (2012). “That’s how the light gets in”: Poetry, self, and representation in ethnographic research. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 12(8), 8–14. 10.1177/1532708611430479. Fitzpatrick, K. (2017). Poetry, poiesis and physical culture. In M. Silk, D. Andrews, & H. Thorpe (Eds.), Routledge handbook of physical cultural studies (pp. 515–527). London: Routledge. Fitzpatrick, K. (2018a). Gender, body, poetry. The Ethnographic Edge, 2(1). Fitzpatrick, K. (2018b). Poetry in motion: In search of the poetic in health and physical education. Sport, Education and Society, 23(2), 123–134. Fitzpatrick, K., & Fitzpatrick, E. (2015). ‘Since feeling is frst’: poetry and research supervision. Global South Ethnographies: Minding the Senses (pp. 59–70). Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense Furman, R., Lietz, C., & Langer, C. (2006). The research poem in international social work: Innovations in qualitative methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 5(3), 1–8. Galvin, K., & Prendergast, M. (Eds.). 2012). Poetic inquiry [Special issue]. Creative Approaches to Research, 5(2). Galvin, K. T., & Prendergast, M. (Eds.). (2015). Poetic inquiry II: Seeing, caring, understanding: Using poetry as and for inquiry. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense. Gauntlett, D., & Holzwarth, P. (2006). Creative and visual methods for exploring identities. Visual Studies, 21(1), 82–91. doi: 10.1080/14725860600613261.

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Glesne, C. (1997). That rare feeling: Re-presenting research through poetic transcription. Qualitative Inquiry, 3(2), 202–221. Glesne, C. (2010). Disappearing into another’s words through poetry in research and education. LEARNing Landscapes, 4(1), 29–37. González, M. C. (2002). Painting the white face red: Intercultural contact through poetic ethnography. In J. N. Martin, T. K. Nakayama, & L. A. Flores (Eds.), Readings in intercultural communication: Experiences and contexts (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill. Guiney Yallop, J. J., Wiebe, S., & Faulkner, S. L. (2014). Poetic Inquiry in/for/as [editorial for special issue on the practices of poetic inquiry]. Education, 20(2), 1–11. Retrieved from http://ineducation.ca/ineducation/issue/view/21 Lahman, M. K. E., & Richard, V. M. (2014). Appropriated poetry: Archival poetry in research. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(3), 344–355. doi: 10.1177/1077800413489272. Leavy, P. (2010). A/r/t? A poetic montage. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(4), 240–243. Leavy, P. (2016). Fiction as a transformative tool. Commentary. LEARNing landscapes, 9(2). Retrieved from http://ojs.learnquebec.ca/index.php/learnland/article/view/761 Leggo, C. (2008a). The ecology of personal and professional experience: A poet’s view. In M. Cahnmann-Taylor & R. Siegesmund (Eds.), Arts-based research in education: Foundations for practice (pp. 87–97). New York: Routledge. Leggo, C. (2008b). Astonishing silence: Knowing in poetry. In G. J. Knowles & A. L. Cole (Eds.), Handbook of the arts in qualitative research: Perspectives, methodologies, examples, and issues (pp. 165–174). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Leggo, C. (2018). Advice for Living the Quotidian. Maddison-MacFayden, M. (2013). This white women has journeyed far: Serendipity, counterstories, hauntings, and Ekphrasis as a type of poetic inquiry. Morning Watch Journal of Educational and Social Analysis, Special Edition: Narratives of becoming a researcher, 40, 1–15. Madison, D. S. (2014, November 26–28th). The politics of the performing body across private and public ethnographic spaces. Paper presented at the meeting of Contemporary Ethnography across the Disciplines, Waikato University, Hamilton, New Zealand. Prendergast, M. (2004, July). Ekphrasis and inquiry: Artful writing on arts-based topics in educational research. Paper presented at the meeting of Second International Imagination in Education Research Group Conference, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Retrieved from http://www.ierg.net/pub_conf2004.php Prendergast, M. (2009). “Poem is what?” Poetic inquiry in qualitative social science research. International Review of Qualitative Research, 1(4), 541–568. Prendergast, M. (2015). Poetic inquiry, 2007–2012: A surrender and catch found poem. Qualitative Inquiry. doi: 10.1177/1077800414563806. Prendergast, M., Leggo, C., & Sameshima, P. (Eds.). (2009). Poetic inquiry: Vibrant voices in the social sciences. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense. Reinertsen, A. B., Ben-Horin, O., & Borgenvik, K. (2014). Articlepoem: Poetry and Reality in Research in Poetry and Reality. International Review of Qualitative Research, 7(4), 465–485. https://doi.org/10.1525/irqr.2014.7.4.465 Rich, A. (2003). What is found there: Notes on poetry and politics. London and New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Richardson, L. (1993). Poetics, dramatics and transgressive validity: The case of the skipped line. The sociological Quarterly, 34(4), pp. 695–710. Richardson, L. (1994). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 516–529). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Richardson, L. (1997). Skirting a pleated text: De-disciplining an academic life. Qualitative Inquiry, 3(3), 295–303.

18 Esther Fitzpatrick and Katie Fitzpatrick Richardson, L. (1999). Feathers in our cap. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 28(6), 660–668. Richardson, L. (2001). Getting personal: Writing-stories. Qualitative Studies in Education, 14(1), 33–38. Richardson, L. (2002). Writing sociology. Critical Studies – Critical Methodologies, 2, 414–422. Richardson, L. (2005). Poetic representation. In J. Flood, S. Brice Heath, & D. Lapp (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching literacy through the communicative and visual arts (pp. 232–238). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Richardson, L. (2008). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Collecting and interpreting qualitative materials (pp. 499–541). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rinehart, R. E. (2012). Poetic sensibilities, humanities, and wonder: Toward an e/afective sociology of sport. Quest, 62, 184–201. doi: 10.1080/00336297.2010.10483641. Sparkes, A., & Smith, B. (2014). Qualitative research methods in sport, exercise and health: From process to product. London, UK: Routledge. Spry, T. (2011a). Body, paper, stage: Writing and performing autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast. Spry, T. (2011b). Performative autoethnography: Critical embodiments and possibilities. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage publishers. Thomas, S., Cole, A. L., & Stewart, S. (2012). The art of poetic inquiry. Halifax, NS: Backalong Books. Vincent, A. (2018). Is there a defnition? Ruminating on poetic inquiry, strawberries, and the continued growth of the feld. Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, 3(1). Walsh, S. (2012). Contemplation, Artful Writing: Research With Internationally Educated Female Teachers. Qualitative Inquiry, 18(3), 273–285. https://doi. org/10.1177/1077800411431553 Webster, L., & Mertova, P. (2007). Using narrative inquiry as a research method: An introduction to using critical event narrative analysis in research on learning and teaching. London, UK: Routledge. Wolf, K. (1972). Sociology, phenomenology, and surrender-and-catch. Synthese, On the Methodological Situation in Sociology and other Social Sciences, 24(3/4), 439–471.

Section I

Poetry and poetic methodologies

2

Poetic inquiry Lynn Butler-Kisber

McGill University, Canada

Poetry has forever had the power to attract humankind because of its ability to convey poignancy, musicality, rhythm, mystery, and ambiguity. It appeals to our senses and opens up our hearts and ears to diferent ways of seeing and knowing. Poetry’s work is the clarifcation and magnifcation of being. Each time we enter its word-woven and musical invocation, we give ourselves over to a diferent mode of knowing: to poetry’s knowing, and to the increase of existence it brings, unlike any other. (Hirshfeld, 1997, p. vii) In poetry, so much can be said and revealed in compelling and contracted forms. Poetry concisely registers on the nerves the whole skein of human emotions. It harrows, enthralls, awes, dazzles, confdes … The soul is the depth of our being and poetry is one means of sounding that depth … A poem doesn’t wile away time; it engages our feetingness and makes it articulate. It seizes and shapes time. (Wormser & Cappella, 2000, p. xiii) It is almost certain that poetry predates literacy since many of the ancient works, such as the Odyssey, were written in poetic form. Because of the original prominence of oral cultures and the rhythm and musicality in poetry, it was a way to narrate and memorize cultural stories, and to preserve them by transmitting them through the generations of ancient cultures. The use of poetry in qualitative research is not particularly new. As early as 1982, anthropologist Toni Flores was using poetry in her work, at frst as a form of self-therapy and refexivity to help quell the feelings of doubt she had about living and researching in another culture. Subsequently, she realized that her poems served to “add to one’s observation of the process of observation” and added “a dimension to our study of our own methods, by turning the subject into an object, by turning the observing I into the observed me” (Flores, 1982, p. 18). The use of poetry in qualitative research has taken root across many disciplines that now include, among others, anthropology (McConochie, 1986), leadership (Ayot, 2012), medicine (Carr, 2003; Shapiro & Stein, 2005),

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nursing (Souter, 2005), social work (Furman, Lietz, & Langer, 2006; Shafer, Maxwell, Strauss, & Knopp, 2007), and most particularly education (ButlerKisber, 2002; Butler-Kisber, Guiney Yallop, Stewart, & Wiebe, 2017; Finley, 2000; Glesne, 1997; Guiney Yallop, 2016; Leggo, 2008; Neilsen-Glenn, 2008; Prendergast, 2006; Sullivan, 2004; Thomas, Cole, & Stewart, 2012; Wiebe, 2012). The International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry, which was initiated by Carl Leggo and Monica Prendergast in 2007 at the University of British Columbia, is held every two years and attracts poetic inquirers from diferent disciplines and from all over the world. Since then, this symposium has been held in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Bournemouth, the United Kingdom, Montreal, Quebec, and most recently in Vancouver, British Columbia. Each symposium has resulted in a publication on poetic inquiry and is a wonderful testament to its growth in the last decade. Poetry, however, had its frst real boost in qualitative circles in the early 1990s when sociologist Laurel Richardson used “found” poetry, words extracted from sociological interviews and crafted into poetic form, to depict the poignant stories she heard from her participant (Richardson, 1992). This was at a time when many qualitative researchers, in particular feminists, were grappling with ethical issues of voice and representation in their work (Personal Narratives Group, 1989). They turned to “experimental writing” to retain the voices of their participants and to communicate more evocatively and accessibly. Since then, others have built on this work to counteract the hegemony inherent in more traditional texts, to evoke emotional responses that bring the readers closer to the work, and to permit silenced voices/stories to be heard (Butler-Kisber, 2002). This body of work has demonstrated how form mediates understanding (Eisner, 1991), and that these forms of texts bring new and unexpected insights into the world of everyday experience. Since the early 1980s, poetry in research has been described variously as “feld poetry” (Flores, 1982), “ethnographic poetics” (Brady, 2004), “poetic transcription” (Glesne, 1997; Reissman, 1993), “data poems” (Sullivan, Butler-Kisber, Commeryas, & Stewart, 2002), “autoethnographic poetry” (Furman, 2006), “investigative poetry” (Hartnett, 2003), and “research poetry” (Langer & Furman, 2004; Stein, 2003). Then the terminology changed and, since 2004, has been called most frequently “poetic inquiry” (Butler-Kisber, 2004). Poetry has been used refectively and refexively by researchers in their work, as well as for feld text analyses and/or as representational forms. These various approaches to poetic inquiry have served to bring together, in what has proven to be fertile ground for exchanges and learning, researchers who have discovered the possibilities in poetry and poets who have realized the “research” in their poems. This chapter suggests two ways for framing and thinking about poetic inquiry. These are as “found poetry”, when words are extracted from transcripts and shaped into poetic form, and as “generated”, or more autobiographical poetry, when the researchers use their own words to share understandings

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of their own and/or others’ experiences (Butler-Kisber, 2005b). Found and generated poetry can also be classifed as either narrative, poetry that tells a story, or lyric poetry, the goal of which is to “stress moments of subjective feeling and emotion in a short space” (Faulkner, 2005, p. 6). It should be noted, however, that these are false dichotomies as it is not always easy to specify exactly what is found and what is generated and, as Faulkner points out, narrative and lyric dimensions are often mixed. I am using the terms “found” and “generated” poetry in this chapter as a way of thinking about this work. Examples are included to show how researchers have been able to transform their work into poetic form. The chapter discusses, with examples, how found poetry can be used to portray salience and poignancy, how generated poetry can be used as an efective refexive strategy, and how poetry clusters (Butler-Kisber & Stewart, 2009) around a particular topic or theme can tease out nuances that give greater depth to the work. Finally, it discusses the criticisms of poetic inquiry, issues of quality, and when and where poetic inquiry might/should be used. Suggestions are provided for how researchers who are interested in this genre of research, and do not have literary backgrounds, can develop their ability to do this kind of work.

Found poetry Found poetry is the rearrangement of words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages that are taken from other sources and reframed as poetry by changes in spacing and/or lines (and consequently meaning), or by altering the text by additions and/or deletions. The resulting poem can be defned as “treated” (changed in a profound and systematic manner) or “untreated” (conserving virtually the same order, syntax, and meaning as in the original; see Wikipedia:www.answers.com/topic/found-poem). One of the earliest examples of found poetry was in the work of 19thcentury poet Isidore Ducasse (aka Conte de Lautréamont) entitled Poésies. He appropriated words found in popular texts, encyclopedias, and even in existing poetry and shaped them into poetic form. A forerunner to the Surrealist Movement, he believed that compilations of found words and phrases become more specifc and useful when they represent a collective of multiple voices (Hadlock, 1997). Laurel Richardson is considered to be the frst social scientist to include found poetry as a form of representation in her work by using words and phrases from taped interviews conducted with her participant, Louisa May. Her rationale for her work is that, “poetic representation ofers … researchers an opportunity to write about or with, people in ways that honor their speech styles, words, rhythm and syntax” (Richardson, 2002, p. 880). She suggests that poetic representation is integral to both oral and written traditions and, as such, makes research “fndings” accessible to diverse audiences. As well, it is “a practical and powerful … method for understanding the social, altering

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the self and invigorating the research community that claims knowledge of our lives” (p. 888). Corrine Glesne (1997) built on Richardson’s work. After interviewing an octogenarian professor of education, Dona Juana, from the University of Puerto Rico and beginning her analysis of the taped interviews, Glesne realized that her linear and progressive thematic analysis was not revealing the links and subtleties she saw within her data. She began to move back and forth across the pages of the transcripts underlining salient words and phrases and putting these together in stanzas in a process that she has referred to as “poetic transcription”, mentioned above. She illustrates how she remained close to the feld texts by showing an excerpt from the transcript and underlining the found words she used in the poetry, giving transparency and credibility to her work. Her attention to, and explication of, her process have made her work very helpful to others experimenting with poetic inquiry. Glesne suggests how poetic transcription represents an amalgamation of both the participant’s and the researcher’s voices, rather than the single, authorial voice of the researcher that appears in traditional work. Furthermore, she discusses how the careful and close readings that are part of the process give the researcher new insights about the participant and her experiences. The portrait of Glesne’s participant comes alive in her poetic renditions and provides the reader/listener with a nuanced and multilayered understanding of this fascinating woman and her Puerto Rican context. That rare feeling I am a fying bird moving fast seeing quickly looking with the eyes of god from the tops of trees. How hard for country people picking green worms from felds of tobacco, sending their children to school, not wanting them to sufer as they sufer. In the urban zone, students worked at night and so they slept in school. Teaching was the real university. So I came to study to fnd out how I could help I am busy here at the university, there is so much to do. But the university is not the island.

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I am a fying bird. moving fast, seeing quickly so I can give strength, so I can have that rare feeling of being useful. (Glesne, 1997, pp. 202–203) Susanne Gannon (2003), an Australian scholar, whose work is built on poststructuralism and feminism suggests that poetry “is the art of the stark” (p. 99), which is probably one of the most difcult demands in the process when moving from prose to found poetry. She suggests that, “the poem works best when each of the words that make it work operates in several dimensions at the same time” (p. 99). She shares how she used the feld text produced by a collective of scholars to transform the words into a found poem. Mary was beautiful and exotic and had grown up brothers and memories of life in another country. At school she was a wonder because she was double-jointed. She could bend over backwards to the ground from a standing position and arch her stomach up to make a bridge of her body. She had golden skin, long black frizzy hair, always parted in the middle and plaited down the sides of her head. It was pretty and soft when it was loose. (p. 99) She’s beautiful your friend who speaks with another tongue, of another place, of another world. Her golden skin black eyes black hair always plaited and fattened, but now (for bed) soft and loose and long. Your friend is double-jointed at school she bends over backwards to the ground (your fngers itch to walk along the strong bridge of her body) (Gannon, 2003, pp. 99–100) There is no template or prescribed approach for creating found poetry. Some researchers start with the transcribed interviews and approach the work thematically by categorizing and assigning code names to the categories

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(Butler-Kisber, 2010; Maykut & Morehouse, 1994), and then they choose the most salient words within a particular theme/experience and work with these to recreate the rhythm and speech patterns of the participant. Others (ButlerKisber, 2002; Madison, 1991) use forms of narrative or poetic transcription/ analysis (Mishler, 1992; Reissman, 1993) to maintain and/or pull together the contiguous dimensions as well as the aural aspects of rhythm, pauses, and emphasis of a particular story or experience from the outset, and then work with these feld texts to craft a poem or poems. Melanie Stonebanks, an MA graduate of McGill University, combined both the use of found poetry augmented with some of her own words for an exercise she produced for a class assignment on poetic inquiry. She was using a transcript of an interview I had conducted with Ann and Debbie after they had worked closely together in a graduate class on literacy. The purpose of the interview was to examine their collaborative experience. Subsequently, they gave permission to use this interview as feld text material in my qualitative inquiry course, so that students without material of their own are able to carry out class exercises (see Figure 2.1).

88: I thought, Oh, I’d really like to do it with somebody, but I didn’t know anybody – and Ann was there 96: but we ended being there and I just seized the moment, and I said,Ann would you like to do this with me? 130: but the more I thought about it, and the more I listened to you… 133: whether I asked you frst and just said, Look, do you want to do this together? Would you consider it? And I remember there was a little bit of negotiation already there 147:That was it, because you had already made the ofer. 182: and we started chatting and so on … this is what was the clincher for me – ’ cos I think I was feeling insecure … 189: But even before that, I think we were just … Talking ... talking before class started 196: It was like all of a sudden – Okay then, she’s doing this. I can do this.This will be great fun.And I just relaxed 203: but I think maybe certain afnities. 277: the kind of vibes that are the positive vibes that you got from Debbie … is that she had some direction already? [ ]she wasn’t waiting … 288: It just felt that she was comfortable. 292:You know [ ] comfortable. She wasn’t putting on airs. 296: I felt she was looking for, as much as I was looking for. 298:Yeah.And she felt comfortable – the nicest way of putting it. 302:What kind of role, were there roles, or, or, you know, more static roles? 306: It felt great at the beginning. 378:And you know, there’s two of us! 385: (Ann) Detailed things, and I think it came from all my reading, 398: (Debbie) Oh yeah. It was like a wide-angled lens. 406: (Debbie) I have a very difcult time, to go in really narrow.And I, inevitably I just, I widen out, I widen out and get frustrated at times, Figure 2.1 Excerpts from transcript with words and phrases highlighted. (Reproduced with kind permission from Melanie Stonebanks.)

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421: She wants the essence. (Ann) 429: I think because you can’t talk about the essence if you’re just looking at one particular part of it. (Debbie) 449:That’s an evolution … she’s the synthesizer, and I’m the verbose one. 474:That was when it was difcult. 481:That was hard. 491:Well, there was tension. 496: But you knew it was there. 497:Visible sort of frustration. 540: and we had two sets of writing.Yeah.Very diferent.And it was like, physically, how do we put these together? 572: No, we were still scrambling. 588: But that’s where I really drew on your expertise 614: I said,We have two diferent styles, so HOW do you do this? But it’s not to say than, you know, that either one is wrong.They’re just two diferent styles and how do you put it together? And so, I think what it was, was we were trying to merge … 631: Somehow I’m going to learn how to do this with another person, and do it properly. 637:There’s a complementarity about your styles that seem to work really well, and yet when you go to merge, those diferent styles in the writing, that makes it a little frustrating 644: It’s not a lack of trust 671: Just relax about this … you know 712: I think they were shifting roles. 758: I’m just going back—I, just the roles—I could be the Slasher when it comes to writing … And you could be the Embellisher. 766:There we go, the Embellisher and the Slasher. 771:There are moments when I think I see the humour. 801:We’ve got two choices: we can cry or we can laugh, so we might as well laugh. 808:There was a lot of laughing. 809: I don’t know if you can do collaboration, if you don’t have … humour. 842: How would I defne collaboration? Uh, the frst word that came to mind was trust.You know- out of the blue … And taking a leap of faith, in a way … it’s uh, consuming … and you are always thinking about it.And you want to live up to your part of it.You want to be responsible.You want to show that you can do it too, that you’re contributing, that your part is valuable.You don’t want to let your partner down. 869: Being very open, and willing to share what you have, but also when you say there’s the element of trust, but, there’s also the element of respect. Figure 2.1 (Continued) Excerpts from transcript with words and phrases highlighted.

Melanie became very engaged in the work and outlined her process as follows: • •

Conduct a close reading of the transcript to allow themes to “pop out” and to keep in mind certain elements to muse about while letting the writing possibilities “cook” inside. Pull out the phrases and words that will “breathe life into the poem” highlighting any words that might help to shape the poem (see above).

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•

• • •

Immerse oneself in the world and words of experience and successful attempts of writing poetry. (In this instance she read some poetry by Georgia Heard, Langston Hughes, Eloise Greenfeld, and particularly Naomi Shihab Nye who suggests that poetry hides, in this case, in the transcript. This idea resonated strongly with Melanie.) Combine phrases from the transcript, adding words to help with the fow and rhythm to portray, in this instance, Ann and Debbie’s views on collaboration. Use poetic licence to help to craft the text. Use keywords from the transcript in the title to help give meaning to the poem. (Stonebanks, personal communication, May 2009).

The result of this process was Melanie’s poem about Ann and Debbie’s collaborative experience: Ode to the embellisher and the slasher Collaboration hides in listening, in talking even before you begin. It hides in certain afnities that draw us to one another. It is in the positive vibes that exist without being seen. It doesn’t put on airs. It is simply that feeling of being comfortable. It just feels right. Collaboration hides in the roles we take on. It hides in the carefully considered details found when you go in really narrow. It hides in the wide-angled lens where you widen out, widen out, so far that you get frustrated at times. Collaboration hides in the tension of diference. In the scrambling, the merging, and in the shifting roles. It hides in the complementarity of styles that seem to work really well together. Collaboration hides in the knowledge of choice – to cry or to laugh, humour wins out every time. It hides in the openness of wanting to share, in not only the element of trust but also in that of respect.

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Collaboration hides in the all-consuming need to be responsible and contributing. It hides in never wanting to let your partner down. It hides in the essence. It hides in the evolution. It comes bounding out of the blue and forces you to take a leap of faith. (Melanie Stonebanks, 2009) Glesne, Gannon, and Stonebanks recognized the “occasions for poetry” (Sullivan, 2009) in the feld texts with which they were working. Not all transcripts lend themselves to found poetry. When they do not, the results can appear fat and contrived. This does not mean that researchers should shy away from working poetically. The insights and new perspectives that can be gained from just working with this genre without “going public” are worth it. Audio or videotaped interviews, because they closely approximate everyday conversation, and preserve the auditory and/or visual aspects of the exchanges, work best. Observational feld texts, particularly if videotaped, where sights and sounds of language and gesture can be revisited, also lend themselves to poetic form (Butler-Kisber, 2001). A close and ethical researcher/participant relationship most often produces the richness and poignancy in what is conveyed in interviews. Then it is the delicate convergence of what emerges because of this relationship, and the creativity and sense of craft that is brought to the work, that give resonance, appeal, and usefulness to this type of inquiry. There are other researchers who have created found poetry from existing texts, rather than transcripts. For example, Monica Prendergast (2006) appropriated words from the literature that she was examining for her dissertation to represent a literature review of aesthetic philosophy and performance theory in order to derive understandings about the role of audience in performance. She rationalized her work based on the long history that exists among poets who have used found poetry in their work, and her desire to express her “own view of the thoughts and words of others through the re-creation of their texts” (p. 372). Anne Sullivan (2000) has used a similar approach to succinctly and saliently portray Dewey’s poignant messages about the importance of art in education and society. More recently, Janine Metallic (2017) combined qualitative and Indigenous methodologies in her study of young adults in her Mi’qmag community who were learning their heritage language. From her interview transcripts she created found poems to share poignantly what it means to be part of a generation that has lost its language. These forms of poetic writing, used to summarize and represent salient ideas taken from longer texts, ofer interesting possibilities for both research and curriculum across disciplines.

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Generated poetry Generated poetry, as mentioned earlier, is when researchers use their own words to describe an interpretation discovered in research with others (Furman et al., 2006), or write autobiographically about personal experiences that may be “metaphorically generalizable” (Stein, 2003) because the work “may speak about one” but also, “speaks to many” (Furman, 2006, p. 35). Percer (2002) has discussed how difcult it is to make this process transparent, even when asking seasoned poets to elaborate. She concludes that it is “impossible to separate poetic language and form from an understanding of the phenomena” (p. 3). And perhaps it is not even desirable or advisable to try. Yet, it is difcult in the research world to ignore clarifcation and explication even in these current times when arts-based inquiry, in this instance, poetic inquiry, is embraced much more fully than it was two decades ago. Moreover, for novice researchers wishing to experiment and explore, or more seasoned ones venturing into poetic inquiry, some sort of scafolding can be helpful. I have described elsewhere (Butler-Kisber, 2005b) how I have found it helpful to reimagine a pivotal memory or event as vividly as possible, recalling the visual and auditory context, and then to brainstorm a series of words, phrases, and metaphors that become the kernels for a poem. In summary, this “visualizing process” for poetic portrayals is as follows: • • • • • • • •

Identify an event/experience or phenomenon on which to focus. Picture the context(s). Use the “mind’s eye” almost like a camera to scan the context from diferent vantage points noting sensory details, zooming in to visualize specifcs, and to “hear” the auditory details. Brainstorm and record concrete and evocative words or phrases and/or metaphors. Begin arranging the words in poetic form, going back and forth to the mental images and sounds to experiment with “exact” word(s) to express the salience of the event/experience or phenomenon. Add and subtract words and phrases and play with rhythms, line breaks, pauses, and syntax to bring the memory to life. Read aloud to fne-tune. Revisit the piece as needed after putting it aside. (Butler-Kisber, 2005b, p. 105).

Charlotte Hussey, a poet, researcher, and colleague, “free writes” in her journal daily and then “nuggets” words and phrases, choosing those that are concrete, vivid, salient, and poignant. She repeats this process until a direction or theme emerges, and then she shapes these nuggets into poetic lines and stanzas. In her workshops she emphasizes short, free-writing “sprints” using diferent kinds of elicitations such as a memory, a story,

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a photograph, or another poem. The process of doing a sprint consists of the following steps: • • • • • • •

Brainstorm with your neighbour about some interesting images of your childhood or adolescence. Make a list of these. Pick one image and free write about it for two minutes, non-stop. Punctuation is not necessary. Read through it and mark passages, phrases, and words that seem energized and compelling. Refect upon the image and free write about your emotions – how you felt. Read through it and mark passages. Copy those nuggets onto a fresh page. (Hussey, personal communication, January 1999).

Hussey fnds it helpful to direct participants to fold their pages in half before free writing to break up the initial tendency to write discursively, rather than freely (personal communication, January 2000). To illuminate her poetic research process in her dissertation, Hussey (1999) used a number of heuristic devices, like the free writing described above. Heuristic devices are deliberate techniques that help to structure and shape thought processes (Hussey, 1999). A heuristic device does not supply a recipe or a step-by-step model for a particular process. Rather, it serves as a “scafold” to help the writer fnd material that is fled away in memory, suggest new material that can be obtained through reading and/or observation, and to help order whatever is being generated by the writer (Hussey, 1999). One such heuristic device that Hussey used was an epistolary format composed of letters and generated poems that she exchanged with her imaginary poet muse and other letters directed to her dissertation committee. This letter-writing format enabled Hussey to communicate with an audience and express her thoughts about her work as it unfolded. It got her reading and communicating with her muse about these readings, and imagining and composing her muse’s reply. Hussey explained that, “not unlike a two-voiced response journal, it helped me sift through texts to glean out their essentials” (p. 361). The third form of letter writing that she employed was entitled “Dear Reader”, in which she used expository writing to communicate “a close reading of my own composing procedures” (p. 362) to her committee. Moving back and forth across her exchanges with her muse, her explanatory letters to her committee, and the creation of poetry that marked her journey, resulted in a very artful, compelling, and transparent portrayal of the complexities of her poetic inquiry process. While working regularly with Charlotte Hussey in a poetry workshop, Mary Stewart turned to generated poetry (Butler-Kisber & Stewart, 2009). An example emerged in a poetry exercise that used photographs as an elicitation/heuristic device. Participants brought photographs to the workshop and shared with each other why these pictures held signifcance. The poetry

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writing process was facilitated by a heuristic strategy outlined by Hussey (1999) in her dissertation which suggests that the writer should “narrate the photograph” as follows: • • • •

Speak the poem as the photographer. Speak the poem as someone or something in the photograph addressing the photographer. Address the poem to someone you know who has not seen the photograph. Address the poem to someone in the photograph. Address the poem to the photographer. (pp. 50–51)

Furthermore, Hussey (1999) suggests a heuristic device for “hatching the words” (p. 127) ultimately used in a poem as follows: • •

• • • •

Circle the keywords of a given text. Free write about these keywords and any others as well. Start this writing of by answering the following questions about each word: (1) What does this word have to do with my past? (2) With my present? (3) With my future? and (4) What strong emotions does it express? What would someone real or imagined, dead or alive, have to say about this word? Quickly write ten metaphors for your word. Go to the thesaurus and look up your word, and free write phrases that come quickly to mind as you scan the word lists of which your word is a part. Now from all these verbal broodings, start nuggeting, or extracting, the authentic, energized bits and see if you can make a poem, or add a metaphor, a vivid memory or vignette … (p. 127)

With these devices in mind, Mary’s poem was generated from a picture of herself with her father who had passed away a few years before. Her free writing and subsequent nuggeting took her back to the last few days of her father’s life and the poignant and mixed emotions these memories held for her. The result was the following: Putting my father down Propped up in the velvet wing chair in my parents’ bedroom my father looks like a fevered child waiting in the principal’s ofce to be taken home. Quietly, knowing my role I slink to the basement and make the call.

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Bring him in I am told his numbers are way of. As if luring a puppy into a cage I ofer half truths and help him pack the old razor, the one that won’t get stolen, into his soft-sided luggage next to seven hundred pages of Serum and crosswords. He jokes about the cute nurses at the General And I, laughing, follow his shortcuts there. (Mary Stewart, 2001) Poetry, like any art, requires practice … But since we consider ourselves fuent in language, we may imagine that talent is the only requirement for writing poetry. Talent certainly is essential, but so are curiosity, determination and the willingness to learn from others … most poets would argue … that the aspiring poet must apprentice, … must master the elements of language, the complexities of form and its relation to the subject, the feel of the line, the image, the play of sound, that make it possible to respond in a voice with subtlety and range when he hears that music in his inner ear, or she sees in the world that image that’s the spark of a poem. (Behn & Twichell, 1992, p. xi) Found poetry can be restricting because the researcher tries to adhere closely to the words that are present in the feld texts. In fact, in instances when researchers deviate slightly from the found words, there are those that feel it is important to acknowledge the degree of liberty that they have taken with the found words (Glesne, 1997). The restrictions that result from using found words can be alleviated somewhat by conducting interviews that elicit metaphors and imagery which enrich the language of the responses (Richardson, 2000). On the other hand, using found words can be somewhat reassuring. The researcher does not feel the pressure of fnding the perfect word and/or phrases to convey a specifc thought. The fip side of this is that while generated poetry is very open and liberating, the onus is on the writer to fnd that special mix of words to make the work compelling. What remains elusive in poetic inquiry, as with any kind of creative process, is the ability to really demonstrate how the poet moves from thoughts, images, and sensations to

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the actual shaping of the words on the page. This creative process, to some extent, will always remain impervious to an articulation that is largely intuitive and individualistic. To add to our knowledge about poetic inquiry specifcally and in qualitative inquiry generally, however, it is imperative that we try to fnd ways to share our processes with each other.

Poetry clusters The online Merriam-Webster Dictionary defnes cluster as “a number of similar things that occur together”. I/we have suggested elsewhere (Butler-Kisber, 2001, 2005b; Butler-Kisber & Stewart, 2009) that a themed “cluster” of poems, or a “series” of poems (Richardson, 2000, p. 881), is a powerful and compelling way of getting a prism-like rendition of the subtle variations of a phenomenon, while at the same time giving a more holistic understanding of it. Clusters produce the particular and the general simultaneously and help to show the tentativeness of individual interpretations. Poetry clusters are not new. There are many well-known poetry collections that are created around a particular theme, and much of the poetry from antiquity retained constant, thematic threads while being performed orally with improvisation by diferent performers over time. In qualitative inquiry, poetry clusters can be created as found poetry (Myer, 2008; Wells, 2004) or as generated poetry (Butler-Kisber & Stewart, 2009). I would suggest that, for example, Stewart’s poem above, when clustered with the following poems, all on the topic of death, show the cycle of life, the irony of death, the interconnectedness between life and death, the everyday nature of death, and a reluctance to face it. Clusters give nuances that are not apparent in a single poem. They provide a “closer reading” of the topic while, at the same time, a more “general” one. Walking my mother Like a large insect moving toward its prey the chair rolled steadily through the bland corridor only her small silver head peeked above the handles hard between my hands. Careening thoughts resounded noisily love, sorrow fragility, fnality questions … She said, “I used to push you.” We laughed at life’s irony. (Butler-Kisber, 2005)

Poetic inquiry

Fani You sat diminished breathless on the couch. The cough a ripple that interrupted erupted wracking every sinew. Your luminous gaze chided my inner thoughts bathed me in warmth. Gently, you said, “I thought I would be one of those miracles, I won’t.” Like giving birth taking death is slow an arduous argument between spirit and body. (Butler-Kisber, 2008) Mayo in spring You strode to check-in your navy trench fowing framing your crisp white shirt and tie A handsome fgure as always just a paler version. The engines roared yet, the silence between us screamed louder. You spoke about kids and work mundane niceties among those who have lots of time. My heart leaped When you slipped in quietly, I wish I travelled more. The gowned fgure returned after an eternity in unforgiving chairs against stark walls. It’s stage 3B reverberated like a gavel a life-short sentence.

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A springtime later behind billowing, antiseptic curtains getting to brass tacks we traded vows. I ofered, I thought we would grow old together in rocking chairs. (Butler-Kisber, 2017)

Rigor and quality issues in poetic inquiry The 1990s marked a change in how qualitative research was received and evaluated. The huge increase in narrative work and the burgeoning interest in artsbased inquiry necessitated thinking and talking diferently about qualitative studies. Early on, Lincoln (1995) reiterated what had been part of the feminist research agenda for some time. She defned this “new paradigm” as one that embraced the need for ethical and deep relationships between researchers and participants, one that committed to research activity that would engender change and make participant lives better, and that would be oriented to social justice and equity for all. She suggested that these new commitments in research necessitated new standards for research writing that demonstrate the positionality of the researcher, the reciprocity between researchers and participants, the refexivity in the work, and the inclusion of voices, particularly those that are typically marginalized or silenced. As mentioned in this chapter, the increasing acceptance of arts-based inquiry, the quantitative language that had dominated questions about qualitative rigor in terms of validity and generalizability were increasingly replaced by notions of trustworthiness, persuasiveness, and credibility (Reissman, 1993) and belief in the value of the particular (Donmoyer, 1990). These have become very accepted ways of talking about qualitative inquiry. When these new forms of writing increased and moved from prose to other forms of writing, such as poetry, discussions about the quality of the art form and who should write poetry became a hot topic. The polarized versions of this discussion were equally unsettling. Should there be researcher poets, or only poet researchers who engage in this kind of work? The former had the potential of hampering the progress of arts-based work when representations lack aesthetic qualities. The latter smacks of elitism and formalist notions of art that many have tried to counter (Butler-Kisber, Yi, Clandinin, with Markus, 2007). Works by Richardson and Finley have been helpful. Richardson (2000) has suggested, in general, that good qualitative research and/or work that includes arts-based representations should “contribute to our understanding of social life … succeed aesthetically” and include “… refexivity … [have] impact [and] express a reality” (p. 254). Finley (2000) has acknowledged that she is not overly interested in the qualities of “craftsmanship, artistry, and expertism” (p. 294), but rather in whether

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the research has utility to the community. Furthermore, she suggests that meritorious work must clearly include participant voices and show a caring and ethical relationship with the participants. In addition, it should experiment with form, create an open space for subsequent dialogue, induce questions rather than answers, demonstrate passion, and move others to action. Others have written more specifcally about how to discern quality in poetic inquiry (Faulkner, 2007; Piirto, 2002). Perhaps the most helpful attempt has been by Sullivan (2009). As a poet frst, who then came to qualitative inquiry, she talks about the “occasions for poetry” (p. 3) as mentioned earlier. She suggests that, when summed, these occasions provide the architectural dimensions of a poem. One of these is concreteness that brings the image to life and provides the reader/listener with a sensory and embodied experience. Another is emotion. Descriptions, memories, and experiences that evoke emotion contribute to the aesthetic quality of poems. Still another quality of poetry is the presence of “ambiguity, open-endedness, paradox, mysteries, unresolved complexity …” (p. 13). Sullivan suggests, too, that poems must have an “associative logic” or “a set of complex principles related to web-like relations” (p. 14) that provides a coherence that is diferent from that found in linear texts. Finally, she discusses how the associative logic found in poetry comes from a “nexus of tensions” (p. 18) that are integral to the logic. Her work has provided a way of talking about the aesthetic elements of the craft that should be particularly useful to researchers creating poetry. A compilation of the qualities suggested by Lincoln, Richardson, Finley, and Sullivan should be helpful to both the researchers and those assessing this type of work.

Concluding remarks My use of the term “poetic inquiry” to describe the various approaches and occasions for poetry in qualitative research is not an accident. I introduced this term (Butler-Kisber, 2004) just after I began my frst forage into found poetry (Butler-Kisber, 2002, 2016) and I realized that engaging in poetic inquiry encompasses a form of work that includes much more than “experimental” writing through the production of poetry from feld texts or generated from personal experiences; it is an artful way of being a researcher. This means developing research questions and programs that have utility and social consciousness. It means living an ethic of care that includes sensitivity and refexivity. In addition, it requires attending carefully to people, places, events, and contexts, engaging in the pursuit of an aesthetic craft, and sharing our processes and supporting the work of others in interest of the greater good.

Suggested readings 1. Barone, T., & Eisner, E. W. (2012). Arts-based research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. An extremely helpful overview of arts-based inquiry with examples, including its history, a rationale for its claim to be research, ethical and political dimensions of the work, and criteria for assessing its rigor.

38 Lynn Butler-Kisber 2. Sashemina, P., Fidyk, J. K., & Leggo, C. (in press). Poetic inquiry: Enchantment of place. Wilmington, DE: Vernon. An excellent overview of process and product of researchers who are committed to using poetic inquiry and emanate from difering felds and geographical locations. 3. Butler-Kisber, L. (2016). Defnes arts-based research. Sage Research Methods Video. Retrieved from http://methods.sagepub.com/video Butler-Kisber, L. (2016). Defnes poetic inquiry. Sage Research Methods Video. Retrieved from http://methods.sagepub.com/video Two videos on arts-based research with a particular emphasis on poetic inquiry.

Acknowledgement This chapter is reprinted with permission: Butler-Kisber, L. Qualitative Inquiry: Thematic, Narrative and Arts-Based Perspectives, 2nd Ed., pp. 95–113. Copyright © 2018 by Lynn Butler-Kisber. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications, Ltd.

References Ayot, W. (2012). E-mail from the soul. Glastonbury, UK: Avalon. Behn, R., & Twichell, C. (Eds.). (1992). The practice of poetry. New York: Harper Collins. Butler-Kisber, L. (2001). Whispering angels: Revisiting dissertation data with a new lens. Journal of Critical Inquiry into Curriculum and Instruction, 2(3), 34–37. Butler-Kisber, L. (2002). Artful portrayals in qualitative inquiry: The road to found poetry and beyond. The Alberta Journal of Educational Research, XLVIII(3), 229–239. Butler-Kisber, L. (2004). Poetic inquiry. In L. Butler-Kisber & A. Sullivan, A. (Eds.), Poetic inquiry in qualitative research [Special Issue]. Journal of Critical Inquiry into Curriculum and Instruction, 5(1), 1–4. Butler-Kisber, L. (2005a). The potential of artful analysis in qualitative inquiry. In F. Bodone (Ed.), What diference does research make and for whom? (pp. 203–217). New York: Peter Lang. Butler-Kisber, L. (2005b). Arts-based qualitative research and self-study: A poetic approach. In K. O’Reilly-Scanlon, C. Mitchell, & S. Weber (Eds.), Just who do we think we are? Methodologies for self-study in teacher education (pp. 95–110). New York, NY: RoutledgeFalmer. Butler-Kisber, L. (2010). Qualitative inquiry: Thematic, narrative and art-informed perspectives. London: Sage. Butler-Kisber, L. (2016). Permission: A nodal moment in poetic inquiry. In J. White (Ed.), Permission in the academy: A study of the infuence of Laurel Richardson in contemporary qualitative inquiry. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense. Butler-Kisber, L., Guiney Yallop, J., Stewart, M., & Wiebe, S. (Eds.) (2017). Poetic inquiries of refection and renewal. Lunenburg, NS: MacIntyre Purcell. Butler-Kisber, L., Li, Y., Clandinin, J., with Markus, P. (2007). Narrative as artful curriculum making. In L. Bressler (Ed.), International handbook on research in arts education (pp. 219–233). Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer. Butler-Kisber, L., & Stewart, M. (2009). The use of poetry clusters in poetic inquiry. Poetic inquiry: Vibrant voices in the social sciences. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense. Carr, J. M. (2003). Poetic expressions of vigilance. Qualitative Health Research, 13(9), 1324–1331. Donmoyer, R. (1990). Generalizability and the single case study. In E. W. Eisner & A. Peshkin (Eds.), Qualitative inquiry in education (pp. 175–200). New York: Teachers College Press.

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Eisner, E. W. (1991). The enlightened eye: Qualitative inquiry and the enhancement of educational practice. New York: Macmillan. Faulkner, S. L. (2005). How do you know a good poem? Poetic re-presentation and the case for criteria. Paper presented at the 1st International Conference of Qualitative Inquiry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (May). Faulkner, S. L. (2007). Concern with craft. Qualitative inquiry, 13(2), 218–234. Finley, S. (2000). ‘Dream child’: The role of poetic dialogue in homeless research. Qualitative Inquiry, 6(3), 432–434. Flores, T. (1982). Field poetry. Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly, 7(1), 16–22. Furman, R. (2006). Autoethnographic poems and narrative refections: A qualitative study on the death of a companion animal. Journal of Family Social Work, 9(4), 23–38. Furman, R., Lietz, C., & Langer, C. L. (2006). The research poem in international social work. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 5(3), 24–34. Gannon, S. M. (2003). Poststructural theory and writing research (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia. Glesne, C. (1997). That rare feeling: Re-presenting research through poetic transcription. Qualitative Inquiry, 3(2), 202–221. Guiney Yallop, J. J. (2016). OUT of place. Victoria, BC: Friesen Press. Hadlock, P. G. (1997). Lautreamont and the poetics of indeterminacy (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Hartnett, S. J. (2003). Incarceration nation: Investigating prison poems of hope and terror. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Hirshfeld, J. (1997). Nine gates: Entering the mind of poetry. New York: HarperPerennial. Hussey, C. (1999). Of swans, the wind and H. D.: An epistolary portrait of the poetic process. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). McGill University, Montreal, QC. Langer, C. L., & Furman, R. (2004). Exploring identity and assimilation: Research and interpretive poems [19 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum Qualitative Social Research [On-line Journal], 5(2), Art. 5. Retrieved from www.qualitative-research. net.fqs-texte/2-04/2-04langerfurman-e.htm Leggo, C. (2008). Imagination’s hope: Four poems. LEARNing Landscapes, 2(1), 31–34. Lincoln, Y. (1995). Emerging criteria for quality in qualitative and interpretive research. Qualitative Inquiry, 1(3), 275–289. Madison, D. S. (1991). ‘That was my occupation’: Oral narrative, performance, and black feminist thought. Text and Performance Quarterly, 13, 213–232. Maykut, P., & Morehouse, R. (1994). Beginning qualitative research: A philosophic and practical guide. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. McConochie, R. P. (1986). Three poems from the Alps. Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly, 11(1), 15–16. Metallic, J. E. (2017). Nta’tugwaqannminen our stories: Language stories and experiences of young of young adult Mi’qmag learners (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). McGill University, Montreal, QC. Mishler, E. G. (1992). Work, identity and narrative: A craftsman’s story. In G. C. Rosenwald & R. L. Ochberg (Eds.), Storied lives (pp. 21–40). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Myer, E. (2008). ‘Who we are matters.’ The phenomenology of teacher identities: Representation in found poetry. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New York (March). Neilsen-Glenn, L. (2008). Second hand philosophy. LEARNing Landscapes, 1(2), 215–216.

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Percer, L. H. (2002). Going beyond the demonstrable range in educational scholarship: Exploring the intersections of poetry and research. Qualitative Report, 7(2). Retrieved August 2, 2008, from www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR7-2/hayespercer.html Personal Narratives Group (Ed.). (1989). Interpreting women’s lives: Feminist theory and personal narratives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Piirto, J. (2002). The question of quality and qualifcations: Writing inferior poems as qualitative research. Qualitative Studies in Education, 15(4), 431–445. Prendergast, M. (2006). Found poetry as literature review: Research poems on audience and performance. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(2), 369–388. Reissman, C. K. (1993). Narrative inquiry. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Richardson, L. (1992). The consequences of poetic representation: Writing the other, writing the self. In C. Ellis & M. G. Flaherty (Eds.), Investigating subjectivity: Research on lived experience (pp. 125–137). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Richardson, L. (2000a). Evaluating ethnography. Qualitative Inquiry, 6(2), 253–255. Richardson, L. (2002b). Poetic representation of interviews. In J. F. Gubrium & J. A. Holstein (Eds.), Handbook of interview research: Context and method (pp. 887–891). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Shafer, A., Maxwell, B., Strauss, R., & Knopp, V. (2007). I must tell you in a poem: Poetry and commentary. Journal of Medical Humanities, 28(2), 173–180. Shapiro, J., & Stein, H. (2005). Poetic license: Writing poetry as a way for medical students to examine their professional relational systems. Families, Systems, & Health, 23(3), 278–292. Souter, J. (2005). Loss of appetite: A poetic exploration of cancer patients’ and their carers’ experiences. International Journal of Palliative Nursing, 11(10), 524–532. Stein, H. F. (2003). The inner world of workplaces: Accessing this world through poetry, narrative, literature, music and visual art. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 55(2), 84–93. Sullivan, A. (2000). The necessity of art. Three found poems from John Dewey’s ‘Art as Experience’. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 13(3), 325–327. Sullivan, A. (2004). Poetry as research: Development of poetic craft and the relations of craft and utility. Journal of Critical Inquiry into Curriculum and Instruction, 5(2), 34–37. Sullivan, A. (2009). Defning poetic occasion in inquiry: Concreteness, voice, ambiguity, tension, and associative logic. In M. Prendergast (Ed.), Poetic inquiry: Vibrant voices in the social sciences. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense. Sullivan, A., Butler-Kisber, L., Commeryas, M., & Stewart, M. (2002). Constructing data poems: How and why – A hands-on experience. Extended pre-conference session at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA (April). Thomas, S., Cole, A. L., & Stewart, S. (2012). The art of poetic inquiry. Big Tancook Island, NS: Backalong. Wells, K. (2004). Safe in my heart: Found poetry as narrative inquiry. In J. McNinch & M. Cronin (Eds.), I could not speak my heart: Education and social justice for gay and lesbian youth (pp. 7–18). Regina, SK: University of Regina. Wiebe, S. (2012). Curricular foundations and poetic tactics. In C. Chambers, E. HasebeLidt, C. Leggo, & A. Sinner (Eds.), A heart of wisdom: Life writing as empathetic inquiry (pp. 197–205). New York: Peter Lang. Wormser, B., & Cappella, D. (2000). Teaching the art of poetry: The moves. London: Erlbaum.

3

Poetic representations, not-quite poetry and poemish Some methodological refections Andrew C. Sparkes

Leeds Beckett University, UK

Introduction A confession. I am not naturally drawn to literary or what I think of (or have been conditioned to think of ) as, “proper” poetry. I rarely read it. When I do, feelings of intimidation, inferiority, and alienation tend to food my body. Occasionally fnding myself in the poetry section of bookshops I become a trespasser on private land. The penetrating looks of the assistants silently reminding me: “You don’t belong here”. This shameful sense of exclusion from such esoteric territory returns me to my schooldays where, as one of the “thick” kids in the “B” form, aged 15, I was allowed to take the national exam in English but not the one in English Literature. The latter was reserved for the clever kids in the “A” form. They, the linguistically and intellectually elite (allegedly), did poetry, not me. As a way of explaining my distance from poetry, I want to draw on Arthur Frank’s (2010) notion of narrative habitus. For him, the development of this kind of habitus over time involves the embedding of stories in bodies in ways that predispose one to hear “some stories as those that one ought to listen to, ought to repeat on appropriate occasions, and ought to be guided by” (p. 53). Here, an embodied sense of attraction, indiference, or repulsion is developed that shapes how people feel in response to stories so that intuitively, and often tacitly, they sense that some story is for them or not for them by expressing possibilities of which they are or can be part, or by representing a world in which they have no stake. For me, given my experiences described above, I did not feel an embodied sense of attraction to poetry, did not feel it expressed possibilities for me in my life or represented a world that I inhabited. As Frank would have it, literary poetry simply foated by in the river of not-for-me. Given this background, it is not surprising that, as an emergent and naïve qualitative researcher in the mid-1980s grappling with the delights and dilemmas of ethnography, that the poetic was not on my mind. Learning the trade back then as a doctoral student involved spending time in the feld collecting data, analyzing it, and then producing what John Van Maanen (1988) described as a realist tale characterized by experiential author(ity), the participant’s point

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of view and interpretive omnipotence. So that’s what I unrefectively did and continued to do for a number of years as I began publishing my work in journals. Then in the early 1990s I was touched by the debates that began to swirl around what has come to be called the dual crises of legitimation and representation (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994). Regarding the latter, uncomfortable questions were asked about the textual products of qualitative research that had hitherto sufered from benign neglect and a collective amnesia concerning literary modes of representation (e.g. see Atkinson, 1990, 1992; Eisner, 1991; Ellis & Flaherty, 1992; Richardson, 1990; Van Maanen, 1995). I began to realize that there was no such thing as a neutral, innocent report since the conventions of the text and the language forms used are actively involved in the construction of various realities. It slowly dawned on me that form and content were inseparable, and that the form of representation I used had something to do with the form of understanding I secured. Within this shifting landscape, opportunities arose for me to review, critique, and revision my writing practices as a method of inquiry and a way of knowing about my chosen topic and myself. During this period, I was fortunate to have my frst encounter with the inspirational work of Laurel Richardson on diferent ways of writing and representing our “fndings” in qualitative research (e.g. see Richardson, 1990, 1994, 1997).

Poetic representations, not-quite poetry, poemish: good enough? As part of her inspiration, Richardson began to reduce my distance from things poetic and challenge my genre habitus. She did so by showing me how and why she chose to take a 36-page transcription of a fve-hour, in-depth interview she conducted with Louisa May (a pseudonym), an unmarried, Southern, rural Christian woman from a poor family, and fashion it into a fve-page poem titled Louisa May’s Story of Her Life (e.g. see Richardson 1992, 1997, 2001). Her goal in writing this poem was to meet both scientifc and poetic criteria. This goal appealed to me as a researcher because it is clear that Louisa May’s Story of Her Life is based on “real” data which gave me a sense of security, and you didn’t have to be a “real” poet to produce a poetic representation of fndings from interview based or ethnographic studies. As Richardson (2001) explains: Following social research protocol, I used only Louisa May’s words, tone, and diction, but relied upon poetic devices such as repetition, of-rhyme, sounds, meter, and pauses to convey her narrative. The speech style is Louis May’s, the words are hers, but the poetic representation, including the ordering of the material, are my own … I have taken liberties with the placement of the words, but not with Louisa May’s language or her sense-making process. (pp. 882–883)

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Other qualitative researchers (e.g. Green, 1997) were also inspired by Louisa May’s Story of Her Life and began to transform their data into a poem-like composition, often using the exact words of the participants and arranging these to create a meaningful representation of the participant’s lived experience. This process involved word reduction while at the same time illuminating the wholeness and interconnectedness of thoughts. Poetic techniques were used as a vehicle to represent the data and the fndings of a qualitative study to an audience in a condensed and evocative manner. On reading such work, and having the honour of working with a number of scholars who had constructed poetic representations (e.g. see Rapport & Sparkes, 2009; Sparkes & Douglas, 2007; Sparkes, Nilges, Swan, & Dowling, 2003), I became more and more convinced of the point made by Richardson (1992, 1994, 1997) that settling words together in new confgurations lets us see, and feel the world in new dimensions and, therefore, poetry is a practical and powerful method for analyzing social worlds. Further evidence of my convincing over the years as I partially recovered this genre from foating by in the river of-not-for-me, can be found in my 2002 book entitled Telling Tales in Sport and Physical Activity that devoted a chapter to poetic representations. In addition, there is also my 2014 summary (with Brett Smith) of the advantages of this genre as a form of inquiry. These included the following: •

•

• •

Transforming data into poetry displays the role of the prose trope in constituting knowledge, and is a continual reminder to the reader or listener that the text has been artfully constructed. This dissolves any motion of separation between the observer and the observed. Poetic representations are able to create evocative and open-ended connections to the data for the researcher, reader, and listener. This kind of creative analytical practice can touch both the cognitive and the sensory, recreate moments of experience, and show another person how it is to feel something, with an economy of words. People respond diferently to poetry than they do to prose. When the dynamics of the reading or listening process are changed, the potential to elicit diferent responses arises. Poetic representations can provide the researcher, reader, and listener with a diferent lens through which to view the same scenery, and thereby understand the data, and themselves, in diferent and more complex ways. (Sparkes & Smith, 2014, p. 162)

Given the advantages described above, over the last 30 years, poetic representations have been used increasingly by qualitative researchers in the social sciences for a variety of purposes. In part, my advocacy and enthusiasm for poetic representations as a valuable way of communicating the fndings of qualitative research, as I indicated above, is based on my assumption that one does not need to be a “real” poet to accomplish the task. In this sense,

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therefore, poetic representations can be viewed as not-quite poetry or poemish and still accomplish their representational task. The use of such terms is not intended to demean the process and product but rather to liberate and reduce the intimidation of the term poetry for people like me whose genre habitus does not draw them towards it and who feel they don’t have the necessary “literary” skills. Clearly infuenced by the work of Laurel Richardson cited earlier, Maria Lahman, Veronica Richard, and Eric Teman (2018) state that poemish representations may be said to be “research representations characterized by features of poetry and an efort to blend the aesthetics of poetry and science of research into something which may be said to be poem-like, a resemblance of a poem, ish, or poemish” (p. 1). Importantly, for them, the idea of poemish involves a safe space for growth and “good enough” creations depending on the desired goals. This notion of good enough is intriguing as it hints at judgement criteria for what one ofers to others as an example of “something”. In this regard the refections of Jane Piirto (2002), a literary writer and a qualitative researcher, are interesting. Piirto (2002) asked the follow tough question: Should we accept inferior poems as qualitative research? In answer to her own question Piirto ofers up the case of a poem she wrote called Crazy Is Good that is based on her experiences of visiting several academic high schools in India as part of a research project. Having presented this poem to a special interest group at a major educational conference held in the United States, she told the audience that when judged by her personal and literary standards it was an inferior poem. The audience, however, informed her that the poem had merit too, that it worked at a number of levels ranging from the emotional to the pedagogical, and was therefore efective for the purposes of qualitative research. In short, the poem was good enough for the job it was intended to do at that time for that particular audience. The notion of good enough not-quite poetry or poemish is therefore context dependent and what is good enough in one context may not be so in another. Importantly, aspiring to be good enough also opens up the possibilities for reasonable improvement and avoids the paralysis of the perfect and its insidious ally perfectionism. Accordingly, Richardson (2001, pp. 181–183) ofers the following advice to beginners on how to get better at constructing good enough poetic representations. • •

Take a class in poetry, attend poetry workshops and poetry readings, join a poetry circle, and read contemporary poetry. Remind yourself: A line break does not a poem make.

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• • •

Revise, revise, revise. Read the poem aloud and listen to other people read it aloud. Put the poem away for a while. And then revise some more. Write diferent poems about the material. Do not imagine that all poetic transcriptions will be publishable. Do not imagine that your work cannot be published. Nor need you imagine, if you are a student, that your adviser will not approve your work.

Having noted that poetry may come to a poet in a seemingly out-of–theblue fashion, Lahman et al. (2018, pp. 5–11) point out that the work of the poet comes in the revisions and they ofer the following advice. • •

•

• •

•

To write poemish research poetry, one must frst read poetry extensively and regularly …. More importantly they should read literary poetry …. Read, read, read. One enriching strategy to help overcome a reluctance to engage with poetry is to join a poem of the day virtual list or read a poem of the day book. These practices are rich yet a reasonable time commitment for people with lives already overly busy. When one of the poems you read inspires you, do some work around it. Who is the author? What era and contexts were they writing about? What other poetry have they written that you may wish to read? What about the poem appeals to you? How was the poem formed and what poetic devices did it employ? How might your poetry be afected by this poem? Research poets also need to write poetry and create space in their lives for experiencing and playing with words in diferent ways. Therefore, review textbooks and websites on writing poetry. As the area of writing poetry is so vast then only address what seem to be primary areas: choosing important impactful topics, imagery, clichés, triteness, and sentimentality, rhythm and rhyme, sound devices, allusions, and repetition. As research poets are often in the position of learning an art form then revise, revise, revise.

The advice offered by Lahman et al. (2018) and Richardson (2001) along with their collective ref lections on engaging in the process of constructing good enough poemish, not-quite poetry and poetic representations, provides a valuable resource for qualitative researchers in developing their skills and sensibilities. Their work has played an important role in reducing the distance between the poetic and the self for many, who like me, are not naturally drawn to this genre in the f irst instance. Accordingly, we should thank these guides for their creative efforts and generosity of spirit.

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Not-quite poetry and poemish at the will of the body Another confession. Despite the limiting dispositions of my genre habitus as described earlier, at various times in my life something not-quite poetry or poemish has emerged rather unexpectedly in, through, and from my body to reveal itself on the page. Given the deeply embodied nature of this process and its unpredictability, I think of such writing as being at the will of the body involving a corporeal knowledge that does not necessarily presume consciousness (see Sparkes, 2013). Johanna Uotinen (2011) distinguishes general bodily knowledge from knowledge acquired while unconscious, that is, unbeknown knowledge. For her, this refers to the “specifc type of bodily knowledge that is formed while one is unconscious or which, at least, is not mediated and signifed by conscious, intellectual activity” (p. 1308). Uotinen suggests that it is possible to know without knowing and that unbeknown knowledge is frst and foremost of the body. This form of knowledge is raw and unfltered. It is also inevitably fuzzy, vague, and difcult to reach or analyse. While such bodily knowledge is constantly produced, Uotinen reminds us that when we are in our normal condition, “it remains hidden, avoids analyses and signifcations, and it is difcult for us to become aware of, even if we wanted to” (p. 1312). The notion of unbeknown knowledge expressing itself at the will of my body is the best way I can describe how the following pieces of poemish or not-quite poetry about father-son-body relationships over time came into being (see Sparkes, 2012). In terms of this “coming into being” I am reminded of the point made by Jeanette Winterson (2012) that there are two kinds of writing. One kind – you write. The other one – writes you. For her, the one that writes you is dangerous because you have to go where you don’t want to go, and you have to look where you don’t want to look. With these points in mind, I ofer the following that I wrote (or wrote me) having watched my son Alexander (aged eight at the time) play numerous games of football before realizing how my spatial and emotional location in this act was shaped by the behaviours of my own father a generation before. Watching a script unfold Standing back from the other parents, not shouting, I watch. Short blond hair shines. A body moves with grace into spaces not available to others. Balance shifts imperceptibly. Drifting, elements blend together in a moment. The ball is his to control, caress and release, a playmaker. Standing back from the other parents, not shouting, I watch.

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Crescendo. A game won. Hands are shaken. Water pours into dry throats. The coach declares with a massive smile: “Alexander, you were brilliant today.” Bemused, the boy asks, “Why?” Standing back from the other parents, not shouting, I watch. Talented, skillful, fast, and strong, my eight-year-old son. Constructing a performing identity on the run. Love and pride infuse the tears that soon will come. Standing back from the other parents, not shouting, I watch. Embodied memories connect my fesh to him. In shared movement, in sinews, masculinities crystallize. Him-I-he-me-we-touching trajectories in time and space. Standing back from the other parents, not shouting, I watch. A ghost brushes against me. My skin shivers. This script has been lived before. My father Standing back from the other parents, not shouting. Watching me. Staying with the theme of father-son relationships the following piece emerged from me sometime in 2011 when I was deeply worried about my father’s physical and mental health. At the time, he was 86 years of age. I did not realize that he was displaying the early signs of vascular dementia that led to him being admitted to a psychiatric wing of a hospital for assessment prior to eventually leaving there to live in a care home in April 2012 (see Sparkes, 2013). A phrase my father often used when we talked about moments from his life was “I could write a book about it”. Book of life “I could write a book about it” You often say about your life. I wish you would Dad. To read your take on the whole would be better than the bits and pieces I know.

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How would the chapters in your book unfold? What moments would you select to remember? Which memories would choose you without your say? What would we learn of each other along the way? How might your story create a new dawn or destroy the day? If I dived into the text and swam between your words would I know you any better and understand your regrets? Looking behind the letters should you try and hide there would this exposure make me love you any less? Such possibilities are scary and make me gasp for breath. And what would I do with this story of your life? This life, in bits and pieces, so neatly arranged on the page. Devour it whole or savour it in segments? Lovingly caress it or tear it with rage? Just like us, stories are uncontrollable once out of the cage. In October 2017, my father was admitted to hospital with pneumonia. Nine weeks later, late at night on 5th December 2017 he died aged 93. During those nine weeks as he waned and withdrew from the world the nature of the sensorium changed in terms of the way I cared and communicated with him and he with me. I was blessed to hold him on the day he died and tell him of my love through touch. Not long after his death these words, fuelled perhaps by an unbeknown knowledge, delivered themselves to me. Only touch In the end At the end There is only touch The holding of hands The gentle kissing of faces The hugging of bodies All beyond words Speaking through fesh Of love, life and letting go

Closing thoughts Unfortunately, I still don’t read much literary poetry, or attend poetry readings and workshops. I have yet to join a poem of the day virtual list or read a poem of the day book, and I still don’t devote time to reviewing textbooks

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and websites on writing poetry. I wish I could but I can’t. Perhaps my genre habitus is stronger than I give it credit for. This said, I feel the distance between the poetic and me has lessened over the years. In part, this has come about by me understanding the concept of “good enough” in relation to notquite poetry and poemish constructions that are able to work for me, and others, in certain sets of circumstance and in various contexts. My anxieties and fears about poetry have also been reduced by the sublime words of Leonard Cohen in his 2011 How I got My Song Address at the Prince Asturias Awards in Spain. Cohen tells the audience that he feels uneasy because he has always felt some ambiguity about an award for poetry. This is because, for him, “Poetry comes from a place that no one commands and no one conquers. So I feel somewhat like a charlatan to accept an award for an activity that I do not command. In other words, if I knew where the good songs came from I’d go there more often”. The possibilities of the poetic are now available to me to be used for certain purposes and in ways that I feel comfortable with as a poemish or notquite poet. Along the way, I’ve also learned that qualitative researchers and “proper” poets have more in common than I imagined. Refecting on a collection of his early poems in a book titled Breathing Spaces, Brendan Kennelly (1992) makes the following observation. Poetry is an opening of the doors of rooms that are never fully known; the poet is an external door-opener while at the same time living with the sense of always being on the outside, of not being entirely at home even when he might be said to belong. For me, poetry is an entering into the lives of things and people, dreams and events, images and mindtides. Thus passion for “entering into” is, I believe, the peculiar vitality of the imagination. (Kennelly, 1992, p. 10) I suspect that many qualitative researchers will recognize themselves in Kennelly’s description of poetry which bodes well for the future of all involved as the distance between us diminishes and creative connections unfold.

References Atkinson, P. (1990). The ethnographic imagination. London: Routledge. Atkinson, P. (1992). Understanding ethnographic texts. London: Sage. Denzin, N., & Lincoln, Y. (1994). Introduction. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 1–17). London: Sage. Eisner, E. (1991). The enlightened eye. New York: Macmillan. Ellis, C., & Flaherty, M. (Eds.) (1992). Investigating subjectivity. London: Sage. Frank, A. (2010). Letting stories breath: A socio-narratology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Green, C. (1997). That rare feeling: Re-presenting research though poetic transcription. Qualitative Inquiry, 3(2), 202–221. Kennelly, B. (1992). Breathing spaces. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books

50 Andrew C. Sparkes Lahman, M., Richard, V., & Temen, E. (2018). ish: How to write poemish (research) poetry. Qualitative Inquiry. doi: 10.1177/1077800417750182. Piirto, J. (2002). The question of quality and qualifcations: Writing inferior poems as qualitative research. Qualitative Studies in Education, 15(4), 431–435. Rapport, F., & Sparkes, A. (2009). Narrating the Holocaust: In pursuit of poetic representations of health. Medical Humanities, 35(1), 27–34. Richardson, L. (1990). Writing strategies. London: Sage. Richardson, L. (1992). The poetic representation of lives. Studies in Symbolic Interactionism, 13, 19–27. Richardson, L. (1994). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 516–529). London: Sage. Richardson, L. (1997). Fields of play. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Richardson, L. (2001). Poetic representations of interviews. In J. Gubrium & J. Holstein (Eds.), Handbook of interview research (pp. 877–892). London: Sage. Sparkes, A. (2012). Fathers and sons: In bits and pieces. Qualitative Inquiry, 18, 167–178. Sparkes, A. (2013). Autoethnography at the will of the body: Refections on a failure to produce on time. In N. Short, L. Turner, & A. Grant (Eds.), Contemporary British autoethnography (pp. 203–212). The Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Sparkes, A., & Douglas, K. (2007). Making the case for poetic representations: An example in action. The Sport Psychologist, 21, 170–189. Sparkes, A., Nilges, L., Swan, P., & Dowling, F. (2003). Poetic representations in sport and physical education: Insider perspectives. Sport, Education & Society, 8(2), 153–177. Sparkes, A., & Smith, B. (2014). Qualitative research methods in sport, exercise and health: From process to product. London: Routledge. Uotinen, J. (2011). Senses, bodily knowledge, and autoethnography: Unbeknown knowledge form an IVU experience. Qualitative Health Research, 21, 1307–1315. Van Maanen, J. (1988). Tales of the feld. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Van Maanen, J. (1995). An end to innocence. In J. Van Mannen (Ed.), Representation in ethnography (pp. 1–35). London: Sage. Winterson, J. (2012). Why be happy when you could be normal? London: Vintage Books.

4

Education and/as art A found poetry suite Monica Prendergast

University of Victoria, Canada

Embracing metaphor as method (Prendergast, 2005; see also Prendergast, 2006a, 2006b, 2008a), which I suggest is a key characteristic of thinking poetically and doing poetic inquiry, is the process conveyed in this suite of found poems. The investigation began with a cross-disciplinary scholarly database search on the term “education as art” that asked: How has education been conceived as artful over time? This search led to (sadly but unsurprisingly) very few sources that explicitly employ this metaphor. However, what was discovered was powerful enough to warrant interpretation through poetic transcription and representation in a suite of found poems. These poems reveal the frustration, even rage, of those who wish to re-vision education as artful. They also reveal hopeful (perhaps utopian) views of what education could look like if re-conceived as the enculturation of artists. Imagination we live in lands of what might be and what might have been worlds far greater of more import than the world of what is imagination turns lust into love the need for shelter into construction and industry converts food-taking into dining (but turns some into gluttons)

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by virtue of imagination human life oscillates a vague median line (what we might call natural animality) it soars above in ideals, science, art, religion it drops below in crimes, cruelties, injustices, perversions the work of actuality is imagination’s legacy it is only with imagination we get away from everything but the bloom of the rose early in the morning it takes imagination to think of being free (Broudy, 1972/1994, pp. 12–14) Art as education/education as art during one very unfortunate moment in history Philistines in positions of power decided to isolate art from education art (metadiscipline of knowledge) was degraded to today’s defnition: discipline and craft

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focused on the production of objects (few manufacturers/ many buyers) a dispensable entertainment rather than a way of thinking redesign this structure: underline the relationship between artist and public incorporate the visitor into the creative process equip the consumer to become the creator reclaim art as a methodology for knowledge stimulating the intelligence a profound revision of the social function of art (Camnitzer, 2009, p. 230) Art and education art and education are not diferent things; they are diferent specifcations of a common activity (Camnitzer, 2009, p. 234) The fact is the fact is: we have to introduce art into education as a pedagogical method as a methodology to acquire knowledge

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the fact is: we have to hone the rigor in creation and improve communication with the public the fact is: there is no real education without art no true art without education the fact is: the artist who cannot survive in the market goes to teach without knowing how the fact is: the teacher who runs out of ideas doesn’t dare to go to art to get them the fact (the tragic fact) is: we socially accept one can teach without rigor one makes art by divine appointment (Camnitzer, 2009, p. 235) Transparency transparency is a fundamental ingredient in true pedagogy

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we have to become educator-artists we have to become artist-educators another country: doing away with borderlines pushing in the same direction (Camnitzer, 2009, pp. 236, 237) Education as art and discipline education so conceived (very far from being a performance of learner as passive spectator) the subject detains, fxes thought, feeds interest, giving color to excitement resembles very closely the attitude of artist to material (the complex relation of submission and mastery) the discipline of art emerges (Black, 1944, p. 292) Likelihood there is no more a likelihood of fnding a recipe

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for education than fnding an infallible method for making painters or poets (Black, 1944, p. 294) Education as art human experience is layered mechanical behaviors/beliefs require no investment/intelligence (our hearts beat we learn to walk we believe the sun will rise tomorrow) the mechanics of our world breathing and pumping blood we must learn to perform to adopt we call this training intelligent behaviours call for drawing a conclusion forming an intention achieving understanding conceiving a new creation we must learn the alphabet before we read to spell before poetry

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to add and subtract before proving to hold a pencil before we draw to play scales before Mozart what is most worth learning? a conception of the good constituted at the level of community (Alexander, 2003, p. 9) Teaching teaching not only transmits old ideas, it creates new ones not only predetermined feelings and norms [but] also new attitudes and practices teaching is generative not (merely) reproductive recalls the past but also pushes the limits criticizes explores examines

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education as creative or artistic activity to transmit and transform to initiate visions of the good: that which we cherish most at the boundaries of culture (expanding and testing) nurturing good people (Alexander, 2003, pp. 9–10) Artful teachers artful teachers of all subjects (like sculptors and painters) study and fnd creative ways to expand their discipline artful teachers attend to their audience (like dancers on a stage) most fruitfully to be engaged

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artful teachers aware of the classroom space (like actors in a theater) in which they move the roles and faces they represent artful teachers choose language (like writers, like a blank page) care-fully artful teachers abandon intended melody (like jazz musicians) to explore an unexpected theme artful teachers break the boundaries (like art) and set us free (Davis, 2005, p. 193) What makes it possible? what makes it possible to notice the fower the moonlight the songs of birds? exposure to works of art the capacity to engage responsiveness to colour to texture to design a release of imagination moving beyond space and community

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(energized by shared art experiences touched in desire and thought) to explore such moments to expand the spaces conversations meanings can only be to ponder the future of school (Greene, 2000, p. 278; see also Prendergast, 2005, 2006a, 2006b, and 2008b, pp. 26–27)

Acknowledgement Some of these poems previously appeared in: Prendergast, M. (2012). Education and/as art: A found poetry suite. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 13(Interlude 2). Reprinted with permission.

References Alexander, H. A. (2003). Aesthetic inquiry in education: Community, transcendence, and the meaning of pedagogy. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 37(2), 1–18. Black, M. (1944). Education as art and discipline. Ethics, 54(4), 290–294. Broudy, H. S. (1972/1994). Enlightened cherishing: An essay on aesthetic education. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Camnitzer, L. (2009). In R. Weiss (Ed.), On art, artists, Latin America, and other Utopias. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Davis, J. H. (2005). Framing education as art: The octopus has a good day. New York: Teachers College Press. Greene, M. (2000). Imagining futures: The public school and possibility. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 32(2), 267–280. Prendergast, M. (2005). Metaphor as method. Paper presented at the Provoking Curriculum conference, University of Victoria, BC. Prendergast, M. (2006a). Audience in performance: A poetics and pedagogy of spectatorship (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Victoria, BC. Prendergast, M. (2006b). Found poetry as literature review: Research found poems on audience and performance. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(2), 369–388. Prendergast, M. (2008a). UNESCO World Conference on arts education: A poetic review. LEARNing Landscapes, 2(1), 33–43. Retrieved from http://www.learninglandscapes. ca/archives/59-education-and-the-arts-blurring-boundaries-and-creating-spaces Prendergast, M. (2008b). Teaching spectatorship: Essays and poems on audience in performance. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press.

5

Sensible poets and the poetic sensibility Mitigating neoliberal/audit culture in education through arts-based research Robert E. Rinehart

University of Waikato, New Zealand Sanata A sanata is a solo piece from the Baroque and Classical periods of opera, usually performed within the overture. These solos stand alone, are meant to engage the audience in anticipatory refection, and, rather than simply summarize, work to pique interest in the audience, to pull the audience members into the work in media res. Thus, the sanata introductory to this piece is informed by three quotes: the frst is from Pieper and Weiser (2012, p. 2): “Metaphors can positively provoke imaginative elaborations and the construction of hypotheses, both as an aesthetic medium and as a medium of knowledge …” The second “soloist” is Sandra Faulkner, a proponent of research poetry: “… poetry defes singular defnitions and explanations, it mirrors the slipperiness of identity …” (2009a, p. 100). Laura Raicovich (2018, para. 13) speaks to the larger “arts-based research” rationale. She posits that our created art may “provide new ways of seeing the world, creating desperately-needed space for imagination as well as new views on the seemingly-intractable challenges of our day, but it can also impact culture beyond what we might conceive of the ‘art world’ to directly infuence the culture of our times”. Overture Poetry – and a sensibility to things poetic, to poetic practice, to engaging with the world in poetic ways, to thinking poetically (cf. Rinehart, 2010, 2013a, 2014) – allows educational researchers to manifest a distinction between what Dewey termed the “subject and [the] substance” of poetics. That is to say, the subject is concerned with the content, what is essentially inside the poem; the substance is “is the art object itself and hence cannot be expressed in any other way” (Dewey, 1934, p. 114). Pieper and Weiser (2012) argue that metaphorical language – and reading poetry – engages readers in cognitions that they would not normally encounter in prosaic work. Sandra Faulkner (2009), arguing for an efective “research poetry”, similarly views poetry as about something, but grounded in craft.

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Advocating for the use of poetry within education – and, concomitantly, educational research – is sensible, especially to a pragmatic mindset. Williams (2016) explicates Dewey’s approach this way: “the central thrust of his philosophical writing” includes: … a more pragmatic conception of truth where humans creating knowledge transform both the human and natural worlds. In this system, education is not about students learning the “facts” as revealed by authorities. Rather, students should be ofered educative experiences that provide a drive for even more educative experiences – experiences that are openended and not restricted to the natural world. (p. 62) Poetry, and a poetic sensibility, provides opportunities for students – and in this sense, Dewey sees humans as lifelong students – to explore their own substance by means of a variety of subjects. The art and the craft of poetry demand this receptive mindset in readers, writers, and thinkers who engage with the poetic worldview(s) within educational research. Furthermore, as Poet Laureate of the United States, Tracy K. Smith, has said, poetry “awakens our senses, frees us from the tyranny of literal meaning and assures us of the credible reality of emotional truth” (2018, para. 1) – each a vital rationale justifying the use of poetry for educational research. However, in recent decades, a creeping anti-poetic worldview (accompanied by an anti-intellectual shift), like a societal cancer, has rejected any liberatory aspects of progressive social democracies in favour of a bottomline-encoded and stultifying neoliberalism. “Bifo” Berardi points out, “Neoliberal ideology pretends to be a liberating force that emancipates capital from state regulation, but it in fact submits production and social life to the most ferocious regulation, the mathematisation of language” (2012, p. 31). This reductionism which I posit is countered by a poetic sensibility, largely because of an untrammelled capitalism seeps through educational endeavours. Further, Berardi critiques the contemporary “techno-linguistic machine that is the fnancial web” (p. 26) as stultifying, and he sees poetry and poetic responses as a signifcant way forward – a “paradigmatic shift: to a new paradigm that is not centred on product growth, proft, and accumulation, but on the full, unfolding [sic] of the power of collective intelligence” (p. 64). What do I mean by this overused word, “neoliberalism”? Drawing from David Harvey, some of the applicable tenets of neoliberalism for education might include belief that: … human well-being can best be advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade. (2007, p. 22)

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Harvey (2007) explains how neoliberalism has become a hegemonic standard globally, and how its values have become naturalized within a vast array of institutions, including education. Educational practice, while still steeped in a humanistic rhetoric by its practitioners, has become a site for practices of privatization, uneven workloads, “divisions of labour, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life, attachments to the land, habits of the heart, ways of thought, and the like” (Harvey, 2007, p. 23) – all in the name of neoliberalism. An outgrowth of neoliberal practice is what Chris Shore has come to term “audit culture”. Shore claims that audit culture is not “so much a type of society, place or people” as it is: … a condition: one shaped by the use of modern techniques and principles of fnancial audit, but in contexts far removed from the world of fnancial accountancy. In other words, it refers to contexts in which the techniques and values of accountancy have become a central organizing principle in the governance and management of human conduct – and the new kinds of relationships, habits and practices that this is creating. (2008, p. 278) The connections between neoliberal and audit culture practices and conditions to higher education, public education, and contemporary education as institutions are obvious, but perhaps a couple of examples may sufce to fesh it out. When higher education was fuelled by nation-state governments and not made to show profts, cooperation rather than competition between institutions and individuals (formerly termed “colleagues”) was the dominant mode. A second example is the increase of form flling in primary and secondary education: assessment data gathering and reporting, increasingly prescriptive learning outcomes, and the move to individual responsibility through an increased use of self-assessment. As Berardi (2012) suggests, poetry, in short, may work as a countermeasure to an audit culture gone amok: “Often an art form such as a poem can … express the ferce urgency of the need for change amid a world that persists in perpetuating injustice” (Karlin, 2015, para. 2). Poetic sensibilities make us think of the irreducible substance of poetry and make us eager for our own discoveries and understandings of the world. As well, poetry (and metaphors) make us think: they engage the reader (Pieper & Weiser, 2012), just as the “operatic” metaphor for this chapter serves as a bit of a puzzle: why “Overture”, “Libretto”, and so forth, as sub-headings for this chapter?1 What comprises this “poetic sensibility”? It is fundamentally a worldview, a way of viewing and experiencing the world that yearns for novelty, that hungers for metaphors, that links disparate elements together in new ways. Earlier, I have noted that it is an ethos that derives from: scholars whose fundamental unit and terrain are the body and the realm of sensory knowledge and understandings, values and afect, [and that it]

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should be in the vanguard of exploratory work where exploration into and dissemination of value and afect are experimental – utilizing methods and lenses such as fction or poetry. (2010, p. 185) Later, I wrote that those utilizing a poetic sensibility “must re-acquaint her/himself with the meander, the connection with imbricated pasts, the collective” (2014, p. 657). Similar to Dewey’s “object … that cannot be expressed any other way”, an appreciation for this poetic sensibility can be developed and nurtured, but the worldview itself is likely irreducible. That is to say, the patterns that exist remain whole, not simply digestible into their component parts, or variables. The DNA of a deadening, stultifying neoliberalism, as contrasted with Sandra Faulkner’s (2009a, p. 100) “slipperiness of identity”, courses through the western contemporary social body. To save the body – to save the Earth, the air its inhabitants breathe, the water that provides life, the homeostasis that involves both insensate and living inhabitants of the world – we should consider Zygmunt Bauman’s insight that “in a sense, sociology is a destructive work: it needs to destroy these very thick veils of prejudices and stereotypes which predetermine our view of the world before we start thinking” (cited in Tabet, 2017, p. 5). I agree, but would link that characterization to sociology with a similar one to education and the processes of education: to become educated, one must be open to new, often destructive, ideas. One must, as Dewey meant, be courageous in reforming one’s own prior conceptions. One example of the linkages between this usage of poetry in educational research and today’s OECD educational models is in the creeping educative practices of “teaching to the test”. What could possibly be more unimaginative than a rote memorization of facts? What could less engage students on their own path for understanding than setting up singular “answers”, easily manipulated to surveil and police generations of students (Lipman, 2010; Monahan & Torres, 2010)? Regimes of “Doublethink” (Orwell, 1949) grace the land: for example, the rewriting of history in Texas schoolbooks where slaves were termed “workers” in a section discussing “Patterns of Immigration” (Isensee, 2015, para. 2). The kind of activist educational sociology that challenges regressive and mind-numbing educational practice meant to result in docile subjects also, when confronted with social disease, must act as a phagocyte to enclose and swallow the bits that are (potentially) toxic to individuals, to human society, to other sentient beings, and to the Earth. Regarding a “poetic sensibility” worldview that provides students and researchers with fresh lenses to view their world, I shall return to Berardi’s work. His suggestions, while touching upon poetic sensibility within education, paint much broader strokes, providing philosophical underpinnings of what I’m writing about here. Educational research has the opportunity to mitigate some of the stultifying efects of neoliberal-based educational models, and the overt and covert use of poetry and a poetic sensibility, respectively, are proper tools to accomplish this intervention.

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Libretto Those who immerse themselves in philosophical, literary, or what Sandra Faulkner tends to term “research poetry”, know that “poetic truth is not only some extraction of exact words or phrases from interview transcripts or our personal experience but rather requires a more focused attention to craft issues” (Faulkner, 2007, p. 221). In seeking to utilize poetics or even what I term a “poetic sensibility” within prose and poetry, researchers must attend to a synthesis between their goals and their method. This is, of course, true within social “science”, but it is also true within more evocative, more interpretive, types of research. Consistency and harmony between goals and methods (and between subject and substance) matter, even if concerned with cacophony: for example, Hunter S. Thompson’s Gonzo journalism “style” wedded his frenetic, drug-induced worldview with his non-linear style of reportage (cf. Thompson, 1989[1971], 1994[1966]). Recitativo Secco I Faulkner (2007) discusses a range of “criteria” for “good [research] poetry”. It is a range because the authors cited – all with valid criteria – have diferent goals for their “research poetry”. For example, Laurel Richardson suggests fve criteria: “substantive contribution to understanding social life, aesthetic merit, refexivity, impact on emotions and intellect, and expression of a reality” (Faulkner, 2007, p. 223); Arthur Bochner looks for “concrete details that include facts and feelings; complex narratives that rotate between past and present; the author’s emotional credibility, vulnerability, and honesty; transformation of narrator; ethical consideration; and work that moves heart and head” (Faulkner, 2007, p. 224); and “Clough (2000), Denzin (2005), and Hartnett (2003) focused on social justice and political action as prime criteria” (Faulkner, 2007, p. 224). Each, though linked, comes to the poetic project with diferent goals for research poetry in mind. Faulkner (2007) sees these goals or purposes, collectively, as an author’s Ars poetica or Art of poetry. I take this to mean that she is attempting to fnd mutually agreeable criteria (or, in C. Wright Mills’ (1959) terms, the public) which derive from individual sensibilities (or the private issue). My take on research poetry, poetic impulses, and the poetic sensibility within education, however, serves a slightly diferent purpose: a blend between an aesthetics that reveals a new image, what Bachelard termed a “poetic image”, and a functional, pragmatic research poetry that jars the reader with a newly found sensual recognition of another’s experience. To incorporate a poetic sensibility, there exist other examples of “criteria” for poetry. If we ask the poets – what I term literary poets – what “criteria” they use to “judge” an efective poem, they generally dive into philosophical or practical, crafts-based answers. Or: the more incorrigible will answer in scatological terms. There is no defnitive answer. Occasionally we

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may glean some snippets from them, from interviews. Such is the case for Carolyn Forché. Forché, sometimes celebrated as a “poet … of witness”, especially in her poems refecting her time in El Salvador (The country between us, 1981), writes with a deeply profound poetic (and “educational”) sensibility. She proposes and defends the political nature of poetry and the written word, frmly advocating that all “language is political”: … in the sense that it all refects a certain sensibility, a certain ideology that might be the pervasive ideology of the culture, but that nevertheless indicates a certain orientation, a certain societal formation … [and we need] and to admit that to choose to write historically … politically or socially or in any sense, or not to choose is equal. (ACM, 1983, p. 103) In the intervening 35 years since this interview, academic researchers have embraced both “action research” that seemingly bridges a gap between what used to be termed theoretical and applied research and activist research that admits to the author’s complicity in having an agenda (Lisahunter, Emerald, & Martin, 2013). By bearing witness poetically, Forché, it seems to me, is anticipating these academic moves by a good decade. Strangely, I fnd myself agreeing with some of Michael Schwalbe’s (1995) points regarding the place of poetry within ethnographic written presentation. He rightly, in my opinion, points out that poetry and prose are both socially constructed, and quite diferent from lived experience. But calling them fabrications is simply disingenuous: yes they are created, but the connotation of fabrication is that it is a lie. Poetry, as Dewey and Bachelard and many others have insisted, is as close to a “truth” as the written word gets. In this vein, Jessamyn West has written that “fction reveals truths that reality obscures” (1957, p. 39). In his essay, Schwalbe confronts Laurel Richardson’s arguments for the use of poetry in research, point by point (which, incidentally, in “true” social science style, serves to decontextualize the whole of her argument). More specifcally, he writes: Poetry on paper is no more naturally connected to, or inherently refective of, experience than is prose. Both are fabrications; both are dependent on shared conventions for their power to signify; both are merely attempts to induce echoes of the original experience; neither is the thing itself. (1995, p. 403) Of course, this argument completely misses the point(s) Richardson was making. By parcelling out Richardson’s arguments, Schwalbe fails to take into consideration the whole of the argument for the use of poetry within

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ethnographic writing. His apparent gatekeeping of the so-called scientifc method must be, however, seen in its own context of a classically trained sociologist: variables, discrete categories, and analysable parts prevail, but the whole is rarely reconstructed. As well, Schwalbe’s argument regarding quality within both prose and poetry – he calls it a “focus on form [which] fails to get to the bottom of things” (1995, p. 403) – refects, to me, a surgery that kills the patient. Both prose and poetry writing can be accessible, “true”, engaging – or dense, ring false, and be of-putting. (This does not even begin to account for the worldview, or the subjective lens, that readers bring to the endeavour of written communication.) The myriad efects of writing and reading are quite obvious, and another argument for scholarly writers to work on their craft: but his point is precisely why I have called for a “poetic sensibility” in both prosaic and poetic ethnographic writing. I think Schwalbe shows his bias when he criticizes Richardson’s citation of “Kai Erikson’s Everything in its Path” (1995, p. 403) for not being poetry. Schwalbe falls into the trap of fnitely classifying genres within sociological writing – not beginning to account for continuums of genres rather than discrete variations of genres. While Laurel Richardson was explicitly calling for poetry in 1992 – I would characterize that move as a political one, meant to move positivist sociologists toward greater acceptance of non-traditional (at the time) forms – it is clear in her subsequent use of prose, poetic prose, poetry, and the play form that she was experimenting with many tools for dissemination. I have come to call this blending of rigid poetic form with rigid sociological prose the poetic sensibility. Recitativo Secco II A poetic sensibility evokes some of the holistic, process-oriented power of the poetic: its intent is not simply to defne, characterize, dissect, vivisect, or otherwise freeze how “groups of people think and feel and behave … [or even] reveal the deep, non-obvious meaning of a group’s beliefs and customs” (Schwalbe, 1995, p. 395). Schwalbe’s accusations – read backlash from dominant sociology – regard the very use of a poetic sensibility and poetry itself, or as Richardson terms it, “poetic representation”. His attacks are summed up this way by Richardson (1997b): My “irresponsibilities”, thus, are many: failure to patrol ethnography’s boundaries; refusal as a qualitative researcher to align myself with those who would discipline and punish postructuralist ideas; and, worst of all, not making nice-nice with those already well-situated and secure within the academy, i.e., the anti-“antirationalists”. Policing is always about bodies, though, isn’t it? (p. 146)

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Interesting in this exchange is the boundary crosser (Richardson) and the boundary enforcer (Schwalbe). They represent two possible directions of intellectual inquiry for both educational and sociological research: creation of new amalgams, new formations, and an insistence on the status quo. But we have seen this dynamic operating before. Gaston Bachelard’s oeuvre may ofer us a way forward through the binary conundrum of whether or not to use poetry – or poetically infuenced prose – in our reporting of research: throughout his writing, he argues for poetry as a means to “the joy of creation”: By living the poems we read, we have then the salutary experience of emerging. This, no doubt, is emerging at short range. But these acts of emergence are repeated; poetry puts language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity. … the poetic image … presents us with a sort of diferential … A great verse can have a great infuence on the soul of a language. It awakens images that had been efaced, at the same time that it confrms the unforeseeable nature of speech. And if we render speech unforeseeable, is this not an apprenticeship to freedom? (2014[1958], p. 11) Bachelard thus disrupts the traditional dialectical between material causality and formal causality: … for the philosophical realist, as well as for the ordinary psychologist, it is the perception of images that determines the processes of the imagination. In their opinion, we begin by seeing things, then we imagine them; we combine, through the imagination, fragments of perceived reality, memories of experienced reality, but there is no question of ever reaching the domain of a fundamentally creative imagination. (2014[1971], pp. 68–69) Bachelard then proceeds to argue for the co-existence of a “ function of unreality” with a “ function of reality” that, for the poet (and other creative artists), resolves in an “imagined image” (2014[1971], p. 69). In his life’s work, I believe he seeks an appreciation – if not resolution – for the strengths each of what he terms “ formal imagination and material imagination” (2014[1971], p. 66). To me, these terms are analogous with Dewey’s “subject and substance” in ways that border on Bachelard’s ideas of image and matter, abstract and concrete both. Bachelard’s discussion of “images of matter, direct images of matter” (2014[1971], p. 67), itself reeks of a poetic imagination, a recognition of imaginative and evocative recounting: Vision names them, but the hand knows them. A dynamic joy touches them, kneads them, makes them lighter. One dreams these images of matter substantially, intimately, rejecting forms—perishable forms—and

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vain images, and the becoming of surfaces. They have weight, they are a heart. (2014[1971], p. 67) Bachelard is writing about two divided worldviews. Roughly, they are the imagined and the tangible. They are the dreamt of and the numerated. They have become more divided since the time of his writing in the early- to mid20th century. But Bachelard’s advocacy for a return, in Didion’s terms, to “Magical thinking” (2005); his promotion of reawakening the dormant material imagination; his celebration of the “poetic image [which] is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche” (Bachelard, 2014[1958], p. 1): these all acknowledge, frst, that a poetic image and invention and imagination – and sensibility – exists, and second that their “aim” is higher than simply recounting “surface” textures of a foreign or previously unknown group. The “use-value”, if that term is even appropriate, of the poetic sensibility is its own weight, its own heart, that is to say, as Bachelard would perhaps say (and autoethnographers might agree): the necessity for solitude and reverie, of imagining diferent worlds that our senses can apprehend, is its own reward. The image – or, as Dewey has it, the art object itself – is irreducible. But Michael Jackson perhaps sums up the issue(s) of bifurcated worldviews best when he points out: … while the romantic is prepared to leave everything in the realm of mystery, and the person of faith allows God to have the fnal say, the scientist puts his [sic] trust in instruments and methods that neutralize observer bias and promise certain knowledge. Yet all these diferent world views may be regarded as strategies or defence mechanisms for overcoming the existential uncertainties and aportias to which I have alluded. (2017, p. 55) What he alludes to, broadly, is “… the development of new techniques for integrating the arts of showing with the sciences of knowing” (2017, p. 48). And make no mistake: he is calling for a pedagogy that is integrative, not divisive. To briefy summarize then, the poetic sensibility project encompasses research poetry, literary poetry, and epistemological, ontological, and axiological concerns. To capture human evidence in educational research, a poetic lens, or sensibility, may enhance appreciation for, and understanding of, participants’ own worldviews, beliefs, and value systems. To join with studied worlds and humans, in a writerly and scholarly sense, may also be enhanced by seeking freshness, patterns of key images, and meaning through a poetically sensible lens. And poetry and a poetic sensibility increase researchers’ ability to disseminate our educational, sociological, anthropological, and other ethnographic and qualitative work in new and insightful ways, with an intent to bringing audiences closer to lived experience.

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Recitativo stromentato Research regarding poetry within education has several incarnations, or projects: the teaching of poetry within primary and secondary schools (its implementation, its efcacy, its hierarchical standing within schools’ curricula); the refexive and philosophical basis for using poetry to disseminate research (e.g. Richardson, 1997a); the use of poetry and a poetic sensibility in reporting participants’ stories (e.g. Rinehart, 2010); and admixtures of any of the three (e.g. Iida, 2017). For the most part, I shall concentrate on the second and third of these research projects, though they are of course layered, complex, interrelated, codependent, and symbiotic with all three. As a fairly remarkable example of the frst type, a more practical and pragmatic approach to the teaching of poetry, one “children’s” book stands out: This is a Poem that Heals Fish, a French illustrated book (Siméon & Tallec, 2007). Though the illustrations demonstrate an integration of the object of “arts-based” research, the text is also quirky, poetic, and mysterious. Evocative for children (and the adults who co-read the book with them), the text does not shy away from ofering puzzling metaphorical language: A poem is when you hear the heartbeat of a stone, when words beat their wings. It is a song sung in a cage. (p. 38) So this literary object – this representation using poetry to “teach” complex thinking – is married to visual illustrations that similarly fre readers’ imaginations. Regarding the second incarnation of poetry within research: on an extremely practical level, what are the uses of poetry to disseminate research (social “science” research)? Laurel Richardson, a pioneer in the use of poetic reportage in sociology (see, e.g. “Louisa May’s Story of Her Life”, in Richardson, 1992b), has examined fve personal (1992b, pp. 134–136) and fve philosophical and rational reasons (1992a) calling for the use of poetry and poetic language and devices to more efectively bring the embodiment of lived life to the page. She includes the assertion that poetic expression produces “nonalienating sociology” (1992b, p. 126), or a sociology that invites the reader into unexperienced worlds in not simply intellectual, but also in embodied, ways. One of these embodied ways is a note of how we experience time in our jobs, in our personal lives, and in our pacing of our own lives: Our culture has become adept at convincing us that the more time we save, the more we have. This time-warp isn’t true. Staying active and busy builds memories, but they’re most remembered when we stay

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present. Details are preserved and experiences recalled more vividly, giving us the sensation of time passing slowly. Choosing to warp-time through speed and progress doesn’t work. It only causes the sensation of life passing by as our recollections fade. (William, 2017, para. 5) How educational researchers and others experience time in our use of it, our apprehension of it, and our assumptions related to it is tied inextricably to how we write things up, how we settle in to read (or, in contrast, read in short spurts), and how we embody time within our hegemonically neoliberal lives. Reading, writing, and thinking in poetry – in poetic abstractions, metaphorical language, images, creative moments – has the ability to slow us down. I don’t mean that it slows us down simply and only in the way Berg and Seeber (2016), in The Slow Professor, envision it. They assert that, “because research is what gains most visibility in the current university, it ofers a particularly fertile site for resistance. We can choose how we talk about our scholarship to each other and more publicly” (p. 56). Of course, resisting the corporate university with its audit culture – with its emphasis on publication numbers (not necessarily quality) of knowledge (as opposed to understanding) – by “conversing” in poetic formulations is, as well, a political move: it deliberately pushes us to deeper thought, while simultaneously afording us the foundational layers of knowledge. In poetry, the actual reading of the lines aloud actually slows us down, because the knowing poet crafts line breaks in ways that our usually sociological minds fnd odd; the lines sometimes can act as breath units, so that the poetic verse insists on a slight, meaningful pause. Writing poetry is something else: since so much means in poetry, we ferret out the exact word; we attempt to wed the words on the page with the way they exist for each other, so that form and function act in multiple ways on the reader. And thinking in poetry slows us down in ways that are unique and singular yet layered with universal meaning(s). We mull over multiple meanings, meandering through word choices and the branching out of possibilities. We wrest – and wrestle with – what the writer wants to say. We receive the world anew, or create new worlds and approaches –or simply ponder. We accede to the demands of thoughtful rumination, and this process makes us more empathetic.

Aria Arioso prelude Berardi (2012), in part crediting a Foucault lecture and Paul Tillich and Peter Sloterdijk as inspiration, traces cynicism (zynismus) from the Greek and kynismus from the ancient Cynic Diogenes’ “practice of telling the truth

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(parrhesia)” (p. 159). As he refects on the disparate ways, these two types of cynicism play out within contemporary society, Berardi writes: The real alternative to cynicism is not passion, but irony. .… while Diogenes and his fellow kynicists were ascetic individualists rejecting the acquiescence to the law of the powerful, the modern zynicists are the conformist majority, fully aware that the law of the powerful is bad, but bending to it because there’s nothing else to do. (pp. 161–162) The cynic and the ironist are characterized by Berardi in this way: “… the cynical person bends to the law while mocking its false and pretentious values, while the ironic person escapes the law altogether, creating a linguistic space where law has no efectiveness” (p. 166). This space is the space of poetry, of poetic sensibility, where the “ironist simply refuses the game” (p. 166). Within engagement from both the kynicist and the zynicist, according to Berardi, an act of creation – a poetic act – is both a strict adherence to logics and a refusal to play. Understanding this paradox is critical to seeing how a poetic sensibility may lead critical discourse forward. This irreducible fact – this paradox of the two seemingly exclusive, simultaneous modes of being – can best be explained by analogy. The non-productive nature of play, amidst the deep concentration and involvement in worlds unseen by outside observers (cf. Huizinga, 1955), serves as an identifable analogy: the child, immersed in his or her made-up world, flled with rules and yet malleable and open to anything, creates the world as she or he proceeds. Simultaneously, all possibilities exist in the creative act. So, too, with the research poet, or one struck by a poetic sensibility. Research poetics are not “snowfake” texts; neither are they produced by “snowfakes”. These are hopeful text songs, representations of how aware individuals – ironists, in Berardi’s terms – wish the world to be. They are not nihilistic – “Irony is an opening of a game of infnite possibilities …” (Berardi, 2012, p. 169) – rather, they identify problems – rightly so – and encourage discussion, pointing towards solutions, mitigations, resolutions, mutual tolerances, and coexistences. They may be scholarly, based on evidence gleaned from the feld, libraries, focus groups; they could be literary, based on the mind of the author and on her biography and life experience; they may be combinations, or amalgamations, or blends of these phenotypes. They may be characterized as research poetry or investigative poetry or narrative poetry – or even autoethnography (Faulkner, 2009b, para. 1); Steven Hartnett and Jeremy Engels (2008) coined the term investigative poetry; Laurel Richardson, “… experimenting with textual form, … wrote sociology as drama, responsive readings, narrative poetry, pagan ritual, lyrical poetry, prose poems, humor, and autobiography” (1997a, p. 298).

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The poetic sensibility notices: those who exercise its muscle engage in sensory and sensual awareness of the world. Deeply, they look, they hear, they smell, they taste, they touch. And, beyond the western-identifed senses, those growing their poetic sensibility intuit, blend, and merge. They may discriminate within the senses: for example, they may learn of “the social dynamics of touch, who can touch, when touch is appropriate, pressure of touch, reciprocal touch, and commercialized forms of touch” (Rinehart & emerald, 2016, p. 6). They may explore radically diferent ways of sensing: “sensory energies [that] explore space and time, determine health and illness, life and death, and govern social and personal identity” (Classen, 2005, p. 160). In short, they derive from multiple ways of knowing (and understanding) and lead to new performances that possibly satisfy the poetic sensibility. These may be enactments of songs that express emotions, that recreate a world inhabited by humans who celebrate their connection(s) to one another: their disagreements, relations, tomfooleries; their societies both grand and confned; their frustrations and angers and slights; their hopes, their wishes, their small joys. Infnite, open, stretching the boundaries. The repetitive renderings of a humpback and her calf, soothing, teaching, poetic. Textually ironic, not cynical; complex and multilayered. The tui melody, a song of discovery. Representational renderings, inexact “copies”, soporifcs, soft-edged, slanted, politics, poetries. A human using a poetic sensibility notices and reacts, places words carefully, minds word choices for multiple layers, and enacts an ironic sense of hope. The humpback mother, nourishing and sensitizing her calf, must point out dangers as well as wonders. For an example of combinatory art and political criticism, this simple yet efectively fresh skew by Arundhati Roy (2014, p. 7) carries both a notice and a sense of a way forward: … Clearly, Trickledown hadn’t worked. But Gush-Up certainly has. That’s why in a nation of 1.2 billion, India’s one hundred richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of the GDP. By personifying economic theory (“Trickledown” and, to an imaginative extent, “Gush-Up”), Roy is abundantly playing with the rhetorical tools of the neoliberal model. She is simultaneously criticizing India’s embracing the world’s hegemonic economic model of governmental enriching of private industry ostensibly to “trickledown” to the middle and lower classes/castes and delivering a warning. Her criticism includes a barb, and an admonition for economic change: stop giving the rich more. In the following section, I ofer a few exemplars of disseminated poems, works that aim both to point out possibly unknown experiences and to invite audiences to share experientially in the worlds created. They invite readers to engage with and co-produce the processes of their enactment.

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Arioso I–V I Teaching in the 1980s Again and again, Christian died coming into the room. Dodged patterned chairs, smacked Kenny, dropped down heavily with a muttered, “Welcome to the ‘tards’ room!” It wasn’t peaceful in Special Needs before Christian: Mary ranted constantly about her vagina. How it ached. How it bled. The heat she felt. Boys hung, crucifed, on every new revelation. Mary’s fascination with her new-found sex was of-limits, but she trumpeted like Gabriel. Her chorus beat her protest, though, if quieted. Under his breath, Kenny recited a litany of pre-race incantations: he was a swimmer, deprived of air during birth. The labeling: Pen knife carving “Christian” into his desk. Tick. Attentionseeking, Ritalin®-exacerbated bi-polarity for Mary. Tick. Kenny: simply mentally handicapped. Tick. Tick. Tick. This, friends, is America’s future.

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II Classroom management he chucked a hard-bound history book the length of two classrooms. the room divider was folded back into the wall. he chucked the book & it slammed up against the far wall: SMACK! it said. its pages splayed when it dropped to the foor. he chucked the book, narrowly missing a thin blonde girl’s face, choosing instead the wall. he chucked. this was the wild west of substitute teaching. I saw him chuck the book. I could not prevent it. by the grace of some unknown god his throw was stillborn. he chucked that book, hard as he could, nearly taking out that girl. fourteen, growing bigger by the minute, he was shocked when he missed her. splayed open to Manifest Destiny. I picked him up, in his desk—only touching the desk, in another superhuman display of ‘manhood’— &, desk & boy, slammed them into the wall. III Helen Kelly, by her son “Jacinda Ardern, in her fnal interview before becoming prime minister, told John Campbell that her government was going to ‘bring kindness back’.” (Kelly, 2017, para 25)

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IV Closing down the 80s Look: it comes down to one of two ways of seeing it. Food in your mouth at night, or a gnawing gut. He pointed shaky, crooked fngers at me. His voice shook, emotion strained. My wife lives in a 3-bedroom in the Valley. Her new husband supplied that: inherited from invested Micro stocks. I piss in a used Starbuck’s cup, and throw it out in the bushes. Nothing’s simple. Used to be, a long time ago, wives would leave you water, meat pie. No more. Fear reigns. He shares his fre; three more men sit, mulling. The fre, a thousand points of light, illumines their greasy faces on this black night. One wears discarded boots, another a patchworked lumberjack shirt. My clan, he laughs. We share my bottle of Merlot, passing it round. The one says, as I leave for home, Notice? I’ve got no straps here.

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V A pastiche on kindness & empathy “… my dream: Norman & I were walking into a crowded hall – maybe it was Foellinger, at UIUC (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) – talking about this issue of Studies in Symbolic Interaction.” Norman. Kindness personifed. “He turned to me with a twinkle in his eye, & said, ‘That’s why Kindness wanted God established.’” (Rinehart, 2013b, p. 4) “This empathic process is something that ethnographers seek to both create & discover.” (Rinehart, 2013b, p. 5) “… they are comfortable with uncertainty, they are intrigued by mystery & the open text.” Seekers, wanderers, creators. “In short, they align with those whose worldview seeks to understand but not categorize, for they understand that the very act of categorizing & classifying is fraught with power relations from the start.” Higher level thinking. “They see understanding as gentler, more just – & those who seek understanding strive for an equivalency of shared understanding that mere classifcation systems & practitioners simply don’t get.” (Rinehart, 2013b, p. 5)

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In all of these ways – and certainly with many more examples, as having a poetic sensibility seeps into the way we apprehend the world – a poetic lens moulds the educational endeavour. For example: how we view the complex diferences between knowing and understanding. Knowing is like a fyover spacecraft taking pictures of an exotic planetary surface; understanding is being an inhabitant of that planet, living within its gravitational forces, anticipating weather patterns based on topography. Knowledge is surface, understanding is depth; knowledge is recall of facts, understanding bases itself on those very facts but “gets” how and why and where and when they ft together or dissolve. Knowledge, then, is description, while understanding takes that description and posits relationships, futures, possibilities. To my mind, the fundamental problem of these created “research poems” is that they are more centred on knowledge than on understanding: they are overly balanced towards making the reader work fairly hard to achieve understanding, a with-ness, with the world’s imagined. But of course, as Berardi reminds us, “.… one way of decentring the unrefexive ‘self ’ to create a position for experiencing the self as a sociological knower/constructor …” (2012, p. 136). A short breakdown of some of my key elements in these poems: Teaching in the 1980s is not a literary poem. In my view, it is relatively pedantic in its approach: by focusing on the specifcs of concrete images of students, it reimagines a simplistic past that celebrated the one-size-fts-all, managerial mentality of educators who ran programmes for their efciency, not their humanity. The fnal line is an echo, 30-some years later, of the regressive views of many educators who privilege proft over progress. The quick images of each of the children in the poem serve as metonyms for forgotten and ignored groups. It is meant to warn against an audit culture within education that devalues individual interests and needs. Classroom management uses the repetition of “he chucked” to insert the idea of blind frustrations – of both the adolescent student and the substitute teacher – and to begin a dialogue about toxic masculinity. Where are its roots? Is the (male) teacher’s reaction assistive to the young boy? Does the teacher’s reaction – picking up the child, still in his desk, and slamming him against the wall – simply reify the sense of toxic masculinity coursing through contemporary educative practice? Helen Kelly, by her son is simply an ironic statement, a snippet taken from a newspaper interview. Helen Kelly was a political activist in New Zealand and, under the National-led Government (2008–2017),2 advocated for personal and medicinal use of marijuana by terminally ill patients. She herself was terminally ill, so it was both a personal stance for relief of months of agony and a public stance for something she believed in. The National-led Government rejected her petitions, and refused to consider exceptions. Her son’s statement alludes to the very poetic fact that the Labour-Green-NZ

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First Government (2017), a coalition with Jacinda Ardern serving as Prime Minister, acknowledged eforts towards more humane treatment of citizens. Closing down the 80s is a noticing of the burgeoning homeless population in the United States. It utilizes some popular phrases, ironically, to make its points: “The fre/a thousand/points of light” echoes George H. W. Bush’s use of the phrase (and subsequent volunteer organization) during the height of neoliberal cutbacks to democratic socialist governmental programs; “I’ve got no straps here” alludes to the common sentiment voiced by many in the US for underprivileged or disadvantaged citizens to simply “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps”. A pastiche on kindness & empathy is what it professes to be: a pastiche of previously published work (by me), lined together (with published work quoted and cited, new slight bits of connective tissues not in quotations), to ofer some way(s) forward. Taken with the piece Helen Kelly, by her son, it is meant as a refection of what governments might aspire to do, countermanding the dominant neoliberal (and conservative, sometimes inhumane) trends towards individualism and tribalism.

Finale What to make of poetic sensibility and educational research within a culture of neoliberalism and audit? How can borrowing from the language of the freshly honed demands of literary poetry assist education and sociological and ethnographic researchers to convey their “truths” more efectively? There are no simple answers, but Smith ofers some insights: .… the language circulating upon the surface of the 21st century is in the business of pulling us away from the interior, the refective, the singular, the impractical and the un-summarizable. In such a current, the language of poetry is a radically re-humanizing force, because it is one of the only generally accessible languages that rewards us for naming things in their realness and their complexity. (Smith, 2018, para. 7) In short, poetry – and a sensibility that engages with poetry, poetic artifce, ars poetica, and prose informed by poetic thinking – may assist us in resisting dehumanizing efects of contemporary society – particularly within educational practice and vision. It may give us enough time to slow down and engage with the nuances of political argumentation, to think logically through ramifcations of decision-making. Or it may simply pull us back into a semblance of reciprocal respect, an appreciation of the other through empathic understandings (or what New Zealand Aotearoa Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern simply calls “kindness”), and a sense of good and solid rumination.

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Notes 1. Admittedly, for some, the openness of using operatic terms for chapter sub-headings may be cause for frustration; for others, it may lead to deeper engagement with the heart of the chapter: living a poetic sensibility. 2. New Zealand has a system of “proportional representation”. In practice, this means that multiple parties may represent citizens in Parliament: There are fve parliamentary parties represented in the 52nd Parliament by 120 MPs. These MPs represent 64 general electorate seats and seven Māori electorates. The other 49 MPs are selected from the party lists. (New Zealand Parliament, 2018).

References ACM (Another Chicago Magazine). (1983). Conversation with Carolyn Forché. ACM 9, 98–111. Bachelard, G. (2014[1958]). The poetics of space (M. Jolas, Trans.). New York: Penguin Books. Bachelard, G. (2014[1971]). On poetic imagination and reverie (C. Gaudin, Trans.). Putnam, CT: Spring Publications. Berardi, F. “B.” (2012). The uprising: On poetry and fnance. New York: Semiotext(e). Berg, M., & Seeber, B. (2016). The slow professor: Challenging the culture of speed in the academy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Classen, C. (2005). McLuhan in the rainforest: The sensory worlds of oral cultures. In D. Howes (Ed.), Empire of the senses: The sensual culture reader (pp. 147–163). Oxford: Berg. Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. New York: Penguin. Didion, J. (2005). The year of magical thinking. London: Fourth Estate. Faulkner, S. L. (2007). Concern with craft: Using Ars Poetica as criteria for reading research poetry. Qualitative Inquiry, 13(2), 218–234. Faulkner, S. L. (2009a). Poetry as method: Reporting research through verse. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Faulkner, S. L. (2009b). Research/poetry: Exploring poet’s conceptualizations of craft, practice, and good and efective poetry. Educational Insights, 13(3). Retrieved February 18, 2018, from http://www.ccf.educ.ubc.ca/publication/insights/v13n03/articles/faulkner/ index.html Hartnett, S. J., & Engels, J. D. (2008). “Aria in time of war”: Investigative poetry and the politics of witnessing. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Collecting and interpreting qualitative materials (pp. 587–622). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage publications. Harvey, D. (2007). Neoliberalism as creative destruction. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 610, 22–44. Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo Ludens: A study of the play element in culture. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Iida, A. (2017). Living in darkness at the time of the East Japan earthquake: A poetic-narrative autoethnography. Qualitative Inquiry Online First. doi: 10.1177/1077800417745917 Isensee, L. (2015). Why calling slaves ‘workers’ is more than an editing error (23 October). NPREd. Retrieved April 6, 2018, from https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/10/23/ 450826208/why-calling-slaves-workers-is-more-than-an-editing-error Jackson, M. (2017). After the fact: The question of fdelity in ethnographic writing. In A. Pandian & S. McLean (Eds.), Crumpled paper boat: Experiments in ethnographic writing (pp. 48–70). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Sensible poets and the poetic sensibility 81 Karlin, M. (2015). Poetry can inspire resistance to plundering, exploitation and injustice. Buzzfash (29 July). Retrieved October 18, 2017 from http://buzzfash.com/ commentary/plundering-and-exploitation-haven-t-changed-in-impact-they-ve-justtaken-on-a-new-face Kelly, D. (2017). On a new government, kindness and the (unfnished) legacy of my mother, Helen Kelly. New Zealand Herald (2 November). Retrieved February16, 2018, from http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11939650 Lipman, P. (2010). “Politics by other means”: Education, accountability and the surveillance state. In T. Monahan & R. D. Torres (Eds.), Schools under surveillance: Cultures of control in public education (pp. 159–174). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Lisahunter, Emerald, & Martin, G. (2013). Participatory activist research in the globalised world: Social change through the cultural professions. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer Science & Business Media. Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Monahan, T., & Torres, R. D. (2010). Introduction. In T. Monahan & R. D. Torres (Eds.), Schools under surveillance: Cultures of control in public education (pp. 1–18). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. New Zealand Parliament. (2018). Members of parliament. Retrieved October 1, 2018, from https://www.parliament.nz/en/mps-and-electorates/members-of-parliament/ Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen eighty-four. London: Secker and Warburg. Pieper, I., & Weiser, D. (2012). Understanding metaphors in poetic texts: Towards a determination of interpretative operations in secondary school students’ engagement with imagery. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 12, 1–26. Retrieved October 1, 2018, from http://dx.doi.org/10.17239/L1ESLL-2012.01.03 Raicovich, L. (2018). Why in the age of Trump, I believe the art world must become a sanctuary. Frieze Magazine, 193. Retrieved March 28, 2018, from https://frieze.com/ article/why-age-trump-i-believe-art-world-must-become-sanctuary Richardson, L. (1992a). The poetic representation of lives: Writing a postmodernist sociology. In N. K. Denzin (Ed.), Studies in symbolic interaction 13 (pp. 19–27). Greenwich, CT: JAI. Richardson, L. (1992b). The consequences of poetic representation: Writing the other, rewriting the self. In C. Ellis & M. Flaherty (Eds.), Investigating subjectivity: Research on lived experience (pp. 125–140). Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Richardson, L. (1997a). Skirting a pleated text: De-disciplining an academic life. Qualitative Inquiry, 3, 295–304. Richardson, L. (1997b). Fields of play: Constructing an academic life. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Rinehart, R. E. (2010). Poetic sensibilities, humanities, and wonder: Toward an e/afective sociology of sport. Quest, 62(2), 184–201. Rinehart, R. E. (2013a). Poetic sensibilities and the use of fction for sport history: Mapmaking in representations of the past. In M. Phillips & R. Pringle (Eds.), Examining sport histories: Power, paradigms, and refexivity (pp. 273–293). Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology. Rinehart, R. E. (2013b). Ethnographic practice(s) and symbolic interaction: Work from the contemporary ethnography across the disciplines Hui. In N. K. Denzin (Ed.), Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 40, 3–12. Rinehart, R. E. (2014). Reliquaries and a poetic sensibility. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(5), 653–658.

82 Robert E. Rinehart Rinehart, R. E., & emerald, e. (2016). Minding the senses in Global South ethnographies: Expanding worldviews. In e. emerald, R. E. Rinehart, & A. Garcia (Eds.), Global South ethnographies: Minding the senses (pp. 1–17). Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Roy, A. (2014). Capitalism: A ghost story. London: Verso. Schwalbe, M. (1995). The responsibilities of sociological poets. Qualitative Sociology, 18(4), 393–413. Shore, C. (2008). Audit culture and illiberal governance: Universities and the politics of accountability. Anthropological Theory, 8(3): 278–298. Siméon, J.-P., & Tallec, O. (2007). This is a poem that heals fsh. Brooklyn, NY: Enchanted Lion Books. Smith, T. K. (2018). Staying human: Poetry in the age of technology. Retrieved June 1, 2018, from https://www.thelily.com/tracy-k-smith-staying-human-poetry-in-the-ageof-technology/ Tabet, S. (2017). Interview with Zygmunt Bauman: From the modern project to the liquid world. Theory, Culture & Society. Online First Published November 3, 2017, Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276417734902 Thompson, H. S. (1994[1966]). Hell’s angels: A strange and terrible saga. New York: Ballantine Books. Thompson, H. S. (1989[1971]). Fear and loathing in Las Vegas: A savage journey to the heart of the American Dream. New York: Vintage Books. West, J. (1957). To see the dream. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Williams, J. L. (2016). The poetry of John Dewey. Education and Culture, 32(2), 50–63. William, B. (2017). Cross country: Finding a new pace on the California Zephyr. Amtrak. Retrieved July 9, 2017, from http://blog.amtrak.com/2017/07/ fnding-a-slower-pace-on-the-california-zephyr/

Section II

Poetry, politics, and educational issues

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Poetry and cancer Six ruminations Carl Leggo

University of British Columbia, Canada

In July 2018 I was diagnosed with a brain tumour, and my days are now devoted to chemotherapy and countless tests and long stays in the British Columbia Cancer Agency. My typical life has ceased. I am currently on medical leave, and I am learning to be a patient who lives each day with indefatigable hope. As always in my life, living with hope means living with poetry. I ofer six ruminations on how poetry can contribute to living and loving well in a hectic, often confounding, world.

Rumination 1 A while ago, Katy Ellsworth, the Executive Director of the Association of Canadian Deans of Education, invited me to respond to the question, “If you could start your academic career over again, what would you do diferently?” I wrote a short rumination for the Canadian Society for the Study of Education (CSSE) Blog, titled “Even More”: I am now near the end of my academic career. I began a tenure-track position in the Department of Language Education at the University of British Columbia (UBC) on 1 July 1990. I am 64 years old, and I might continue at UBC for another four or fve years, but I might not. My academic life has been a delight, full of wonderful colleagues and brilliant students. When I consider what I would do diferently if I were to start my academic career over again, my frst response is: nothing. I would do nothing diferently. I have reached an age when I have learned to acknowledge privileges and blessings in the current moment. When I was interviewed for the position at UBC, I was frank and honest in my explanation of who I was and who I hoped to become if I was invited to join the Faculty of Education. I explained that I was keenly interested in studying issues of desire and love in pedagogy and curriculum. I pointed out that I was enamoured with the theoretical perspectives of French philosophers even if I still needed a lifetime to translate their work into education. I declared that I was a poet looking for a community who would support me as a poet. I disclosed that I was not much interested in the kind of traditional empirical research many colleagues pursued in the social sciences. My background was English literature and creative writing, and I wanted to

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promote language and literacy education from arts-based perspectives. I am not sure I even used the language of arts-based education research in 1990, but I defnitely presented myself as a poet, scholar, and educator who was enthusiastically committed to creative approaches to research and teaching. When I was ofered the position of assistant professor, I accepted eagerly and gratefully. In many ways, I have continued to live my academic career with eagerness and gratitude. I have never lost my enthusiasm for innovation, creativity, and risk-taking. I have never lost my commitment to speaking frankly, even boldly. I have never abandoned my conviction that an academic life needs to attend to the whole person – heart, mind, spirit, imagination, and body. And I have never forgotten that an academic life is a vocation, a calling. I have been called to a life of productive collaboration, vibrant conversation, creative criticality, and loving care. So, when I consider what I would do diferently if I were starting my academic career over, I realize I would do nothing diferently, except I would do what I did with even more courage and conviction and conscientious resolve. In other words, I would speak up even more in department and faculty meetings. I would listen even more acutely, even with the ears of the heart, to my colleagues and students, and I would ofer more lively hope, especially to colleagues and students who are hurt, curmudgeonly, impolite, and unkind. I would write even more poems and stories. I would profess and defend the value of creative writing with even more performative and persuasive energy. I would write even more personally, autobiographically, confessionally, subjectively, and emotionally. I would live poetically with even more indefatigable zeal. I would love every moment of every day as if I had just been startled by the scent of cherry blossoms. I would lean into the strong gales of peer reviewers’ evaluations with even more stalwart confdence. I would discern the wisdom of administrators with even more perspicacious intuition. I would enjoy even more sabbaticals without e-mail. I would celebrate, grieve, praise, forgive, and forget even more. If I could start my academic career over again, I would continue adding to the following poem, always more: Perplexing pedagogy: Pensées if lost in mystery something emerges a time you learned something almost always begins with letting go at the end of the day, writing is about desire the heart, breathing and not breathing I will learn to live attentively in tentative times I will learn to live the tenuous in tensile times

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under the sky where possibilities defy calculus I am a radical rooted in earth, heart, and wind I attend to the familiar with unfamiliar words I attend to the unfamiliar with familiar words if we don’t see the value in our lived stories we won’t see the value in others’ stories seek words infused with the heart’s rhythms efcacious, capacious, efervescent words I come alive in my writing where I see, hear, know promises no day is complete without reading and writing poetry! I am in process I am content

Rumination 2 I received the harshest peer review of my work recently – the harshest criticism in 30 years of seeking publication. Meike Bal (2018) thinks we should abolish the peer review system. I never really understand why peer reviews are so often harsh and even mean-spirited, but after many years of writing and seeking publication, I have now developed strategies for living with critical reviews. For example, I like to write found poetry out of peer reviews. Reviewer B ( found poem) Abstract: Average. The abstract could be strengthened to provide a more clear and concise summary of the article. Additional details are required related to the purpose of the study, the methods used, the results obtained, or the main conclusions reached. Argument and logic: Unacceptable. The logic is disjointed and misaligned. The research purpose does not follow

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from previous research and is unclear. If present, the theoretical framework is underdeveloped and inconsistently used throughout argument. The knowledge claims and conclusions do not logically follow from data or previous literature. Methods: Unacceptable. Methods are unclear and underdeveloped. Data sources are insufcient to respond to the research purpose. Data are weak and do not provide a defensible basis for the knowledge claims made throughout the paper. Analysis and interpretation of results (empirical studies): Unacceptable. Data are inaccurately analyzed. Data and data analysis are simplistic and do not provide sufcient basis for meaningful contributions and interpretations. Results and interpretations are disconnected from previous literature. Writing and references: Unacceptable. The writing requires signifcant attention and editing to enable efective communication of ideas. There are signifcant errors in referencing and APA. Overall, do the focus and rigour of this scholarship meet the standards for a premier national journal? No Overall, would this article make a highly valued contribution to the education research literature in Canada? No Overall, is this a compelling paper that is “must read” for educational researchers or practitioners? No Final Recommendation: Reject

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Though the intention of the paper is commendable, there are two very serious problems. The frst is the quality of the poetry is, in my view, poor, by which I mean, often very didactic or very generalized with no real attention to metaphor or the shaping of language. The second, and related problem, is that, while there is clear evidence that the author has read some relevant ‘literature’, the paper tends to be very generalized— a series of rhapsodic appeals for the value of poetry. The author does not really ofer a rigorous case for how exactly poetry could ofer a challenge to what he sees as the faults of the academy— in terms of the staf or, indeed, the pedagogy. There is, I believe, a case to be made, but it is not really made here. There is also a tendency to cite various experts but without really examining their work and how certain ideas might substantiate a case. I am very sorry to have to suggest rejection because it is clear that the author is very sincere and even passionate about poetry. I am defnitely “passionate about poetry”, and no critical peer reviews can dissuade me about the power of poetry for guiding our lives with insight and wisdom and heart.

Rumination 3 I recommend that schooling be devoted to inviting students and teachers to be resistant, interrogative, agnostic, hermeneutic, subversive, radical, and ultimately ethical. If I were an architect and could design schools I would design them like big question marks. We are subjects-in-process, creating or constructing ourselves and one another in a carnival of conficting and chaotic and cacophonous word-making without end. May we dance with desire for one another, for the other, for ourselves, and all that we might be/come.

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After being diagnosed with cancer in early July 2017, my brother Rick died on 22 August 2017. He was 62 years old. I wrote a paper titled “The faces of love: The curriculum of loss”. One peer reviewer wrote that the paper was “sentimental and self-indulgent”. How could it be anything else? So, we shouldn’t write about personal experiences!? The Spider ( for Mirabelle) While searching for the etymology of fantastic I stumbled down the rabbit hole of the rhizomean internet, seduced by stories about Brad Pitt and Kim Kardashian, and stopped abruptly on a feature from The Detroit News about the 2017 Fiat 124 Spider, and remembered the car Saul drove in Stephenville when I was a teacher, in my 20s, kind of poor, but still making ends meet, dreaming about the future, learning how to be a father, and remembered how much I liked Saul’s Spider – black, sleek, glistening, compact, fast – the kind of car smart, sophisticated people might drive, the kind of people you can now follow vicariously (even voraciously) on the internet for hours and hours, and I remembered how glad I was to leave Stephenville after six years of frenzied fundamentalism, and how much I would have enjoyed driving away in a Spider while I drove away in a Chevy Impala, loaded with family and stuf, on our way to new adventures (and what a lot of adventures there have been) and now, decades later Mazda bought Fiat or Fiat bought Mazda (or at least they are sharing body parts in a game of reckless or shrewd economic cohabitation), and the Spider has been reinvented and represented more than three decades after the last Spider was produced in 1985, the same year I left Stephenville, and I realize I haven’t thought much about the Spider or about Stephenville since, but all these decades later, a new Spider has been manufactured, and I am suddenly the man who still wants one because the Spider (with its turbocharged, intercooled SOHC 16-valve inline-4 with 160 horsepower and 184 pound-feet of torque – all impressive, especially if you know what any of those specs actually mean) continues to spin a web in my imagination, a web connecting the past to the present like they are still staring one another in the crystal eye, but the new Spider is not the old Spider (the new Spider is really a Mazda Miata with the body of an Aurelio Lampredi-inspired Fiat – a lot like the elderly Jane Fonda still looks like Hanoi Jane or Barbarella) since the new Spider with its Italian Fiat curves is made in a Mazda plant in Hiroshima with a suspension designed by American engineers – the ofspring of cosmopolitanism, corporatism, consumerism, and cultural compulsion – and while walking with my granddaughter Mirabelle (well, I was walking, and she was riding her skateboard – cool in the way a six-year-old is cool), she saw an old two-seat roadster with the top down, and I’m suddenly dreaming about Lana and me driving fast up the Sea to Sky Highway on our way

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to Whistler as dusk settles on the Coast Mountains, the engine roaring romantically (dreaming doesn’t get better than the dream I am dreaming) when Mirabelle looked long at the tiny, tight interior, at the two seats, and asked, Papa, where do the children sit?, and I knew then and there I will never drive a Spider, especially as I veer around a sharp curve on my way to the Richmond Auto Mall for a Dodge Caravan.

Rumination 4 I have written many poems about growing up with my brother, and now that he has died, I am revisiting the poems I once wrote and writing more because writing is my way of addressing grief. Writing is an integral path in the curriculum of loss, and I trust writing will lead me to the understanding I need to begin each new day with hope, even joy in the midst of loss. Joy Kogawa (2016) sees “the world as an open book embedded with stories” that we can hear “if we have ears to hear” (p. 149). When my brother died, the loss was grievous, but the loss reminded me I am alive and I must keep on telling stories. I am learning to live with the curriculum of loss. As one who is left behind, my calling is to remember my brother and to share stories about him, but my calling is also to explore connections between life and loss, and the possibilities that extend beyond loss. Ultimately the curriculum of loss is a curriculum of hope. I want to be open to learning from my brother. I am not satisfed with remembering or memorializing him. I want to continue in a pedagogic relationship with my brother so that I learn from both memories and loss, as well as from the possibilities that continue. The human heart beats anywhere from 50 to 100 times per minute. On average, the human heart beats 72 times in a minute. My goal is to help generate a conversation. I am not trying to convince anyone about anything. I am the host of a gathering who invites others. I am promoting connections between poetic knowing and research in the social sciences. I am promoting a poetics of research by promoting poetic ways of knowing. I feel called or convened by the writers, ideas, experiences, and poetry that I have gathered here on this day in this place, and I extend an invitation to readers to listen for the call, to hear their hearts, to hear the hearts of others beating with poetic rhythms. Algebra ( for Lana) love is the unpredictable predicate no calculator can measure love is enough heartbreak to fll a season of Coronation Street

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love is fctions fragments fgments fractures fred in the heart’s foundry love is Madeleine in her Oscar costume wearing the dress you wore on our honeymoon love is knowing the creation is always creating with the creator’s collaboration love is leaning into the wind, hauling hard on the line that does not break love is the geometry of the Steveston winter sky trusting in a fundamental theorem love is Mirabelle on roller skates remembering our frst date love is saying good-bye to family and friends moving from one ocean to another, new stories love is getting it wrong much of the time but still shaping a right angle in complements love is seeking the divine and inefable amidst the distinctly human, even in the inevitable wounds love is Gwenoviere, arms stretched out for the whole world like we knew long ago love is Yahtzee Monopoly Scrabble where so much depends on who gets X love is caressing a scar, a reminder of what was and might have been love is living on borrowed money and hope remembering heartbreak with forgiveness love is Alexandria, wearing wigs and costumes like her father always wore, flled with make-believe love is learning to live alongside the stranger the inscrutable and intimate other

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love is iterable irritable inimitable illimitable inhabitable irresistible irascible infamed love is algebra (Arabic, al-jabr), like our story the reunion of broken parts

Rumination 5 A long time ago I was a teacher in a small school in a small town in Newfoundland. I had some difculty with the principal who I regarded as a man who was not adequately gifted for school administration. We tolerated one another for six years, but the years were fraught with tension and frustration. After more than 30 years since I last saw Hank, I was reminded of him when I read a joke in a recent issue of Esquire, and I was reminded that there is always more to a story than the parts I have written and stored and linger with. One line just read a joke in Esquire An actor has been out of work a long time. His agent calls him. I’ve got you an audition. It’s just one line. I’ve been out of work so long, I’m happy for any part. What’s the line? Hark! The cannons roar! The actor spends hours reciting his line, rehearsing, hearing, learning his line: HARK! The cannons roar! Hark! The CANNONS roar! Hark! The cannons ROAR! HARK! The Cannons ROAR! The actor arrives at the audition, marches on stage, and shouts, HARK! THE CANNONS ROAR! Brilliant! says the director, you’ve got the job! First show is 9 o’clock, Saturday night. On opening night the actor waited behind the curtains, still repeating his one line in diferent intonations.

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When he received his cue, he rushed on stage, ready to perform with gusto. An almighty boom pulverized the theatre. The actor jumped and shouted, What the fuck was that? I frst heard the joke in 1982 in Newfoundland told by Hank, the principal, at a school staf party I’d never heard Hank tell a joke before couldn’t even remember his ever laughing staunchly Pentecostal he almost certainly said heck, maybe hell, defnitely not fuck but I laughed hard and I’m still laughing even if Hank is still the monster in many of my stories more than 30 years since I left Hank’s world I remember how he could not negotiate confict liked to tinker with locks CB radios computers planes liked to administer by stipulation suspicion stupidity but while writing this poem remembering Hank I hear that Billy Graham has died, for 99 years he refused to shape Christ and Christianity like a fundamentalist fction, even if he played golf with presidents who were glad to shine with a little sacred sanctimony and I read his books about angels, death, hell and the need to devote more time to study his Christianity was a counterweight to the harsh theology of Hank’s Jubilee Pentecostal Temple and I wonder what Billy Graham would say if he knew I am still rehearsing my one line HARK! THE CANNONS ROAR!

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Rumination 6 Now that I am living with cancer, some days seem more bleak than days have usually seemed. I work hard to remind myself that I am still living with numerous privileges and hopes. I need to remind myself about all the gifts that are mine, gifts to enjoy. Among those gifts are the love of a partner I have known since I was 13 years old. My wife Lana teaches me about love, and poetry is a way of celebrating the love. Slope of a curve ( for Lana) love is not Purdy’s chocolate Valentine’s Day cards bouquets of hothouse fowers fuchsia lingerie from Victoria’s Secret dinner out with candlelight and a bottle of Prosecco but enough with all love is not, like other poets, I too will count the ways of love love is the eight thousand walks, hikes, bike rides we have traced, learning how to breathe light love is the forty-eight thousand meals we have savoured, most prepared by you with Julia Child’s culinary eagerness love is the sixteen thousand nights we have slept often knotted in one another’s arms and legs love is parenting children who still mesmerize us with their wild imaginations, their fondness for adventures love is learning to be Nana and Papa, enthralled by the inefable energy of vivacious granddaughters love is seeing you, remembering the frst time, easily millions of times, still astonished by you love is never running out of stories, never taking for granted the stories that have run out

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love is the calculus of continuous change, how the slope of a curve is never the same, but always familiar love is the fruit of the spirit, a heavenly vintage called into dazzling delight by tender, frm hands

References Bal, M. (2018). Let’s abolish the peer-review system. Media Theory. September 3, 2018. Retrieved September 13, 2018, from http://mediatheoryjournal.org/ mieke-bal-lets-abolish-the-peer-review-system/ Kogawa, J. (2016). Gently to Nagasaki. Halfmoon Bay, BC: Caitlin Press.

7

Writing the university through poetry The pleasure of scholarship against the spike of neoliberalism Katie Fitzpatrick

The University of Auckland, New Zealand Growing out of a worldwide audit culture with its governmental demands for evidence-based practices … scientistic methods are being (re)privileged as if the last several decades of the critique of positivism had not existed. (Lather, 2007, p. 3) Poems … profer a vision that is an alternative to the conventional, at odds with the commonplace, the usual lens through which we view the world. We fnish a good poem in a state of disturbing ambiguity. One that demands a radical rethinking of what seemed to be fundamental assurances, assumptions about the world upon which we have for so long contentedly relied. (Barone, 2010, p. 331) In this chapter, I explore – through poetry – the difculties of being an academic intent on critiquing the neoliberal university. While I contend that we need to continue to expose and question neoliberal happenings in the academy, I also wonder whether too much focus on all things neoliberal continues to accentuate its spike, to make it sharper. Is it possible to ignore neoliberalism, to reject its language in order to remember other alternatives? I want to suggest that, as scholars, we dwell in the realm of words and can write our way to somewhere diferent. But the problem I have is that, each time I try to write about the university, I am overwhelmed by the neoliberal edges of my own work, how audit-cultures, numerical outputs, and accountabilities underpin and frame my own practices and even my own strategic professional survival. I am pinned down inside the academy with the spike of neoliberalism, just like everyone else. In the quotation above, Patti Lather (2007) observes that one efect of the centrality of neoliberalism in current times is the renewed demand for university research to produce (particular kinds of ) “evidence”. Such evidence rarely countenances qualitative, creative, or aesthetic forms of research but, rather, demands large-scale (funded), numerical studies, and

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even randomized control trials – the supposed “gold standard” of research. These empiricist approaches to research, of course, produce particular kinds of knowledge at the expense of others. However, focusing on these forms of research (even with critique) in some ways reinscribes their dominance. Lather (2007) encourages us to admit that these tools are deeply fawed and to pick up new ones (while also acknowledging that the new tools we choose are also problematic, partial, and imperfect). Tom Barone (2010, p. 331) ofers us a diferent strategy. He suggests that poetry may provide an alternative way of looking, one that “demands a radical rethinking” of our ontological and epistemological bases. Drawing inspiration here from Barone and Lather, I ofer a few poems that help me to engage with the problematics of neoliberal university contexts, while also admitting that neoliberalism is very difcult to ignore because it is part of the very context we write from; it inscribes our practice even as we try to resist it. It also inscribes our resistance. These few poems then aim to both name and reject, to invoke and undermine my own struggles with neoliberalism in the academy. In writing these poems, I also embrace the pleasure of academic writing, remembering that pleasure itself is a subversive motivation for the scholarly work we do (Riddle, Harmes, & Danaher, 2017). Writing the university Writing the university is to write privilege It is embarrassing to complain about the state of the institution The ivory tower of obscurity, advantage, peace, consolation It is necessary to critique the tools we use, the way we are sheltered here It is ungrateful It is a public responsibility we have guilt we have gilded edges Writing the university is to write class the degree lines that divide who is chosen and who works three shifts for the minimum wage It is necessary to keep repeating those realities to keep recording the exclusions our failures it is pointless, important, ignored, explosive we have the words all we have are words Writing the university is to write economics The framing of our scholarship in counts The value of teaching as money, as clicks

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It is ugly, bereft, the single lens that eyes a pin head forgets the rest it is necessary to remember, recall, relive other practices to play with words, to write the reimagined into being we have ourselves we have all of our selves To write the university is to write the body Located in experiences of skin colour and assumption colonial settings to edge against It is necessary to write history, expose the whiteness at the core of the bricks shake the foundations but not shake apart the fesh We have walled of spaces We have space This poem attempts to grapple with the responsibility to name the oppressions of the academy, while acknowledging its privilege. I wonder here (in the fnal two lines of each stanza) whether limitations also contain possibilities. If we interrogate the places in which we are most marginalized and which we marginalize, there we might fnd openings for new ways of thinking. Lather contends that research should shake “any assured ontology of the “real”, of presence and absence” (Lather, 2007, p. 6) and so, indeed, maybe the limitations are a place of beginning, the very place that will allow a different kind of engagement to open up. One of my own commitments when engaging with poetic forms of representation is to destabilize texts in order to write about, but also to make the reader feel, issues of marginalization, and inequity. This is a political use of poetry, one that inserts emotion and unexpected writing forms into an academic text. Analyses of neoliberalism in the academy are many (Ball, 2012; Davies & Petersen, 2005), they are a headache-inducing cacophony of audit, performance culture, outputs, productivity, enterprise, metrics, proft and value, strategic planning and competition, individual accountability, economic objectives, and performance indicators. Davies and Petersen (2005, p. 34) ask: How is it, given that neoliberal discourse can so easily be constituted as monstrous and absurd (for example, valuing intellectual work in dollar terms), that academics appear to have engaged in relatively little systematic or widespread resistance and critique of it, given their overt commitment to resistance and critique as a way of life? And how has neoliberalism become an apparently viable, even normalised set of signifying practices through which academics control, regulate and report on their own work and on the work of others?

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But, as Enright, Alfrey, and Rynne (2017, p. 2) observe: “the concept of the neoliberal university is also productive and hopeful, in the sense that it implies that there are, have been, and can be, other kinds of university…. The concept gives those who care to do so licence to imagine universities, felds and academic work in diferent ways”. The neoliberal context of scholarly work gives us a context to play with, critique and satirize our work and our institutions. In this sense, it can also engage refexive scholarship. You have to be a shape shifter Catch the next turn Don’t get caught being Outdated old or over Accused of (gasp) structuralism Not up with the new materialisms and the next ismisms post everything Like, everything Instafacebooktweet everything Pass it on Pass it out Pass out from reading Deleuze and Guattari Mix them up with Dolce and Gabbana Which just makes you crave gelato And Italy in general Lie in the sun in Italy At a conference Where someone you are seen with turns out to be a Marxist Oh. And you’ll never be cited again. Honan (2017) suggests that academics might embrace irony, humour, and even discourses of “foolish failure” to subvert audit culture, competitivism, and endless accountability measures. Foolish failures, she argues, “engage with subversion through making use of subjugated knowledge and minor literature to ‘de-form’ academic writing” (p. 20). Poetry obviously speaks to this argument. Honan (2017), along with Riddle et al. (2017), observes that pleasure is at the heart of the work academics do. Embracing and exploring the pleasure of academic work can refocus scholarship on its more subversive productivities. Riddle et al. (2017, p. 3) defne pleasure as follows: “Here pleasure is defned and experienced variously as: afrmation, afordance, fow, focus, fulflment, happiness, heightened consciousness, immersion, joy, motivation, and self-actualization in various academic environments”.

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They encourage academics to interrogate pleasures, including the pleasures of engaging in neoliberal processes, successes, and gains. Meanwhile, Bronwyn Davies and Eva Petersen (2005, p. 7), rather poetically, ask: How might we catch ourselves mouthing the comfortable cliches and platitudes that together we use to shape that same world that we shake our heads at with sorrow and resignation – or that we secretly in our darkest hearts applaud? Pleasure is, of course, also political, and Davies and Petersen (2005) encourage us to critique how power relations in the academy weigh on us in productive and even pleasure-inducing ways. Pleasure Pleasure is the reason we engage here We have the liberty to chase it Not the hedonistic kind, that grows over-gorged But pleasure in difculty The pleasure of working at something until it gives Until we are molded by it Until the old ideas give up and a new concept foods in To overwhelm Sculpt a pathway to the sea Riddle et al. (2017, p. 2) lament the increasing pressure for academics to work against pleasure and instead generate ever faster outputs. “From this perspective”, they argue, “the academic institution produces multiple tensions and moments of crises, where it seems that there is limited space left for the intrinsic enjoyment arising from scholarly practices”. Riddle (2017) elsewhere argues that one response might be in doing what sustains us. “By tapping into the immanent forces and fows of an academic vitality”, he suggests, “we might meaningfully and collectively sustain ourselves through a slower, more care-full, creative and collaborative scholarship” (p. 27). He acknowledges, however, the challenge of performing academic subjectivities in self-defeating ways, and how the desire for success may run counter to pleasure, ethics, and pursuing one’s own scholarship. Poetic forms of representation might thus be a kind of subversive research output, one that fulfls the neoliberal desire, while also subverting the powerful forms of writing of the academy, the gold standard of research methods. Lather (2007) encourages us to get lost in our work, to submit to the freedom of not knowing, and to reject the voice of certainty.

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Poetry undoubtedly opens up spaces for uncertainty, for texts to be both destabilized and made multiple in meaning. At the meeting Meeting at the meeting I am meeting colleagues But it feels more like a contest Some voices are smaller Some bodies take up less space The sound cracks as it bounces of the vocal chords Brings with it memory of other meetings Slides of the note, and withdraws Tries not to cry I remember that meeting I made myself stay in the chair so I didn’t seem weak Didn’t run away Over Emotional A meeting the meeting place of histories Carried in the body A performance of status and success of talking the loudest and hardest Meeting the standard Meeting expectations Meeting outputs Meeting closed. Later this year (2019), I will take up a head of school position in my own university. I wonder now how this chapter (and this book) will continue to work through me in that role, part of which requires me to be an agent – a manager – of the neoliberal university. I hope I might continue to imagine the “other kinds of university” that Enright et al. (2017, p. 2) both remember and desire. In that, I might attempt to undertake my work with one wing pinned with a neoliberal spike and, perhaps (hopefully), the other still fapping.

References Ball, S. J. (2012). Global education Inc.: New policy networks and the neo-liberal imaginary. Oxon, UK: Routledge. Barone, T. (2010). Educational poetry that shakes, rocks, and rattles. In T. Huber-Waring (Ed.), Storied inquiries in international landscapes: An anthology of educational research (pp. 331–335). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Davies, B., & Petersen, E. B. (2005). Intellectual workers (un)doing neoliberal discourse. International Journal of Critical Psychology,13, 32–54.

Writing the university through poetry 103 Enright, E., Alfrey, L., & Rynne, S. B. (2017). Being and becoming an academic in the neoliberal university: A necessary conversation. Sport, Education and Society, 22(1), 1–4. doi:10.1080/13573322.2016.1259999. Honan, E. (2017). Producing moments of pleasure within the confnes of the neoliberal university. In S. Riddle, M. K. Harmes, & P. A. Danaher (Eds.), Producing pleasure in the contemporary university (pp. 13–24). Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Lather, P. (2007). Getting lost: Feminist eforts toward a double(d) science. Ithaca: SUNY Press. Retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780791480267 Riddle, S. (2017). “Do what sustains you” desire and the enterprise university. In S. Riddle, M. K. Harmes, & P. Danaher A. (Eds.), Producing pleasure in the contemporary university (pp. 25–36). Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Riddle, S., Harmes, M. K., & Danaher, P. A. (Eds.). (2017). Producing pleasure in the contemporary university. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense Publishers.

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My middle-aged rage burns the template in front of the Provost’s ofce after the assessment meeting Sandra L. Faulkner

Bowling Green State University, USA My eye twitches in time to the beat of a pencil tapping, tap, tappy on the crick of my neck. 8AM hooks a sea of mouths open from chin to nose, the air sloppy with sighs, waves of professor uvulas fap in laptop glare, the burn of muscle stretched like tight ropes under a rain of spreadsheets that dampen my unpressed pants. I won’t meet students where they’re at on the bench pocked with best practices, the gouge of thwarted dreams. I stick pens in the tips of my fngers to pinpoint the nerves to sever before I type the fnal report. I need to poke pencils in their ears, up their nose, anything to stop the drone of acronyms.

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About the poem This poem began in a faculty senate meeting. As I listened to the Provost at my university talk about templates and student success, I was annoyed – more metrics, more measurement, another template getting us further away from what it means to be an efective teacher. To me, presence, enthusiasm, deep listening, accountability, challenge, and care are the hallmarks of good teaching. Things that are difcult to measure. Things that do not ft neatly on a template. Things like challenging students, so that they can learn from discomfort are not “meeting students where they are at”. I wrote down reactions as notes on my laptop as the meeting wore on. Then, I wrote a poem as a response to the imperative for measurability to show my thoughts about teaching in higher education. I often write a poem as a way to refect on things that upset me. I use poetic inquiry – poetry as/in/ for research – as a way to show refexivity, research process, and messy identity negotiations (Faulkner, 2017). “My main goals in using poetic inquiry in my feminist research and teaching are to agitate for social change, to show embodiment and refexivity, to collapse the false divide between body and mind, public and private, and as a feminist ethical practice” (Faulkner, 2018). This poem is speaking back to the need for templates and “measurable outcomes” in my teaching practice. Who I am and want to be as a teacher and mentor are not easily measured by metrics and annual evaluations.

References Faulkner, S. L. (2017). Poetic inquiry: Poetry as/in/for social research. In P. Leavy (Ed.), The handbook of arts-based research (pp. 208–230). New York: Guilford Press. Faulkner, S. L. (2018). Crank up the feminism: Poetic inquiry as feminist methodology. Humanities, 7(3), 85. doi: https://doi.org/10.3390/h7030085.

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Community and belonging An international student’s journey in North America Frank C. Worrell

University of California, Berkeley, USA

Psychosocial factors play an important role in the academic trajectories of all students (Dixson, Worrell, Olszewski-Kubilius, & Subotnik, 2016; Olszewski-Kubilius, Subotnik, & Worrell, 2015), and some factors, such as motivation, have been identifed as critical in promoting outstanding academic achievement (Worrell, 2018). For international students, the academic trajectory can be complicated by issues of adjustment and belonging. This chapter traces the journey of an international student of African descent from the Caribbean region. I highlight issues of importance in Clay’s academic journey using his poetry across the years interpreted through the lens of research fndings on issues that afect the adjustment of international students. Clay left Trinidad and Tobago and completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Canada and a doctoral degree in the United States. The story begins with Clay’s frst semester as an undergraduate in Canada and continues through his graduation from the University of California, Berkeley, with his doctoral degree.

Canada Weather One of the factors that is not always considered when thinking of international students is that of climate. Poyrazli and Isaiah (2018, p. 66) pointed out that some international students “experienced considerable hardship while trying to adjust to the weather on the East Coast” as they “came from countries with warm climates and were unprepared for cold weather. Because they were unprepared for the climate change, some students skipped class when it was cold, which afected academic progress”. Although Clay had studied geography in secondary school in Trinidad and understood winter theoretically, he had never experienced winter. The coldest temperature recorded in Trinidad and Tobago was 16.1 degrees Celsius (61 degrees Fahrenheit) in 1964 (Met Ofce, 2017). Thus, weather is a recurring theme, beginning in Clay’s time in Canada (1981–1986) and continuing through his studies in the United States (1988–1994).

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First winter I am cold. The winter winds blow outside and freeze The marrow in my bones. Big, waterproof boots with fur lining, Three layers of clothes, A coat of goose down with a hood My only protection against Jack Frost’s revels. It is white outside. Snow falls softly, silently, unending… Houses, cars, people are buried Every night. Every morning we must with shovel and broom Dig out, Recover our possessions From Mother Nature’s silent tears. What a beautiful world….! As I gain courage and venture into the cold whiteness Outside my door, I discover the vividness of Nature’s brush The pastel colours of the houses, The starkness of the leafess trees, All stand out against a background of the purest white. A cold wind? A healthy one! The freshest air swept down From places farther north. Such beauty is but temporary. I am outside only in transit. Inside the warmth of another place, I peer outside Through steamy windows and wonder At the frigid, ugly winter. Beauty lost… Until I am forced into confrontation Once more.

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For Clay, like many who experience winter for the frst time, winter represents a contradiction. On the one hand, it is beautiful and wondrous and results in a sense of awe. On the other hand, snow signals temperatures that are extremely uncomfortable for individuals from the tropics, even when dressed appropriately. Indeed, although the layers of clothes are necessary, they also pose a challenge for individuals from warmer climates, as they can be uncomfortable and stifing for individuals who are used to dressing in lightweight materials. Individuals from the tropics also need to develop the habit of checking the weather throughout the day, as temperatures can difer markedly over the course of a day in the spring and fall in temperate climates. As can be seen below, weather and a nostalgic appreciation for summer are ongoing themes during Clay’s time in Canada, and one wonders if developing at least some ability to appreciate the colder seasons contributes to more positive outcomes for students. October fourth The day is going to be very warm. We are surprised. October is supposed to bring cool Blustery winds to blow the multicoloured leaves Into heaps beneath the trees. The trees, they know that Nature is late this year. Most of their leaves are still green. So we rejoice as Sister Summer Keeps her stern brothers Away a little while longer. We know our respite is but brief. November frst Red and green and gold and brown, A myriad of Autumn colours Stretch towards a gray horizon. Nestled in between the variegated trees, Green roofs, white walls, Lampposts training to receive the last bit of sunshine From a fast receding summer. Community Several researchers (e.g., Constantine, Anderson, Berkel, Caldwell, & Utsey, 2005; Poyrazli & Isaiah, 2018) identifed relationships and community as

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important themes in understanding the adjustment of international students. Poyrazli and Isaiah wrote about making friends and Constantine, Anderson et al. identifed family and friend networks. Clay had visited Canada once before he started his undergraduate degree. He had been on a YMCA exchange program and had stayed with a family in Toronto, with whom he had maintained a relationship. This Canadian family became an important support network, and his closeness to, and appreciation for, the home away from home and this Canadian family are refected in the following series of poems, in which he describes his Canadian “home” in fond terms, but also tries to capture the essence of two of his Canadian “brothers” and his Canadian “mother.” Home away from home A home a thousand miles from home, A friendly, warm, and loving place, A mom, a dad, a warm embrace. Where does all this co-exist? 55 Quebec. The person I know (For Russel) No one can accuse you Of wearing your heart on your sleeve, At least, not deliberately. You’ld like us all to believe That you can face the world alone. In fact, from your point of view, Nothing is right with the world Most of the time. But it’s all a facade, A face you put on to protect Your vulnerability. We know you care as much as we do and maybe more, But we’ll keep it quiet. After all, what are friends for But to accept you as you pretend to be. To ‘big’ Alan With a smile in your heart And a joke on your lips,

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You, brass-faced young man, Assault the world with laughter. Behind the ready smile lies A genuine warmth and love for mankind, A belief that friendship is a sacred trust. And the readiness to take on the world With fsticufs to prove your point. A lesson to the rest of us: Life is so much better When we shower it with laughter. Keep teaching us; we may yet learn To enjoy the world as much as you do. To Mrs. Fraser Six years ago, I came into your life, a timid teenage boy. After a week of assessment, you said casually, “You can stay if you want to.” Little did you know that I would take Your words to heart. I left and I returned and have been hanging around ever since… You lecture, scold, counsel, and tease your Personal Watusi Warrior As he grows into manhood. What would I have done without you? I love you, Mary Mom. It is likely that Clay’s capacity to fnd something to appreciate about winter and his strong connection to the Fraser family played a major role in his adjustment to, and success in, university in Canada. His surrogate Canadian parents also countered one of the negative factors identifed by Poyrazli and Isaiah (2018), that is, lack of adult supervision. His seven-week stint when in high school was perhaps another positive factor in his adjustment. Clay moved back to Trinidad and Tobago for two years prior to beginning his doctoral studies in the United States.

The United States When Clay began to his educational journey in the United States, he was not only older, but also had the experience of having lived in Canada for

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several years. In the United States, issues of community and family continued to be important themes. Several additional themes identifed by Constantine, Anderson et al. (2005) also emerged, including responding to discrimination and stereotypical perceptions of the area of the United States that he moved to. Looking for connections Unlike Canada, where Clay’s early concerns centred on the weather, in the United States, the lack of connection became an important early theme, and the early poems refect Clay’s longing for a kinder, gentler space and a support network. Tolman Hall, named after psychologist, Edward Chace Tolman, housed the Graduate School of Education and the Psychology Department. All of Clay’s classes were in Tolman Hall, as was his research assistantship and ofce, and this building looked large in his consciousness. Tolman Hall What can I say about Tolman Hall? It’s cold. It’s unfriendly. It’s my department’s building. It’s my home for the next six years – if I’m lucky. I’d better learn to like it. My frst haiku Squat, ugly building, My home for too many years, UC’s Tolman Hall. The next poem contains a return to the familiar theme of climate, both in the title and the second stanza, but it also refects several other themes, including Clay’s coming to terms with the length of time it will take to complete the doctoral degree and an attempt to make a required assignment more interesting. The passing reference to what the Bay Area means in Stanza one also refects the stereotypes held by Trinidadians about the San Francisco Bay Area. Ruminations of a graduate student from a tropical country living in a temperate climate, doing written homework using a tape recorder Testing 1, …2, …3, …. I cannot remember the beginning, So much for great memory. Writing for homework; Is this any way to live?

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Speaking of life and its alterego, death, I have been seven months in the Bay Area And I have yet to be done in by AIDS or earthquakes. So much for the prognostications of pessimistic Trinidadians. UC Berkeley is not such a bad place. One can learn to like it here I suppose, If one can learn to live in temperatures that Very seldom get above 70 degrees Fahrenheit, Or 20 degrees Celsius if you want to use the metric system. I guess I can put up with six years… I don’t have a choice anyway. Forgetting Karma for a moment, This is supposed to be an exercise in writing using hypertext. It’s an interesting concept, So I’ll use hypertext Or I’ll try to write in a hypertext mode And see what I get. Doing it with poetry is just more fun, Or at least more interesting. Experiencing and responding to discrimination The literature on international students of African descent in the United States suggests that these students often do not understand the perspectives of African Americans and are not understood by African Americans. Clay experienced this situation frst-hand. Clay enrolled in a graduate seminar entitled “Prevention of School Failure” in the Psychology Department in his third year. The instructor was a female Jewish professor and a community psychologist who studied teacher expectations and their contributions to the achievement gap. The class had a diverse group of students and from Clay’s perspective, many of the students from underrepresented groups seemed to be hostile towards the instructor and to guest lecturers of European descent. The attitude seemed to be that these individuals, given their European backgrounds, had no knowledge of what the students needed to learn, and indeed, that as students from underrepresented backgrounds, the instructors should not only learn from but also agree with every point an underrepresented student made. For Clay, issues came to a head when several students objected to some statistics about dropouts in the United States and one of them claimed that only “Black and Brown” students were dropping out. Clay responded that this point was inaccurate given the extant literature. He acknowledged that African American, Latino, and Native American students had considerably higher dropout rates than did Asian Americans and European Americans, but he also pointed out that given the relative sizes of the populations, there were a greater

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number of dropouts of European American descent than of the other groups. Thus, he argued that research on school failure and dropping out could not only focus on individuals from underrepresented ethnic minority groups. A few days after the class in which Clay had made his remarks, he was approached by an African American male student from the class. The student indicated that he was not speaking for himself, nor did he necessarily agree with the message that he was delivering, but he had been asked to tell Clay on behalf of the other students from underrepresented groups that Clay was never to disagree publicly with any points made by minority students in the school failure class. The student pointed out that as Clay was a foreigner from a colonized nation, he did not understand oppression in the United States nor what the students were trying to accomplish. Thus, his task was to listen and learn. A few minutes later, at the Education-Psychology library, Clay ran into another student who was in the class, an African American female who he considered a friend. She pulled Clay aside and asked if she could speak to him. She told Clay that she had been approached by a group of students from the class and interrogated about Clay’s views and even asked if she had copies of papers that Clay had written. She indicated that she had found the incident unsettling and distressing and asked him to “watch his back”. This incident was not the frst one that could be interpreted as potentially discriminatory. By this time, Clay had experienced several incidents in the United States. These included (a) a woman grabbing her handbag from her grocery cart when she saw Clay coming down the aisle, and (b) being forced to kneel on the sidewalk alongside some African American male choir members, with a gun to his head and several policemen standing around them with guns drawn and pointed at them. The policemen later indicated that pulling over Clay and his friends was a case of mistaken identity. I am Black I am Black. I am Black in a land where For many Being Black means to hate Being White. I am Black in a land where For many Being Black means the cops shoot frst and ask questions later. I am Black. I am Black in a land where For many Being Black means that only you understand oppression.

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I am Black in a land where For many Being Black means wearing handcufs when going home from Praising God. I am Black. I am Black in a land where For many Being Black means only you understand racism. I am Black in a land where For many Being Black means regularly kneeling at the side of the road with a gun Held to your head. I am Black. I am Black in a land where For many Being Black means not running on the street if you wish to live. I am Black in a land where For many Being Black means persecution from Blacks for treating Blacks and Whites Equally. I am Black. I am Black in a land where For many Being Black means to embrace anything Afrocentric And despise anything Eurocentric Without considering the Value of the things I embrace or despise. I am Black. I am Black in a land where For many Being Black means forgetting that Black and White are created in God’s image.

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I am Black in a land where Many Forget that Black, Brown, Red, White, and Yellow are Equivalent members of the human race. I am Black. I am Human. Lord, help me! Stay home! (With Alvan G. V. Quamina) I was born in distant lands, In a nation, small but free. I was brought up to be proud: To respect both you and me. But a confict splits my soul In this land of liberty. How can I fulfll my goals Without hating somebody? Let me take you back a while To the place where I grew up: Warm, Caribbean breezes blew Over felds of buttercups, But more beautiful than these Were the values held so dear: Every creed and every race Were assured an equal tier. Though my nation had its ills, Problems I cannot deny, Still, we faced the feld as one And we all contrived to try Answering the challenges Only twenty-fve years old Of our fedgling nation-state, Of our hopes and dreams so bold. I, to educate myself, Sadly left my island home, Made my journey far and long Over briny ocean foam To a land that had been freed Some two hundred years before.

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Seeking knowledge and ideals, I went to that fateful shore. I was foolish or naive, Or I did not want to see, Could two hundred years’ attempt Not produce a nation free? When confronted with a state Plagued by crime, by racial strife, Alcohol and drug abuse, I went running for my life. And soon on my island-nation I arrived and kissed the soil, And I vowed never to leave it, In my own vineyard I’d toil. With that land of diverse peoples, With its enmities, I’m done. I will stay where virtue shaped me On my island in the sun. In “I Am Black”, Clay explores the dilemma of being Black in the United States, noting that there is the potential for oppression from both individuals who are not like you, but also from individuals who look like you. In the second piece, “Stay Home!”, co-written with a friend, he refects on America’s racial problems in the context of its age as an independent nation and resolves his concern by idealizing Trinidad and Tobago and returning home, fguratively. This response is a variant on Ogbu and Simons’ (1998, p. 170) notion of the positive dual frame of reference held by voluntary minorities: One frame of reference is based on their situation in the United States. The second frame of reference is based on their situation “back home”…. For them the comparison is a positive one because they see more opportunities for success in the United States than back home. (Ogbu & Simons, 1998, p. 170) Finding community Clay’s time at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, began with his lamenting about the fact that Tolman Hall was cold and unfriendly. In the pieces below, he has found community. In the frst piece, Clay is wishing “farewell but not goodbye” to an administrative assistant who had become an important part of his support network. An opportunity for promotion resulted in her leaving the School Psychology Program and relocating to another department in the Graduate School of Education. The second piece is Clay’s farewell to his UC

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Berkeley family upon his graduation. Beginning in his second year, Clay began working as a research assistant with the Academic Talent Development Program (ATDP). Clay worked for ATDP from his second to his sixth and fnal year in the doctoral program, and continued to be afliated with the program even after he graduated. Like the three poems at the end of the section on Canada, this poem tries to capture the essence of the ATDP family members, including Clay, himself, and showcases the support that Clay received from this group. Farewell but not goodbye I was born in Trinidad, came to the world anew Upon a pleasant little isle set in an ocean blue, And there I grew and learned some things about the game of life: Good food, some drink, a little love, a pinch or two of strife. These are the things that all folk need to live upon this plane In peace, before our soul goes round the wheel of life again. Oh Trinidad! Oh Trinidad! My country I must thank For teaching me to be myself: To speak up and be frank. But life had fated me to be a person born to roam, As soon as I was old enough, I left my loving home, The carnival, calypso songs, and beaches of white sand, My family, my house, my friends, left in my native land. And to the Great White North I sailed to gaze upon the snow, To see frsthand Canadian soil, blizzards, and Eskimo. O Canada! O Canada! Your beauty is so rare, But I must leave you ‘cause you lack The warmth I fnd so dear. In ‘88, my wandering steps to California led, And in Berzerkley town I stopped and made my little bed. Not that I slept in Berkeley town, but there I spent my days Learning the education craft beneath the East Bay’s haze. In Tolman Hall, I studied hard, got furrows in my brow So I could earn a Ph.D. and be called Doctor. Wow! O Ber-ke-ley! Oh Ber-ke-ley! O mad town that you are, With naked guy and sixties’ tone You’ll always be bizarre.

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Tolman was not a friendly place, to me it seemed unkind, I’d come so far and learned so much, but left the joy behind. Until one day a wonder came, life never was the same, A saucy lass with spicy tongue and Marjorie was her name. My life was changed, I could stay put, but here’s the irony, For now that I had plans to stay, ‘twas Marjorie now left me. Oh Marjorie! Oh Marjorie! I love you, yes, sirree, You brought the smile back to my lips With brazen repartee. Oh Marjorie! Oh Marjorie! Don’t go too far away For very few, yes, precious few Love joy in the same way. Portrait of a family They work together as one As well they should, For ties deeper than blood Have linked their lives together. Mother named after Columbus’ smallest ship, Protects her brood with the strength Of an aircraft carrier; Small, but feisty, Full of laughter, Would-be stand-up comic, Get her riled and rue the day. Older sister, Concern and warmth personifed, Sacrifces her joy for all the rest. Talented artist, A little insecure about herself Showers us all with fortune cookie promises Of a better life. Computer whiz, the brother Who has a sense of fun. Hides true self behind a wall of brusqueness. Writings reveal the depth Of feeling in this soul. No children,

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Yet a father to many, Simple things make him happy Like a home run. Other sister, Bears the burdens of the rest On shoulders broad. Competence and caring, Self-efacing despite her status, A champion, certainly In more ways than one. Baby of the family, Bright, energetic, even cute, Reminds us all, envious, Of our lost youth, Yet so sweet, we love him still. Learning to laugh and tease through Corruption of older siblings. Moody and brooding, The author of these lines. Another son Who’s sometimes fun, Pontifcates a bit too much But still indulged by family. Active Talented Delightful People. All for one into the future, Must I leave home to seek My fortune in a distant land? How I will miss you. But tears are not for Vulcans. Be strong with me And pray for my return To home and family.

References Constantine, M. G., Anderson, G. M., Berkel, L. A., Caldwell, L. D., & Utsey, S. O. (2005). Examining the cultural adjustment experiences of African international college students: A qualitative analysis. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 52, 57–66. Dixson, D. D., Worrell, F. C., Olszewski-Kubilius, P., & Subotnik, R. F. (2016). Beyond perceived ability: The contribution of psychosocial factors to academic performance. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1377, 67–77. Retrieved from https://doi. org/10.1111/nyas.13210

120 Frank C. Worrell Met Ofce. (2017, February 23). Coldest February in the last fve years. Loop News. Retrieved from http://www.looptt.com/content/met-ofce-coldest-february-last-5-years Ogbu, J. U., & Simons, H. D. (1998). Voluntary and involuntary minorities: A culturalecological theory of school performance with some implications for education. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 29, 155–188. doi:10.1525/aeq.1998.29.2.155. Olszewski-Kubilius, P., Subotnik, R. F., & Worrell, F. C. (2015). Antecedent and concurrent psychosocial skills that support high levels of achievement within talent domains. High Ability Studies, 26, 195–210. https://doi.org/10.1080/13598139.2015.1095077 Poyrazli, S., & Isaiah, J. (2018). International students’ journeys from academic probation to academic success. International Perspectives in Psychology: Research, Practice, Consultation, 7, 62–75. Worrell, F. C. (2018). Motivation: A critical lever for talent development. In P. OlszewskiKubilius, R. F., Subotnik, & F. C. Worrell (Eds.), Talent development as a framework for gifted education: Implications for best practices and applications in schools (pp. 253–279). Waco, TX: Prufrock Press.

10 The Munchkin and the medicine man Poetry’s place in a “hard” world Laura Hope-Gill

Lenoir-Rhyne University, USA

I want to tell you what I did last Thursday. I gave a Grand Rounds talk about Narrative Healthcare to an auditorium of medical students, residents, and fellows at the Brody School of Family Medicine at Eastern Carolina University. I did this by telling a story interspersed with Power-point slides about the “Clinical Gaze” and its counterpart, the “Aesthetic Gaze”. I then conducted a two-hour workshop in which these students, residents, and fellows all engaged in creative writing exercises. I want to tell you about this because one medical student approached me after the workshop and said, “I’ve never heard a story told in this room before”. This statement rang in me like the bell at the end of a meditation session. It accumulated a scattering of thoughts I have been carrying around and exploring with colleagues and medical professionals since attending the Narrative Medicine training sessions at Columbia University Program in Narrative Medicine in 2013. Programs are emerging that support story and creative writing in medicine, for both patient and physician, from University of Toronto’s Narrative Healthcare Program to Stanford University’s Medicine and the Muse. I launched a Narrative Healthcare program at Lenoir-Rhyne University as part of the M.A. in Writing Program I co-ordinate. The program is based on the notion that creative writing and narratology can help medical practitioners, including nurses, social workers, physician assistants, and chaplains, deliver better care, and develop emotionally sustainable practices. In my own program and its sibling programs, students engage how the human side of medicine, rather than the clinical, brings us face to face with the paradoxes, unknowns, and other complexities to build students’ capacity to remain emotionally healthy and present in practice. Reading literature, as in the Medical Humanities and Narrative Medicine, supplements professional training with “insight transcending” clinical skill (Last, 2008). This insight then leads to increased diagnostic accuracy (Holmes, 2007) and increased empathy (Charon, 2007), which increases the meaningfulness of the patient-provider relationship, where, as Charon states, “narrative medicine ofers fresh opportunities for respectful, empathic, and nourishing medical care” (p. 1). This connection fosters communication, failures of which the Joint Commission says lead to 70% of serious adverse health

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outcomes ( John & Rahman, 2011). The benefts of reading literature and actually engaging in creative writing include burn-out prevention (Reisman, Hansen, & Rastegar, 2006), the capacity in which I was speaking to the residents at Eastern Carolina University. I was supposed to be a doctor, in terms of family expectation, that is. My father and grandfather were doctors. Excellent ones. A certifcate of gratitude penned in Mandarin in 1942 hangs on my wall, thanking my grandfather for his medical service during the Japanese shelling of Swatow. Following in his footsteps my own father was regarded as a hero in my teenage hometown of Sarasota, Florida, where he practiced Endocrinology. Hearing my last name evoked praise for him from absolute strangers like the men working the SunTrust bank drive-through or a woman checking out a library book to me. They were excellent physicians. That is, until each burned out tragically in his own way. One thing stopped me though, before this burn-out occurred. When I asked my father how he could handle giving the order to discontinue life support over the telephone then sit back down at the dinner table and eat, he gave me an explanation. He said, “When I lost my frst patient, it ruined me. When I couldn’t pull myself together, my teacher told me that if I couldn’t shut of my emotions I should not be a doctor”. That was it for me. The end of my medical career and of the family legacy. I knew at 16 I was a sensitive person. I relied on poetry as a means for helping me carry the weight of my own feelings, feelings I wondered if others didn’t feel as well. The more I matured and saw of high school and life, I flled notebook after notebook with this peculiar language of emotion. Poetry was not spoken of as a language of emotion in English class. Rather, it was presented as mathematical designs using words. Yes, there was mention of themes that I was supposed to recognize in the examples, but what really mattered I gathered, was the rhyme scheme and the rhythm, the dum-DUM of the iambs marching along the page. Why no one ever came out and told me just about every poem written before Walt Whitman followed this beat, I still don’t understand. “Poetry is form” was the message. Not content, although when we were skilled enough, we might be able join Wordsworth in comprehending the mysterious nature of memory but for now we ought to trust the textbook’s summaries. Keats experienced a mystical experience in the song of a nightingale. Shelley imagined his voice being bound to the west wind and transforming the world. I counted the syllables and circles the words that rhymed. Meanwhile, I was writing poems in the margins of notes in math class. I made poems in science class about the fre rising from the Bunsen burners and the glint of light on the cannula and graduated cylinders. Poetry was how I was processing both the new information and my personal experiences, often in the same poem. I never once connected what I was making to what I was learning in English class. I called them poems, but I never considered their source to be the same source as the poems in the books. This perception changed when I read

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Keats’ description of his creative process, “poems should come like leaves to a tree”. My poems had always come to me “like leaves to a tree”. They just weren’t iambic perfections as his were. Still, they were poems. My cognitive dissonance ended there. The leaves come to the tree as a means of absorbing light. It is a puttingoutward as a form of drawing-inward. At an early age – at age 10 I compiled my frst little three-ring folder collection and gave it to my parents for Christmas – I employed poetry as a tool for processing the world. I felt it was something everyone did because it seemed such an obvious way of taking things in and making something out of them, for making energy out of sunlight on the good days and for storing energy to draw on through winter. The poet Tom Andrews told me about his own teacher, William Staford, who replied when asked by a reporter when he started writing poetry, “When did you stop?” This is what came to mind when the resident told me she had never heard a story in that auditorium. When did we stop? It was only a fraction of a second before I recalled my father’s creative silence. When my father was thoroughly breaking down towards the end of his medical career, I took some oil paints and canvases to his new house where he now lived alone without my mother and sister and me. He painted a monstrous face on one canvas and an isolated doorless cabin surrounded by snow on another. He said quite painly as he regarded them, “This is what I have become”. I wanted to destroy them or tell him to paint over these horrifying images of a sealed up and inhuman self. I realized bringing oil paints might not have been the right idea. I had completed my degree in English and returned from a year studying poetry in Australia. My undergraduate Honors thesis had been “The Discredited Muses: Poetry as Education for the Emotions”. The review panel had been very mixed in its reviews, and one professor had even gotten angry with me for suggesting the emotions could possibly be positive things. His mother had died recently, and this was his grounding argument somehow for my being wrong. Daniel Goleman’s book on Emotional Intelligence would come out four years later. I wasn’t without ground in my argument, though. Richard Rorty, Ronald de Sousa, and my own professor Dan DiNicola were already chipping away at the Western premise that emotion is a hindrance to reason. Three decades later, empathy and creativity warrant special editions of National Geographic (Nunez, 2017) and Time magazine (Special Edition, 2018). For a poet, a lot of this is old news and more than a little frustrating. Percy spoke to all of this in the 1840s’ “A Defence of Poetry” in which he quite blankly called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. The current awakening is also heartening. Finally, the world is recognizing the value of these forces. And terrifying because I have to ask how have I been living among so many people who did not know this and furthermore how many still don’t?!” This is how I came to stand in front of 150 medical students last Thursday. I was there to tell them that since 1910 physicians have been “impregnated

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with the fundamental truths of biology” ( John & Rahman, 2011), but not so the fundamental truths of humanity, that we are emotional beings. In short, not with poetry. The medical community has been operating under the same lesson my father received, while philosophy and neuroscience have signifcantly altered their stance on feeling. “I’m on a visit from the other side of the corpus callosum”, I said. The world on “their” side was posted on the wall of the auditorium: posters representing other Grand Rounds talks, with titles such as “Pain in Thigh” and “Lump on Neck” and corresponding images of said thigh and neck. The body as organism. This was the necessary education of future physicians. But what I was ofering is now also considered necessary. It is necessary because we go to doctors when our bodies have changed. We want to know the nature of the change. We want to know how the change will impact, or end, life as we know it. For physicians, this change is rather all they see of life all day long. The rest of us can look away. Poetry has always been about change. If only the English teachers had told me this then I would have recognized it sooner but instead it has taken me 30 years of teaching and nearly 50 years of writing. It is a means of meeting life and making sense of it, even if the sense is associative rather than linear. Poetry holds value because making a connection when life is shattered is often all we need in the moment of crisis. I was diagnosed with deafness in my late 20s and have often turned to poems and essays to make these connections. Writing about deafness has flled deafness with meaning. I did not learn this from medicine. I learned it from poetry – both the reading and practice of it. For this poem, I turned also to the story of Beethoven for company. Beethoven When he learned he was going deaf he wrote in a letter to his brother he no longer heard the birds that other men talked about, had lost the sound of a shepherd’s fute carved from a lilac. He said he’d sooner die than live without the music, the one thing he loved. If I could have dinner with him, we’d put away our hearing devices, these machines that protect us from the quiet he later taught us to understand. His ear horn could curl around my hearing aids as I pour him wine and he nods in gratitude, as he spoons soup into my

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bowl and I smile, and speechlessly we’d share company, flled with those other senses we so often talk over as though we fear to discover the source of the music that they are. Writing about deafness helped me fll in the spaces left blank by repeated visits to the audiologist. I understood that the nerves in my ears were dying and that I could wake up any day with no hearing at all. I understood how to take care of my new hearing aids. None of this addressed the impact of becoming “disabled”. That was a major change in my life. I applied the language of change, poetry, to soften the language of science. While poetry has not restored my hearing, writing about deafness has restored equilibrium about losing my hearing. Since medicine is as much about not-fxing as it is about fxing, poetry is a perfect language for its daily practice for its allowance of what I refer to in this context as the Aesthetic Gaze to accompany the Clinical Gaze. At the start of the Grand Rounds talk, I projected two slides and a Matisse painting of a window looking out onto a beach with sailboats. “What splotches do you see?” The students had to describe only what their objective eye saw. This meant they could only say what colours, what geometric shapes, and what brushstrokes. “Now, what objects do you see?” To this the students could interpret the colours and shapes and brushstrokes to mean things: sailboat, fowers, fowerpot, window, and ocean. “How does it make you feel?” For this part, student made jokes about wishing they were wherever the painting was. They described feelings of being at the seashore. The diferences in their responses embody the diference between the clinical and aesthetic gazes, the diference (or the union of ) between science and art. Surprisingly, all the students who responded to the frst question went straight for the interpretations of the splotches: sailboats, window, curtain, and fowers. I had to reign them back into clinical gaze, which would actually only regard the splotches as splotches. They’d made their point for me: as humans, we are aesthetic beings. The challenge remained: given that we are all aesthetic beings frst, all of them will feel tremendous emotion during the course of their medical practice. Next, I told the story of Mr. Luke Harper (not his real name), my dad’s favourite patient. We lived in Sarasota, Florida, the winter home of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey Circus. As one of only two endocrinologists in town, my father treated the “little people” who had performed under the big tent. Many had also played the roles of “Munchkins” in The Wizard of Oz. Mr. Harper sings “We thank you very sweetly, you killed her so completely” to Dorothy after she ofs the Wicked Witch of the West. My father’s Endocrinology practice on Bee Ridge Road in Sarasota served many

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people with Dwarfsm who resided near the winter home of the Ringling Brothers, Barnum, and Bailey Circus. I told the students about the diference between professional distance and aesthetic distance, highlighting John Bullough’s essay, “Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle” (Cahn & Meskin, 2007) on the latter, in which he describes the feeling we get when we are confronted by fog at the sea as being part of the nature of fog. I told them that the feelings that come with the practice of medicine are, in fact, the nature of medicine. I told them that these feelings can be mediated and educated through the practice of “refective writing” as Dr. Rita Charon prescribes in her ground-breaking and practice-transforming book, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Medicine; through Poetic Medicine as presented by John Fox in his book of the same title and also Finding What You Didn’t Lose; and through Expressive Writing as presented by John Evans and James Pennebaker in Expressive Writing: Words that Heal and Louise deSalvo in Writing as a Way of Healing. The day before my talk, I was soaring through the clouds above North Carolina and crying. During a brief plane-change in Charlotte I’d googled the date when Mr. Harper had died. I’d done it casually, like looking up the gate number. This information is easily available for just about everyone in cinema, but it wasn’t for Mr. Harper. I found an article detailing attendees at the 50th Anniversary reunion of the cast of The Wizard of Oz (Fricke, 2014). Mr. Harper, the article said, died before the event. A quick additional search found his death date. I selected a sandwich and a banana, leaning my suitcase against the counter at a little café in the terminal so I could pay, and I walked to my gate. On the plane I leaned my head against the window and wept. Mr. Harper’s death aligned perfectly with the time that my father suddenly went very cold and told all of us he never loved us and then, within the next two years, spiraled into fnancial and emotional disaster. Another year later, he would disappear entirely and not contact any of us for three years. I wrote the following poem years later, even after his death, as I continue to make sense of his sudden change and absence. Siesta key So many places you decided to leave me: First in the sands of Siesta Beach, Like a key you forgot you carried as you went swimming In a pocket that now is empty. So many ways you forgot to say to me This happened. The solidity of the shrimp boats after sunset, their nets Trap a rising moon.

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And when you left it was not by accident And still I called the homicide departments of all the islands Perhaps just so I could describe you to someone So I would not forget. Lyric poetry has always worked well for me in piecing together the shattered story of my family and also the various other shattered stories that comprise, not just my life, but anyone’s. It allows me to put something on a paper without it having to be right or make sense. It allows the space for not knowing, while keeping silence at bay. The fractured narrative seemed to come together anew with Mr. Harper’s death date. After his resurfacing, he returned to medicine on a smaller scale on Bermuda. His licence revoked in America, he practiced under the supervision of another physician on the island in the middle of the Atlantic. I reached for my suitcase to get some tissue and realized that I had left it at the café, and I observed that the revelation of the connection I had made had unsettled me, had unearthed me so severely I now had nothing to wear for my talk to the medical students. I laughed then at the power of story and was happy I had two seats to myself so I did not have to explain. Nearly 20 years ago I taught English at Christ School, an Episcopal School for boys. The stone buildings glistened in evening mountain sunlight, and an arbour of wisteria blossomed each spring outside the school building entrance. Everything about the place was sealed in time, a century past. As a poet, my approach to teaching was very process-oriented. Fortunately, for most of my 10 years there, we were analog, and I could assign projects that took two weeks or a month to complete, such as making flms out of Beowulf in the school’s 500 acres of wilderness or acting as Knights of the Round Table and racking up points for good deeds and quests accomplished on campus. Because poetry was such an integral part of my approach to experience, I found it very easy to integrate poetry throughout everything we did. It was a processing tool, not a product. When it did come time to write sonnets, my boys and I headed to the school’s music room where they “lay down tracks” and turned sonnets into songs. When the wisteria bloomed, we headed outside and read Modern Poetry under the arbour, dodging the occasional bee. One afternoon, when I was seated with the Dean and other faculty in the school’s cafeteria, a quarterback shouted to a tight-end across the room, “Hey, Ronnie, did you fnish the poem for Ms. Hope’s class?” “Yeah, and it’s awesome!” The cafeteria seemed to go quiet. I was thrilled. But then the Dean cleared his throat and I saw his dining etiquette go up a few notches. It was a very odd thing to witness. He always wore a bow-tie and a blazer encrusted with the Y for Yale. We were neighbours on campus and had shared a collegiality for years. But I felt something shift. Days later he called me to his ofce, the one with the Yale rowing oar fastened to the wall.

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“Christ School is a hard school”, he said. I understood very clearly what he meant. Poetry had no place here except within what Robert Frost terms “brief strongholds”, within limits and always with a way out. This was my Dead Poets Society moment, Mr. Keating being fred before Neil commits suicide. I was a danger, a threat to something primordial the Dean held sacred, the giant oar glaring down at us in all its own hardness. Football players shouldn’t be shouting across the dining hall about poetry. It was not long after this that he hired a new English teacher who became Chair even though I had seniority by nearly a decade. In our interview, she told me she had published an article or written one entitled “An Arsenal of Weapons to Help Boys Attack Poems”. I shuddered where we met in the theatre. When she was hired and given the position of Chair, the school acquired the Blackboard online learning program and our policy developed from one of process-based learning to product-based so we could enter grades every week, allowing parents to see how their boys were doing. My Beowulf movies dissolved right away into a solution of suggested worksheets and digital vocabulary tests. For my tests, I liked to erase dialogue in comic-book pages and have the boys use their vocabulary words in dialogue between battling villains and superheroes. I left a year later. There is a soul to things. This is what poets have long taught us. Sitting on my printer right now, I have an article from the American Psychological Association entitled “The Science of Creativity (2018)”. It will join my pile of other printed articles marking this shift of wonder, from scientifc reason to creative imagination. Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind is also here to predict this ongoing trend of bridging the arts and sciences using creative imagination. This trend is what led me to stand in front of 150 medical residents and fellows last Thursday, not talking about science but talking about the soul, about emotion, about the aesthetic gaze through which we can behold life and not just analyze it from professional distance. I assured them that doing so will make life more complicated but also more meaningful, and that with poetry and refective writing they will have valid tools for accommodating life’s full experience. I was a young teacher when I taught the boys at Christ School. My boys are grown now. One just released a video game with vast, beautiful landscapes for characters, earlier versions of which he used to doodle in English class. Another is a make-up artist at CNN, and another refnishes and maintains sailboats on Key West. Several have become doctors and attorneys, but as many have become artists and musicians. I taught nearly a thousand boys in ten years, and they all loved poetry. I returned one day after I had resigned, as I had to pick up some speakers I’d left in my classroom. As I walked through the Headmaster’s Hall, I saw many of my boys sitting in the large leather sofas. They were working in small groups – analyzing an Emily Dickinson poem and putting the answers on a worksheet. A hard school.

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Medicine is also supposed to be hard. That is what my father’s teacher was saying to him all those years ago. It is also what undid my father, this lack of a method for moving through the emotions, for feeling the experience of being a doctor and human at once. I am not a vengeful person, but poets win so few victories that I allowed myself some portion of that dramatic device when the medical students and faculty applauded my presentation about poetry’s place in Medicine, a place to process the emotions that come with practice, which is to say: the emotions that come with life, emotions that practitioners have been advised to overcome, emotions that poetry conveys into meaning. I felt I was completing a story of my father and I had each been half told. Dr. Rita Charon summarizes describes this half-telling, and its remedy in narrative, “By bridging the divides that separate physicians from patients, themselves, colleagues, and society, narrative medicine ofers fresh opportunities for respectful, empathic, and nourishing medical care” (Charon, 2007, p. 1). “If you ever get good at this, you’re doing this wrong”, I had said to the medical students. It’s a warning I am reminded of constantly: behind every emotion there is another, and behind every story there is also another, as it is with poetry, too. Surrounded by people in lab-coats and with pagers going of every few minutes somewhere in the room, I was faced with my father’s spirit. Everyone in that room was in love with medicine or fghting to save their love for medicine. My father adored medicine. That is why when after losing his frst patient and being told that if he can’t shut of his emotions he shouldn’t practice, he pretended to or actually did shut them of so he could continue. It is why when Mr. Harper fnally did pass away, my father went into a death spiral and lost everything he had loved and achieved, including his family and medical practice. I witnessed a mythic fall. Was it only Mr. Harper? Or was Mr. Harper the patient that came to represent all the patients my father had “lost” due to the non-negotiable fact that we are all mortals. If my father had been schooled in the art of poetry for educating and processing his emotions as a physician, he would have had lifelong resources for coping with the stress and emotions of medical practice. Instead, he was sold a hard science, and he left it when his heart fnally broke open. It is a sad story. And it is a story that is, like all stories, changing. “It is that simple and that infnite”, I brought my talk to a close without actually closing anything down. It was a soft close. I thought of the Dean and his hardness, and I thought of the panel for my undergraduate thesis – particularly the professor who broke into tears insisting the emotions are not good. As I watched the medical students turn to each other and share their writings, and heard them laugh and ask for more, I did not feel this was an isolated incident. I know that in medical schools around the country and world, student doctors are being given the missing piece of Medicine: story. Today, I received a poem from the Chief Resident who had invited me in the frst place to deliver a Grand Rounds, Dr. Miller Johnstone, III, M.D. His poem was about a particularly challenging encounter with a patient, involving

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attempted suicide and intergenerational stress at home. He prefaced it telling me he hadn’t written a poem in a very long time. This is what he wrote. Pressure We’ll take it again – it’s the stress, you know the stress, Everyone’s does this. The white coats, white coat syndromeIt’s really common. It will be less, less millimeters of mercury On the top and the bottom. Systolic and diastolic. When we check it again, time will have passed and this is the fx. It won’t be normal because these fve minutes Will not erase the unpaid bills Will not erase the failed marriage Will not erase the lost job Will not erase the bruises of abuse Will not erase the hopelessness Will not erase the loneliness Will not erase the struggle Will not erase the millimeters of mercury of my life Which pulse back through my veins as your cuf defates. The question that comes up often, “but what makes it a poem?” This question comes up because we were raised reading iambic pentameter and don’t really know what to do with everything that has happened since Walt Whitman, mainly free verse. Having been taught to count syllables and mark rhyme scheme, we have not really been taught what to do when faced with poetry. When I read Dr. Johnstone’s poem, I walk inside the experience of taking a patient’s blood pressure knowing that the diastolic/systolic are measuring much more than the physical movement of blood in the body. They represent life itself, and in the mere act of taking this measurement, the speaker is coming to terms with his own life, feeling his own pressure, becoming aware of the “white coat syndrome” that for many physicians and their patients somehow ought to remove the wearer from these pressures, but it does not. The syndrome of the white coat is that is renders, or can render, the whole of a physician’s life invisible when they are wearing it. Even to the physician. This is how to walk around inside a poem: walk inside a person. Even better: walk inside yourself. This is what poetry is, I tell my students. I take away all the numbers and the counting of the sounds (though these are certainly wonderful instruments to play with later on). And to teach a room of doctors how to write poetry, all I do, really, is tell them that it’s there. It’s there for them, for all of us, when the pressure becomes too much.

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References Cahn, S. & Meskin, A. (2007). Aesthetics: A comprehensive anthology. New York: Blackwell. Charon, R. (2001). Narrative medicine: A model for empathy, refection, profession, and trust. JAMA, 286(15), 1897–1902. doi:10.1001/jama.286.15.1897. Fricke, J. Little people … humongous hearts. Oz Museum. Retrieved October 25, 2018, from https://ozmuseum.com/blogs/news/16153044-little-people-humongous-heartspart-two Holmes, F. (2007). If you listen, the patient will tell you the diagnosis. International Journal of Listening, 21:2, 156–161. doi: 10.1080/10904010701302030. John, S., & Rahman, S. (2001). Humanity before science: Narrative medicine, clinical practice, and medical education. The Permanente Journal, 15(4), 92–94. Retrieve from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3267572/ Last, J. (2008). Medicine and literature: Passion, compassion, confusion and other emotions in stories of sickness and healers. Symposium on the role of the medical humanities in education and healing conducted at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, May 19, 1999. Frontispiece Fall, 1(1). Nunez, C. (2017). Chasing genius: Six ways to spark your creativity. Retrieved October 27, 2018, from https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/05/what-inspires-creativity6-tips-chasing-genius/ Reisman, A. B., Hansen, H., & Rastegar, A. (2006).The craft of writing: A physician-writer’s workshop for resident physicians. Journal of general internal medicine, 21(10), 1109–1111. The Science of Creativity. (2018). Time Magazine [Special edition], August 3, 2018.

11 Becoming a frst-time mother as an international graduate student A poetic ethnography Kuo Zhang

University of Georgia, USA

Getting a graduate degree in a non-native language host institution abroad can be regarded as an unusual period of transition and accomplishment in one’s life. As women achieved greater equality around the world, more and more women were able to attend graduate school and even pursue graduate education abroad. However, female graduate students also need to face many women-specifc issues, one of which is the coincidence between the age of graduate study and woman’s fertility years. Through examining the changes in motherhood rates between 1970 and 2000 among women aged 20–49 who were enrolled in US graduate schools, Kuperberg (2009) summarized that women enrolled in graduate school were increasingly likely to be mothers of young children, and almost half of the births occurred while women were enrolled in graduate school. In recent decades, as US universities are enrolling an increasing number of international students, many international students have combined motherhood/parenting with their academic study and careers in the United States. Becoming a frst-time mother is not only a biological process, but also a social transformation by “playing a socially defned, publicly visible role” (Collett, 2005, p. 328) of the mother identity. As Chase and Rogers (2001) point out, “it is rarely said out loud that the good mother is a white, able-bodied, middle-, upper-middle-, or upper-class, married heterosexual” (p. 31). While the journey of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood is not easy for any women, even for those who fulfl these criteria, it brings additional pressure to international graduate student mothers, who may also need to cope with the dramatic change of culture, tradition, medical system, and institutional knowledge in their second language, and struggle to balance the dual and often conficting roles of being an international student and a frst-time mother, all of which require tremendous emotional and time commitments. Pregnancy and birth break the unspoken rule – no children allowed in US higher education (Springer, Parker, & Leviten-Reid, 2009), especially for international students, who are in a temporary and unstable condition as sojourners. It’s also important to note that some of President Donald Trump’s recent policies, such as the America-frst policy and the travel ban, appeared to create unwelcome larger sociopolitical environments for international students and immigrants, which may further add more

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burden to the international graduate student mother’s life, in the context of the United States. As Woo (2018) reminds us, learning happens not only in the classroom, but also in social spaces where people actually live their lives; the latter are not typically regarded as educational sites. International students are learning the languages of their disciplines, but are also obtaining new identities, experiencing new things, and interacting with other people in various social settings. Stories about pregnancy, birth, and motherhood ofer international student mothers potential opportunities for second-language acquisition, language socialization, and intercultural dialogues in social contexts. International students’ relatively high profciency in academic English cannot be assumed to smoothly translate to other social contexts, such as medical encounters, because language is not a neutral mechanism of transferring thoughts, but “inseparable from a speaker’s identity, speaking purpose, intonation, nuances, and personalities” (Lee & Hassett, 2017). While international students are negotiating their new identities as “good” mothers in the target language and culture, they may have afordances from higher English profciency but also some interactional challenges – being assumed to know and understand more than they do because of the new genre/context where the “language” of motherhood is “new” even for native speakers, but especially for those who are non-native speakers. As a result of my own experience of becoming a mother during my PhD work as an international student from China, I’m very interested in other international graduate student mothers’ stories. By examining the experiences of international graduate student frst-time mothers during pregnancy, childbirth, and the early years of motherhood in the United States, this poetic ethnographic study provides an evocative interpretation of the lived experiences of frst-time international graduate student mothers in the United States. This study not only aims to explore the lived experiences of international graduate student mothers – this under-represented group of people, but also delves into the many potential opportunities for second-language acquisition, language socialization, and intercultural dialogues in social contexts, and captures the dramatic moments of corporeality, language, identity, and gender in intercultural interactions. It therefore contributes to the understanding of international graduate student mothers’ experiences as social, cultural, and educational phenomena. This study also aims to provide implications for various audiences and stakeholders for considering the way universities prepare to serve international student populations, greater issues of policy and practice at the government level, and intercultural understanding among healthcare staf in medical practices. This chapter will address international graduate student mothers’ stories in the following way. First, it will provide a brief literature review of immigrant mothers and motherhood in academia. Second, it will explore how poetic inquiry makes and communicates meanings in ethnographic studies. Third, the methods and contexts of this study are described. Then, eight poems are presented to help capture the most evocative and heteroglossic moments and scenes in my participants’ stories. Finally, I end with a refection on the poetic journey of this study.

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Qualitative studies on immigrant mothers and motherhood in academia To situate the stories of international student mothers in the context of globalization and higher education, I begin by incorporating a larger framework to borrow insights from two distinct bodies of literature: (1) immigrant mothers and (2) motherhood in academia. Immigrant motherhood Contrary to the popular belief that we simply follow the natural laws and “common sense” of reproduction and motherhood, the practices from the prenatal stages to early years of childrearing are always social phenomena and biocultural events, which vary widely across time and space, and are frmly embedded in divergent physical, economic, sociocultural, political, medical, and ethical environments (Gottlieb & DeLoache, 2017). Many researchers view the culturally diverse women’s pregnancy, birth, and childrearing stories as rich data to document the meaning of a signifcant life event (Callister & Khalaf, 2009). These stories also ofer many unique lenses to explore the diversity and complexity of embodied experiences of maternity as related to gender, bodies, and space (Longhurst, 2008). They are meaningful for us to understand cultural diferences as well as the larger political and economic contexts of globalization, poverty, and war facing so many families (Gottlieb & DeLoache, 2017). According to US Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics (2013), 22.5% of all children who were born in the United States had at least one immigrant parent. Manderson (1994) points out that pregnancy and birth have numerous additional meanings for immigrant parents, especially for immigrant mothers: the birth of a child whose nationality is that of the host country, the child symbolically staking the parent’s claim to a new home; the absence (usually) of kin for whom the birth is so signifcant; often the specifc absence of the mother or mother-in-law whose role during this period might be regarded as crucial; and the absence of a traditional birth attendant knowledgeable of various culturally and ritually important procedures. (p. 3) As globalization and other forces bring more diversity to many societies worldwide, there is an increasing number of studies that focus on immigrant mothers’ struggles during pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing due to language and culture barriers, settlement issues, lack of support from extended family and community, unstable living conditions, heavy work as immigrants, and conficts between childbearing traditions, as well as how they utilize their agency through motherhood (e.g. Hennegan, Redshaw, & Kruske, 2015; Jin, Mori, & Sakajo, 2016; Lo, 2016). In their meta-synthesis of 15 qualitative studies

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published between 2003 and 2013, Benza and Liamputtong (2014) examined the lived experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood among immigrant mothers in Australia, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Switzerland. In total, 323 participants were included and the mothers were from Turkey, Portugal, India, Somalia, Cambodia, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Liberia, and Kenya. Benza and Liamputtong (2014) concluded that immigrant mothers’ pregnancy, birth, and motherhood experiences are strongly infuenced by the societal and cultural values in both home and host countries. These mothers had “the desire to preserve their culture and traditions while trying to embrace the valuable knowledge of the new homeland” (p. 580). Likewise, Liem (1994) uses Ogbu’s (1981) notion of “cultural ecology” to explore the childrearing practices of Chinese frst-time mothers in Australia. Liem (1994) argues that “individual parents do not invent new ways to raise their children, nor new competencies to transmit to their children” (p. 139), but follow “generations of collective experiences to meet the demands of physical, social, political, economic and supernatural environments” (p. 138). However, rapid social change such as migration may compel parents to “either abandon or modify their traditional practices to meet new environmental demands” as part of their struggle for survival (Liem, 1994, p. 139). It is also interesting to note that the dramatic change of migration coupled with technological advances in recent decades, the communication with “home” and “traditional practices”, as well as the sharing of cultural knowledge and practices, might become more possible in various ways. Motherhood in higher education From the perspective of women in higher education, in their report on the efects of family formation on the careers of academic men and women, Mason and Goulden (2002) found that over two-thirds of women in the United States believed that the ideal time to have a frst child is between 28 and 34 years, while the average age of doctoral degree completion is 33 years, with tenure not expected before 39 years. As the normal time frame of completing the doctorate and achieving job security competes with women’s biological clocks, it has become more common for women to have their child(ren) while they are still enrolled in school (Kuperberg, 2009). Some researchers suggest that the graduate school years might be a good opportunity to become a mother because students have relatively more fexible schedules and the possibility of communities to share parenting experience (Ketcham, 2017; Spalter-Roth & Kennelly, 2004). However, a number of scholars also point out that the identities of mother and graduate student contain irresolvable conficts because both roles require so much attention and efort (e.g. Perlow, 2013; Pitts, 2017). Douglas and Michaels (2004) defne the intensive mode of mothering as “the new momism” which insists that “to be a remotely decent mother, a woman has to devote her entire physical, emotional, and intellectual being,

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24/7, to her children” and enjoy every minute of it (p. 4). On the other hand, the academic landscape, which privileges “Western, competitive masculine frameworks for learning, teaching, and research” (Castañeda & Isgro, 2013, p. 9), determines that academics should be “monkish in their devotion and slavish in their pursuit of knowledge” (Springer et al., 2009, p. 438), and graduate students often need to work longer hours to simultaneously accomplish multiple obligations, such as teaching, conducting research, working with faculty, etc. Mason’s (2006) study reveals that graduate student mothers spend 102 hours per week on various kinds of paid and unpaid duties compared with 95 hours for graduate student fathers and 75 hours for childless graduate students. With regard to academic careers, women with PhDs who had early career babies were 20% less likely to achieve tenure than men (Mason & Goulden, 2002). Springer et al. (2009) further point out that “graduate student mothers are not only confronted with logistical difculties, limited support, and eventually constrained career paths; they must also contend with conficting and powerful ideologies that surround academia and motherhood” (p. 438). In their study of faculty mothers, Eversole, Hantzis, and Reid (2013) proposed that “momprof ” is seen as a stigmatized social identity, which violates “a set of appearances and actions as well as beliefs and attitudes that can be reasonably expected of each member” (p. 161) of the social identity category of professor. Similarly, graduate student mothers can also be regarded stigmatized social identities that break the unspoken rule: no children allowed in higher education. In some societies, it even remains as a cultural taboo for college students to get married (and become parents). For example, the “Chinese Ministry of Education prohibited marriage among university students until 2005” (Chi, Yu, & Winter, 2012, p. 6), even though many of the students had reached the legal age of marriage. Although the literature on immigrant mothers and motherhood in academia has brought some important insights and implications to the research on international graduate student mothers, few studies address lived experiences. In comparison to the experiences of immigrant mothers, many of the difculties and challenges remain the same for international graduate student mothers, such as lack of support, language and culture barriers, and conficts in traditions. However, international graduate student mothers also difer from other immigrant mothers in a couple of ways. For example, many international graduate student mothers are sojourners who may choose to return to their home countries after graduation. In addition, the pursuit of a graduate degree in American higher education brings student mothers relatively more social and cultural capital, which can be transformed into supportive networks and other useful resources. Nevertheless, international graduate student mothers might need to cope with diferent kinds of pressures to balance the dual roles of student and mother. As Zhang, Smith, Swisher, Fu, and Fogarty (2011) suggested, “the boundaries separating the home and the workplace, along with the general isolation

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of international student families” (p. 523) keep their family, marital, and parenthood experiences of the radar screen of higher education and mainstream academic research. Given the fact that the reason for international students to come to the United States was to study, their role as students tends to be the single identity that is overtly judged by others (Myers-Walls, Frias, Kwon, Ko, & Lu, 2011). However, the impacts of family, marriage, parenthood, and gender issues can play central roles in international students’ adjustment to the new environment, personal and sociocultural stressors, cultural negotiation, immigration goals, and education for their children. Accordingly, these issues may also afect international students’ learning experiences, academic research, and personal development in both explicit and implicit ways. A research-based understanding of international students’ multiple social identities is critical to develop efective strategies for improving international students’ intercultural and sociocultural competency, as well as suggestions for colleges and universities to better serve the needs of their growing international student populations.

Methodological approach: poetic ethnography Poetic ethnography refers to the integrating of poems in ethnographic studies. It can also refer to poetic prose, such as the ethnography that attends to its literariness, making the language rich and evocative, inclusive of metaphor, and the qualities of creative writing (Maynard & Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010). As ethnography became more open to literary forms under the postmodern turn in the mid-1980s, poetry has become a more accepted mode of representation in ethnographic studies (Maynard & Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010). For example, Nomi Stone’s (2008) poems were based on her anthropological research in one of the last cohesive Jewish communities in North Africa. Likewise, CahnmannTaylor (2016) did a poetic exploration of her own and other’s second-language acquisition based on her years of research and teaching among communities of second-language learners in Mexico and the United States. These ethnographic poets, among others, have provided inspiring possibilities to the feld of ethnographic research, as well as the feld of poetry. Poetic ethnography makes the ethnographer’s experience central to the scene and allows researchers to “listen to and report on the ‘sentimented’ nature of social life” rather than “treat emotion as ornamental of, or incidental to, economic, political or other instrumental acts” (Maynard, 2009, p. 121). Poetry can be employed in heterogeneous ways in qualitative studies. Butler-Kisber (2012) classifes poetic inquiry into two major categories: (1) found poetry (Butler-Kisber, 2002; Richardson, 1994), also known as poetic transcription, data poems, in which researchers transform the participants’ interview transcriptions into poetry, with an emphasis of only using the exact words from the original data, but the words can be “rearranged or juxtaposed in order to highlight themes, or to convey complex or conficting ideas” (Furman, 2015, p. 105); and (2) generated poetry (Butler-Kisber, 2005), also

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known as interpretive poetry, where the researchers use their own words to create poems in response to data. Many studies in poetic ethnography adopt such approaches to transform the exact words of interview transcriptions into poems. For example, as a key scholar in poetic ethnography, Hanauer (2014) employed found poetry to explore the wartime experiences of Jackie, a child who lived through the repeated bombings, displacement, distress, and uncertainty of London during World War II. In his study, Hanauer (2014) frst conducted and audio-recorded oral life history interviews. Before writing the poems, Hanauer extensively read the interview transcript and also examined the existing historical research literature on London during World War II. According to Hanauer (2014), “the construction of the poem was a refective, dialogic, and analytical process” (p. 586). It involves organizing the interview transcript into thematic units, editing irrelevant sections, and “carefully constructing the graphic presentation of the information so as to maximize emphasis, emotional salience and juxtaposition” (p. 586). Both chronological narrative and thematic units were used to facilitate the organization of the poems and connect the personal events with broader historical understandings. In another, similar study, Hanauer (2015) used found poetry to represent a US soldier’s narrative of his experiences during the second Iraq war in 2003. His research process consisted of three stages: (1) narrative elicitation (through interview); (2) transcription, thematic organization, and poetic rendition (through carefully considering the themes, images, events, and emotions that arose from the interview, as well as reading extensive literature on soldiers’ experiences, outcomes of exposure to confict and processes of military socialization); and (3) member checking and poem revision (through presenting the poems to the participant for comments and revising accordingly to make the fnal version approved by both the participant and the researcher). Hanauer’s (2014, 2015) studies have showcased how found poetry can help to condense research data to provide an evocative version of participants’ responses and facilitate researchers’ insights into depth and complexity (Langer & Furman, 2004). However, the necessity of sticking exactly to the same words of the interviewees is also questionable. Although the poems using direct words from interview transcripts claim to convey the participants’ voices, there always exist the researcher’s voice as well as many other people’s voices, because the researcher is the one who selected the words and crafted the poems based on his/her own understanding and interpretation, and also because “the word in language is half ours and half someone else’s” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 345).

The current study: context and method The current poetic ethnographic study employs a series of poems exploring the lived experiences of international graduate student mothers and their stories of pregnancy, childbirth, and the early years of motherhood. The study began with my own personal poetic account that I had kept since my pregnancy

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in Fall 2016 as a second-year, international doctoral student. I continued my poetry writing after I gave birth to my son, experienced the early years of motherhood, read literature on diverse mothers’ stories, interacted with other mothers, and conducted interviews with international graduate student mothers in the United States. Therefore, the poems are full of my own stories as well as other mothers’ stories. The speaker “I” (if it appears in my poem) may refer to a diferent person (and even some non-human artefacts). The voices of others populating in my poems may be cited directly or indirectly in accordance with the form and meaning-making process in each poem. After I got the Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval in 2017, I started to enrol participants and conduct interviews with international student mothers who gave, or would give, birth to their frst child during their graduate study in the United States. Among the ten participants I enrolled, one of them was pregnant and nine of them had children who were 0–2 years old at the time of the study. Nine of the participants came from the Chinese mainland, and one participant came from Taiwan. Both China and Taiwan are the current leading countries of origin of international students in the United States. According to the Open Doors Report (2017), Chinese and Taiwanese students accounted for 34.5% of the international student population, with a total number of 372,271 by the 2016–2017 academic year. My own identity as a Chinese graduate student provided me more convenience and a network to access this group of people. I frst drew on personal contacts by asking the Chinese mothers I already knew and then asked them to refer me to other international student mothers. I also posted my research call to various Chinese students’ chatting groups on WeChat and online discussion forums for Chinese-speaking mothers in the United States. I employed “snowball” sampling techniques (Atkinson & Flint, 2004) by asking my participants to help spread my research call to other Chinese/Taiwanese graduate student mothers they knew at the end of each interview. Usually, mothers always know some other mothers who are in similar situations. This poetic ethnographic study mainly involved four types of data collection: (1) pre-screening questionnaire, (2) individual interviews, (3) participant observation, and (4) WeChat group chatting records. I initially spread an online survey among the mothers who were interested in the study. The survey took about 3–5 minutes to complete, aiming to collect some basic information about the potential participants’ language, university, pregnancy, birth experiences, etc. The essential requirements and criteria included: (a) The participant defnes herself as a non-native speaker of English; (b) the participant has/had pregnancy and/or childbirth experience while pursuing a graduate degree in a US university; (c) it was the frst time for the participant to become a mother; and (d) at the time of childbirth, the participant had been in the United States (and/or other English-speaking countries) for less than ten years (preferably less than fve years). In-depth interviews were conducted with participants who fulflled the requirements and agreed to talk with me about their motherhood experiences. Each interview lasted between

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60 and 90 minutes. All interviews were audio-recorded with my participants’ permission. Mandarin was used in all the interviews in order to get maximum understanding in communication. The audio-recorded interviews were later transcribed and translated by the researcher. The semi-structured interviews were guided by a series of open-ended core questions on their pregnancy and birth stories, such as the announcement of pregnancy to professor(s), the eforts of balancing the dual roles of mother and student, the communication with doctors, nurses, midwifes, and paediatricians, and the challenges in early years of motherhood, etc. However, the questions were not asked in any set order and participants were free to introduce and explore any relevant topics. For participant observation, I focused on my own experience of pregnancy, birth, and early years of motherhood, as well as my ongoing formal and informal interactions with various kinds of people in social settings. Since I’m personally living the life of an international graduate student mother, I have numerous opportunities to communicate with other mothers who share/do not share similar situations with me. My institutional interactions with people in social settings are always ongoing. For example, I need to take my son to his paediatrician for healthcare visits, look for a satisfying day-care centre, and also communicate with his teacher after he attends day care. I keep feld notes of my interactions with people during these occasions. The last type of data collection is WeChat group chatting records. WeChat is a Chinese multipurpose messaging, social medical app developed by Tencent. As one of the most popular ways for Mandarin-speaking people to interact in their social networks all over the world, WeChat is perhaps best described as a mixture of Facebook, Skype, and texting, using internet to send written, voice, and/or video messages to friends and groups. In May, 2017, I created a WeChat group for Chinese-speaking (including Taiwanese) mothers in my university town to interact with each other. The initial members included seven mothers, but now it has developed to 46 mothers. Some of the mothers in this WeChat group are international graduate student mothers who are holding an F1 student visa, while others are working mothers, visiting scholar mothers, postdoc mothers, and stay-home mothers. In the WeChat group, mothers shared information, stories, and raised questions. The online chatting is always informative and practical, and also covers various aspects and concerns of motherhood in a foreign country. Poetic inquiry was employed in the data-analysis process. First, I coded my data with diferent themes, and paid particular attention to some key elements in the text, such as binary concepts, metaphors, repetitions, and “things that stick out”. Then I searched for poetic ideas by closely reading through each theme and key element that emerged in the data. I particularly looked for those evocative, shocking, critical, and dramatic moments in the data. I selected these moments from the transcript, copied all the relevant utterances referring to each moment into a new document, which became the frst version/draft/prompt of poems. This version/draft/prompt of poems was “chronologically and linguistically faithful to the transcript” (Glesne, 1997, p. 207).

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For the second round, I drew from “other sections of the interviews, [took] more license with words” (Glesne, 1997, p. 207), investigated the heterogeneous voices connected to relevant literature and broader sociocultural issues, and transformed the frst version/draft/prompt into poems.

A poetic account of international graduate student mothers’ stories Week 9: back to America1 I didn’t tell the Chicago custom ofcial how my Great Grandpa ploughed in Shandong Province with his foot-bound wife. Nor that Grandpa braved his journey to the Northeast2, served as a coal miner, then a local ofcial in the Communist Party. And that my parents, like the phoenixes rising from a chicken coop, became frst generation college students after the Culture Revolution, that they settled down in the capital of Liaoning Province. Though the ofcial claimed to know all my stories: Lagos for 8 months in 2010, 4 entries to Beijing, U.S. state of Georgia 5 times since 2011 …, and how many more years, months and days I can legally stay. Welcome back! He smiled, returned a smuggler’s passport. He didn’t know I was carrying a tiny undocumented immigrant & U.S. citizen in my secret garden. One who’ll speak a language that belongs to evil capitalists in my grandpa’s eyes.

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Week 20: boy or girl?3 It is against the law for a doctor to reveal the gender of a baby in China. But if you bribe or know someone who knows the doctor, it’s no longer a big deal. My parents didn’t know what I was until the day I was born. After hearing the “bad” news, my grandma stayed in hospital. A lifelong cold war broke out between my mom and her in-laws. 断子绝孙(duan zi jue sun)— die without sons and grandsons the most venomous curse to Chinese people. I am the terminator who denied my father’s right to be buried in the ancestral grave. “Would you like to know the baby’s gender?” asked by my sonographer. “Yes, please.” The proud sign of a male towered on the screen. “You see! It’s a boy!” My parents-in-law got the “good” news in a Skype call. “Oh! A BIG Grandson!!!” They grinned from ear to ear. “如你所愿吧? (Ru ni suo yuan ba?)”—Is it as you wish? “没有啦。(Mei you la.) Nono, boys and girls are the same.” Non-native4 Bulldogs are non-native to Georgia. The house is non-native to the land, where bushes of Japanese knotweed grow and European rabbits run. Sunshine is non-native, forever, to earth.

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Rice is non-native to rice cookers. A wife is non-native to her husband, who is native only to his mother. Smartphones are non-native to fngers, which are native to a beloved’s face on the screen. I am non-native to English, just like I am non-native to childbirth, but I say “Oh, my God!!!” when they told me “Push!” Upon returning to the US to pursue a doctoral degree as Trump got elected president5 The second year after my return to Georgia, I became a mother, a frst-time international student mother. My son was born on Trump’s inauguration day. He also had an immigrant mother. On Skype, Mom shouts “Our Little Trump! He’ll be president someday!” “Or he may be banned,” I say, “birthed to an immigrant mother.” We give him an American name, Edgar for Edgar Allan Poe. “How to say?” “爱打嗝 ai da ge (love hiccup)!” I explained to his grandmother. 徽言 Huiyan, as his Chinese middle name, beautiful words from Confucius, chosen by his mother. Edgar Huiyan Xue (E.H.X.), always a middle initial included. It’s not okay to be “EX,” although a son’s an ex-lover, in the past life, to his mother. Pregnancy6 I have known the secret joy of pregnancy, clip-clop of heartbeats in duet, high-fves across the belly, a mini-stove in winter, a hug lasting 24/7, a grey table, a white pillow, ice-cold ultrasound gel, the most common androgynous creature detected, a perfect patient, a happy hospital, an additional free bread from the Korean baker in H-mart. And I’ve seen the checklist of inappropriate mothers-to-be——

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Too young, too old, too queer, too many children already, Single, selfsh, still in school (x), no stable job (x), speaking imperfect English or no English at all (x), an alien attempting to parent a U.S. citizen (x) … After delivery7 In the wheelchair, I hold a newborn, accepting applause and “Congratulations!” all the way to Mother/Baby Unit, as if I heroed, injured in a glorious battle, awarded a Rose Gold trophy. I had become a legend for not using Epidural— a 3.5-inch needle inserted into the arched spinal cord, threaded a catheter of IV fuids into the back, blocking the nerve impulses from the lower spinal segments. Let mothers rest and relax during labor! But I primitived, endured the pain, imprinted on every inch of the separation, that’ll never be reunited. It is the same way Mom birthed, still so common in China. Shumei told me what happened during her son’s 15-month check-up When the nurse pushed the dose into my son’s thigh and said “You are all set for today”, I realized something must be very wrong. “But we’re here for the 15-month checkup!” The nurse was shocked.

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“What is the shot? Is it called this?” I shivered to show her “Pneumococcal” in my cellphone, a name too complicated to pronounce. “Oh yes!” “But he already got it last Tuesday!” The nurse checked her computer, rushed to report. “We’re so sorry! The blonde girl who did records made a mistake. We won’t let her work here anymore.” The doctor said. “He’ll be fne. He may get a bigger bump. Don’t worry.” Should I be mad at him? Call my husband? I nodded, thanked him, and just let it go. Concerns8 How can I choose a daycare center? Church school, development lab, Montessori, in-home care? When I don’t have anyone else’s story to remember. The chubby cheeks and cherry mouth are clever to match the curve of my neck, while he clings like a koala bear. It’s a crime to drop him in a daycare center. I was the kid who kicked, refused to enter, cried too much. My teacher locked me in the bathroom, “Fair to other kids!” A terrible story to remember. I want him to learn English from a native-speaker, but also worry about his Chinese. With yellow skin and dark hair, it’s hard to fnd Asians in a Georgia daycare center. The shameless administration’s a lavish spender of my monthly salary, while they keep me waiting at the door, full of expectations. A contradictory story to remember. “The children were pricked, fed wasabi, stripped naked,” from a Beijing newspaper. It can’t happen——right? Not over here? It’s so hard to choose a daycare center, if you have so many stories to remember.

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Refections on the poetic journey I cannot claim that my poems represent real experiences and original thoughts from my participants. As Richardson (1993) stressed, a poetic inquiry researcher shouldn’t aim to be faithful to the participants’ experiences, but be faithful to his/her academic understanding of the participants’ experiences. Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor (2010) pointed out the tension between the aesthetic merit of poetry and ethnographic validity: “For ethnographic validity, ‘data’ must be grounded in empirically ‘true’ experiences that may confict directly with the mantra of good poetry …, that it is better to be ‘true’ to our feelings and aesthetic excellence, than ‘true’ to fact” (p. 12). In my poems, I was frst faithful to my academic understanding of the participants’ experiences. I also seriously considered the aesthetic merit, because nobody wants to read “bad” poems. Admittedly, everyone may have diferent judgements on the artistic and literary merit of a poem; however, if the author him/herself knew a better way to write/revise the poem but purposefully chose not to do it for the sake of ethnographic validity, then poetic inquiry would largely lose its meanings. With regard to the quality of research poetry, Cahnmann-Taylor (2018) proposed four principles that may serve as a useful guide for arts-based research practice: (1) public good, (2) ethical good, (3) aesthetic good, and 4) scientifc good. Public good means that researchers should explore topics with complexity for more multifaceted understanding and clearly articulate the relevance of their subjectivity to the community and larger audience. Ethical good requires arts-based researchers to review the principles of sound, ethical practice when other (non)human agents are involved, such as considering “human subjects’ voluntary and informed consent, as well as the risks and benefts of others’ participation” (Cahnmann-Taylor, 2018, p. 250, emphasis in original). Aesthetic good is relevant to the researchers’ “mastery of technical skills in the arts (e.g., brushstroke, meter, dialogue, etc.), originality of concept and form, the mediums used, emotional complexity, timing, and social consensus” (p. 252). Finally, scientifc good refers to that researchers should articulate why their arts-based works matter in certain academic felds such as education, anthropology, ecology, and medicine. It always seems invalid to debate on how good a poem is good enough without considering who our target readers/audiences are. In other words, who will read our research poems? What kind of impact do we try to make on our readers? What does our poems mean to them, and why should they care? Considering the audience for poetic inquiry might consists of art critics, research participants, community members, scholarly researchers, and the general public, it is important for poet researchers to decide whom to write to most sincerely. Inspired by Cahnmann-Taylor’s (2018) four guiding principles, I have identifed three major groups of potential audiences who would greatly infuence the evaluation of my research poems. The audiences I write to most sincerely are scholarly researchers in arts-based inquires in education, especially in language and literacy

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education, because this study was a signif icant high-stakes project for me to pursue my doctoral degree and entry to academia. For this group of audiences, they mainly require the ethical good and scientif ic good in Cahnmann-Taylor’s (2018) four principles. The evaluation criteria of my research poems should be consistent with the criteria for evaluating the quality of qualitative research, such as the eight “big-tent” criteria proposed by Tracy (2010): (a) worthy topic, (b) rich rigor, (c) sincerity, (d) credibility, (e) resonance, (f ) signif icant contribution, (g) ethics, and (h) meaningful coherence. The second most important group of audiences are international student mothers, immigrant mothers, mothers in academia, university student parents, and international students in general. For this group of audiences, the requirements echo the public good and ethical good principles. The evaluation criteria are their empathic understanding, emotional response, the guidance/lessons they could gain for solving real-life challenges, and their awareness of the opportunities for “language” learning and identity construction through intercultural and interlingual interactions. In order to achieve these goals, my research poems need to be evocative, accessible, explicit, practical, and illuminating. The third most important group of audiences are literary/poem magazine editors and the audiences of literature and poetry, who uphold the highest standards for artistic quality. Their major concern is the aesthetic principle. In order to fulfl their evaluation criteria, I need to show maturity in my lyrical decision-making and take time to acquire the language of poetic craft (Faulkner, 2007; Maynard & Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010), such as the various poetry forms, the choice of subjects, details, metaphors, tones, and the meter, length, stress, rhythm, repetition, alliteration, and rhyme in each line. In order to test the power and aesthetic value of my poems, I’ve kept submitting poems in both academic arts-based research context as well as in literary magazines. At the time of revising this chapter, I have published 12 research poems in literary and scholarly journals. It is interesting to point out that research poems are often crafted in a planned and controlled way. For example, Carroll, Dew, and HowdenChapman (2011) used poems to capture the lived experience of 40 people who were living in informal dwellings (such as sheds and vans) in Aotearoa/ New Zealand. The researchers wrote a series of 34 poems – one for each “household” – to refect the participants’ experiences. For the purpose of academic study, writing research poems in a planned way may be benefcial to match one’s research agenda. For example, before I start writing poems, I need to fgure out a series of topics, or follow the sequence of my interviews. In this way, I can have a clear picture about how many parts I have done and how many more are left. However, it doesn’t seem to be an ideal way for poetry writing itself. Just like the limited choice of diction as a place holder at the end of an exact rhyming line, having a plan in advance can take away a lot of the surprise of poetry writing, and may directly infuence the quality

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of the poems. Richardson (1992) suggested that much of her own research poetry came from her capacity to be emotionally moved by participants. In my poem writing, I particularly looked for stories in the data “where a situation was described vividly and participants had revealed personal feelings” (Breckenridge, 2016, p. 451). I followed Richardson’s (1992) approach and only wrote for those evocative, shocking, critical, dramatic, impressive, ironic moments, which Cahnmann-Taylor and Hwang (2020) have referred to as “Kapow!” moments in her poetry class, as an imitation of the comic book action fgure to express the surprise, the most shining points, and “hot spots” where a poem is working. The purpose of poetic inquiry in my study was not to cover all the themes or stories, but to capture the depth of human experience and create an afective and evocative analysis. This ethnographic poetic investigation helps capture unspoken but inerasable moments experienced by international graduate student mothers as they have struggled hard as frst-time mothers in the huge sociocultural gaps of motherhood-related practices and beliefs between China (and Taiwan) and the United States. The poems can also be a treasure for the American-born Chinese (and Taiwanese) children, who might inevitably become “bananas” – the stereotyped Asian Americans who have assimilated and acculturated into the white/Anglo/Euro/Christian American mainstream culture, lost touch with the cultural identity of their parents, and appeared “yellow” on the outside, but “white” on the inside (Tu, 2011) – at least, to some extent. I have felt the need to help these children understand their cultural and family origins and experiences, aspects of gender, language, and culture that occurred during their mothers’ pregnancy and birth stories. In addition, the exploration of international graduate student mothers’ stories and the insights conveyed by the poems serve as a means of speaking to the larger world, raising questions to the marginalized and often-overlooked discourses that international graduate student mothers must face, such as the explicit and implicit pressure of baby plans, barriers in cross-cultural communication, diferences and isolation in medical practices, and inheriting and fracturing of cultural origins, and gender discrimination. My hope is that the empirical process of writing these poems refexively, and as a form of inquiry, can contribute to the understanding of the international graduate student mothers’ experience as a social, cultural, and educational phenomenon.

Notes 1. Zhang, K. (2019, April 4). Week 9: Back to America. Raising Mothers. Retrieved from http://www.raisingmothers.com/pregnancy-stories-of-a-chinese-ph-dstudent-in-the-u-s-kuo-zhang 2. Brave journey to the Northeast: 闯关东 (Chuang Guandong), literally “Crashing into Guandong”, is descriptive of the rush into Northeast of the Han Chinese population, especially from Shandong peninsular, during the 100-year period starting at the last half of the 19th century. This region, the traditional homeland of the ruling Manchus, was previously closed to settlement by Han Chinese during the Manchu Qing Dynasty.

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3. Zhang, K. (2019, April 4). Week 20: Boy or girl? Raising Mothers. Retrieved from http://www.raisingmothers.com/pregnancy-stories-of-a-chinese-ph-dstudent-in-the-u-s-kuo-zhang 4. Zhang, K. (2019, February 11). Non-native. MUTHA Magazine. 5. Zhang, K. (2019). Upon returning to the U.S. to pursue a doctoral degree as Trump got elected president. Adanna Literary Journal, 9, 62 6. Zhang, K. (2019, February 11). Pregnancy. MUTHA Magazine. 7. Zhang, K. (2019, February 11). After delivery. MUTHA Magazine. 8. Zhang, K. (2019, February 11). Concerns. MUTHA Magazine.

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150 Kuo Zhang Douglas, S. J., & Michaels, M. (2004). The mommy myth: The idealization of motherhood and how it has undermined women. New York: Free Press. Eversole, B. A. W., Hantzis, D. M., & Reid, M. A. (2013). Reimagining the fairytale of motherhood in the academy. In M. Castañeda & K. L. Isgro (Eds.), Mothers in academia (pp. 160–169). New York: Columbia University Press. Faulkner, S. L. (2007). Concern with craft: Using Ars Poetica as criteria for reading research poetry. Qualitative Inquiry, 13(2), 218–234. Furman, R. (2015). Autoethnographic explorations of researching older expatriate men: Magnifying emotion using the research pantoum. Creative Approaches to Research, 8(3), 102–114. Glesne, C. (1997). That rare feeling: Re-presenting research through poetic transcription. Qualitative Inquiry, 3(22), 202–221. Gottlieb, A., & DeLoache, J. (2017). A world of babies: Imagined childcare guides for eight societies. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Hanauer, D. I. (2014). Experiencing the Blitz: A poetic representation of a childhood in wartime London. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(5), 584–599. Hanauer, D. I. (2015). Being in the Second Iraq War: A poetic ethnography. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(1), 83–106. Hennegan, J., Redshaw, M., & Kruske, S. (2015). Another country, another language and a new baby: A quantitative study of the postnatal experiences of migrant women in Australia. Women and Birth, 28, e124–e133. Jin, Q., Mori, E., & Sakajo, A. (2016). Risk factors, cross-cultural stressors and postpartum depression among immigrant Chinese women in Japan. International Journal of Nursing Practice, 22(1), 38–47. Ketcham, J. (2017). The chaos of Kairos: Conficting discourses of timing, mothering, and fexibility. In M. A. Massé & N. Bauer-Maglin (Eds.), Staging women’s lives in academia: Gendered life stages in language and literature workplaces (pp. 53–68). Albany: State University of New York Press. Kuperberg, A. (2009). Motherhood and graduate education: 1970–2000. Population Research and Policy Review, 28(4), 473–504. Langer, C., & Furman, R. (2004). The Tanka as a qualitative research tool: A study of a Native American woman. Journal of Poetry Therapy, 17(3), 165–171. Lee, S. W., & Hassett, D. D. (2017). The multiple modes of ideological becoming: An analysis of kindergarteners’ appropriation of school language and literacy discourses. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 25(3), 462–475. Liem, I. I. L. (1994). The challenge of migrant motherhood: The childrearing practices of Chinese frst-time mothers in Australia. In P. L. Rice (Ed.), Asian mothers, Australian birth: Pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing: The Asian experience in an English-speaking country (pp. 135–160). Melbourne: Ausmed Publications. Lo, M. M. (2016). Cultural capital, motherhood capital, and low-income immigrant mothers’ institutional negotiations. Sociological Perspectives, 59(3), 694–713. Longhurst, R. (2008). Maternities: Gender, bodies and space. New York: Routledge. Manderson, L. (1994). Pregnancy and birth in intercultural settings. In P. L. Rice (Ed.), Asian mothers, Australian birth: Pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing: The Asian experience in an English-speaking country (pp. 3–14). Melbourne: Ausmed Publications. Mason, M. A. (2006). Graduate student parents: The underserved minority. Paper presented at the Council of Graduate Schools, Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://www. cgsnet.org/portals/0/pdf/mtg_am06Mason.pdf

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Mason, M. A., & Goulden, M. (2002). Do babies matter? The efect of family formation on the lifelong careers of academic men and women. Academe, 88(6), 21–27. Maynard, K. (2009). Rhyme and reasons: The epistemology of ethnographic poetry. Etnofoor, 21(2), 115–129. Maynard, K., & Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2010). Anthropology at the edge of words: Where poetry and ethnography meet. Anthropology and Humanism, 35(1), 2–19. Myers-Walls, J. A., Frias, L. V., Kwon, K., Ko, M. M., & Lu, T. (2011). Living life in two worlds: Acculturative stress among Asian international graduate student parents and spouses. Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 42(4), 455–478. Open Doors Report. (2017). International students: Leading places of origin, Institute of International Education. Retrieved from https://www.iie.org/Research-and-Insights/ Open-Doors/Data/International-Students Perlow, O. (2013). Parenting within the nexus of race, class, and gender oppression in graduate school at a historically Black college/university. In M. Castañeda & K. L. Isgro (Eds.), Mothers in academia (pp. 111–122). New York: Columbia University Press. Pitts, M. (2017). Uses of my anger: Negotiating mothering, feminism, and graduate school. In M. A. Massé & N. Bauer-Maglin (Eds.), Staging women’s lives in academia: Gendered life stages in language and literature workplaces (pp. 41–52). Albany: State University of New York Press. Richardson, L. (1992). The consequences of poetic representation: Writing the other, rewriting the self. In C. Ellis & M. G. Flaherty (Eds.), Investigating subjectivity: Research on lived experience (pp. 125–137). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Richardson, L. (1993). Poetics, dramatics and transgressive validity: The case of the skipped line. The Sociological Quarterly, 34(4), 695–710. Richardson, L. (1994). Nine poems: Marriage and the family. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 23, 3–14. Spalter-Roth, R., & Kennelly, I. (2004). The best time to have a baby: Institutional resources and family strategies among early career sociologists. ASA Research Brief, 1–18. Springer, K. W., Parker, B. K., & Leviten-Reid, C. (2009). Making space for graduate student parents: Practice and politics. Journal of Family Issues, 30(4), 435–457. Stone, N. (2008). Stranger’s notebook: Poems. Evanston, IL: TriQuarterly. Tracy, S. J. (2010). Qualitative quality: Eight “Big-Tent” criteria for excellent qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 16(10), 837–851. Tu, D. L. (2011). “Twinkie,” “banana,” “coconut”. In Encyclopedia of Asian American Folklore and Folklife (Vol. 1, pp. 88–89). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. US Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2013). Children under age 19, by nativity of child and parent(s). Retrieved from https://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa14/population-characteristics/ children-immigrant-parents.html Woo, Y. Y. (2018). Putting critical public pedagogy into practice: Reorienting the career path of the teacher-artist-scholar. In M. Cahnmann-Taylor & R. Siegesmund (Eds.), Arts-based research in education: Foundations for practice (2nd ed., pp. 19–31). New York: Routledge. Zhang, J., Smith, S., Swisher, M., Fu, D., & Fogarty, K. (2011). Gender role disruption and marital satisfaction among wives of Chinese international students in the United States. Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 42(4), 523–542.

Section III

Decolonising education and indigenous poetry

12 Cultivating resonant images through poetic meditation A de/colonial approach to educational research Kakali Bhattacharya

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Cultivating resonant images through poetic meditation: a de/colonial approach to educational research In living rooms of my home, homes of family friends, on stages at school and theatres, I engaged in recitations growing up in India. Recitations were the act the memorizing a poem or poems, usually with several stanzas, and then performing the poems on stage, or at home when guests came to visit, or when elders wanted to be entertained. Aware of body posturing, elocution, diction, and emotion, of I went into this space of being, that was liminal, neither here nor fully there, wherever there was, but it was a place of imagination and freedom to express in an embodied way how I am responding to the poem. We pronounced the word as – re-cee-ta-tion. Now I look at the word and see it also as recitation. It is a re-citing of work that came before me and a response to that work in an embodied manner that is sensory, imaginal, and liminal. Creativity inspired responses and refections have been an ongoing part of human culture as can be seen in how we have engaged in fan fctions, fan fction arts, various adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, etc. Further, artists engage in responding to music via art through their album cover, or responding to other music via doing cover versions of songs, where they recreate an original song in their own style. Artists who work with altered books also create a space of practice and response in how they repurpose an existing book. Satire and parodies are often responses to original work, events, speeches, etc. through extending salient ideas to the absurd extreme for various purposes, including hyper amplifcation. Thus, art has always been a refection, a response to something – an experience, an insight, tensions, etc. In this visual essay, I juxtapose de/coloniality, poetry, and visual art-making as practice-based inquiry of cultivating resonant images and being in dialogue with a poet whose work allows me to return to my sense of indigeneity. De/coloniality for me has always been an interplay between resisting colonial forces and dreaming of freedom without colonial infuences. As colonial subjects (I was born in India, raised and educated in Canada and the United States), it has become impossible to imagine a pure space devoid of colonial infuence for us, so de/coloniality is a shuttling, a movement between multiple states of desire and resistance, unsettledness, and anchoring in certain transient moments and relations (Bhattacharya, 2009, 2015b, 2017).

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In the spirit of recitation, I meditate on the work of an Indian poet, Sharanya Manivannan (2017) who I came across rather serendipitously. Sharanya was writing a poem book in India and she came across my work on liminality, using indigenous Indic ideas. She cited my returning to a concept of liminality, lokaloka, within Indian ancient texts and repurposing it for my current work (Bhattacharya, 2015a). Lokaloka refers to “a belt of mountains that act as an in-between space between a world with sunlight and a world without” (Bhattacharya, 2015a, p. 499), in other words, a world without a world (Manivannan, 2017). Sharanya reached out to me and informed me that she has cited my work and I was deeply touched. Here I was in a shuttling, transnational, un/settled relationship with my roots and routes of journeying as a woman of Indian heritage, and there is Sharanya, who evokes unapologetic imagery grounded in her south Indian cultural sensitivities, social-political discourses, sensuality, and spirituality and found something I wrote worthy of her poetic work. When Sharanya’s book was published, she sent me a copy of it. I read the book as an act of poetic meditation. Sometimes I pause after reading a line, a word, or a stanza, and other times I sit with whatever becomes alive for me after reading Sharanya’s poems. In this essay, I turn to Sharanya’s poems and put them in dialogue with my own poems through visual and digital art-making. I do so inspired by the work of Brooke Hofsess (Hofsess, 2018), I used her blueprint as a way to format this visual essay, where I engaged in breaking rules, border crossings, spaces for contemplation, and engagement in the sensibilities of viewing and interacting with art. While there are several scholars who have discussed poetic inquiry in education and social sciences (Cahnmann, 2003; Faulkner, 2009; Leggo, 2008), poetry as a method and meditation to disrupt colonial agendas in educational research is an area that warrants attention. Responding to Sharanya’s work by putting my de/colonial poetic inquiry in dialogue bears the promise of expansiveness and generativity. Therefore, I engaged in the process of art-making,

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where I gathered my art, poems, and found pictures for which I either had purchased the copyrights or they were in public domain, and tried to cultivate resonant images. Resonant images are also openings or invitations to the readers to create their own entry points. The resonant images are those that emerge out of engaged inquiry, and in some ways, can be argued as “found images” in conversations, silences, memories, imaginations, observations, archived materials, pictures, paintings, poems, videos, and sociocultural discourses. A de/colonial approach to poetic inquiry, then is a meditation on these images, where the poet engages in a journeying of her own, perhaps as an escape from the daily bombardment of colonial discourses and materiality, to fnd the vulnerable, relatable, and layered images with multidimensional tentacles. The poet is able to take these resonant images and layer them with complex interplay between colonial and decolonial desires, resistances, and imaginations. Sometimes transparent, sometimes hidden in between words, lines, and stanza, in plain view or in liminality lie what cannot be solely said in prose, with pictures, but can be described with the amplifcation of deep emotional truths that exist of sufering and injustices in overt and hidden curriculum in education, imploring us to understand how we relate to such truths, how such truths transform and translate us, and how we then become agents of such truths in our work in educational research.

Meditations on re-citing Colonial education wherever it is present erases a heritage language, indigenous ways of knowing and being. In addition to destroying land, property, and people’s lives, colonialism destroys epistemologies and ontologies. A meditation on such colonial forces requires us to unlearn and deprogram from such violent erasures. Colonial education teaches us to undervalue our cultural heritage, rituals, and the ways in which we engage each other in community. What becomes dismissed as uncivilized and superstitious, later become rebranded/co-opted/appropriated as valued commodity to which the colonized people from whom much was stolen have limited access.

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Stitching and Weaving Stories through Poetic Inquiry Remembered stories. Lost stories. Imagined stories. Stories of the future. Not yet happened but imagining them makes them my memories of the future, unbound by time. Time travelling stories. Stories in motifs, symbols, secret messages, transmitted across oceans, generations. An escape space, a dream space, where sweetness and sting collide, where we engage in sacred illusion and delusion, as a reprieve. Where Goddesses Lasya and Tandava dance to creation and destruction.

We are not allowed to be inspired by our poets, authors, thinkers, and philosophers but translate works of other people who never created their work with us in mind. A re-citation is an act of resistance and an imagination of freedom simultaneously. Returning to a cultural sensibility represent powerful deprogramming, unlocking, releasing, and cleansing moves. These moves are de/colonial and they allow journeying into portals, passages, into unimagined spaces that challenges the absurdity of the daily oppression and presents possibilities that were previously unimagined. Additionally, these spaces are often liminal, the world without worlds, and as poetic inquirers we are crossing thresholds (Anzaldúa, 2015), while juxtaposing materiality, spirituality, imaginal sensibilities, sufering, healing, and connecting with wisdom beyond the trappings of the binaried and oppositionally discursive ones that lock us into positions that are spirit draining.

160 Kakali Bhattacharya Memories etched on My aching ligaments, Cracking joints, Straining muscles, Sending secret messages Undetected almost. For decades. (Bhattacharya, 2013, p. 606)

Re-citing is an act of remembering. Piece by piece, as I moved in and out of Sharanya’s pieces and connected with my own poetic work, I began to recollect forgotten pain, familiarities, dreams, and hopes. I remembered a sensibility that was long lost buried deep in my consciousness. Staying within this dialogic space, I remembered a line said by one of my participant, Neerada, recently arrived in the United States from India to pursue her graduate studies. Going through some of her pictures from home as she was telling me about her memories of home, she said, “It’s the small, small things really. After sometime it feels natural to forget them”. I knew something then that Neerada was yet to fnd out. Home would no longer feel like home again, and these small small things that she cherished, may never be part of her experiences again. I wrote about it in an earlier publication, where I stated: Yet the “old country” as we lived and remember it, is no longer the same old country; nor, given our diferent paths, are we the same as the people who remain there, or even the same people we were when we left. (Bhattacharya, 2017, p. 11) Neerada did not know what she was going to forget, what would need re-citation, remembering, and how she will carry the pain of separation, isolation, and un/settledness, while meeting the stark nakedness of colonial oppression, in more overt ways in a foreign land than she had ever imagined. And how such experiences will forever change her relationship with herself, her home, and her place in this world. This essay can be read as a meditative approach to de/colonial poetic inquiry. Yet there is no method, process, verifcation measures, or compulsion for truth chasing. We allow ourselves the necessary permission to reconnect to buried knowledge, to re-cite as a remembrance, and to honour that which we long deemed as inferior in our colonial oppression. This is lokaloka, the middle world of everything, nothing, impermanence, tension, and possibilities.

Resonant images Often artists create resonant images to evoke, provoke, facilitate perspective taking, empathy, or actions, or create awareness. While it is true that no artist or poet could ever determine how their art will live in the world once it is released to the world, we enter into the creative process with some intention. If we want the art

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Cultivating resonant images 163 to live beyond ourselves, then we enter into a relationship between the art and the receiver of art; however, non-linear and unstable that relationship might be. Sharanya’s poem testimony speaks about transgressive border crossing and its imprint on one’s mind, body, and spirit. In responding to those lines, I went through my prior work and created a “found” visual response to those lines as a way to re-cite, remember, and reconnect. Years ago, I was taking a mixedmedium art-making class. The instructor told us to doodle signs that are important to us. I began to think what might be some signs I was taught when I was a child. I began to draw an oil lamp that we lit every day during prayers, and many during Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. I started drawing other signs that we would draw on the foor during our festivals that looked like round mandalas. And I began writing my name, as an act of re-citation in Bangla, my native language. Later, I combined these signs, into a de/colonial autoethnographic mixed-medium artwork (Bhattacharya & Payne, 2016) with the help of a friend with whom I was in a meditation circle, who is a professional artist and an art therapist. I painted on a window pane, narratives that are hieroglyphed on my being, body, and spirit, and narratives that I hid, and narratives that no longer served me and had become detrimental. I understood lines drawn for me and the lines that I drew for myself, normalizing my own oppression. And I remembered my mother and our collective and separate journeys as women in India and women of colour in Canada and in the United States. My mother’s face in a photograph, partially visible, looks back at me. Her face when she was 18 years old, trusting her parents as she was married to a man she did not know. Unable to bear the pain of being bruised, beaten, abused, and cheated on, she endured a divorce, a process that took her nearly seven years in Kolkata, India in the 1970s. My father made sure she ran out of money and ways to make money, by visiting every school that hired her and reminding the principal that she had left her husband and requested a divorce. This code for dirty woman with loose morals implied that this was not a woman they wanted to teach their students. My mother would be fred a day or two after my father’s visit. Although I did not realize it at the time, the feminist in me was triggered at the ripe old age of seven, when I wondered why women were aforded so few choices about how to author their lives. (Bhattacharya & Payne, 2016, p. 1112)

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I begin wrapping the crepe paper through the frame, over the panes, tearing it up, attaching it somewhere else, like a sari fowing, torn, covering, revealing. It strikes me at that moment that in so many ways I have moved through the spaces of my life, breaking rules, doing the unexpected, or accommodating the rules strategically. I have chosen to explore arts-based approaches in qualitative inquiry, and I have chosen to do so from de/colonizing (Smith, 1999), transnational feminist perspectives. These are not easy places in which to reside, and building bridges from these spaces to other spaces requires a degree of self-knowledge and an understanding of intersectionality that can come only from deep forms of inquiry. (Bhattacharya & Payne, 2016, p. 1113)

In another century I held gems in my lower jaw and waited underwater for a signal. Borders crossed in the shadow of the boats. (Manivannan, 2017, p. 39)

Cultivating resonant images 165 Brown goddesses emerge, demolishing mediocre magic Riding on wave crests, baptized with more gifts than before Dappled gems, trishul, stars plucked directly from Orion’s belt Lighting up their rose-gold armour, fsts holding balls of fre Secret weapons, messages from the universe Kundalini serpent awakened, reminding the one thousand and one words for desire.

Embodied education Refecting back on years of colonizing education in India, Canada, and in the United States, I have to ask questions about where is this education living in my body and in what form. What is it doing to my body, and by extension to my mind and spirit? How much attention have I given to such embodiment and internalization of pain, trauma, and toxicity? For years, I have been witnessing the use and co-optation of mysticism and other spiritual practices from India in the west. This rebranding of meditation, yoga, mindfulness, in education and beyond, has became so attractive and pervasive that billion dollars of industries were formed around these rebranded commodities around the world. Next thing I knew people in India also began to buy into how cultural outsiders co-opted that which was so precisely and historically indigenous to our land, cultural rituals, and practices. In this erasure, I was sinking into a bottomless abyss. As a move to hold onto some semblance of familiarity, I wanted to write a poem about the

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bastardization. And as it often happens, as I was working on the poem, it worked on me. I constructed a poem titled, Yoga in Kolkata (Bhattacharya, 2013).1 I wanted to trace my colonizing educational journey in three continents using the metaphor of yoga. By the time I surrendered to the process of the practice of writing poem and remaining open to whatever was unfolding. Like Sharanya’s border crossings, her hieroglyphic imprint of pain, complicity in her own oppression, her poetic inquiry awakened decades of buried narratives in me and a possibility of healing that was previously unknown to me. This healing is not complacent about colonization but aware of spiritual nourishment. I understood tracing and meditating on these points of pain, the stuck places, the dark places are critical in healing. I engaged in shadow work as a meditative and contemplative practice in every aspect of my life, including my academic publications (Bhattacharya, 2018). I traced what it meant to be a woman of colour in education and how often it felt like I was making deft and clumsy acrobatic moves and thrusting myself into silence or was being thrust into silence. I had a problem being thought of as a “minority” when in the global context, people like me are not the numerical minority, but we were being minoritized. I wrote a silent play and included a visual response with my face darkened and the world map on my face to denote my liminality, border crossings, and transgressive moves (Bhattacharya, 2014). The contortion of body, mind, and spirit to ft into various educational spaces was the focus of the piece flled with performative writing. Sharanya’s poems evoked this remembering as a visual response, lines of her stanza becoming lines from my life lived. As if somehow, she and I were connected with this thin thread of woven poetic lines, dissolving continents, borders, oceans between us, culminating in one moment, in this place of our joined liminality.

Practice-based inquiry of art-making Practice-based inquiry is not new in arts-based approaches to research (Sinner, Leggo, Irwin, Gouzouasis, & Grauer, 2006). As a qualitative researcher, such approaches to inquiry appeal to me and scare me simultaneously. The appeal lies in the freedom of not having to set up every step of the process of inquiry in advance when the practice itself becomes a site of inquiry. This approach is also scary because years of programming in positivist research have taught me to have a predetermined plan, without which I feel lost and insecure. Yet I know that I always emerge richer, more expanded in my consciousness when I engage in practice-based inquiry. In this essay, I tried to embrace this uncertainty of journeying into a practice-based inquiry driven re-citation and response to someone’s work with which I became connected that blurred time, space, memories, and relationality. To respond and dialogue with Sharanya’s work I brought together lines from poems written by both of us, images that I recollected and reconneted

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Cultivating resonant images 169 as a form of response that was already buried somewhere in my possession. And much like a shamanic journeying, I embraced moving into an experience of connecting to something that exceeds both Sharanya and me to gain insight that is not just limited to traditional empiricism and limited sensory-driven information. In engaging with the practice of art-making and meditation of what it produces for me and where it is alive in and around me, it became clear that de/colonial poetic inquiry focused on tracing the imprints of colonization on body, memory, spirit, and called for deep healing. This call for healing did not come from just the poetic art-making. Instead, it came from the meditative journeying to parts buried within me (or perhaps beyond my daily awareness), through cultivating an intentionality of surrendering. The process of surrendering brought forth a need to heal and an invitation to others who are engaged in this work or have some curiosity.

After everything Sharanya wrote a poem entitled After Everything which I read as part of a eulogy for a student whose father passed away suddenly and recently. The process of healing feels like a process of death and grieving, as we let go of memories, pain, toxic relationships, that had become such an integrated part of our knowing, being, and living in this world. A de/colonial approach to poetic inquiry meant going beyond the convention of how to engage in inquiry, responding with multidimensional and multilayered art-making, where not everything that needed to be said has been said, yet between saying, hiding, speaking, quietening, the ways in which colonizing separates us began to dis/appear. Thousands of miles between two people became dissolved in a connected awareness, and in bearing witness to Sharanya’s healing, I traced my own through various stages of de/colonial moves I have made in my career as an educational researcher. Creating resonant images became a process of breathing, a commitment to be resonant and re-cite my own pain and awareness. From that commitment images began to work on me and I started constructing this visual essay. I did not know what words I would write as I created visual responses to our collective poetic inquiry. It wasn’t until I created the images, layered them onto the pages, that I allowed a meditative process on the images to reveal to me what words should be shared. These words came out in English and Bangla, sometimes unyielding to the boundaries of scholarly publication. But unless we push on the edge of the boundaries of our trappings, how do we discover what lies beyond? As a concluding de/colonial move to demonstrate interconnectivity in poetic inquiry and engage in acts of healing, I present the last four lines of two poems written by Sharanya and me. Readers are invited to create their own entry points in their engagement.

170 Kakali Bhattacharya Receiving, surrendering, Parting waves of resistance, Sitting down, bowing head, Touching ground, reaching, I resign to the child’s pose. From Yoga in Kolkata, Kakali Bhattacharya (2013)

How wild the miracle is, that after everything we have come to we have come to be here still. From After Everything, Sharanya Manivannan (2017)

Note 1. The picture in the section” Embodied education” is a visual response in tracing. The lines are from my Yoga in Kolkata poem, the dark face with a map of the world is from a publication, and the painting is my mixed-medium art work with Rachel.

References Anzaldúa, G. E. (2015). Geographies of selves – reimagining identity: Nos/otras (Us/ other), las nepantleras, and the new tribalism. In A. Keating (Ed.), Light in the dark: Luz en lo oscuro (pp. 65–94). Durham NC: Duke University Press. Bhattacharya, K. (2009). Othering research, researching the other: De/colonizing approaches to qualitative inquiry. In J. Smart (Ed.), Higher education: Handbook of theory and research (Vol. XXIV, pp. 105–150). Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer. Bhattacharya, K. (2013). Voices, silences, and telling secrets: The role of qualitative methods in arts-based research. International Review of Qualitative Research, 6(4), 604–627.

Cultivating resonant images 171 Bhattacharya, K. (2014). Cirque de silence: Acrobatics of transnational female academic. Critical Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 14(2), 209–213. Bhattacharya, K. (2015a). Diving deep into oppositional beliefs: Healing the wounded transnational, de/colonizing warrior within. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 15(6), 492–500. doi: 10.1177/1532708615614019. Bhattacharya, K. (2015b). The vulnerable academic: Personal narratives and strategic de/colonizing of academic structures. Qualitative Inquiry, 22(5), 309–321. doi: 10.1177/1077800415615619. Bhattacharya, K. (2017). Coloring memories and imaginations of “Home”: Crafting a de/colonizing autoethnography. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 18(1), 9–15. Bhattacharya, K. (2018). Walking through the dark forest: Embodied literacies for shadow work in higher education and beyond. The Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships, 4(1), 105–124. Bhattacharya, K., & Payne, R. (2016). Mixing mediums, mixing selves: Arts-based contemplative approaches to border crossings. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29(2), 1100–1117. doi: 10.1080/09518398.2016.1201163. Cahnmann, M. (2003). The craft, the practice, and possibility of poetry in educational research. Educational Researcher, 32(3), 29–36. Faulkner, S. (2009). Introduction: Why poetry poetry as method (pp. 15–44). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Hofsess, B. A. (2018). Blueprinting a poetics of materiality. International Journal of Education Through Art, 14(1), 49–58. Leggo, C. (2008). Astonishing silence: Knowing in poetry. In J. G. Knowles & A. L. Cole (Eds.), Handbook of the arts in qualitative research (pp. 165–174). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Manivannan, S. (2017). The alter of the only world. Uttar Pradesh, India: HarperCollins Publisher. Sinner, A., Leggo, C., Irwin, R. L., Gouzouasis, P., & Grauer, K. (2006). Arts-based educational research dissertations: Reviewing the practices of new scholars. Canadian Journal of Education, 29(4), 1223–1270.

13 Making the invisible visible Poetic explorations of a cross-cultural researcher Pauline Adams

Te Whare Wā nanga o Aotearoa, New Zealand

As a mixed-race person from Aotearoa-New Zealand, I sit, simultaneously, on the opposing margins of cultural and ethnic spectrums. I am an indigene and a colonial. I am indigenous Māori and I am a settler-descendant Pā kehā. Alongside these dichotomous spectrums are another set of binary constructs that I navigate. I am seen and I am unseen. I am an insider and I am an outsider. I belong and I don’t belong. I am visible and I am invisible. At the same time, I sit at the intersections of these converging spectrums. I am a bicultural, biracial, bi-ethnic, mixed-race Māori-Pā kehā. In the intersections I am neither wholly Māori nor wholly Pā kehā, but a blend of both. I occupy what Webber (2008) defnes as a “walking the space in-between”. I am not fxed nor tied to any of these contexts perpetually. Instead I move across and between the contexts with fuidity, between M āori, Pā kehā, and Māori-Pā kehā. Within and across these spaces I am simultaneously an insider and an outsider. These are my multiple places of belonging, my multiple ways of being, my multiple identities, and my multiple positions as a researcher. As a bicultural, Māori-Pā kehā, educational researcher, a large part of my inquiry process involves making sense of my place within the research, at the cross-cultural intersections of both Māori and Pā kehā worlds. The bipolarity between indigenous and European values, traditions, and worldviews creates a tension within the shared cross-cultural middle ground. It is the tension of two conficting and opposing worldviews, one indigenous, the other colonial in its origins. It is within this space that people who identify as Māori-Pā kehā are situated, and are tasked with fnding, claiming, and declaring our position as cross-cultural, educational researchers. In seeking to understand mixed Māori-Pā kehā identities, my challenge is to untangle and understand two contrasting worldviews that exist within a shared context. As a researcher, I am also obligated to communicate these layered conficts and binaries in a way that makes sense in my research. With these tangents and tensions in mind, poetry in my research is inextricably linked to my navigation of these multiple spaces. In this chapter I unpack the ways in which I, as an emerging researcher and developing poet, am exploring the place of poetry in my research, with a specifc focus on how I examine my researcher identity and my place in inquiry.

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Using the poem Blending in as a reference for analysis, I unpack the ways in which I use poetry to “create moments” that convey my evolving identity development across multiple contexts and through complex layers. Finally, I consider how poetic forms of writing in research can serve to re-privilege indigenous Māori ways of knowing and being. In this sense, my “unlearning” of formal research writing “rules” to incorporate poetic verse becomes a journey in decolonisation. It is a journey that returns me to Māori forms of writing and oracy, where metaphor, expression, and symbolism are valued over the literal, detached, and neutral approaches that have long been privileged in research.

Poetry as positional: coming in from the margins as a cross-cultural researcher Poetry as a research tool is highly adaptable and fexible. Poetry is used in a multitude of ways both within and across research, as analysis, as a method, as representative of data, or as the research itself in its entirety (Faulkner, 2009). A broad analysis on poetic inquiry across qualitative research conducted by Prendergast (2009) identifed 29 diferent uses of poetry in research. These included (but were not limited to): poetry as a cultural critique; poetry as an embodied, emotional response; poetry to show moments of “truth” and “humanity”; and to recreate moments of experience. Prendergast also identifed some pragmatic uses of poetry in inquiry, such as the compression or reduction of data through poetic representation. As Faulkner (2009) and Prendergast (2009) demonstrate, there are many ways in which poetry can be utilized as a powerful tool in qualitative research. As an emerging researcher, the ways in which I use poetry provides additional approaches. My research poetry forms an integral part of a process that guides me through my exploration of my researcher identity. A large part of fnding and declaring my researcher identity involves contemplating my place in the research, and understanding how visible my position is within it. Through articulating my contemplation of my position and my resolve in declaring my position, in poetic form, I become “visible” in my research. Richardson (1998) described this process as giving us the ability to “fnd ourselves in poems” (p. 459). Parini (2008) surmised that: Poetry matters because it serves up the substance of our lives, and becomes more than a mere articulation of experience … Mainly it allows us to see ourselves freshly and keenly. It makes the invisible world visible. (p. 181) This process of making myself visible in my research is especially important to me, due to my intersectional, cross-cultural realities. Hence, any research I undertake always begins with an introspective contemplation of my position in the research, as well as personal scrutiny of my perceived position in the research. I am often identifed (by others) as Pā kehā, as I do not project

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many of the overt markers that others use to identify me as Māori. I am a light-skinned Māori with an Anglo name. English is my frst language, and I am still at an intermediate level of profciency in my native Māori language. Therefore, understanding both my place in the research and my perceived place in the research is important. I ask myself, am I Māori in the research or am I Pā kehā? Am I an insider or am I an outsider? Am I seen in the research or am I unseen? To be more specifc, am I seen as a Māori researcher insider doing Māori research – and therefore validated by the communities within which I am situated, or am I seen as Pā kehā, an outsider, trying to do Māori research? These ponderings are articulated in poetic form, highlighting the dichotomous nature of my position(s). The insider/outsider Like a woven thread I am there, then I’m not I appear, then I’m gone I am seen, I am unseen Emerging, submerging Māori, Non-Māori Māori, not Insider, outsider Inside and Out These are not idle questions of a philosophical researcher. They are real and actual concerns of someone who is not always “seen” as being from within my own cultural groups. They are important questions for me to consider, as someone who sits across both Māori and Pā kehā contexts, as well as within the overlap. These questions are especially important in instances where Kaupapa Māori research methods are deemed to be appropriate. This is because Kaupapa Māori research is often described as “Research by Māori, for Māori and with Māori” (Smith, 1999). Irwin (1994, p. 40) is more precise in describing Kaupapa Māori research as “Research which is … culturally relevant and appropriate while satisfying the rigour of research, and which is undertaken by a Māori researcher, not a researcher who happens to be Māori”. Thus, as an educational researcher, I always begin by asking myself the question: What do you see When you see me? Do you see you, when you see me? Or do you see through the parts of me That are like you, so you only see The parts of me, that separate we?

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Will we ever connect, you and me? Or will I always be seen, Suspiciously? What do you see When you see me? What do you see, when I am unseen? In my 12 years as a primary teacher, I constantly considered how I was perceived by the communities within which I worked. My self-awareness was heightened when building relationships with Māori parents in low socio-economic areas. In these contexts, I often worked with Māori mothers of young children, who struggled with the realities of living and raising a family within the bounds of gangs, whose lives were defned by violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and absentee fathers in and out of prison. As a teacher trying to reach out to these mothers, and make a genuine connection for the sake of the children in my care, I was always mindful how I was perceived. It was important to me to ensure that I didn’t come across as “another privileged white person”, someone in a position of authority who was seen as “speaking down” to them. Someone who couldn’t be trusted. In these instances, in particular, I was tasked with making my indigenous culture visible, recognized and valid. This was important in assuring my Māori parents that, through my own Māori worldview, I also saw and understood their children as Māori. That I valued their cultural identities and aspirations. That, while I could not relate to their world socially, I did understand their children culturally. As a Pā kehā also, I understood that these aspirations (to connect with Māori children and their families) were not exclusive to Māori teachers, as highlighted in my masters’ research (Adams, 2014). However, I recognized that being a teacher who is Māori gave me an opportunity to connect culturally to these families, but only by making my culture visible to them. This is because for Māori, bonds and relationships are built upon the sharing of whakapapa (lineage), reinforced by the connections we make to each other through whānau (family), iwi (tribal), and whenua (location, places of belonging). Sharing and voicing my connections through my whakapapa was how I made myself “seen”, which gave me a platform on which to build positive relationships with Māori parents, based on trust, as well as shared familial connections and kinships. Ko au te moana, ko te moana ko au I am the sea, and the sea is me1 When I moved away from the “chalkface”, leaving the classroom to take up research, my concerns of being “seen” or “unseen” continued. My Master of Education thesis, titled Bringing biculturalism into the mainstream primary classroom in Aotearoa-New Zealand, examined the place of te reo and tikanga Māori

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(Māori language and culture) in mainstream primary classrooms. Here, my concerns centred around how I was “seen” as an educational researcher, which infuenced my research design. These concerns were particularly valid, given the historically capricious nature of race relations in Aotearoa-New Zealand, and the emotions that my topic could (and continues to) evoke. Again, I had two opposing yet linked concerns. Would my perceived ethnicity and culture create a self-selection bias in potential participants? If I was viewed as a Māori researcher, asking teachers’ for their views on the place of Māori language and culture in the mainstream primary classroom (a contentious topic at the best of times), how might this efect my research? Alternatively, if I was viewed as a Pā kehā researcher, asking the same questions, what might the impacts be? These dilemmas were considered from the outset of my research: The ideal of all Aotearoa-New Zealand children having some schooling in Māori language and culture sits comfortably on my shoulders. Through my Māori heritage I feel secure about accessing Māori knowledge, while as a Pā kehā I now feel confdent passing this knowledge on to other Pā kehā (as well as other non-Māori). This raised an important question for the research. Would I feel the same if I were predominantly Māori, or if I were of non-Māori descent? This refection intrigued me, as the majority of the primary teacher workforce in Aotearoa-New Zealand is non-Māori (Ministry of Education [MoE], 2012). I embarked on this research with the assumption that these teachers may not have, or feel they have, the opportunities or the right to access Māori forms of knowledge in the same way that is my right (by birth). (Adams, 2014, p. 2) These dilemmas lead me to understand that my position in educational research is never fxed, nor can it be assumed or taken-for-granted, just as my identity cannot be taken-for-granted. As a bicultural Māori-Pā kehā researcher, the intersection of insider and outsider is my default position. I am therefore, simultaneously, an insider and an outsider, whether I am seen or unseen. I belong to one side in ways that I cannot belong to the other. I am accepted and acknowledged, while simultaneously being questioned and challenged. I conform, and I resist conformity. I am my own, walking dual paradigm. I am therefore a cross-cultural researcher, for whom assigned identities such as Māori researcher, Pā kehā researcher and Māori-Pā kehā researcher are fuid rather than fxed states. Thus, my poetry is borne out of the challenge to make myself visible in my research, and to make my position clear. Using poetic verse, I am able to situate myself within one of my multiple places of belonging, for the beneft of defning my position in a particular inquiry. For me, poems are pou2, signposts that mark my position in a point of time, allowing me to pause for introspection and analysis, before re-positioning to consider another view. In these examples, my poems are not in themselves refective or analytical

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representations of my research. Instead, I use poetry as a pre-inquiry pause, to locate myself in a research context, or to signal/declare my position within it.

Poetry to “create moments” as a cross-cultural researcher One of the difculties in cross-cultural research is trying to convey one’s multiple worldviews or cultural outlooks in ways that create a deeper understanding of what it might be to “walk in another’s shoes” so to speak. Part of the process of claiming my position in educational research is understanding my identity journey growing up as a mixed-race child, (which is the subject of my current doctoral thesis). My research poems express my experiences of being both seen and unseen and explore the dichotomy of belonging and un-belonging. They provide insight around my experiences of being acknowledged and validated as Māori in some circles, while simultaneously being overlooked as Māori in other spaces, due to my lighter skin and Anglo name. Through poetry I can “re-create moments” that succinctly express my experiences in fnding my voice across multiple places of belonging, experiences which are subsequently considered and analysed. The following poem Blending in is one such example: Blending in Immersed My ancestral home I will the sun to burnish me Turn my skin a darker bronze Instead of copper, that outed me Plunged In a stark, white privilege Erase the tint that colours me Seeking sameness, pure whiteness Instead, my russet tones, they outed me Mingled In multi-cultural adolescent bustle Where are those who look like me? Black, white, brown, ethnic No, I am grey, an in-between Grown Boldly defying, testifying To those who wish to colour me No longer grey, or in-between But a fuid blend of hybridity

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The above poem traces the different ways in which I have felt like an outsider across multiple contexts growing up. Where I am stand out physically as different, in places where I have a legitimate claim of belonging. The f irst verse speaks to my experiences in my ancestral, tribal home as an uri or descendant. I deliberately use the word immersed to describe myself in this context, to give a sense of my deep connectedness to the location. It is not a place I “visit” but a place in which I am immersed. This speaks to my spiritual connection to my tipuna (my ancestors) through the whenua (land). Here, my maunga (mountain) and my awa (river) are more than geographical features, but are ancient ancestors. This is me, as “unseen”. My “seen” self makes me look out-of-place in such a context. I am light skinned with European features, and thus not as being “from this place”. I am asked constantly by those locals who do not know my whakapapa – “what are you doing here?” I am an outsider, outed by my copper-coloured skin. My skin testif ies on my behalf, telling the world “you are not from here”. The second verse traces a similar experience, but in reverse. As a young child I attended a school that could easily be described as white and afuent, two things that my family were not. I was plunged into this context due to the circumstance of having two working parents, so needed to attend a school close to where my mother worked. While I was happy and had friends, I knew I was diferent. Not white and afuent like the other children and their families, but “with a touch of the tarbrush” to use the derogatory expression. Hence, again I was outed as “being diferent” by my russet skin tone, underpinning a sense of not belonging. The third verse, Mingled conveys a sense of the multicultural high school I attended. While my high school was a diverse context that refected many diferent cultures and ethnicities, I still stood out as a mixed-race adolescent. The process of streaming had alienated me from other Māori students, placing me into yet another white, middle-class context where I felt that I didn’t belong. Having already been “outed” as not ftting in a Māori community or in a white, middle class primary school, my high school experiences created another layer of separation. In a place of diversity, I still couldn’t fnd sameness. I occupied a grey area, so to speak. The fnal verse traces my journey to reconciling my mixed identity. It recognizes that “seeking sameness” was not the path to a secure identity. Instead, I found my salient identity in my chameleon-like ability to move fuidly across multiple spaces and fnd ways to belong, whether those ways were overt and “seen”, or covert and “unseen”. This revelation, aided by the process of maturity and growth through experience, underpins my exploration of my identity as a researcher. I have the ability to consider multiple perspectives in research, as both an insider and an outsider. My fuidity also allows me to “reach across” contexts and work with other M āori and/or Pā kehā researchers, either wholly within a culture (as in some Kaupapa Māori

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research projects) or cross-culturally, providing an indigenous perspective alongside non-indigenous researchers.

Poetry as a reclamation of indigenous expression in cross-cultural research The Māori was not only a warrior … He was a poet and a mystic. No other primitive race had evolved such a treasury of poetry and folk-song, revealing a soul and a mental culture that removed the Māori high above peoples still in the savage state. (Cowan, 1930, p. 90) When a culture is empowered to express its own worldview, rather than have it interpreted and retold from the outside, the picture this paints can be strikingly more vivid. For Māori, expressions of knowledge through poetic form are not new. For indigenous people of Aotearoa-New Zealand, m ātauranga (knowledge) is traditionally embodied within, maintained and expressed through oral forms, and as such are complex and diverse (Mahuika, 2017). These oral methods value eloquence, metaphor, rhythm (mita), cadence, and poetic articulation. Most notable forms of Māori oracies include oriori (lullabies), mōteatea (traditional chants), waiata tangi (laments), mata (prophetic songs), haka (protest chants), whakatauki (proverbs), and karakia (spiritual chants) (Higgins and Loader, 2014). European arrival to Aotearoa-New Zealand brought written language, and a worldview that privileged the written word over other forms of literacy. Such privileging of knowledge saw the relegation of Māori epistemologies, and Māori literacies of whaikōrero (oracy), waiata and mōteatea (song/chanting), whakairo (carving), raranga (weaving) – to name a few. This favouring continued to prevail in academia, where claims of rigour were measured through the articulation of scientifc, neutral, and objective language. The ongoing preference for detached researchers/research is documented by Duszak: For the sake of scientifc purity and veracity, a plain and impersonal language was recommended, a language devoid of emotion and interpersonal meanings, of fuzzy emotions and of intellectual or attitudinal bias. All this contributed to the image of a dehumanised writer/reader. (Duszak, 1997, p. 1) The privileging of a detached, scientifc language in academia simultaneously served to reduce the poetic forms of M āori literacies as invalid, second-rate knowledge, repackaged as myths, legends, and fairy tales (Sorrenson, 2013). This view was reinforced by the lack of written

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documentation by M āori of their histories. Thus, the portrayal of M āori histories in subsequent, post-colonial written texts were selective, and supported the interests of Pā keh ā as the dominant group. Often, these post-colonial histories were homogenized accounts taken from multiple oral sources, in the pursuit of a “one single truth”. This was to have a negative efect on M āori forms of knowledge. Paul Moon succinctly describes the trajectory of M āori epistemologies when taken from their indigenous context to be examined cross-culturally, “from a profoundly sacred tableau at the nucleus of M āori identity … to a specimen of interest to scholars, and from there, the fnal descent to a trivialized object of popular amusement” (Moon, 2013, p. 22). Re-privileging the Māori preference for eloquence, symbolism and metaphor from oral traditions, through the use of poetry in research, opens up the opportunities to reconsider multiple and diverse tribal narratives. This process is, in itself, a process of decolonisation, where the multiple voices and multiple truths across many tribal groups are extracted from the previous single, homogenized narrative. As Māori academic, Patricia Johnson, suggests “Reclaiming and rewriting our stories means contesting and struggling over meanings, and while validity of written and “scientifc” evidence continues to far outweigh the oral forms of Māori knowledge, the struggle will continue ( Johnson, 2012, p. 270). As a Māori-Pā kehā researcher, the colonisation of Māori epistemologies mirrors the colonisation of our own indigenous identities. Strip back the layers of colonisation of urbanisation of disconnection of dislocation of language loss of discrimination of cultural cringe of marginalisation Strip back the layers of your assimilation so you will know just who you are Thus, the feld of poetry as methodology provides a powerful and exciting space in which to explore and traverse cross-cultural boundaries. From a Pā kehā perspective, authenticating poetry in western research facilitates a repositioning of traditional Māori narratives, from “folklores” and “fairy tales” – as defned by western worldviews – to legitimate bodies of knowledge. From a Māori perspective, a move towards validating poetic verse in research supports a desire to reinstate matauranga Māori (knowledge systems)

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that were in place before colonisation (Glover, 1997). As a M āori researcher, poetry as methodology encourages me to re-engage with traditional expressions of knowledge in an academic space. I will strip back and lay myself bare but not to fnd out who I am or recount to you how I was lost I will strip back and reveal to you that I have been here… all along

Notes 1. My tribal afliation is Te Whānau-a-Apanui, a coastal tribe on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island. As a coastal people, we have a deep afnity with the ocean, hence this verse. Other tribes (iwi) may connect more closely to other geographical landmarks (who we as Māori refer to as ‘tipuna’ or ancestors) and so might say ‘Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au’ (I am the river and the river is me), or ‘Ko au te maunga, ko te maunga ko au’ (I am the mountain and the mountain is me). 2. Literally, a pou is an elaborately carved post that is used as a marker or signal to those who pass by. Metaphorically, a pou is a signpost, a symbolic marker of one’s intent or position.

References Adams, P. (2014). Bringing biculturalism into the primary classroom in Aotearoa-New Zealand(Unpublished MEd thesis). The University of Auckland, Auckland. Retrieved from http://hdl. handle.net/2292/23353 Cowan, J. (1930). The Poetry of the Māori. In The Māori: Yesterday and To-day (pp. 91–109). Christchurch, New Zealand: Whitcombe and Tombs. Duszak, A. (Ed.). (1997). Culture and styles of academic discourse (Vol. 104). Walter de Gruyter. Faulkner, S. L. (2009). Poetry as method. Reporting research through verse. New York, NY: Routledge. Glover, M. (1997). Kaupapa Maori Health Research: A Developing Discipline. Paper presented at the Hui Whakapiripiri, Whaiora Marae, Otara, Auckland. Higgins, R., & Loader, A. (2014, October 22). Waiata tawhito – traditional Māori songs. Retrieved from http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/waiata-tawhito-traditioinal-maori-songs/print Irwin, K. (1994). M āori research methods and practices. Sites, 28(Autumn), 25–43. Johnson, P. (2012). Talking back to the colonial experience: Creating an indigenous framework for education. In W. Allen, R. Teranishi, & M. Bonous-Hammarth (Eds.), As the world turns: Implications of global shifts in higher education for theory, research and practice (pp. 251–283). Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing.

182 Pauline Adams Mahuika, N. (2017). An outsider’s guide to public oral history in New Zealand. New Zealand Journal of Public History 5(1), 3–18. Moon, P. (2013). Encounters: The creation of New Zealand. A history (1st ed.). Auckland, New Zealand: Penguin Publishing New Zealand. Parini, J. (2008). Why poetry matters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Prendergast, M. (2009). “Poem is what?”: Poetic inquiry in qualitative social science research. In M. Prendergast, C. Leggo, & P. Sameshima (Eds.), Poetic inquiry: Vibrant voices in the social sciences. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Richardson, M. (1998). Poetics in the feld and on the page. Qualitative Inquiry, 4, 451–462. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies. Dunedin: Otago Press. Sorrenson, M. P. K. (2013). M āori origins and migrations: The genesis of some P ākeh ā myths and legends. Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press. Webber, M. (2008). Walking the space between: Identity and M āori/P ākeh ā. Wellington, New Zealand: NZCER Press.

14 The tukutuku panel is never bare Weaving bicultural relationships through poetic performances Virginia Tamanuia and Esther Fitzpatrickb a

Friend whose great grandmother lived at Ōpape University of Auckland, New Zealand

b

This chapter uses poetry as a method to illuminate the tensions and wonderment of committing to a bicultural relationship that speaks ultimately to bicultural performances in education. Esther hoped for a poetic conversation between two women, haunted diferently through colonization – embodied hurt and lingering crisis – and yearnings for restoration and redemption. Autoethnographic poetry is understood here as a method for enabling and refnding moments with each other by coming to understand relationship and to illustrate a becoming relationship as the researchers struggle to shed and to create shared meanings of being bicultural. Much like the conversations we shared in our local café, this work too is interrupted by quotes that resonate, poems in the making, tangential thoughts, as we weave ourselves into relationship. It is a collaborative autoethnography, a duoethnography, a storying of our becoming friendship. It is a living poem, stories in entanglement with others, always in the process of being/becoming bicultural. First to introduce ourselves. Virginia begins with a pepeha to identify who she is, where she is from, and where she belongs in relation to important geographical marker’s such as her mountain (maunga), signifcant ancestral stories and standing connections. Virginia Ka t ū au ki runga i taku maunga a Mangap ārae! I stand on the mountain of Mangap ārae Herehere te muka ki Areoma, Ko te whitinga mai o Tamanui tena The strands of fax tie me to Areoma, The place where Tamanui prevailed Ka titiro aku kamo whakararo ki Te Ng āwari I look down and can see Te Ngāwari Te Tūhononga o ng ā maramara The Gathering Place of the people Rere ki uta rere ki tai,

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The waters that fow from land to sea Ko Urukokomoka, Ko Mangat ū. Ng ā awa e mahea nei ng ā wae ki te Tapu-ae-o-Te-Rangi. The waters that clear the path to Te Tapu-ae-o-rangi. Nau mai ko Tamar ūr ū, ko Hinekoukou o Tepō Pō te ao, Ao te pō. Day turns to Night, Night turns to Day. Tau mai ng ā hihi o Tamanui te rā ki runga te whenua The rays of The Sun eternally fall upon the land, Taku t ūrangawaewae ē! My ground I stand on, My standing place ē! (Kaituhi/Māori translation: Apenti Eruera Tamanui-Fransen)

Esther Ō pōtiki is my place of contentment, my place of sustenance (ū kaipō).

The place of my birth. A Pā kehā, the descendant of colonial New Zealanders. Pā kehā a name gifted by Māori. Pā kehā: an ontological and biological mixedness.

A Pā kehā haunting I What if you were blind? How would you see me then? How would you read my actions? How would you hear my words? If you touched my skin Would it be soft and warm? Sweaty from the summer sun, Salty from the sea, Smokey from the hangi?1 If you shared my meal Would you taste my love, My invitation for friendship? If we had time to share our stories Would we talk of our arrivals, The waka2 and the ships, Our whakapapa stretching back in time. I believe we would love and cry, Argue and agree. And you would see my Pākehā bricolage: My Jewish bones, My Viking skin, My Sami cheek bones,

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My Danish eyes, My German hair, My Cornish courage, My Yorkshire creativity, And my Welsh love of singing. (Fitzpatrick, January 2013) For this chapter I invite you to use your imagination. Both authors met several times in a local café to kōrero (talk) about being and becoming in relationship as Māori and Pā kehā (indigenous and settler). It was not our beginning. Virginia and I had talked on and of over the years, reading each other’s work, giving feedback, watching each other’s whā nau (family) grow, laughing and sharing tears, and hugging when we found each other on the street, pausing for a while. The series of conversations in this chapter represent a much longer pause. Although the fnal writing “for publication” of this text is Esther’s, the placing of Virginia as frst author recognises her signifcant role in the telling and writing of the story and the mahi (work) of engaging in a bicultural conversation. Working in bicultural practice, I have become increasingly curious about the idea of being an ally and/or friend as Pā keh ā . Virginia, interested in poetry, sits beside me and reminds me she had no cause to be my bicultural friend or ally – she is?/I am already/always bicultural. Alison Jones (2012) reminds us that early Pā keh ā and M āori were “primarily allies and friends, rather than competitors and antagonists” (p. 107). She argues that a “[p]roper engagement with kaupapa M āori requires Pā keh ā individuals to become ordinary, at ease in M āori contexts, open to M āori knowledges, and familiar with te reo M āori” (p. 108). When working to achieve a “proper engagement”, Pā keh ā need to position themselves to learn, watch, listen, develop relationships of depth and longevity, “as well as having a sense of humour, suspended judgement and humility” … [conscious always] “of the wider relationships of power in which this engagement takes place” (p. 108). I was inspired by Virginia’s poetic work and unrelenting aspiration for Māori ontologies – she would say “I/we just want to live”. Virginia and I are both haunted by other beginnings, of past Māori Pā kehā relationships, of indigenous and settler histories and becoming through the ongoing process of colonization (Fitzpatrick, 2017; Tamanui, 2013). Haunted by diferences in our histories with the Whakatōhea Iwi, Virginia’s with whā nau ties through one of her indigenous Iwi (Ngai Tamahaua, Whakatōhea) and Esther’s colonial ancestor Charles (renamed Te Puia by the Iwi). We both whakapapa (through ancestral connections and other relationships stories) back to Whakatōhea. My desire was to understand how our whakapapa to Whakatōhea might be useful biculturally or in relation to being/becoming bicultural today.

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Virginia says … You can’t have whakapapa Cos it’s language Te reo is like land. Land is who we are. OUR whakapapa to Whakatōhea - what do you mean? The term, whakapapa, refers to the layered Māori genealogy which includes spiritual, mythological, and human stories (Taonui, 2013), including actual ancestors. How whakapapa might relate to Pā kehā identity is an ongoing ontological question. In his essay “Ancestors of the mind – a Pā kehā whakapapa”, Traue (1990) illustrated his Pā kehā identity through using the Māori concept of whakapapa and recited his own genealogy. Traue’s (1990) whakapapa included his ontological ancestors and he made reference to the many diferent ideas of ancient and modern-day writers and thinkers. Metge (2010), inspired by Traue’s essay, went further to add to her European “ancestors of the mind” signifcant Māori, who had also shaped her ideas, beliefs, and values (Metge, 2010). Our becoming is haunted. Virginia: I never meant all that but you looked to fnd a way to connect to or to claim a whakapapa of Maori thought and/or a friendship past and present as a right/rite of passage to fulfl a bicultural expectation that you have. What I mean is that you are so good at claiming things that aren’t yours and shifting what it means to someplace else – shifting what I meant – and now you have your ancestors of the mind, Traue and Metge as tautoko (support). Where are your ancestors of the mind from? In the turn to escape blood and land through thought did you hear ME say hauntology? In fact, I said I don’t like hauntings but here we are. So, writing through the hauntology of the whakapapa of colonial thought weaponised to confscate and appropriate, among other things, how shall I read that YOU? I read you here presently, among other things, as not listening. Is that a haunting? How might an ongoing becoming bicultural relate to notions of hybrid ontologies, and/or an ontological becoming? (Whitehead, 1978 cited in Woodruf Smith, 2004, pp. 227–237). Virginia: On You can’t have whakapapa… But YOU looked, Look! Look! Keep on looking, Look, Look, Until you fnd MY whakapapa of thought

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Virginia wanted to say, I know some poetry from Whakatōhea; Ah the food at Wai-aua! ’Twas a sleeping house for you, for all men Where nets are hauled upon the beach (Tāpuikā kahu) (Maxwell, 2019; Walker, 2007). Esther replies … “Between 1865 and 1875 much of the Whakatōhea lands had been confscated after continued resistance to land sales and subsequent battles between the colonial soldiers and local iwi” (Fitzpatrick, 2017, p. 5). Because of this, because my colonial ancestor purchased confscated land of the Whakatōhea, because Virginia’s whanau whakapapa back to this land, we fght. Te Popo declares, “You need a proper name, I will now call you Te Puia – the fery one.” Great rumbles of laughter fowed out around the camp fre and each fought to share a tale … (Fitzpatrick, 2016). We fght … because Virginia holds the history of Whakatōhea diferently to me (see also Maxwell, 2019). [And because I want to say] It’s my place too! Virginia has whakapapa to Whakatōhea Esther [wants to say she] whakapapas back to Ōpōtiki… Whakapapa matters. O Whakatōhea! O Whakatōhea! Tut ā mure Manutaurehe Rongo te Ake Urekaka Ruawharo Upokohapa Te Hopukana Marut ātaka Te Uru Rehe Tamakauwhata Te Piuana Motu Taiuru Te Kaha Te Ohu Te Pāpuni Te Aro

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Te Mokotua Te Whareumu (Te Pere) Harata Virginia Ka moe a Te Pāpuni i a Tāpeka Jones ka puta mai ko Te Aro; ka moe a Te Aro i a Hā rata(Wiwi) Gannon ka puta mai ko Te Mokotua (Sam), Rawa(Bessie), Nia, Te Pāpuni(Robert), Taiaro, Te Aro, Patu, Mate ki Tātahi (Sonny), Noa, anei ng ā uri o Tāpeka raua ko Te Pāpuni. He uri au no Te Mokotua. Our beginning in Ōpōtiki Charles Rogers (Te Puia) William John Rogers Gordon John Rogers Esther Fitzpatrick (nee Rogers) Jessica, Jude, Asher. We agree to pause. Without poetry we can’t speak It is our breath.

At the café And so, when we arrive at the café, we bring with us our ‘whakapapa’ (ancestors), Esther’s ghosts and ongoing commitment to bicultural relationships, Virginia’s readings of Esther’s Being/Becoming Pā kehā and her hyper vigilance savvy at the break downs anticipating it, ready for it, defeated by it … …. even before we start. And so, I invited Virginia to work with me to kōrero our becoming relationship through a series of poetic conversations. We never really grasped the time, energy, and emotion that would unfold, and who else would be involved. These research collaborations should not be entered into lightly. It is important to remember here, reader, that we have a history of friendship, a history of reading each other’s work, and a respect and love for each other. Thinking of Joe Norris, Rick Sawyer, and Darren Lund’s (2012) work in duoethnography – a caring friendship is important. In many ways, our research conversations resonated with the Norris and Sawyer’s method of duoethnography.

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First, premised on postmodern explanations of identity, duoethnography acknowledges the culturally layered, contradictory, socioculturally based, and constantly changing nature of identity (Sawyer, as cited in Krammer & Mangiardi, 2012). Sawyer and Ligget (2012) further argued that duoethnography demands “understanding and critiquing our own … histories in an honest and complex way” (Sawyer & Liggett, 2012, p. 72). Second, because of the relationship, duoethnography provides a way to be sensitive to and “say the unsayable”. Trying to disrupt the distance that our hauntings create. Everything we wanted to say and not listening/hearing at all. We needed to talk with honesty. hooks (1994) argued that it is essential for critical thinkers to engage in conversations that cross boundaries and create space for interventions in order to transform our teaching practice (p. 129). So, too, in the tertiary context, as researchers collaborating together we need to fnd ways to engage in difcult conversations that “break” down boundaries. For many Pā kehā, the legacy of whiteness hangs over them as an unwelcomed inheritance in which they are unsure how to act; they become paralyzed (Tolich, 2002). [H]aving the courage to open up conversations that have been silenced gives us the opportunity to voice important issues and continue necessary conversations (Le Fevre & Sawyer, 2012, p. 285). Virginia had just completed a tukutuku-tuurapa (weaver’s panel) with the Roimata Toroa (tears of the albatross) design that she described represented an epochal reckoning of embodied repetitions of weeping, weaving desire and generational practice. It contained “unique patterned elements from [her] Nanny Harata Papuni’s whaariki and Te Hemoata Henare’s joyful use of transparent plastic tubing [as kaaho tarai], pingao and glittered nylon string [as the lashing materials]” (Takoa, 2018, p. ii). The contemporary rendering exposed the kaakaho that would be ordinarily hidden in the back. Deeper meanings/realities regarding the tukutuku were not explored, but rather we made use of the idea of opening up dialogue between the weaver-pair. Virginia brought the metaphor of a weaver’s panel or weaver’s practice – Nanny Harata (Hā rata Hokimate Pāpuni, Born 1870 - 1950) - to respond to Esther’s poetry on being bicultural but in particular her telling of the story of about the friendship between her great grandfather Charles, and a prominent Māori Chief in the mid-1800s, named Te Hira Te Popo. The Roimata Toroa design Virginia felt was a ftting conceptual framework to represent the lament of history and the weaving of a tukutuku panel is signifcant as a metaphor of our research relationship, and in this instance with Whakatōhea. Tukutuku I thread, you pull You thread, I pull I pull, you pull… Tukutuku Ah to lash a sleeping house for humanity

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Figure 14.1 Tukutuku panel in workshop. Virginia Tamanui photo fles.

See Figures 14.1 and 14.2. Like the weavers of a tukutuku panel, our work as duoethnographic researchers is described as with another rather than on another – both Virginia and I as the researchers are the site of the research. A research site? When did WE decide that? We were both aware that our relationship was of paramount importance in this endeavour; hence, we took the time to maintain a respectful, trusting, and caring relationship. Virginia fguratively worked the front of the panel, Esther the back. Listening, checking in, not always getting it right, and starting again. (Most of the time).

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Figure 14.2 Weaving of tukutuku panel. Virginia.

A Weaver’s desire Not knowing how, hurts a little Willing but Enduring being at the back Not being the teacher I thread, you pull Learning hurts a little And then you will smile Our other priorities sometimes took precedence. Our commitment to each other was to secure for ourselves, and for each other, that our stories would be received. And that we might then talk further. Nothing as ambitious as an openness to transformation that Norris et al. (2012) speak of. Rather it was one conversation at a time. Virginia recalled a thought about her cousin Te Hemoata Henare’s weaving practice and said “one whenu (fax) at a time” (Henare, 2017, p. 28). Te Hemoata Henare’s teaching and weaving practice is a long story. Important to Te Hemoata’s journey as a weaver was Uncle Eddie Maxwell, his calibre of weaving wananga and an eventual encounter with our Nanny’s Harata’s personal whaariki that she had been given, and that she had hoped Uncle Eddie could help her to restore. Many trials, learning and years flled with anticipation had passed. Although they were strangers at the encounter, Uncle Eddie wept old meeting tears for

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Nanny Harata, and her whariki of weaving practice that resonated with him, as being his own. At once Henare (2017) understood the exponential power of each whenu is their interrelationships. It was, she said, beyond simple, “one wā nanga, one marae, one hapū at a time – Ka ora ai te iwi” (Henare, 2017, p. 28). … weavers understand that it takes a whakapapa of relationships to lash a house and an understanding of this reality forms the basis of the weavers’ practice. (King & Tamanui, 2017, p. 1) Research poetry is a creative arts-based method that I have employed in collaborative autoethnographic research previously as a form of improvisation. Grant (2010) argues that the use of improvisation can disorder “power” relationships. Virginia (2013) had stumbled on autoethnography for the same reason, like an intoxicated kereruu (wood pigeon) plunging into a puriri tree, with a bulging belly full of stories. This disorder is possible when dialogue becomes a creative exchange of ideas that build upon one another. Further Grant observes, it requires, “certain capacities including an empathic ability to engage in intense listening … an ability to be fully caught up in the moment, a tolerance for ambiguity, and courage in the face of risk” (p. 273). The improvisation in research dialogue contains a productive and creative fragility, requiring vulnerability from both parties, albeit diferently vulnerable. Elsewhere I have engaged in poetic dialogue with research collaborators to evoke the possibility of improvisation through e-mails, conversations, phone texts, and other (see Fitzpatrick & Alansari, 2018; Fitzpatrick & Fitzpatrick, 2014, 2015; Fitzpatrick, Worrell, Alansari, & Lee, 2017). Engaging in poetic dialogue with Virginia challenged me. research collaboration we sat opposite each other in a café carefully storying our relationship storying ourselves. It was like this and it wasn’t. You thread, Through here, No here, thanks! I pull… We selected words and phrases for me to type into a word document, reading them back to Virginia, editing and adding in the moment. Engaging in relationship through shared experience (an essence of

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whakawhanaungatanga). An intense, risky, emotive conversation and sometimes just deep belly laughter. Later writing, crafting, threading the chapter -together. And so, imagine a café on the corner, on the top of a hill, in a village surrounded by trees. This is Titirangi, the footsteps of heaven, our home. You hear Thomas, the barista singing inside making our cofee, he knows everyone’s name and everyone’s cofee. It’s that sort of place. Nothing fash, but we have sun, friendship, and good cofee. Virginia and I are sitting in the corner with our cofees. Two middle-aged women who are a consequence of the rural to urban drift of the 1960s, shifting from the local community to the fast city. The poems that follow are much like our conversations – they cycle around, plunge deep, then go quiet. One of these conversations took all day in the corner of the café – Thomas said we broke a record. Challenge of time – white time – Māori time – what does it take to sit with somebody else. White time doesn’t like to be held up or wasted. The hauntings of past violence of time and bodies come into our imaginings of one another and time. I’ve been pondering our mahi It takes time to think with someone else

(mahi = work)

Virginia’s internal dialogue after Esther said of our time together in the café ‘we won’t take that long next time’ In Māori time. Hurry up! Always late Not On time Forgot the time Takes too long If it were up to me and my time She took too long – It’s not my fault, you’re too slow to understand [YOU said] We took too long because of you [I am saying] We took too long because of you I am shamed and my head hurts – I wasted my time I am angry – she wasted my time I’m never gonna get that time back Pā kehā Time Or a gift – feast of time? I am a very busy person – as are you. Neoliberal universities – workload formula – all about time.

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But we have a commitment to the Treaty of Waitangi and bicultural relationships. Have you ticked off your check list – have you talked to a Māori today? Did you say morena instead of good morning? Good morning Wake-up!! I thread, you pull You thread, I pull I pull, you pull… Good, one tear drop is complete Now knot that of We’ll start the next tear drop Here, a new fbre is coming through… Together we sat and carefully wove our words, Virginia leading, a weaver, … me waiting quietly, but not all the time. We weave a poetic conversation, her words, my words, our words, later we are not always sure. I was doing well until I suggested to Virginia in our bicultural sitting across from one another that the tukutuku was bare as if waiting to be lashed. The tukutuku is never bare, Our whakapapa is already in front of and ‘behind’ us Ko Te Puia/Charles taku poutokomanawa No Ōpōtiki taku papakainga [Is this not the pepeha you stand on here?] “Te Puia girl” I named you [For the name you say Te Popo gave your Pā kehā ancestor]. Remember the fre you lit for Te Puia[Charles] and Te Popo [in your PhD]! I was sat weaving Nanny Harata’s tears at Opape [I have whakapapa to Whakatohea] [And does your whanau still own that settler-house with Volkner’s Hanging Tree?] You called me to the warm of your imaginary fre Come, Te Puia Pā girl [Remember that Pā that fell to colonial forces; home of your Pā kehā ancestors, and the fre you say that you whakapapa to], Let us pattern its crackle, ache and roar But we must weave through this soft veil ‘Quietly and frmly’ I thread Gently now, you pull

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You thread, I pull I pull, you pull Tukutuku Ah to lash a sleeping house for humanity Ah yes, these research collaborations should not be entered into lightly You arrive And gently pass me the fax, Through the veil. “Te Puia girl” you name me. Tuku tuku I pull you pull. The words lash together, Tuhi tuhi. Weaving together, A sleeping house for humanity. How easy it is to misunderstand. We return to preparing the fbres, Finding each other again. Tuku tuku, I pull you pull. Settling into the rhythms, Settling into the repetitions Time before and after. If I stuf up a lash We start again. To story a friendship of becoming Haunted by the past You say you feel blessed, Me too! But wait…What did you call me? Pause[again]. I named you Māori mentor. Me Pā kehā educator.

Māori What? Māori friend - Māori Doctor – I showed you – [but]Still a Māori A moment of silence for her acquiescent Māori friend For me this work is heavy and hard to wear I’m tired of being constrained by friendly Māori narratives Already long exhausted my Pā kehā friend Haunting? Boo!-/-Booo Māori-Pā kehā relationships

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(leans in): I will show you where to plant your crops. Your land is where some of our best lands were before the wars. And I will also show you where you must never go, where the land is tapu at the top of the hill. That is a sacred place. That is a sacred place. Can you keep that place safe for me, Te Puia? CHARLES (quietly and f irmly): Of course Te Popo. The sacred places will be respected. (Fitzpatrick, 2017) TE POPO

But I [still] arrived and we have travelled far. I’m remembering Te Puia’s freside oath to Te Popo And I don’t want to waste our time around the fre. Listen! I will show you where to place your whenu (thread) And I will also show you where you must never go That is a sacred place. Can you keep that place safe for me Te Puia? Come Te Puia Pā girl bring to us your imaginary fre, The aching memory of the battles still raw.

Working the hyphen This conversation represents the ongoing struggle towards Māori-Pā kehā bicultural relationships, towards post-colonial. The term post-colonial (with hyphen) is usually understood as that period after independence from colonial rule (Sharp, 2009). It is a geographical and chronological term, where the hyphen emphasises the break. The term, however, does not take into account the lingering, even festering, consequences of the colonial project and how it has impacted the culture, language, the psyche, systems of governance, and education of many people – both those colonized and those who are descendants of the colonizers. These consequences are the aftermath of having never quite escaped colonial power. The hyphen in post-colonial reminds me of Michelle Fine (1994), Alison Jones (2012), and Alison Jones and Kuni Jenkins (2008) writing on “working the hyphen”. Fine (1994) suggested that, to work the hyphen we need to engage in the social struggles of our time, to erode the fxedness of categories, and to enter and play with blurred boundaries (p. 72). The word post in post-colonial implies the colonization of other people and their countries is over with, a thing of the past; yet the term colonial persists – even in the name. The aftermath of colonialism requires a working of the hyphen. For Jones and Jenkins, another Pā kehā Māori research relationship, the hyphen demonstrates a space that is always conditional on the relationship between Māori

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and Pā kehā. Recognizing the shared and troubled past of the indigenous-settler hyphen they describe how even our names ̶ Māori and Pā kehā ̶ discursively produce the other. Each term brought the other into being … The shared indigene-coloniser or Māori-Pā kehā hyphen not only holds historical/whakapapa diference, but also marks a relationship of power that continues to shape differential patterns of cultural and social privilege. (Alison Jones, 2012, p. 104) As a ffth-generation Pā kehā, I am forever haunted by the colonial, I need to work the hyphen of this entangled relationship with indigenous Māori and the ancestors of my past. Working towards a post-colonial. Pā kehā today, I argue, are one aftermath of colonialism. As a Pā kehā educator I am aware of the wider macro-factors, where our present education system is the descendent of a colonial system, where the traces of our colonial past are very evident. I speculate that our present (post) is always conditional upon our relationship with our past (colonial). The myth that post-colonial describes a linear process of development, where countries experience pre-colonial, then colonial and at long last reach post-colonial is just that, a myth (Barker, Hulme, & Iversen, 1994). This particular myth serves to ignore the continued experience of colonial power by those who were colonized, [hyphen] and those who are the descendants of the colonizers. There is also increasing recognition that the aftermath of colonialism is still experienced through the “constitutive elements of the modern world and its conficts” (Barker et al., 1994, p. 1). Virginia responds to the ‘hyphen’ talk, challenging me through poetic conversation: What is a hyphen? If we pretend we know how it works then lets ask ourselves through that hyphen Between us Between Ōpōtiki and Whakatōhea; What do you get? Mutterings – Murderings Confscation – Landlessness Satisfed Settlers – Perishing Houses Apologising Crowns – Posthumous Righteousness White Guilt/Amnesia/euphemism – Absence/Silence The privilege is exponential. We have no purpose to do anything together. You will always get more – and I have to promise not to hurt you, but I have to betray myself to do it. See what I mean! Already defeated by it. And after saying the unsayable Silence – silence, Post-colonial Snap!

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“And You will hurt me because of who I am” “You will hurt me because of whose I am” “We will misunderstand each other …” Virginia still doesn’t like the hyphen, it’s not enough, it doesn’t show the multiple layering, the interconnections, the complexity of a bicultural relationship. I agree. On the probability of betrayal in any relationship is captured beautifully by Lincoln Dam: The impossibility of the erasure of betrayal is the opening of any possibility of love whatsoever. Love cannot be love in and of itself. Love is only love by virtue of being partially otherwise than love, …. There is betrayal in the name of (within and for the sake of ) love. Betrayal demands our love too since the impossibility of love for all is what keeps open the possibility of any love at all. …. Only through the necessity of failing and sacrifcing someone and something else can one succeed in serving love, justice and closure to an-other. We are always-already guilty. (Dam, 2018) Too soon I’m not there yet Do I/we always have to go back to the colonial relationship? What did you see around your imaginary fre? My question as a Pā kehā educator is how is it possible to become bicultural? So, I named you – Māori mentor. And so, this chapter stories my grappling with the becoming in a bicultural relationship. You have named me [again]? The tukutuku is never bare I’ve been pondering our mahi We come through kaitiaki of a soft veil (kaitiaki = guardian) Our whakapapa is already in front of and ‘behind’ us Quietly and frmly I thread Gently now, you pull I pull, you pull… Being, becoming Pā kehā to Be, become bicultural. A poetic conversation

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The job, the work, the mahi, To show a path With lingering, hauntings, Hurt, crisis and creation. I’m struggling with the language you use Coming back to language … Humanity Te reo – gets us in trouble (language) Exposing our thinking, our hurt Everybody starts frst by crying, Remembering, Remembering, Remembering, Sensing in the nothing and the dark For creation to begin (Tamanui, 2013). We are activating creation We called them all back in, Those stories of our ancestors. Mine grew up under that mountain Around those hills’ Beside these rivers, Flourished on forest vistas and foors Hauled fsh from that sea. Gathered together And slept. What’s that got to do with our reo, our poetry? I say, everything. We can’t say who we are We can’t talk to each other without it. How can I sit with you? Our armpits connected in this mahi To Tukutuku a house for humanity To Tukutuku being bicultural? They are not even the same thing. It’s impossible to know each other Do something inside that space Through the sacred veil Our panel Between us To do something Not to speak of the hyphen Not to speak of the complexity.

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You say, I honour your words. Take one whenu at a time! Do not waste! But what do we do with These two threads hanging Dry from the post-colonial past Keep wetting it back? Keep them moist for you to use? To wet One whenu A job between us Maybe? But we can’t keep wetting it back You’ll compromise the fbre It will easily break too If the fbre is split, rotted, Got mildew on it. There are a million ways It can be broken. I thread, you pull The whenu broke? Impatient, I pause Discard! Before I come to you, Before I speak with you, Every time before I come to you I have to pray. To protect the welling. That’s what trust is like, That this goes well. Will it? Can you keep this place between us safe Te Puia Pa girl You pull… Preparing the thread [And back to time and space] Sorry to be so … Working out the steps Before we dance.

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I keep fipping back to this thing About being an Ally. Across time we are friends. Across pain and sorrow. Across joy and deep belly laughter. We do this thing inbetween. We do this inbetween thing. Is it just another appointment? She’s ftting me in, In a sea of people. Who is the friend? To honour Is to take time To wait, to listen, And respond when you are asked. Holding the welling. If it is not understood, Plummet into despair. Hope unrealized. Pull yourself away from the noise. Precariousness vulnerability This is an old dance. Whakapapa to relational stories When you are working out the steps. What does that look like? When I’m in that space, Where I don’t think I know Those steps. Those steps you play I quietness still myself I realise I don’t know Things I can never know Being alongside you

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Heavy are the ofspring of our thoughts That make silence plummet into time [again] You go, Oblivious still And for long Away. I thread, you pull You go, I’ll knot if of Finish this tear drop alone… The work That sacred space Between us. We cannot be Safe to be friends. We must always be Anxious. I remember now … You said you will hurt me because of who I am And I said it back to you No you will hurt me because of who I am And whose I am! Whose I am is who I am I whakapapa to this land I promise you taste the blood soiled land - it is me. I remember how … I had no cause to be your bicultural friend or ally Then a fragrance of friendship flled that moment and we remembered-with one another…it takes time to fnd that moment. And we wrote about risking the sacred and impossibility of bicultural friendship. Celebrating the joy of moving and breathing together, Not always getting it right. When I make a mistake, I am dull dense lead. I am picked of the foor We can laugh. Where and when you dance You speak gifts into our poem, Turning words into movement, Another dance step.

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When your friend is not able to hold you, Is reckless, For that precious thing – friendship, Risk being scared [risk of being hurt]. Acknowledging the sacred Virginia weaves across the table Her hands moving over her cofee cup Through the imagined panel. Risking being sacred together, Without that sacred space, Seeing each other as sacred, A relationship predicated on Sitting with the other. Each sacred. Each Sacred We can not be friends. Importantly for us, we have with all our strength tried to attend to and follow the whakapapa of the stories of [our becoming] that we have heard and have come to know with more clarity. Some stories were to be woven in, some were to be left where we found them and some we had no choice but to tell. (King & Tamanui, 2017, pp. 8–9) Virginia and I race of and get busy with our lives. We e-mail each other and meet again to talk through this chapter, the poetic conversation, the twisting, uncertain always becoming words we have spoken – and written. We understand the doing of poetry as a third space, a place to say things that are unhomely, to wrangle with discomfort, to perform our becoming, to breathe together.

Coming back to the front of the panel to see what we have performed For this is just one performance of our relationship to enable a bicultural becoming. We do not bring our whole relationship into this place. There are things the reader does not have access to. Our meeting up, talking, writing, stopped for a while. Other things crowded into our/my life. The publication process slowed down. There was silence. When we fnally did meet again there was a distance. A Māori colleague and

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friend asked me how this experiment worked, I felt heavy, aware that my experience was diferent from Virginia’s. “We didn’t make it” Virginia tells me. I want to say, “this time”, but I don’t know. I am aware also that Te Puia girl has not protected the tapu place as she promised, as she hoped. She still has much to learn. Virginia has stuck with me for the sake of her ancestors of Whakatōhea and Te Popo, when I wasn’t ready to hear the difcult knowledge of my Pā kehā history. My arrogance then revealed, for creating a story with Charles sitting at the fre with Te Popo. My whitewashing with warm brush strokes, creating a warm friendly freside conversation, a fairytale friendship between an Indigenous chief of great worth and the pale young man who now lived on his confscated land. We can’t escape those relationships. These stories need a continual revisiting to disrupt the dominant colonial narrative. How then do we move our souls forward into bicultural relationship? Poetry enables a way to create a third space to bring our stories. I should have stayed in touch more. The importance of protecting such friendships, putting time, spending time, investing time, into the work of such friendships. Time – silence – distance - absence being another ontological problem for Māori Pā kehā relationships. “The paradox of our performance” says Virginia, “is we get a chapter out of it, even if we did fail”. Even if we did fail, for Virginia, saying we have failed is the only responsible ending. How do we complete this performance when we’ve failed? Sacred falls The tear drops of whakapapa The tear drops of time The tear drops of silence Perpetually falling Who are we to think we could stop, to interrupt the perpetual falling, to think we could stop the wailing. We sat together, and wove tear drops. The ongoing performance of these conversations remains important.

References Barker, F., Hulme, P., & Iversen, M. (1994). Colonial discourse/postcolonial theory. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Dam, L. (2018). Love and politics: Rethinking biculturalism and multiculturalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In Z. Rocha & M. Webber (Eds.), Mana Tanagata mixed heritages, ethnic identity and biculturalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand. New York, NY: Routledge. Fine, M. (1994). Working the hyphens: Reinventing self and other in qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 70–82). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Fitzpatrick, E. (2017). A story of becoming: Entanglement, ghosts and postcolonial counterstories [Special Issue]. Decolonizing Autoethnography Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies. doi: 10.1177/1532708617728954.

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Fitzpatrick, E. (2018). Hauntology and Pā kehā: An embodied experience with my ghosts. In Z. Rocha & M. Webber (Eds.), Mana Tangatarua: Mixed heritages, ethnic identity and biculturalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand. London: Routledge. Fitzpatrick, E., & Fitzpatrick, K. (2014). Disturbing the divide: Poetry as improvisation to disorder power relationships in research supervision. Qualitative Inquiry. doi: 10.1177/1077800414542692. Fitzpatrick, K., & Fitzpatrick, E. (2015). ‘Since feeling is frst’: Poetry and research supervision. Global South Ethnographies: Minding the Senses (pp. 59–70). Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense. Fitzpatrick, E. M., Worrell, F., Alansari, M., & Lee, A. (2017). Let us dance [Special issue]. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies. 23(7), 495–502. Grant, B. (2010). Improvising together: The play of dialogue in humanities supervision. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 9(3), 271–288. doi.org/10.1177/ 1474022210379376. Henare, E. (2017). Wh āriki: Beyond Simple (Masters of M āori Visual Arts). Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: education as the practive of freedom. New York, NY: Routledge. Jones, A. (2012). Dangerous Liaisons: Pā kehā, Kaupapa M āori, and Educational Research. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies Te Hautaki M tai M Tauranga o Aotearoa, 47(2), 100–112. Jones, A., & Jenkins, K. (2008). Invitation and refusal: A reading of the beginnings of schooling in Aotearoa New Zealand. History of Education, 37, 125–144. King, K., & Tamanui, V. (2017). Honunui project: K ākah ū M āreikura Report, 2014–2017. The Fibre’s of Hotunui: Whakapapa Tūrapa. Krammer, D., & Mangiardi, R. (2012). The hidden curriculum of schooling: A duoethnographic exploration of what schools teach us about schooling. In J. Norris, R. D. Sawyer, & D. Lund (Eds.), Duoethnography: dialogic methods for social, health, and educational research. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc. Le Fevre, D. M., & Sawyer, R. D. (2012). Dangerous conversations: Understanding the space between silence and communication. In J. Norris, R. D. Sawyer, & D. Lund (Eds.), Duoethnography: dialogic methods for social, health, and educational research (pp. 261–287). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc. Maxwell, Te Kahautu. (2019). Te Kaunati Hikahika a Ō pōtiki Mai Tawhiti: Ka hika i taku ahi, kimihia e Te Whakat ōhea te ara o te tikanga i pai ai te noho i te ao nei. The University of Waikato. http://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/ Metge, J. (2010). Tuamaka: The challenges of diference in Aotearoa New Zealand. Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press. Norris, J., Sawyer, R. D., & Lund, D. (Eds.). (2012). Duoethnography: Dialogic methods for social, health, and educational research (pp. 71–88). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc. Sawyer, R. D., & Liggett, T. (2012). Postcolonial education: Using a duoethnographic lens to explore a personal curriculum of post/decolonization. In J. Norris, R. D. Sawyer, & D. Lund (Eds.), Duoethnography: Dialogic methods for social, health, and educational research. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc. Sharp, J. (2009). Geographies of Postcolonialism. London, UK: Sage. Tamanui, V. (2013). Our unutterable breath: A Maori Indigene’s Autoethnography of Whanaungatana. Auckland, NZ: Tuhi Tuhi communications.

206 Virginia Tamanui and Esther Fitzpatrick Taonui, R. (2013). ‘Whakapapa - genealogy - What is whakapapa?’ Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand .Retrieved from http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/whakapapa-genealogy/ page-1 Tolich, M. (2002). Pā kehā Paralysis: Cultural safety for those researching the general population of Aotearoa. Social Policy Journal of New Zealand, 19. Traue, J. (1990). Ancestors of the mind: a Pā kehā Whakapapa. Retrieved from http:// www.recreationaccess.org.nz/fles/traue_ancestors.pdf Walker, R. (2007). Opotiki-Mai-Tawhiti: Capital of Whakatohea. The story of Whakaothea’s struggle during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. New Zealand: Penguin Books. Woodruf Smith, D. (2004). Mind world: Essays in phenomenology and ontology. UK:Cambridge University Press.

15 Traversing Pacifc identities in Aotearoa/New Zealand Blood, ink, lives Jacoba Matapo and Jean M. Allen

Faculty of Education and Social Work, The University of Auckland, New Zealand Introduction This chapter engages Pacifc methodologies of talanoa and tauhi vā with poetry as an expressive and embodied act. The authors, Pacifc academics Jacoba and Jean, arranged for a talanoa to share poetry that is pertinent to their personal journeys in traversing identity, experience, education, and belonging. A talanoa of poetry. Thus, it is by way of talanoa and attending to tauhi vā , both Pacifc academics share personal narratives of place, identity, and the complexities involved with being in-between multiplicities that are both collective and culturally embedded. Stories reveal tensions of growing up with mixed ethnic-specifc ties to Palagi1 and Pacifc histories, feelings of uncertainty, and, a longing for reconnection to ancestral lands and ties to place and people(s). Such as their engagement with tatau.2 This chapter ofers insights into the intersectionality of Pacifc culture, education, identity, and being.

Pacifc and Pasifka: navigating identity Within this chapter, we refer to two distinct concepts, Pacifc and Pasifka, which are inextricably tied and both are highly contested. Both carry particular ties to cultural, political, and geographical positioning for us as researchers and academics. The term, Pacifc, has been contested by Hau’ofa (2008), suggesting that the word Pacifc, with its Greek etymology and colonizing agenda, is contradictory to how Pacifc peoples conceptualize the Pacifc (ocean, land, and cosmos). Thus, he suggests a reimagining of the Pacifc as Oceania. The transnational relationships of Pacifc peoples cut across time and place to new global locations and are intergenerational (Hau’ofa, 2008). We shift now to the concept of Pasifka to diferentiate between the two concepts. Pasifka is a term coined in New Zealand during the mid-1990s as a bureaucratic terminology, and for both of us, this term has permeated our encounters in and with education, such as in education policy, teaching, and learning. The intent of this term, initially, was to group together Pacifc Islands’ peoples living in New Zealand (either New Zealand born or

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migrant) for ease and efciency in policy. Thus, the term Pasifka is highly contested as a homogenizing concept. However, in more recent years, the term Pasifka has been reconceptualized by Pasifka to represent a symbol of unity rather than a homogenous grouping of Pacifc Islands’ peoples (Samu cited in Matapo, 2018). Pasifka ethnicities include Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Cook Islands, Niue, Tokelau and Tuvalu (Leaupepe & Suani, 2014). What the terms Pacifc and Pasifka ofer us in this chapter, however, is an opening to the intersectionality of identity, culture, place, belonging, and becoming, which has helped us to explore our Pacifc connections in Aotearoa (a place that is not our ancestral lands). Exploration of identity is nothing new, especially for Pacifc and other indigenous people spread throughout the world. Identity and identity politics of who belongs, who does not, and who gets to decide are some of the questions and concerns facing indigenous and Pacifc peoples in Aotearoa today (Mila-Schaaf, 2013). Within the academic feld of education (to which both Jacoba and Jean belong), it is well known that ethnic identity is a cornerstone of young people’s development (Bishop & Glynn, 1999; Siteine, 2013; Webber, 2012; Wendt Samu, 2006). As a result, classroom teachers have been encouraged to provide opportunities for students to answer questions such as “‘Who am I?’ and ‘How do I belong?’” (Webber, 2012, p. 21). While there are a number of ways these questions could be explored, within this piece, we choose to embrace poetry and talanoa. In accordance with indigenous ways of knowing and being, we begin with our genealogies. Kauanui (2007), Tengan, Ka’ili, and Fonoti (2010), and Ka’ili (2017) state that the marking of indigeneity and claims to indigeneity are appropriately made through one’s genealogy that honours elders, ancestors, and Fonua 3 (ties to land). Thus, we begin by introducing ourselves appropriately.

Part one: Jean’s introduction I begin by clearly marking my Tongan indigeneity by sharing two generations of ancestral ties to Tongan elders and Fonua. As a New Zealand Palangi, I also include two generations of my settler ties that originated from England, Poland, and Switzerland. Ko e ‘ofefne lahi au ‘o Billy Uasike mei Makaunga, Tongatapu mo Jocelyn Dent ‘o Talanaki, Nu’usila. Ko e mokopuna au ‘o Siaosi Uasike mei Makaunga, Tongatapu mo Falamoe Tuiono ‘o Kolovai, Tongatapu mo Carl Dent ‘o New Plymouth mo Grace Schriber ‘o Ingelwood Nu’usila.4 I begin with this short genealogy as a way of connecting with you, the reader, a way of providing insight into where I come from and who I am connected to. Ka’ili (2017) shares the Tongan proverb “’ko e va’ava’a he ko e tangata’ (humans have many kinship branches)” (p. 55). This proverb reminds us that we have many branches and by sharing parts of our genealogy we may discover how our branches connect. I hope that, through sharing this short genealogy, our branches connect.

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Part two: Jacoba’s introduction I open my introduction by sharing with you, the reader, particular aspects pertinent to my cultural embodiment and ways of being (in and with the world) as a Samoan/Dutch/New Zealander (this is never so clear-cut). I am a Samoan/Palagi, a daughter of migrant parents who met in a factory in Auckland, New Zealand, and were both from disparate parts of the world. My mother was from a small Village in Upolu called Siumu, and my father was from Leiden in the South Province of Holland. I connect here to my rights to ancestral lands (my tof), that of my mother and her father in Siumu. The land (fanua – placenta) where the lives of my ancestors came into being and continue to be. The freshwater spring of Loloa that comes from deep within the fanua to feed and sustain life in aiga (family). These are some connections I make to place, which is part of my genealogy. I now shift attention back to my parents. Neither of my parents attended university, neither found opportunities within the system of education that would enable room for diference in their own sense of being as learners; as their own multiplicities, yet here I am in education – wrestling with education, with education philosophy in decolonizing self, personhood, and being. I am reminded of Pacifc migration stories that I teach in initial teacher education, reminding younger generations of the political violence Pacifc immigrants experienced in New Zealand, the dawn raids,5 the derogatory language used in media to name Pacifc peoples “coconut”, or “overstayer”. Although these specifc words are not commonly used, defcit thinking lingers in education discourses, under “new” guises such as priority learners, or so-called diverse learners. Essentially such terminologies, signals to anything that is diferent and not “normal”, thus, perpetuating a reifcation of “them and us” I raise this position in my introduction because my thinking, feeling, navigating self, and decolonizing personhood is part of my academic and research identity.

Methodological considerations We invite to you feel your way through our methodology as we introduce specifc Tongan and Samoan concepts that engage in our collective ways of being and knowing, through storying and poetry. In this chapter, we explore our identities at the intersection of poetry, talanoa, and our journeys of education (the rationale for why we engage with talanoa to explore our poetry and identity). Talanoa is our mode of dialogue within this space, and tauhi vā is how we attend to our relational encounters, including relationship to concepts and ideas. The meaning of talanoa is explained as tala – talk, and noa – nothing in particular (Vaioleti, 2006). The complexity of talanoa lies within more profound meaning as a condition and milieu for the creation of knowledge that is socially negotiated and constructed. Talanoa, later explained by Farrelly and Nabobo-Baba (2012), has the potential for emergent and diferent ways of thinking with Pasifka. Talanoa is a relational methodology and is

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considerate of the intricate multiplicities conceived and reconceived in the social space, which draws connections deeply embedded within Pacifc oratory histories (Vaioleti, 2006). Talanoa as a methodological practice is embodied and requires an ontological commitment to being that is embedded upon interconnected cultural engagement. Thus, it involves an openness to all who enter, including what each person brings – histories, genealogy, and worldviews (Fa’avae, Jones, & Manu’atu, 2016). Manu’atu and Kēpa (2006) state that TalanoaMā lie6 is emancipatory as it legitimises indigenous Pacifc knowledge, dance, poetry, and other ways of being. Therefore, trust within the practice of talanoa creates capacity for the sharing of feelings, inner stories, and experiences that speak to our hearts and mind (Farrelly & Nabobo-Baba, 2012). Poetry intersects with talanoa as a means of opening up the space to allow for new understandings, knowledges, and explorations to occur. Our ways of being and ontological commitments encompass both talanoa and tauhi vā where we focus on generative and emerging understandings of identity, culture, and belonging. Through our talanoa, we also invoke the practice of tauhi vā – the nurturing of sociospatial relations. Tauhi vā is a Tongan concept and is the practice of taking care of relationships and the connections we have with one another. Tauhi vā is enacted through multiple means and within this piece of writing, we tauhi vā with you, the reader, through sharing our experiences as New Zealand-born Pacifc academics. Ka’ili (2017) reiterates that tauhi vā can be understood as a performing art and thus, in order to perform appropriately, one must meet the needs of their audience. Therefore, we attempt to meet the needs of our readers, and other Pacifc peoples, through the inclusion of not only talanoa but also poetry. Albert Wendt, Selina Tusitala Marsh, and Karlo Mila-Schaaf are three examples of the many Pacifc people who embrace poetry as a way of exploring a range of experiences. Historically, indigenous and Pacifc peoples have always been storytellers, passing on their knowledge through oral means (Fasavalu, 2015). Poetry is another form of storytelling, which has allowed Pacifc academics to engage and broaden the horizons of what it means to belong to the Pacifc. Ihimaera and Makereti (2017) reiterate that poetry allows Pacifc people to move beyond the boundaries of what they call the “Māori, Pasifka, and Aboriginal bubble”. They state that “in greeting each other – we belong to the same community – we can use our synergy to create new ways of looking and working” (p. 10). Samoan poet and academic Fetaui Iosefo (2014, 2016a, 2016b, 2018) also embrace poetry as a means of creating new ways of looking and working. Poetry has allowed Iosefo to explore the unseen, her experiences, and negotiations of “I.D entity, I -den -t -ity, EYE-dentity, I.dent.it.Y” (Iosefo, 2018, p. 75). This exploration has prompted a shift from the unseen to the seen, where Iosefo unveils her poetry in order to acknowledge her experiences and positionality. Therefore, poetry subverts, rebels, and exists across time, past, present, and future (Fitzpatrick & Fitzpatrick, 2016). Like Ihimaera, Makereti, and Iosefo, we write together as members of the Pacifc community in Aotearoa/New Zealand, sharing our embodied

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identities through poetry and talanoa as a means of acknowledging our journey and as a way of unveiling our negotiations, our unseen. Talanoa and tauhi vā in this chapter bring spatiotemporal (across time and space) ties for both Samoan and Tongan worldviews to enter the tensions of negotiating Pacifc indigenous ontology and epistemology. The question of ontology involves two distinct angles: one is paying attention to how world(s) exists, and, on the other hand, considering how world(s) are connected and open to reanalysis; this is the consideration of matter, agency space, and time. With poetry, we practise Talanoa and tauhi vā throughout this chapter, not only with each other (as researchers) and with content but with you the reader. In our writing, we invite you, the reader, to engage with us, honouring that you, too, will connect to this encounter, to think and feel, traverse notions of identity with us.

Part three: Jean traverses connection – personal narrative Connection is perhaps the most important value to Pacifc peoples. A loss of connection to our land and one another has dire consequences for our health and well-being (Alefaio, 2007; Mila-Schaaf, 2013). I have experienced these consequences myself. Growing up, I was disconnected from much of my Tongan family, experiencing limited amounts of Tongan tradition outside of our family home. This meant that I was hesitant to claim I was Tongan, as I did not have appropriate understanding or language to feel comfortable in Tongan spaces. I was an outsider. Feeling disconnected from your ethnic group is not unique to my personal situation. Indigenous scholars such as Melinda Webber (2008) and Karlo Mila-Schaaf (2013) have written extensively about identity and the efects of being connected or disconnected from your collective ethnic group. Negotiating the space between two ethnic groups or worlds can be stressful and can result in difculties regarding responsibilities, duties, and individual feelings of belonging (Webber, 2008). Tongan scholar, Dave Fa’avae (2018), writes about negotiating his identity and feelings of belonging as a Tongan male raised in Aotearoa New Zealand. He spoke of joining the Tongan cultural group and playing sports as a way of attempting to navigate his sense of belonging as a Tongan male within a New Zealand school. The negotiation of multiple cultural identities is common for indigenous and Pacifc people living in Aotearoa, and ways of navigating these identities are varied. My navigation of Tongan identity as an adult has included taking Tongan language lessons and tau’olunga (Tongan dance) classes and spending more time in Tonga with family members. Another way I have reconnected with my Tongan cultural ties is through the art of tatatau.7 Though tatatau is not well practised in my kā inga,8 with only my brother having tattoos, I chose to adopt the practice as part of my cultural journey. Tattooing was an essential part of Tongan culture until the early 1800s when the arrival of westerners brought about radical political and religious changes (Powell, 2012). With the arrival of westerners and christianity, cultural practices related to the body, such as tatatau, were rejected and thus knowledge of traditional tattooing was not practised as much or as openly. However, in the

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1990s Pacifc young people and community, interest in Pacifc tattooing and traditions grew and Pacifc pride became refected in marking our skin as our ancestors once did (Powell, 2012). Tongan tattooist, Su’a Sulu’ape Toetuu, Aisea is acknowledged as one of the few Tongan tattooists who is leading the resurgence of tatatau (Powell, 2012). Aisea has mentored Tongan tattooists who are now working to revive and administer Tongan and Polynesian tattoos. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Carl Cocker of Kalia Tattoo is one of the leading Tongan tattoo artists and is the tattooist who has created the story of my ancestral ties under my skin. Being tattooed with Tongan motifs and kupesi9 is one way I have participated in tauhi vā with my kā inga, community, and ancestors. Though tauhi vā is understood as nurturing relations between diferent people, I take this a step further and understand tatatau as embodied tauhi vā with my ancestors of old. Ka’ili (2017) reiterates tauhi vā as being performed through arts such as dance and thus reiterates that the human body is a medium of tauhi vā. Therefore, tatatau could also potentially be understood as another form of tauhi vā, another way of nurturing the space between people, our land, spirits, and ancestors. The poem I share here continues my genealogy, refecting my journey through tatatau and the embodiment of my Pacifc identity. As with all nations in the Pacifc, my journey of discovery is not mine alone, but rather a journey of community, a journey of collectiveness. Pacifc worldviews situate the collective as being the essential part of a person’s identity (Alefaio, 2007; Thaman, 2008; Vaioleti, 2011). The frst collective that we belong to is that of the family collective, our kā inga. It is with our family – which includes aunties, uncles, cousins, grandparents – that we frst learn our place and values of faka’apa’apa (respect), mamahi’ime’a (our responsibilities and commitment to others), and lototō (humility) (Koloto, 2017). Reconnecting to my ancestors, land, and Tongan ways of being have become of utmost importance to me over the past few years. Poetry has assisted in this exploration. I frst began using poetry as a way of exploring my feelings, experiences, and emotions when I was a high school student. Now as a university student, I have expanded my use of poetry by embracing it as a way of exploring academic ideas and theories. I prefer poetry to other forms of writing as I fnd it a “safe” and non-judgemental way to experiment and explore my feelings and ideas. As I rarely share my poetry with anyone, I felt poetic writing was an opportunity to be free, to write exactly how I was feeling, or what I thought without censorship that often comes with other forms of writing such as academic. Burchell (2010) asserts that writing poetry allows us (the author) to clarify meaning within our own experience. Clarke (1999) explains that Pacifc poetry, while focusing on a vast number of topics, enhances our understandings of others’ lives and feelings. Thus, the poetry I write, as well as the limited amount that I have shared, works as both explorations of my identity, as well as connection or tauhi vā with you, my audience. Therefore, the following poem is about my journey with my collective family and the broader community. A journey through blood, ink, and lives.

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Blood, ink, lives A story told through ink in my skin. The mixing of blood and ink, Ancestors of old with methods of the new Invoking the spirit, My ancestors surround me Warriors, indigenous, colonial My mixed blood. Pride and importance That is set until I turn to dust. A narrative that I get to decide, A narrative of my complexity Of me. Holistic ties, outside my body but under my skin, land, ocean and spirit. My plight indigenous rights, knowledge, and ways and waves. My kā inga, ancestors’ nieces, nephews. Sun and sons, Daughter, parents, those who gave life. Our story our kā inga. A sign of strength, of battle throughout the journey My journey continues I have not arrived. Jean M. Allen

Part four: Jacoba and Jean talanoa of poetry We invite you, the reader, to join us, to listen, and sense what is written beneath words, sharing with us a part of our expressions and cultural understandings. We present our talanoa (talk of ) our poetry, our theorizing of experience, culture, and identity woven through personal narratives. The talanoa that follows was a planned and intentional event between both Pacifc scholars, who had each chosen a poem to read to each other for the purpose of generating stories, of theorizing stories within stories. Talanoa So, what were you thinking, feeling, sensing when you were writing your poem? JEAN M. ALLEN: The main thing was the idea of getting tattoos, and what they symbolize. A lot of it came about because some members of my family, my non-Pacifc family, didn’t really understand why you would do this. So it was about trying to explore those reasons as to why. The knowing in yourself and the importance of it for yourself. It was interesting trying to explain that to people who potentially didn’t JACOBA MATAPO:

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understand it or get why, what’s the importance of ancestors as such. We know the importance of family but I think the depth of importance of who we are and our relationships with those in the past and present. So, I guess it was thinking about all of that and how that contributed to why I was getting this, what it represented for me, and why it was important. JACOBA MATAPO: When I think of tatau1 from a Samoan perspective, it’s actually not something that is taken on as an individualistic decision, it is a collective act and usually the process of tatau is underpinned by reciprocity, it’s a physical manifestation of shared commitment and responsibility. Not only to your ancestors past, but to your generations to come, to your nu’u (or kainga), to your village, and that connectedness to fanua, to your placenta of land (Matapo, 2018). And I fnd it quite strange looking back at my own understandings around tatau, and how I’ve tried to learn more about it, I am no expert in it. But, I recall my grandfather and his large stature, I remember running my small fve-year-old hands across his tatau, feeling the lines in his skin. I now think how the idea of the tatau itself has been colonized and I wonder how the power of decolonizing and understanding tatau as an epistemological commitment may change the way we think of how knowledge is generated or revitalized, the signs of tatau are methods of expressing stories, knowledge, social standing, and histories. The sharing of knowledge, the generation of knowledge, and your connection through that knowledge to your ancestors as well. So, seeing how it’s being colonized, commodifed now, it does require a decolonizing of mind and body too. The decision for taking on a tatau (for me personally) is not a sort of “Friday night” stop at a tattoo parlour and get a tattoo type of decision. I wonder how our Pacifc elders feel, when Pacifc cultural symbols are worn around as a trendy accessory. I mean, not to say that people can’t, people can, but how are we weaving in our ancestors’ stories who created those symbols in the frst place. How do we wear them and why do we wear them and what is our rationale? Actually we don’t wear them, they wear us. So, when we put them on we don’t wear them they wear us. Are we ready to, you know, are we ready for that relationship with tatau? JEAN M. ALLEN: I know that Samoan tattooing has always been quite prominent. JACOBA MATAPO: Yeah especially in ceremonies tied to tof, which is a Samoan right to ancestral lands, to culture, and ancestral knowledge (Tagoilelagi-Leota, 2018). JEAN M. ALLEN: Where, in Tonga, tattooing died out for a long time there. Depending on who you talk to, there have been images of a similar tattoo to that of the pe’a and malu. A similar one, there has been images, of men in Tonga who had something similar. I don’t really know the history, but after missionaries, the practice had completely died out in Tonga and there seems to have been more of a resurgence but, as you

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say, is the resurgence because of wanting to understand and those links to our land, and our ancestors and that relationship or is it more because tattooing has become really popular now and these patterns, as you say, oh those patterns are cool, I’ll put them on me? JACOBA MATAPO: The popularization of tattooing. JEAN M. ALLEN: Yes JACOBA MATAPO: I think there is a huge responsibility that is often overlooked perhaps, when the decision to be inked using Pacifc symbols are based upon media trends or fads. I believe it takes a process of decolonizing self, I think … for you to then be able to allow the tattoo to wear you. Because it’s not the other way round. JEAN M. ALLEN: I really like that. I have never thought of it like that but it makes sense. And I guess that’s where it links into the post-critical stance that you were talking about, it’s fipping it. What do you mean it wears us? But that’s exactly what it is. JACOBA MATAPO: I felt that in the beginning part of your poem when you talked about under the skin, it bleeds. Well it does bleed and actually any sort of practice that cuts through the skin, where blood is involved it’s a sharing of DNA. Those fbres within your makeup, your biological makeup are inscribed in and with the ink. So, it’s thinking about it in a much more embodied way not just the fnal end product, it’s the whole process of being when you’re getting the tatau carved into your skin. It’s enmeshed in your fbres of being. So, I think these are really interesting insights because I feel as though in many ways much of the Pacifc symbols that are used whether it be in visual arts, or through tatau are becoming universalized and taken for granted, even specifc symbols that are diferent in Tongan, diferent in Samoan, diferent in Cook Island, we can’t just assume that because it is from the Pacifc they all mean the same thing. So, that whole intergenerational knowledge I think is really important.

Part fve: Jacoba’s poem and talanoa The story of Pacifc migration to New Zealand directly relates to my mother’s story; a story of hope for her and her family. Having a job in New Zealand meant that my mother could provide fnancial assistance for her family in Samoa as well as providing further opportunities for education for us, her children. As a child, the stories of Samoa took many forms; metaphors to teach me the value of work and commitment, songs, and fngerplays that showed love, care, and sensitivity. Through stories, my mother reminded me of the blessings this land has provided our family and wider family. The narratives shared with me many a time never alluded to the harsh social and political factors my mother experienced at the time of the dawn raids. Her choice in calling New Zealand home was to express the gratitude that the blessings Aotearoa had aforded.

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Fa’alavelave – a change of heart Four years old, the phone rings… This is a collect call from Samoa, is your mum there? Um, yes – I’ll go get her… Mum…I call, I watch her as she speaks, grief in her eyes Tupe – money to be sent, someone has died. Ten years old, the phone rings This is a collect call from Samoa…? Um, faatali, wait – I’ll get my mum. Another call to send money I assume, we hardly have money to buy food… Why is my mum always sending money? Fa’alavelave this and fa’alavelave that! Mum telefone – the phone’s for you. Twenty years old, the phone rings This is a collect call from Samoa, do you accept the charges? Not again, mum’s gonna ask me for money now and I’ve got my own bills to pay. Mum – telefone, the phone’s for you. Covering the receiver, I whisper to her (I don’t have money to spare so please don’t ask me). Fa’alavelave, I hear in the phone I watch her as she speaks, grief in her eyes Tupe – money to be sent, uncle has died. Thirty years old, the phone rings My son answers and calls out, mum people are coming over. Sitting in the lounge with my father’s body, my mother by my side We talk of his many stories and whisper to him our love I worry about funeral costs and how we will feed our visitors Hurrying to the kitchen my aunt and I prepare The food of visitors at our door I watch my mother as she speaks, grief in her eyes Tupe has arrived, more than enough and food to last us months Fa’alavelave – coming to understand and this is my change of heart. Matapo, J. (2018) JACOBA MATAPO: Yeah, so that’s my one. A bit of a story JEAN M. ALLEN: But I think it’s a – not a universal story –

… but so many people would totally understand that and get it, especially Pacifc people. That pressure, that’s often felt but as you say with the change of heart at the end with understanding and that lightbulb moment.

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I feel like there’s a real diference in terms of the way societies function and from a New Zealand perspective in contrast to a Samoan village, local perspective there’s that sense of responsibility to the collective and its very diferent to an individualistic view. So, looking at this poem for me through my childhood and not really understanding or grasping that sense of responsibility within the wider collective in which I belong, and in which they belong to me, there was this sense of disconnect. The collective relationship cuts across time and space, traverses oceans you know. And then realizing that, at any given point in my life, if there was a crisis or a critical moment, my collective will carry me. I think growing up, you sense the responsibility because, yes, it’s a heavy responsibility to carry, and I looked at my mum often, and her struggles with trying to balance all of that and sustaining life here in New Zealand, fnancially and all of those things. But there is something to be said when that sense of self changes because you realize that it’s not just about your own personal individual needs, wants, desires, or demands. It’s like, your life is enmeshed in the lives of others. I’m still learning because the knowledge we share from a Samoan perspective is not owned by one person. So even publishing and writing and things like this, traversing knowledge in ways that we may think and feel present our ancestors, well, are not ours; they do not only belong to us. It’s far reaching, it’s not just within our own little bubble or our own little reality it also extends beyond that. So, that word fa’alavelave often gets used in the negative connotation too, like “oh fa’alavelave”. I carried that, too, growing up and then coming to realize that actually fa’alavelave should be said in a way that honours the collective not carried as a burden. JEAN M. ALLEN: Do you think a lot of that stems from western views, the understanding from the western view not understanding from the Samoan or other Pacifc perspectives that understand the importance of the collective and, as you say, that idea of carrying is just so beautiful and sums it up. It’s about carrying one another, not just yourself. JACOBA MATAPO: The term fa’alavelave is often used for big life milestones. Usually fa’alavelave, like if it’s a death or birth or wedding they are huge life events and they are to be celebrated and I say, even at funerals because death is not seen as the end, it’s a celebration of life and a continuation of that life into another phase of life. So, fa’alavelave is another component that is part of those celebrations, the rituals, the way that collective comes together. It is in these moments personhood is celebrated, the relational personhood in phases of life (Vaai & Nabobo-Baba, 2017). And, I think, growing up my misconception of fa’alavelave was that it was a burden. This brings me back to the decolonizing of mind to think, to question, and critique how I can engage with cultural practices to uphold and honour my ancestral epistemological roots. If we’re not conscientious of our own bias and assumptions around our own cultural practices, particularly the way we act and behave ethically, then what’s to say that our children and generations to come will not want to commit to those same sorts of responsibilities. JACOBA MATAPO:

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I agree, I think those responsibilities, as you say, and those ideas around acts of service, to serve and how important that is. It’s an honour to serve not a burden.

JEAN M. ALLEN:

With these thoughts of honour and service clearly on our minds and hearts, we bring this chapter to an end by beckoning the call of our ancestors. Their voices guide us, and we have a responsibility to listen to their call as we traverse space and time, cutting across past, present, and future. Giving rise to intergenerational knowing, we afrm Pacifc peoples yet to come as they explore their own and collective identities.

Closing in poetry Intergenerational call and response Do you hear my thoughts, what gives rise to my thinking? My thoughts are clouded, but I listen intently. Can you feel my blood, my life force and fow? Our blood seeps, from markings that honor you. Are you proud of us? Can you sense my knowing, what is inscribed in my being? Kāinga share your stories. You surround us. We listen and learn. Do you know me? I want to know you even more. Knowing you afrms my becoming. How can I know of the worlds you walk? Let us walk together. See through our eyes. Travel with me. Lead the way. What is my purpose in worlds to come? What is my/our purpose in worlds to come? J. Matapo with J. M. Allen

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Palagi – Samoan term for Pā keha or White European. Tatau – Samoan term for tattoo/tattooing. Fonua – Tongan term for land, placenta. English translation – I am the eldest daughter of Billy Uasike from Makaunga, Tongatapu and Jocelyn Dent from Taranaki, New Zealand. I am the granddaughter of Siaosi Uasike from Makaunga, Tongatapu and Falamoe Tuiono from Kolovai, Tongatapu and Carl Dent from New Plymouth and Grace Schriber from Inglewood, New Zealand.

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5. Dawn raids – the raiding of homes where Pacifc people lived in the early hours of the morning during a period of Government enforcement of immigration violations. 6. TalanoaM ā lie – Tongan for good/great or healthy talanoa. 7. Tatatau – Tongan term for tattoo/tattooing. 8. K ā inga – Tongan term for family. 9. Kupesi – Tongan patterns often used to decorate Tapa cloth.

References Alefaio, S. (2007). Supporting the wellbeing of Pasifka youth. In P. Culbertson, M. N. Agee, & C. O. Makasiale (Eds.), Penina Uliuli: Contemporary challenges in mental health for Pacifc peoples. Honolulu, Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press. Bishop, R., & Glynn, T. (1999). Culture counts: Changing power relations in education. Palmerston North, New Zealand: Dunmore Press. Burchell, H. (2010). Poetic expression and poetic form in practitioner research. Educational Action Research 18(3), 289–400. doi: 10.1080/09650792.2010.500096. Clarke, W. C. (1999). Poetry and Pacifc studies: Notes from the feld. Asia Pacifc Viewpoint 40(2), 187–206. doi: 10.1111/1467-8373.00091. Fa’avae, D. (2018). Negotiating the Vā: The ‘self ’ in relation to others and navigating the multiple spaces as a New Zealand-raised Tongan male. In P. Stanley & G. Vass (Eds.), Questions of culture in autoethnography (pp. 57–68). New York, NY: Routledge. Fa’avae, D., Jones, A., & Manu’atu, L. (2016). Talanoa’i ‘a e talanoa – talking about talanoa: Some dilemmas of a novice researcher. AlterNative, 12(2), 138–150. doi: 10.20507/AlterNative.2016.12.2.3. Farrelly, T., & Nabobo-Baba, U. (2012). Talanoa as empathic research. Paper for presentation at the International Development Conference 2012, Auckland, New Zealand. Retrieved from: http://www.devnet.org.nz/sites/default/fles/Farrelly,%20Trisia%20 &%20Nabobo-Baba,%20Unaisi%20Talanoa%20as%20Empathic%20Research%20 %5Bpaper%5D_0.pdf Fasavalu, M. (2015). Tales above ‘the tail’: Samoan students’ experiences of teacher actions as culturally responsive pedagogy (unpublished master’s thesis). Auckland, New Zealand: The University of Auckland. Fitzpatrick, K., & Fitzpatrick, E. (2016). Since feeling it frst. In e. emerald, R. E. Rinehart, & A. Garcia (Eds.), Global South ethnographies: Minding the senses (pp. 59–69). Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense. Hau’ofa, E. (2008). We are the ocean: Selected works. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press. Ihimaera, W., & Makereti, T. (2017). Introduction. In W. Ihimaera & T. Makereti (Eds.), Black marks on the white page (pp. 8–13). Auckland, New Zealand: Penguin Random House. Iosefo, F. (2014). Moonwalking with the Pasifka girl in the mirror: An autoethnographic lens of the spaces of higher education for a Pasifka girl (Unpublished master’s dissertation). The University of Auckland, New Zealand. Iosefo, F. (2016a). Third spaces: Sites of resistance in higher education? Higher Education Research & Development, 35(1), 189–192. doi: 10.1080/07294360.2016.1.133273. Iosefo, F. (2016b). Who is eye? An auto ethnographic view on higher educational spaces from a Pasifka girl. In e. emerald, R. E. Rinehart, & A. Garcia (Eds.), Global South ethnographies: Minding the senses (pp. 199–208). Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense. Iosefo, F. (2018). Scene, seen, unseen. In P. Stanley & G. Vass (Eds.), Questions of culture in autoethnography (pp. 69–79). New York, NY: Routledge.

220 Jacoba Matapo and Jean M. Allen Ka’ili, T. O. (2017). Marking Indigeneity: The Tongan art of sociospatial relations. Tuscon, AZ: The University of Arizona Press. Kauanui, J. K. (2007). Diasporic deracination and ‘of-island’ Hawaiians. The Contemporary Pacifc, 19(1), 138–160. Koloto, A. H. (2017). Ta, Tauhi Va. In M. A. Peters (Ed.), Encyclopedia of educational philosophy and theory (digital format). Retrieved from https://www.springer.com/gp Leaupepe, M., & Sauni, S. (2014). Dreams, aspirations and challenges: Pasifka early childhood education within Aoteaora New Zealand. International Journal for CrossDisciplinary Subjects in Education, 5(3), 1711–1719. Manu’atu, L., & Kēpa, M. (2006). TalanoaMālie: Social and educational empowerment for Tongans by Tongans in the “Pasifka” educational proposal. In I. Abu-Saad, & D. Champagne (Eds.), Indigenous education and empowerment: International Perspectives. Oxford, UK: AltaMira Press. Matapo, J. (2018). Traversing Pasifka education research in a post-truth era. Waikato Journal of Education, 23(1), 139–146. doi 10.15663/wje.v23i1. Mila-Schaaf, K. (2013). Not another New Zealand-born identity crisis: Well-being and the politics of belonging. In M. N. Agee, T. McIntosh, P. Culbertson, & C. O. Makasiale (Eds.), Pacifc Identities and Well-being: Cross-cultural perspectives (pp. 49–64). Otago, New Zealand: Otago University Press. Powell, R. (2012, January 9). Tattooing and traditional Tongan tattoo [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://matadornetwork.com/nights/tattooing-traditional-tongan-tattoo/ Siteine, A. (2013). ‘Positive in their own identitits?’: Social studies and identity afrmation. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 48(2), 99–111. Retrieved from http:// www.nzare.org.nz/nzjes.aspx Tagoilelagi-Leota, F. P. S. (2018). Suli, Tof, Feagaiga, Gafa, and Faalupega: Nurturing and protectorate role of faasamoa for Samoan children. The First Years Journal Nga Tau Tuatahi. New Zealand Journal of Infant and toddler Education, 20(1), 13–17. Tengan, T. K., Ka’ili, T. O., & Fonoti, R. (2010). Genealogies: Articulating indigenous anthropology in/of Oceania. Pacifc Studies, 22(2/3), 139–167. Thaman, K. H. (2008). Nurturing relationships and honouring responsibilities: A Pacifc perspective. International Review of Education, 54, 459–473. doi: 10.1007/ s1159-008-9092-1. Vaai, U. L., & Nabobo-Baba, U. (2017). The relational self: Decolonising personhood in the Pacifc. Suva, Fiji: The University of South Pacifc Press and Pacifc Theological College. Vaioleti, T. M. (2006). Talanoa methodology: A developing position on Pacifc research. Waikato Journal of Education, 12(1), 21–34. Retrieved from: http://whanauoraresearch. co.nz/fles/formidable/Vaioleti-Talanoa.pdf Vaioleti, T. M. (2011). Talanoa, Manulua and Founga Ako: Frameworks for using enduring Tongan educational ideas for education in Aotearoa/New Zealand (unpublished Doctor of Philosophy thesis). Waikato University, Waikato New Zealand. Webber, M. (2008). Walking the space between: Identity and M āori/P ākeh ā. Wellington, New Zealand: NZCER Press. Webber, M. (2012). Identity matters: Racial-ethnic identity and Maori students. SET: Research Information for Teachers, 2, 20–27. Retrieved from https://www.nzcer.org.nz/ nzcerpress/set Wendt Samu, T. (2006). The ‘Pasifka umbrella’ and quality teaching: understanding and responding to the diverse realities within. Waikato Journal of Education, 12, 35–49. doi: 10.15663/wje.v12i.297.

Section IV

Poetry and critical pedagogical research

16 Why I use a poem in every single classroom Selina Tusitala Marsh

New Zealand Poet Laureate for 2017–2019, The University of Auckland, New Zealand

A poem is a rubiks cube red next to yellow next to green a 6-sided, palm-sized puzzle colouring diferent modes of meaning forestalling foregone conclusions by twists of ambiguity and turns of uncertainty. This, is a good thing. A poem is a swing door inviting non-resolution. A poem is a piece of gum stuck on the underside of your best shoe walking back in a logical deductive mode won’t take you to the source but making associative connections may. Poems are every ordinary leaf placed under a microscope its veined highways and byways revealing our world from stellar streams to bloodstreams. They show us how to see again, help us question givens with their green complexity. A poem is a galaxy infnitely interpretable from every vantage point as we asteroid along its lines. A poem is a table on which I place

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a snow globe from Tahiti. We roll it back and forth as fakes fall on palm trees. Meaning is unstable. We examine and revise how we see, what we believe. A poem is an elevator people get on and of at diferent levels. Some prefer the stairs. That’s ok. They don’t realise that poems are also stairs, that what is up is down. It’ll be our secret. A poem is oyster ice cream my invention. It shouldn’t be done. It shouldn’t be liked. But it is. It helps the pre-licker full of protest, deal with coexistent complements and contradictions, question judgments, loosen convictions. And when they get down to the cone they realize: binary thinking is not enough. A poem is the frst teacher who really saw you, lined up outside class, greeting you: ‘My, what beautiful, brown eyes you have!’ And you tie that specialness around your hair for the rest of your life. A poem is that wise and gentle aunt who gives you what you need, not what you want tells you to fetch something from the back of her closet and you pull out a box of war letters from a father you were bent on dismissing.

Why I use a poem in every single classroom

A poem is a barefoot bush runner where every ravine and every clif every stone, boulder, and dirt trail every river crossed, every hill climbed pares her down to her basic human needs and motivations. Decisions are made in a more comprehensive context. Ethical issues can be addressed. A poem is a fun house mirror it’s your face, but longer and thinner and not it’s your legs and arms, but rounder and the skinnier and not. This distorted reality shows nothing and everything. A poem is web so common, so complex a silver feat of technical engineering spun from every spider’s belly weaving emotional dexterity if we see it in a certain light.

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17 Re/turning the world into poetry [an alternative education portfolio] Adrian Schoone

Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand

in hope, turn to poetry, and in turn, turn the world into poetry This chapter comprises a portfolio of poems I crafted regarding alternative education. I have been bothered for quite some time about access to quality education provision for a group of New Zealand’s most vulnerable young people (Schoone, 2009). I am referring, here, to students who have been disenfranchised from mainstream public secondary education provision due to multiple school suspensions, exclusions, and truancy. The Ministry of Education (2018, March 5) puts the number of students aged 13–16 years who are at the end of various “at risk interventions” at a nominal 5000. My involvement with these students began in 2001 when I left the primary classroom to be employed by an alternative education provider in Auckland, Creative Learning Scheme (CLS). By and large, providers of alternative education are contracted by secondary schools to deliver of-site education. The quality of this provision has been under government scrutiny for the past decade. Static funding, poor educational resourcing, an under-qualifed workforce, ongoing issues with teacher registration in the sector, and indiferent secondary schools are just some of the issues that have resulted in the sector becoming as marginalized as the students it caters for (see Education Review Ofce, 2011). The sector is largely held together by the passion of those closely involved. In the struggle to make sense of my own experiences in the sector, and bring authentic voice to the concerns and realities of students and staf members in alternative education, I re/turned to poetry. The poems I present here derive from my arts-based doctoral research (Schoone, 2015) and from my ongoing research that explores the possibility visual poetry afords as a form of critical discourse. In concluding this chapter I give poetry the last word/s, while also acknowledging the poetic word is an opening for more discovery.

In the beginning I had delighted in poetry as a young child, symbolized most by a sole treasured book of rhyming poems I owned, pages dog-eared with the cover long lost. Throughout, I have written personal poems, although I considered that

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my love of words was a private enterprise to aid refection and help make sense of my world. I did not expect that poetry could help me create sense of outer/other worlds and could be shared more widely. However, poetry re/ turned to me in an unexpected way. I had embarked in doctoral studies to explore the lived experiences of alternative education tutors. Having worked closely with many tutors over the years, I was curious to learn about their unique pedagogies that were shown to efectively engage disenfranchised young people in learning (Brooking, Gardiner, & Calvert, 2009). Moreover, the Education Review Ofce (2011) evaluation on good practices in the alternative education sector found that, “despite the complex educational and social issues that arise in connection with Alternative Education students, these passionate tutors often have greater successes than teachers in the mainstream who have previously been unable to support these students” (p. 62). However, the voices of the tutors remained largely absent from education research. When I was considering the research methodology that would best bring voice to alternative education tutor experiences, I visited a CLS programme in Panmure, East Auckland. I was at a staf meeting where tutors were introducing themselves when suddenly I found myself caught up with the manner in which one the tutors introduced himself to the point that I found myself scribbling down what he said: cls panmure university seeing gangsters turn in to soft young males and soft young women (Schoone, 2015, p. 44) Within this impromptu spoken poem, I discerned a universe of insight into tutor pedagogy. I was caught by the juxtaposition of language: university with gangsters, gangsters with soft. The poem’s theme appeared as “transformation” with: turn in to, implying that being a gangster somehow concealed sexual identity. Overall, it was a humorous provocation owing to an alternative education provider being conceptualized as a university. Moreover, that the speaker held no formal tertiary qualifcations, let alone teaching ones, added to the poem’s gravity. At this point, I wondered if the tutor’s poetic language could tell us something about essences of pedagogy that we may have lost in the pursuit of teacher professionalism and specialisation.

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Prose and poetry Re/turning the world into poetry is a hopeful act for transformation. It is both re/turning to a poetic sense of self, and re/turning to “the world which proceeds knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks” (MerleauPonty, 1962, p. ix). In a phenomenological sense, when we return to poetry we return to poetic dwelling, the roots of our existence (Heidegger, 1971). For, as Heidegger (1971) remarks, poetry is no “fight into dream land” or just literary in form, but poetry creates our proper abode (p. 57). This is rather like how Emily Dickinson (1960, p. 327) writes of poetry: “I dwell in Possibility –/A fairer House than Prose –/More numerous of Windows –/ Superior – for Doors –”. In contrast to poetic dwelling, our poetic-selves, along with many of the communities we live in and work with, tend towards institutionalisation and bureaucratisation in the neoliberal milieu. Wielding prose to infict linguistic violence, the felt-fxity of life is cemented by the unrelenting production and publishing of prosaic ways-of-being by the hands of those in power. This has been no more keenly felt than in the world of education. Government reforms in the 1990s saw New Zealand’s education system transform from being one of the “most centralized and social democratic systems of education in the world” (Gordon, 1996, p. 129) to a decentralized system that fostered competition between schools enabled by the introduction of highstakes testing (O’Connor & Holland, 2013). Fielding and Moss (2011, p. 17) supply a list of terms that characterize the impact of such reforms. I have spaced these out below: measurement delivery league tables sanctions

outcomes goals efciency inspections

performance standards high stakes tests competition

indicators assessments incentives

Vulnerable young people become further marginalized in an education system that fosters competition and uniformity (McGregor & Mills, 2012). Alternative education providers, like CLS, were established during the 1990s as community responses to increasing numbers of young people “alienated” (Ministry of Education, 2015, para. 1), from mainstream schools. These providers ofered a type of learning refuge for students (Nairn & Higgins, 2011), denoted by a holistic approach to students and curriculum, imbued with the ethic of care and love and sustained through poetic utterances (Schoone, 2016, 2017). Re/turning the world into poetry provides an alternative discourse that is more concerned with the afective rather than the efective. Poetry re/turns emotions to institutions and reminds us to notice beauty, tastes, hunches and humour. As Martin Buber (2002, p. 53) contends, “Institutions must be loosened, or dissolved, or burst asunder, by the feelings themselves”.

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Portfolio of poems In the remainder of this chapter, I present a portfolio of poems that reveals the poetic language of tutors and transforms one government document into poetry. In terms of tutors who work in alternative education, I sought to bring voice to their experiences and to understand the unique contributions tutors make to pedagogy. In the larger doctoral study, I created over 150 found poems from the interview transcripts of eight tutors with words, phrases I found from observing tutors at work in their centres and from a performative workshop the tutors participated in (see Schoone, 2015, 2017). Butler-Kisber (2012) defnes found poetry as: … the rearrangement of words, phrases and sometimes whole passages that are taken from other sources and reframed as poetry by changes in spaces and/or lines (and consequently meaning), or by altering the text by additions and/or deletions. (p. 146) Following in the methodological footsteps of Richardson (1992) and Glesne (1997), forerunners in creating found poetry from research interview transcripts, I wrote found poems with only the words or phrases spoken by the tutor participants. As Butler-Kisber (2010, p. 85) points out, “There is no template or prescribed approach for creating found poetry”, therefore … … I turned to the light of phenomenology: phosphorescent paths, the twinkle of being scattered before me even the mundane can be made to shine (Furman, 2007) gather the shining words gather the other words and make them shine1 I highlighted portions of transcript text that shone, resonated, or stood out to me. In a phenomenological way, I was physically highlighting that which was already highlighted to me, from within itself (Heidegger, 1996). I linked phrases from across the transcript to enable a compression of language that held a lived moment, or pertinent thought, from a tutor’s experience. This process included many drafts, additions, and changes. In working ethically with the found poems from my participants, with trepidation I presented the draft poems to each tutor separately. To my relief, the poems were well received by all the participants, with only minor factual points needing adjustments. One tutor remarked, “These poems represent my best answers” (Schoone, 2015, p. 160).

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Another tutor remarked that the poems helped him think more closely about his tutoring approaches, I noted in my research journal: He seemed tired after playing basketball, and here I am reading him poems. “Mean”2 He thought the poems were mean. (Schoone, 2015, p. 193) The tutors in this study are predominately Pasifka: two Samoan (Amosa and Fetu), two Tongan (Rose and Pete), and two Cook Island (Luke and Koro). Of the two remaining tutors, one is Pā kehā (Alice, a New Zealander of European descent) and the other is a white immigrant from England (Lincoln). None of the eight tutor participants held teaching qualifcations, and only Alice had an undergraduate degree. Re/turning tutors voices to poetry Amosa you’re their educator you’re their driver you’re their shoulder to cry on you’re their emotional punching bag the list goes on Luke it’s rare it’s hard, it’s fun i don’t know if there are many jobs like that if any Fetu step foot into their world just seeing how life is for them encourage students to see beyond what they think of themselves uplift. know how to restrain love people more Pete they have too much walls, those teachers don’t go there zones. i am a tutor. whereas me, i never thought that way engage at any level, passion (we can say that stuf aye?)

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attention’s good though. it shows that you honour them but not crossing the line when you give them that attention these guys feel honoured. i am a tutor. Rose i do carry grace and i enlarge myself to have a little more grace the way she acts, i don’t have to re act i look at the holistic side maybe she didn’t have breakfast in the morning “what’s going on?” “how’s home life?” there’s time for: “this is what you should do” but i also operate with a little bit of grace Koro i see past that really staunch guy sitting in the corner trying to be tough it may take a while i don’t know how to teach classroom management or anything like that all brand new to me i thought if i can build relationships with the kids then i could teach them that was my motto Lincoln hard to pin her down hard to keep her at school she suddenly turned up in a pink blouse the one who was into all the black arts Alice teacher’s content tutor’s relationship an arrow in the quiver is a tutor-trained teacher Koro qualifed teacher them knowing the planning side, teaching side taught me heaps

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working alongside a qualifed teacher they provide me with quite a lot of experience but i’ve gotta change that experience into the culture of our class What would happen if all the tutors suddenly disappeared and were replaced by teachers? i pray that would never happen they hated their teachers (not trying to bag them or anything like that) it’s all about the curriculum and them doing their teaching they throw it out whenever they can the kids will just absorb it this is what I’ve seen i was at school, that happened to me i don’t want to be formalized lose the essence of the tutor essence of a tutor down to passion, desire to change, turn these kids around i don’t want to lose the tutor this is just me speaking honestly i don’t want to be formalized just saying The following found poem is woven from three diferent sources of discourse. The text justifed on the left derives from Rose’s interview transcript. The text on the right was found from observing Rose working in the alternative education centre. And the centred text comes from my research journal refecting on my time observing in Rose’s centre. Rose i get quite emotional when i talk about the students emotional she got tearful talking about the girls seeing them achieve something moving on to a positive pathway more respectful not shy anymore the way they dress and talk and not just a beautiful face (i thought wow, i’ve done something here, breaking new ground) this is achievement for me that’s my wall of fame

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Re/turning institutional voices to poetry: unofcial information acts Tutors’ experiences and perspectives on education, as expressed in the preceding found poems are juxtaposed with Ministry of Education documentation regarding alternative education released under the Ofcial Information Act (2018, March 5). How government departments work with the Act has been under scrutiny, due to unnecessary delays in releasing information and/or the extent of redactions they contained (see Fleming, 2018, July 19. I suggest these redacted documents perform a type of violent erasure poetry that obscures information that the public should be able to access. Erasure poetry (or blackout poetry) is “a form of found poetry wherein a poet takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or otherwise obscures a large portion of text, creating a wholly new work from what remains” (Academy of American Poets, 2018). In the United States, there has been a revival of erasure poetry in the Trump era. Stone (2017, October 23, para. 4) observes: “erasure has gained new energy at a moment when the country is deeply polarized—when ofcial documents may hold radically diferent consequences and meanings for diferent people”. Ministry of Education documents regarding alternative education, rehearsed the enduring youth “at-risk” narrative; a defcit model that locates “risk” factors within the individual (e.g. drug and alcohol addiction, gang afliation, transient living conditions, criminal behaviour) with little consideration for the wider social and economic macro-narratives that have undoubtedly infuenced young people’s lived realities (Bauman, 2011). Alternative education tutor, Luke, refects in the following found poem that the young people demonized by the system, through “the power of the [alternative education referral] sheet [from the mainstream school]”, do not appear like how they were portrayed when they enter alternative education. the power of the sheet that says why they’re here “got into a fght” “showed violence towards someone” stuck in the pattern of a rip and all this other stuf they don’t refect what’s on that piece of paper it’s just crazy the ones who are supposed to be the most violent aren’t Working with a released Ministry of Education document titled: “Clinic on the review of alternative education” (2018, March 5), I consider the following poem my “unofcial information act” as a hopeful response to information released under the Ofcial Information Act. I redacted portions from

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the original un-redacted text as a way to critically engage with the document in order to transform it from prosaic violence to poetic possibilities. The beginning of the poem renders the word “clinic” in concrete form to suggest ideas such as “putting people in boxes” or “institutional walls”. Within the poem, the Māori word pounamu refers to greenstone, considered by Māori as taonga (treasure). Towards the end of the poem, I placed white text over the Ministry of Education’s redacted portion with a collaborative found poem created by tutor research participants. The poem ends with the intact recommendations to the Minister of Education, although now these words ask the Minister to consider the alternative discourse.

Clinic on the review of alternative education Alternative Education C

L

I

C I For psychosocial and psychological needs There is no limit on the number of students who may enrol

N

Item 1: Characteristics of students in current at-risk provision 1. Pounamu 2.

3. 55% of these students are Maori and 56% are male. 4.

5.

Students often enter at-risk provision because they have experienced a range of acute risk factors, including

6. the education system

Re/turning the world into poetry 235 Achievement data attainment

7. 8.

and

9.

performance

comes close to that obtained in other schools.

Outcomes 10.

We do not know

believe in yourself to see beyond your current reality to lift hopes, love, integrity and fresh ideas move in the right direction – transformed lives: finding that diamond in the rough be a role model and a mentor be someone who builds with the long term in mind we’ve got you covered (Schoone, 2015, p. 233)

Recommendations: •

Indicate whether you support the investment approach framework being applied as outlined above

•

Direct us to report back in 1 month will more detailed advice on next steps and with options/a plan to implement this approach.

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Notes 1. I wrote this poem to refect my found poetry method from a phenomenological perspective. The poem is reminiscent of a literature-sourced found poem (Prendergast, 2006) with the inclusion of the paraphrased reference from Furman’s (2007) article entitled “The mundane, the existential, and the poetic”. I italicized this portion of the poem to make clear the contribution I derived from Furman. 2. Mean is colloquial for “great, awesome, etc.”

References Academy of American Poets. (2018, May 10). Erasure: Poetic form. Retrieved August 17, 2018, from https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/erasure-poetic-form Bauman, Z. (2011). Collateral damage: Social inequalities in a global age. Cambridge, England: Polity. Brooking, K., Gardiner, B., & Calvert, S. (2009). Background of students in alternative education: Interviews with a selected 2008 cohort. Retrieved from http://www.nzcer.org. nz/research/publications/background-students-alternative-education-interviewsselected-2008-cohort Buber, M. (2002). Between man and man. London, England: Routledge. Butler-Kisber, L. (2010). Qualitative inquiry: Thematic, narrative and arts-informed perspectives. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. Butler-Kisber, L. (2012). Poetic inquiry. In S. Thomas, A. Cole, & S. Stewart (Eds.), The art of poetic inquiry (pp. 142–177). Big Tancook Island, Nova Scotia: Canada: Backalong Books. Dickinson, E. (1960). In Johnson T. (Ed.), Complete poems (1st ed.). Boston, MA: Little Brown. Education Review Ofce. (2011). Alternative education: Schools and providers. Wellington, New Zealand: Education Review Ofce. Fielding, M., & Moss, P. (2011). Radical education and the common school: A democratic alternative (Foundations and futures of education). London, England: Routledge. Fleming, Z. (2018, July 19). Zac fled an OIA and it came painted black. Retrieved August 17, 2018, from https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/checkpoint/audio/ 2018654542/zac-fled-an-oia-and-it-came-painted-black Furman, R. (2007). The mundane, the existential, and the poetic. Journal of Poetry Therapy: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Practice, Theory, Research and Education, 20(3), 163–180. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08893670701394416 Glesne, C. (1997). That rare feeling: Representing research through poetic transcription. Qualitative Inquiry, 3(2), 202–222. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/107780049700300204 Gordon, L. (1996). School choice in the quasi-market in New Zealand: ‘Tomorrow’s schools’ today. Oxford Studies in Comparative Education, 6(1) 129–143. Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, language and thought (A. Hofstadter Trans.). New York, NY: Harper and Row. Heidegger, M. (1996). Being and time: A translation of Sein und zeit ( J. Stambaugh Trans.). New York, NY: State University of New York. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. [Phénoménologie de la perception.] London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul. McGregor, G., & Mills, M. (2012). Alternative education sites and marginalised young people: ‘I wish there were more schools like this one’, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 16(8), 843–862, DOI: 10.1080/13603116.2010.529467

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Ministry of Education. (2015). Verifcation form. Retrieved May 15, 2015, from http:// alternativeeducation.tki.org.nz/Resources/Contracts-and-reporting Ministry of Education. (2018, March 5). Factors associated with the risk of not achieving in education. Retrieved August 18, 2018, from https://www.education.govt.nz/ ministry-of-education/information-releases/information-releases-from-past-years/ factors-associated-with-the-risk-of-not-achieving-in-education/ Nairn, K., & Higgins, J. (2011). The emotional geographies of neoliberal school reforms: Spaces of refuge and containment. Emotion, Space and Society, 4, 180–186. http://dx. doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2010.10.001 O’Connor, P., & Holland, C. (2013). Charter schools: A right turn for education. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 48(1), 140–147. Prendergast, M. (2006). Found poetry as literature review: Research poems as audience and performance. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(2), 369–388. http://dx.doi. org/10.1177/1077800405284601 Richardson, L. (1992). The consequences of poetic representation: Writing the other, rewriting the self. In C. Ellis, & M. Flaherty (Eds.), Investing subjectivity: research on lived experience, (pp. 125–137). Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Schoone, A. (2009). Ten myths regarding alternative education. New Zealand Education Review, 14(34), 7. Schoone, A. (2015). Constellations of alternative education tutor essences: A phenomenological poetic inquiry. (Doctoral dissertation, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand). Retrieved from researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/ Schoone, A. (2016). The Tutor: Transformational educators for 21st Century learners. Wellington, New Zealand: Dunmore Press. Schoone, A. (2017). Joy, grace and transformation: The pedagogy of tutors in New Zealand’s alternative education centres. International Journal of Inclusive Education, doi: 10.1080/13603116.2017.1326179. Schoone, A. (2017). The making of maximus: A poetic and performative experience that keeps creating. In L. Butler-Kisber, J. Yallop, M. Stewart, & S. Wiebe (Eds.), Poetic Inquiries of refection and renewal (pp. 203–213). Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc. Stone, R. (2017, October 23). The Trump-Era boom in erasure poetry. Retrieved August 18, 2018, from https://newrepublic.com/article/145396/trump-era-boom-erasure-poetry

18 Creasing and folding language in dance education research Alys Longley

Dance Studies, CAI, University of Auckland, New Zealand

A tenet of my educational research is that creative practices can initiate idiosyncratic forms of writing. Such forms of writing will emerge through the dynamics of artistic process, translating afects, spatial ideas, ecological awareness, and embodied sensations through attention to the vocabulary of a highly specifc passage of time. Poetic forms of writing are an invaluable tool in articulating what would otherwise be intangible and hidden. Through poetry, I can move beyond explanatory, descriptive accounts of research to develop writing that opens up room for considering sense, space, force, and world in the scale (from the glimpse of a moment to the frame of a generation) most suited to the work. As a researcher and teacher in dance and interdisciplinary performance, poetry has enabled me to access the multi-layered experience of embodiment, translating the richness of embodied dance knowledge to pages. This chapter will present poetic writing from two educational research projects. The frst, How Much I Move, engages with participant experience of a series of workshops in inclusive dance education. The second, Unlacing our Sentences, explores forms of writing that might best enable practice-led research to translate to pages and is largely drawn from research with postgraduate dance students. dance education is felt and negotiated and complex and moving and fuid and porous and structured and unstructured and technical and open-to-change-as-towhat-technique-is and made of endless cultures and grounded in atmospheres and imagination-rich and muscular and haptic and emotional and creative and multilayered and misunderstood and vulnerabilising and performative and visibilisingbodies and visibilising-bodies-in-their-diference (or sometimes uniformity) and gendered and critical and intuitive and feared by many, if not the majority of non-specialist teachers and and and how does a dance-education researcher even begin to fnd a language that carries the vitality of dance education practices to pages? For the majority of researchers, standardized social science methodologies provide the structure necessary to focus research questions to specifc

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themes, and thus to contain and make manageable the complexity of translating elements of the pedagogy and practice of dance education in research formats. Through the adoption of conventional social-science methods, the feld of dance education gained validity as contributing robust scholarship to academic forums. It has also inherited a vocabulary of language and model of thesis structure that, in its performance of “scholastic integrity”, tends to minimize the afect, feeling, and atmosphere of dance settings – as these are difcult to convey through the language of conventional social science. Narrative, poetic, and evocative research methods ofer rich sources for tracing the mobility of dance practice to the page. For this dance researcher, it has remained a challenge to fnd stylistic exemplars for positioning the afective, visceral, mobile, atmospheric, relational, performative worlds of practice at the heart of my discipline. The very things that are hardest to write about in dance education are the things that I fnd most vital to engage with as research. In particular I am very interested in touch, proprioception and feelings-of-community as modalities of knowledge-creation which are specifc to dance education pedagogy. we are tangibly a we moving as music does, with the patterning of migrating birds or schools of fsh, the fuctuation of sound spooling us through time and space in such dynamic streaks that the labour of endurance tied to so much of the school day, or sometimes even to life itself, becomes possible to bear

Part one And so poetry. And so a chapter with an introduction and conclusion in solely lower-case letters. In dance, we talk about “dropping into sensation” – this refers to a kind of release from a conventional-scholastic-common-sense-led mode of concentration, to one that allows deeper awareness of the feelings connected to physical sensation, alignment, relational awareness, and spatial attunement. As I write this chapter similarly, I’m searching for a way to “drop” into a style of writing that enables what it is to be a movement-thinker to carry through into text. As a supervisor working with postgraduate dance students, encouraging students to fnd modes of writing that allow such a “dropping in” is a core part of my work. For each student this is slightly

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diferent – for some students, multi-modal work that merges video, photography, critical writing, journal writing, and frst-person accounts of studio practice are key. For others, poetic approaches allow space for the imagination of their dancing to fow into research writing. Poetic thinking invites sensory-afective knowledge – through what could be articulated as efciency in employing language for its artistry, abstraction and felt-sense (Russ, 1997). When the burden of truth, explanation and conventional grammar or scholarly tone is removed, I can hone in on translating highly specifc qualities and forces – so readers can sense the visceral richness of dance education in a language of evocation rather than explanation – to feel along with particular research moments. Laurel Richardson’s seminal article “Writing as a Method of Inquiry” (2005) presents crystallisation as a metaphor for polyvocality, wherein different approaches to writing enable diferent perceptions of research content – each surface is equally important to the structure of the crystal (Richardson & St Pierre, 2005) Following Richardson and St Pierre, this chapter is shaped as a four-sided crystal, with each side providing a specifc lens for considering poetry in dance education research. The frst part is this introduction, the second discusses my Masters research project, How Much I Move, that signalled the beginning of my research career in 2002, the third part is Unlacing our Sentences/Letting the Letters Run Ahead of Me, a research project still in process at the time this chapter was written in 2018, which explores intuitive, playful and unpredictable forms of writing that support creative researchers. The fnal part of this essay is entitled Writing the Minor and discusses the Deleuzian concept of the minor (Deleuze, 1986) as a political framing for both poetic writing and dance education – wherein unconventional forms are recognized for creating new possibilities of thinking. Examples of poetic writing from these research projects are interlaced throughout this article. All of the poems written in this article were written independently by the author – while emerging out of collaborative exchange in studio settings. They trace spaces where ideas were moving quickly and viscerally through (more-than human and human) bodies and spaces. One manifestation of this movement emerged in poetry. 1 How Much I Move You hear sounds of a pencil being felt for in a drawer in the dark and then see its thick shadow in candlelight, writing the remaining words. Paragraphs reduced to one word. A punctuation mark. Then another word, complete as a thought. The way someone’s name holds terraces of character, contains all of our adventures together. Michael Ondaatje from Death at Kataragama Michael Ondaatje’s poem, Death at Kataragama (Ondaatje, 2008, p. 55), evokes the power of poetry to carry worlds of experience in specifc sequences of

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alphabet and phrase, chosen with an intensity of care. The poet attunes to the musical force of language and the particularity of certain words – or the friction between certain words – to evoke or translate or paint or carry a particular world to the page. In the How Much I Move project, I often had the sense of reaching for a pencil in a drawer in the dark – and the poems that emerged through the project were created through collaborations. The collaborations occurred between research participants and also out of the logics of specifc dance tasks and their histories – so the poems did not feel independently authored at all. In the How Much I Move project, I was feeling-out my place as a researcher – drawing on qualitative research to contextualize my research in dance education. The project involved designing dance workshops with an inclusive focus, engaging methods of narrative description, interviews and practice-led research. At times these research-paradigms could be contradictory – as I wanted a research outcome to be in the dancing, yet qualitative research at this time had few precedents for this. In this project, I employed poetry to communicate the afects of subtle workshop-interactions, relationships, atmospheres, and the particularity of performance states. Poetry provided a way to attend to the viscerality, musicality, and artistry of dance research and to the emotions and afects woven through workshops and rehearsals. The aim of the How Much I Move project was to contribute to the feld of dance education, as the New Zealand Arts Curriculum (2002) had been recently released and the issue of how to translate this curriculum into classroom practice was a prescient one (Buck & Snook, 2014). Poetry enabled me to negotiate the demands of academic style, of creative practice, the complexity, and richness of teaching and learning. Each of these felds ofered possibilities and constraints that shaped my research outcomes. How Much I Move was a practice-led research project that followed the experience of six participants in a series of 14 weekly dance workshops exploring diferent strategies for facilitating inclusive dance education. The aims of the research were as follows: • • •

To consider dance as an inclusive art form within the fabric of New Zealand’s educational and performing arts cultures. To provide an example of, and working method for, inclusive dance practice that relates to classroom practice. To develop a methodology interweaving qualitative, educational, and practice-led research as a way of knowing within academia.

As the project developed, poetry became core to the research methodology. A poetic approach to narrative methodology was employed to evoke some of the dynamic elements of inclusive pedagogy within 14 dance workshops – the negotiations between the six participants, the specifc dance tasks we worked with, the feelings these tasks evoked, and the development of

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community that occurred as the workshops progressed. In dance, an inclusive approach involves working together in our diferences – and so feelings of vulnerability, trust, and the development of confdence through specifc dance practices were core to the contribution-to-knowledge this research made. dancing alone balancing in the shape of each other taking a small thing and letting it drop its smallness along the face of movement a muscular cognition of travel The above poem, along the face of movement, was written during a dance collaboration where I was workshopping with three dancers (Longley, 2000). Writing drew on Nigel Stewart’s (1998) discussion of dance phenomenology, as tracing the lived experience of dancing through “expressive fgures” (p. 22), described as: Forms of expressive writing, poetic words, or graphic marks … … a meditation on the experience of dancing that neither sacrifces the integrity and immediacy of that experience nor vitiates its intrinsic qualities. It keeps the live experience alive. It is the body’s way of rewor(l)ding the world. (Stewart, 1998, p. 22) For Stewart, dance phenomenology is a form of artistic perception and refection that can express the dancer’s bodily experience in a language born of that experience. Poetry hones into the felt, emotive, skin sensing, somatic quality of moving, and developing ideas through such intimate mediums as touch, sharing weight, or watching each other moving without sight. The data analysis of this study drew on poetry as, “a meditation on the experience of dancing that neither sacrifces the integrity and immediacy of that experience nor vitiates its intrinsic qualities” (Stewart, 1998, p. 52). Central to the project’s ontology was the principle that dance making is a form of knowledge production, which can generate new forms of theory, articulated by choreographer Carol Brown: Bringing the dancing body into the academy means creating spaces which enable movement and which can accommodate the messy materiality of bodies. It means situating knowledge in the mobile body with its multi-sensory capacities and inherent instabilities. It means refusing the division between thought and action. (Brown, 1997, p. 135)

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Each of the poems presented below follow the “multi-sensory capacities and inherent instabilities” of six dancers as we explored a range of approaches to inclusive dance education in our workshops. After working on dance tasks, we as a group would take time for refective writing, which often moved to poetry. I have only published the writing that I did in these sessions, although each member of the workshop group contributed writing to the project. My master’s included writing from all participants. 1 skin a placement tissue inside this thickets’ luxurious darkness muscle closer to you/the meeting of necessary force bone distances allowed and closenesses made as parts form wholes we are all this a pathway of leaving wrangling in colors that deepen and deepen as doors 2 intently listening the delicate join as the small bones in your walking feet tell stories to each other of great trust and enormous smallness inside the bones of the foor there is gravity that holds you safe this knowledge earths this dance of exchange between initiation from places of balance, support the kinaesthetic houses of thought. 3 entering the door is in the rolling of one shoulder

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without any recognition of just which entrance you have together decided to move through but here you are where time is made in a consistent lifting of breath such shared awareness toward the next memory in a porous conversation of bones 4 the space above powder etching space the strongest touch into nothingness wearing a body through the light and the darkness of limb and listening wearing yourself on night’s sleeve and on light’s timepieces Poetry was a core element of both the workshop pedagogy and the thesis structure of the How Much I Move research project. I engaged poetry as a way to summarize interviews and particular workshops, as a method of journaling with research participants, and as an approach to choreographic process. In writing my Master’s thesis, poems opened every chapter and were a core means to communicate key elements of the inclusive pedagogy at the centre of the project. I defned inclusive pedagogy as an approach to teaching that highlights diversity as a pedagogical strength, prioritizing diference, and multiplicity, rather than replication and sameness. Importantly, it was through poetic writing that I found my voice as an emerging researcher, developing an interdisciplinary approach to creative-research. The poetic element of the work allowed me to bring my imagination to new possibilities of writing – to genuinely play with language. This freedom to experiment made the entire process of learning-to-write-a-thesis-through-writing-a-thesis more lively, and ultimately, more possible. Poetry was a central element in satisfying my stated research aim to develop a methodology interweaving qualitative, educational, and practice-led research within academia as it provided a way to translate the sensory, relational, and afective terrains of knowledge that are central to the practice of dance education.

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Part two Unlacing our Sentences/Letting the Letters Run Ahead of Me The second dance-education research project discussed in this chapter is entitled Unlacing our Sentences/Letting the Letters Run Ahead of Me. This project works from the assumption that the approach to writing (in terms of structure, style, vocabulary, practice) chosen in a research project both enables and constrains what that research can express. In dance research, the value of intuitive, playful, and unpredictable studio methods is well accepted, yet in some circumstances, conventional approaches to writing, and the values of proof, explanation, predictability, analysis, and linear argument, may constrain, rather than enable, creative research (Melrose, 2006). The Unlacing our Sentences/Letting the Letters Run Ahead of Me project emerged through questioning how I, as a dance-educator, could develop methods of writing that encourage intuition, experimentation, not-knowing, risk, a kind of drifting-with ideas which is rigorous in its critical curiosity, in working with my students. What forms of writing support creative knowledge production? In this chapter, I present a series of poems refecting a loose, playful, and experimental approach to writing in dance education and research. A key to such writing is working in a way that is simultaneously light and serious, in order to allow the creativity and viscerality of dancing to translate to pages with momentum and rhythm. Poetic methods provide many approaches for experimenting with such an approach to language. I researched these methods through a design that involved testing methods of dance-writing with students in diferent years of university. I developed poetic forms of learning feedback with students taking undergraduate courses focusing on dance improvisation, dance writing, and in workshops with postgraduate students (Master’s and PhD). We focussed on practice-led research in independent thesis projects. We explored poetic methods such as found poetry (Prendergast, 2006) movement-initiated writing (Longley, 2013) free-writing (Goldberg, 1986) and writing in authentic movement (Adler, 1999). Authentic Movement was developed by Mary Starks Whitehouse in the mid-20th century (Whitehouse, 1999). A core element of this practice is the relationship between a mover and a witness. The mover moves for a specifc period of time, with their eyes closed. The witness is committed to ensuring the mover is safe. In the 1970s, dance therapist Janet Adler, a student of Mary Starks Whitehouse, further developed and refned Authentic Movement practice, which has become a relatively common method in creative as well as therapeutic dance forms. The outer form of this work is simple: one person moves in the presence of another … she is witnessing, listening, bringing a specifc quality of attention or presence to the experience of the mover. The mover works with eyes closed in order to expand her experience of listening to the deeper levels of her kinesthetic reality. (Adler, 1999, p. 142)

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Another key element of this practice is writing or drawing responses to one’s own sense of movement and responding to the experience of witnessing the movement of another. As a structure for teaching writing in tertiary dance education, Authentic Movement ofers a safe space for students to move beyond their habitual movements to focus on the feeling of movement, speed, gravity, and space. In this context, poetic writing is a useful form of experimentation with voice, style, and creative possibility. The simple structure of one moving/one watching – then both writing – then the other moving/the other watching – then both writing again, informs the poems throughout this section. It is a mode of writing specifc to the dance studio, where kinesthetic sensation, collaborative work, and creative vulnerability are typical modalities of pedagogy. Practising art in postgraduate contexts tends to treat creative processes seriously, rigorously, industriously, critically. But are there times when such weighted seriousness is overrated? We often couple studio work with philosophy and/or borrow structural orders from social science. I do question an academic culture where students often forget to breathe through their academic learning and the creativity and experimental aspect of ideas are treated so seriously that the grade becomes more important than the experiment. In an essay mourning brilliant saxophone player Chet Baker’s death, art historian Dave Hickey writes about the uncomfortable relationship that existed between Baker and the institutional establishment: “It really pissed them of”, Lowell George told me once, “that they couldn’t learn anything from Chet’s playing, not anything they could teach. All they could learn was that he could do it, and they couldn’t. It was all about thinking and breathing in real time, and they couldn’t grasp that. It had too much to do with life, with how you live in time”. (Hickey, 1997, p. 79) For me as an academic/artist-researcher, the “heart of the heart” in much of my teaching and researching is exploring the way that ideas can bounce through processes of dance making. Dance education should engage with how we live in time and develop clear relationships between concepts and their relation to the changing world in which we live. I fnd it ironic that this can be such a challenge – that the criteria sheets breaking assignments down into the component aspects of knowledge and institutional timetables so often seem to numb the heartbeat of concepts. How might dance educators encourage intuition, experimentation, not-knowing, risk, a kind of drifting-with ideas which is rigorous in its critical curiosity? And at the same time be complicit with a system that demands research has a good degree of clarity about its conclusion at its outset that demands the adoption of language inimical to playful thinking? For me, poetry is a vital tool for enabling modes of artistic thinking in which ideas can be held both lightly, and seriously. I think of Frank O’Hara, whose creative writing refects deadpan

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wit and self-deprecating willingness to push ideas past sense, to develop an ironic, playful gravity. Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves. (O’Hara & Allen, 1995, p. 197) Or the work of poet david antin who describes his style of writing against standard prose traditions as “dispensing with its nonfunctional markers regular capitalisation most punctuation marks and right and left justifcation, which i see as merely marking propriety and making a dubious claim to right thinking and right writing” (antin, 2005, p. x). antin’s book, i never knew what time it was, could be read as much as “talks” as poems, as they travel with a fuid resistance to the accepted conventions of grammar, infuencing the introduction and conclusion of this chapter. This release from conventional tone, style, and grammar is why poetry is vitally important in educational research – it allows space for new habits of thinking and voice to manifest. Abstraction and ambiguity can be just as important in allowing embodied awareness to move to pages as they are in artistic practice. Some information cannot be written directly – it has to be evoked through the force and afect of language. The following poems emerged out of dance workshops in which I wrote as a form of refective feedback in an improvisation of around eight students. They refect on processes of discovering and developing raw ideas from concept to refnement, moving between dance and creative-writing. 2 Unlacing our Sentences/Letting the Letters Run Ahead of Me 1 you challenge the cistern of it, so the water fnds its escape. You challenge the system by walking away. You challenge time when you refuse the bell & you fall right through & you fall right through the cracks are made out of words like yours & the source of the baseline is all of your loss and you challenge time when you refuse the bell and you fall right through and you fall right through my life

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in the softest and most torrential of ways the raindrops were so constant and enormous and the washing was drenched with all the words put in the clouds because they were too strange to say. 2 activated by touch and sight shared in gestures, uncomfortable, if not painful a muscular perspective this uncomfortable touch a painful gesture of activation of muscular sight such insight such distance such unpracticed closeness 3 freewriting the shape of alignment a number of grips on devices a number of gaps & fuctuations the sound of voices & a m āori bone fute pen as fute word as point of loss where you go underwater from the moment, for a moment, you breathe frst, then fall. Beginning. White boarding lines to aeroplanes & boats enlisting

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speed, patterns & points of resistance fow states lining up to leave a dock of alphabet a storm of breathing a language that brings together every sound without a mark or a trace or a wait. 4 This feeting shelf of Easter Ice If they walk on it If they walk on it If they walk on it To enter risk What it feels like to commit What it feels like to not know Around the edge of it A kind of hollow cold this void space we touch with the last delicate end of smallest fnger – the tiniest taste of space 5 a wall as soft as tenderness itself/falling through/the horizontal a vessel of fuids Poem one in this series refects how creative practices can allow students to move through and share experience and memory. The notion of washing connotes bodies and physical form. This poem refers to how, as learners and artists, we drip with afects and feelings, including the desire to express things that can’t be said aloud. The shapes of our bodies carry meanings, feelings, perceptions, and knowledge that are impossible to articulate in words. Poetry creates one mode for the learning that occurs through such pedagogy to have a voice beyond the studio. The poems were written in improvisation class. The students were performing duets, working with their relationality through touch and weight and closeness

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and distance. As I watched them my pencil scribed the feeling-space of the room. Connecting to the dancers and the space, the handwriting scrawled in lines across the page. This is a practice of writing into the unknown, of listening through the writing practice. The task of poetic-writing-asnotetaking, during and immediately after in-class dance performances provides a non-linear trace of the work to manifest, which often provides a “hook” for discussing specifc moments, tasks, and qualities through a choreographic process.

Part three Writing the minor 1 Every vertabrae is an elegant cup, a criss cross bundle of quickening light, every syllable your elbows say crosses the face of the clouds, the blind seas of distance reach sadly & lovingly, heart-told monstrous, inverted. i had to shield my eyes from the light. it said so much more than my peripheries could take. 2 a leaky initiation catching in the undertow psoas muscle drawn again, the line, the crease the reach the ledge of grace fnds dust and deer and, oh!, life! It’s always an intangible measurement, & something is always open, always breathing. 3 She dreams of a sky train and, once in the sky, gently rotates, gently shakes, a perspex window unfolding, fnding the opposing fngertips, again the fan

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endlessly circles inside the bones of the fbres of the fascia in the spine, & gently reclines. I wrote the above poems as part of a choreographic score wherein one dancer improvises solo while another simultaneously writes a poetic response on paper. This mode of writing is collaborative, responsive, and time bound – an improvisation through writing. It doesn’t matter what words they are and the writing doesn’t have to be “about” anything – it doesn’t have to describe the dance, or explain it, or be true to it in any way. I worked with dancer val smith in the choreographic devising process that underpinned this writing, and the collaborative process we developed together enabled these texts to come into being. The writer is simply part of an explorative creative practice. In placing listening and attending at the heart of creative teaching, this approach to poetic language provides a form of collaboration that attends to the musicality of sensing. Space is left for serendipity, as the process of writing itself unfolds as an improvisation, a site of play. This process is infuenced by the work of ethnographers Alison Phipps and Lesley Saunders, who discuss their work with poetry as, “neither structure nor anti-structure, but working away with words and their spaces to embrace – in the sense of gathering in and in the sense of loving – the fragility and messiness of worlds, half known, misknown, but attempted nonetheless, attempted” (Phipps & Saunders, 2009, p. 4). Dance could be considered a minor form of knowledge-production, compared to the majoritarian behemoths of literacy and numeracy (Longley, 2011). If we consider the status STEM subjects are aforded in schools and universities, government and society, dance, with its focus on embodied knowledge, collaboration, physical agency, and creative practice is rarely acknowledged as a rigorous form of intellectual inquiry. In their book Kafka – Toward A Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish characterizing elements of a “minor literature”. First, the minor is written in the language of the major but deterritorializes it – that is, it opens possibilities for meaning through shifts in vocabulary and structure. Second, the minor is inextricably political. Thirdly, the minor prioritizes a collective, enunciative approach to language (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986, pp. 16–17). In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986, 1987) concept of a minor literature, “language has its own afective power, above and beyond meaning” (Colebrook, 2002, p. 114). Claire Colebrook writes of the distinction Deleuze and Guattari make between minoritarian and majoritarian literatures, noting that work is majoritarian when it is “based upon an identity and demands recognition rather than constitution, of that identity” (Colebrook, 2002, p. 117). The identity of the minor, on the other hand, is always in process and can never be fxed. The minor relates to cultures that are of lesser power, of lower status, that must transgress the rules of the major in order to come into existence. The minor on the other hand is unpredictable with a tendency to upset the hierarchies enforced by the major.

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Deleuze’s (1997) book, Critique et Clinique, discusses style in art as a way of creating new possibilities of life. The role of minor literature is to “make language stammer” and to “create a foreign language within language”. Writers, as Proust says, invent a new language within language, a foreign language as it were. They bring to light new grammatical or syntactic powers. They force language outside its customary furrows, they make it delirious. (Deleuze, 1997, p. iv) In this way writers create a new kind of sense. “Sense is not just the collection of words of a language, nor is it the bodies named; it is the way we think or approach those bodies” (Colebrook, 2002, p. 111). Poetry could be seen as ofering the minor feld of dance education a space of minor literature – working beyond the conventional language of social science to move “language outside its customary furrows” (Deleuze, 1997, p. iv), and to resist majoritarian hierarchies of knowledge that privilege words and the regimes of scientifc fact above creative expression. These hierarchies are upset by dance education, where teachers often do not know what kind of choreography will be made by the end of class – because the choreography is discovered in collaboration with the students. Choreographic knowledge is constantly being reshaped by the diverse students in the classroom, as dancers move in contrast or in unison, through set phrases or through improvisation. And so poetry… poetry moves in streams and fows porous and structured and unstructured and technical and open-to-change-as-to-what-technique-is and made of endless cultures and grounded in atmospheres and imagination-rich and muscular and haptic and emotional and creative and multi-layered and misunderstood and vulnerabilising and performative and visibilising-language and celebrating-voices-in-theirdiference and critical and intuitive and feared by many non-specialist teachers and and and just as dance leads us to the edges of what it is possible to express and goes further poetry leads us to the edges of what it is possible to say and keeps going, past representation, past sense, past the language of the major, into a place where vocabulary can be made anew in real time and as researchers we simply travel with the learning, as ideas touch the skin of each other, and what it is possible to make or to know might be opened and opened, and opened to let some new space in.

References Adler, J. (1999). Who is the witness? A description of authentic movement. In P. Pallaro (Ed.), Authentic movement (pp. 141–159). Philadelphia, PA: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Antin, D. (2005). i never knew what time it was. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Brown, C. (1997). Dancing between hemispheres: Negotiating routes for the danceracademic. In L. Stanley (Ed.), Knowing feminisms (pp. 132–143). London: Sage. Buck, R., & Snook, B. (2014). Artists in schools: Kick starting or kicking out dance from New Zealand classrooms. Journal of Dance Education, 14(1), 18–26. Colebrook, C. (2002). Understanding Deleuze. N.S.W: Allen & Unwin. Deleuze, G. (1997). Essays critical and clinical (D. W. Smith & M. Greco, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1986). Kafka: Toward a minor literature (D. Polan Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Goldberg, N. (1986). Writing down the bones. Boston, MA: Shambhala Press. Hickey, D. (1997). Air guitar: Essays on art and democracy. New York: Art Issues Press. Longley, A. (2011). Moving words: Five instances of dance writing (Unpublished PhD thesis). Melbourne, Australia, Victoria University. Longley, A. (2013). Movement Initiated Writing in Dance Ethnography. 40th Anniversary of Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Ed. Norman Denzin, Emerald Books, U.S, 69-94. Melrose, S. (2006). The Vanishing, or Little Erasures without Signifcance? Performance Research Journal, 11(2), 95–107. O’Hara, F., & Allen, D. (1995). The collected poems of Frank O’Hara. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ondaatje, M. (1998). Handwriting. London: Bloomsbury. Phipps, A., & Saunders, L. (2009). The sound of violets: The ethnographic potency of poetry? Ethnography and Education 4(3), 357–387. Prendergast, M. (2006). Found poetry as literature review: Research poems on audience and performance. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(2), 369–388. Richardson, L., & St Pierre, E. (2005). Writing, a method of inquiry. In Y. Lincoln & N. Denzin (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 959–978). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Russ, C. (1997). Delivering dance. Dance Theatre Journal, 13(3), 16–17. Stewart, N. (1998). Re-languaging the body, phenomenological description and the dance image. Performance Research Journal, 3(2), 20–52. Whitehouse, M. S. (1999). C.G. Jung and dance therapy: Two major principles. In P. Pallaro (Ed.), Authentic Movement (pp. 73–106). Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

19 Poetry drops a plumbline into meaning Findings from an inquiry into teacher creativity Shelley Tracey Meaning Soft semi-moon, porous and buoyant as a cloud. A rain so slight its presence only noted after, a thin dark membrane over stones. Poetry drops a plumbline into meaning. I sensed an almost-eagle fying past. This poem was one of many which I wrote about meaning-making during an inquiry into creativity. The location for the inquiry was a Master’s in Education module which I designed and facilitated, Creativity in Practice for Educators. The roles of the 50 participants in six iterations of the module spanned all educational sectors, including preschool, primary, secondary, additional learning needs, and higher and adult education. The aim of the inquiry was to develop physical and imaginal spaces for teachers to explore their understanding of creativity and their creative identities. The module involved theoretical and experiential explorations of creativity, with participants required to submit assignments refecting on their learning about creativity. Many of these assignments took a creative form, such as flms, exhibitions of pupils’ artwork, collage, installations, and other visual art forms; and even a boat-shaped climbing frame which was installed outside the teacher’s classroom. The complex nature of creativity and my multiple roles in the inquiry, as researcher, teacher educator, and assessor of participants’ module assignments, raised some conundrums and ethical and methodological questions. Poetic inquiry was one of the methods used to address these questions. The following poems refect on the challenges involved in designing an inquiry into a subject as broad and intricate as creativity: Buying a vase Buying a vase for fowers unimagined, unbloomed. Intuiting the holding, a quiet surmising. A vision revealed and contained.

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Story The ribs of story bold my boat from here to if, the waters speaking liminalities. I document my journey with the sound efects of clouds. The horizon is an afterthought, unclaimed. Impossible Impossible to say the rain. The paintings have their references and marks, But words are full of falling, empty sound. Languaging the in-between The art of knotting words together, loose but still connected, leaving spaces for absences and pathways of butterfies, wings almost touching. Using poetry in the inquiry begged a question about its capacity to language the “in-between spaces” of creative processes and knowing. Many of the poems in this chapter play with a paradox: how might language be used to capture the inexpressibilities of creativity? According to the poet John Simon, “Poetry is the meeting point of parallel lines – in infnity, but also in the here and now. It is where the patent and incontrovertible intersects with the inefable and incommensurable” (quoted in O’Driscoll, 2006, p. 16). Many of the poems I wrote in the course of the research engage with that intersection, such as the following: Creativity Silent refections on liminalities; meaning is wordless Waiting Waking on a summer morning to the sometimes music of the birds, invisible among the melting leafclouds. Listening for meaning to their brief intense responses to an unimagined presence, dreamed by the changing light. A poem fnds a rhythm between symphonic spaces, not yet understanding, but waiting in the sound.

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The processes of creativity are opaque and recursive, which makes them difcult to explain and defne. Much of the literature about creativity focuses on the challenge of defning it (Carlile & Jordan, 2012; Pope, 2005; Runco, 2007). The complexity of creativity is refected in the broad scope of the literature, which encompasses the arts, philosophy, psychology, sciences, and business, as well as education. The impetus for this inquiry arose in 2007, with the inclusion of creativity as a “core skill” in the new school curriculum in Northern Ireland (Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2007d, 2007e, 2008). Teachers were tasked with teaching creativity and creative thinking. There was little clarity in the curriculum documentation about the nature of creativity, and few opportunities for teachers to explore their assumptions about it. I was aware from previous interactions with teachers across all education sectors, including arts specialists that they did not tend to identify themselves as creative. They tended to associate creativity, rather, with the spontaneity and out-of-the-box thinking of young children, or regard it as the preserve of famous individuals with “Creative Genius” (Banaji & Burn, 2007). A teacher-focused inquiry into creativity in the Northern Ireland curriculum needed to provide opportunities for teachers to explore and extend their understanding of the nature of creativity, the characteristics of creative individuals, and their own creative identities. These opportunities were provided in the form of a 30-hour professional development module through a part-time Master’s in Education degree programme, “Creativity in Practice for Educators”. Participants related to the following attributes and behaviours of creative individuals described in the literature: high productivity and high energy (Craft, 2001, p. 48), patience and perseverance (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997), the capacity for improvisation (Sawyer, 2004), curiosity, fexibility (Torrance, 1974), and “attentiveness” (Hansen, 2005), which involves receptivity to ideas and the ability to be in the moment. Other important characteristics of creative people include openness to aesthetic experience and a tolerance for uncertainty. These are integral aspects of the poet John Keats’s concept of Negative Capability, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Forman, 1952, p. 71). Negative capability (after John Keats) Dreamed by the tallbodied scent of the lilies, sailed in the swift light vessel of hills, I am the wings of the oak tree, the loam of the cloudbanks, and now the reptilian skin of the sea. Immersing oneself in creative processes and relinquishing a need for certainty can lead to powerful insights and rich experiences. However, teachers’

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responsibilities for facilitating and containing creativity can limit their opportunities for such immersion. Connecting with, and addressing, teachers’ challenges in the inquiry required a refexive stance. It was important to refect on my own assumptions, positioning, and responsibilities as researcher/educator/poet/assessor. To frame my exploration of creativity and of the intersections between my multiple identities, I designed a model of refexivity, The Art/i/culate Eye. This model draws on Macbeth’s (2001) twofold conceptualisation of refexivity as both positional and textual. While positional refexivity refers to the researcher’s roles and biographical and cultural infuences, the textual aspect relates to the written expression of insights into the research topic. As the focus of the inquiry was on the nature of creativity, it seemed appropriate to incorporate creative approaches into the refexive explorations. The Art/i/culate Eye model included three arts-based methods: collagemaking, for exploring the intersections between my multiple identities; photo inquiry, for investigating the processes involved in developing spaces for teachers to explore creativity; and poetic inquiry. The poetic inquiry focused on the nature of meaning-making in creativity and the personal capacities which support openness to the ambiguities and uncertainties of creativity. The term poetic inquiry refers both to using poetry as a research process and for representing its results (Prendergast, Leggo, & Sameshima, 2009). Poetic inquiry incorporates both research methodology and aesthetic aspects of language. Prendergast (2009) identifed “29 uses for poetic inquiry” in her paper of the same name, including the forms, functions, and practices of poetic inquiry. Five of Prendergast’s categories (I, IV, VII, XVIII, and XIX) frame the discussion below.

Uses for poetic inquiry: I Poetic inquiry is a form of qualitative research in the social sciences that incorporates poetry in some way as a component of an investigation. Poetic inquiry perceives poetry as a way of knowing and of interpreting experience. Butler-Kisber (2005, p. 108) argued that poetic representation in research supports “new ways of seeing and understanding phenomena”. The poet/educator/researcher Sullivan (2012, p. 87) referred to learning from neuroscience and the work of other poets to support her assertion that “poetry is not ‘a’ way of knowing; it is a complex of multiple ways of knowing, involving both conscious and subconscious processing, both attention and intuition”. The following poems explore multiple ways of knowing, including sensing, intuiting, the imagination, and remembering. Imagination Raindrops swirl like midges right across the morning. Imagination sails on heaving waves of summer branches. Memories of midsummer’s sculpted marble moon

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Poem In its absence from the fruitbowl, I reinvent the orange. My memory recreates its scent, its internal rhythms. In the lowveld, rows of orange trees are hunched like crabs. A round gold sun upon my palm, a small fre simmering. A cratered sphere of stalactites. Everything clings to the centre. Understanding rising greenly The evening sea cried out my name just once, Understanding rising greenly, But never breaking on the shore. I felt that I was walking every step towards a poem, A faraway impossible and self-protecting moon. New Some days invite my tender living creature mind into a new green feld. Above, the silverwhite thoughtcluster clouds. I almost understand how birds in fight intuit their connection. Poetic inquiry draws on multiple ways of knowing and meaning making. According to Prendergast (2009):

Uses for poetic inquiry: XIX Poetic inquiry is a way of knowing th(r)ough poetic language and devices; metaphor, lyric, rhythm, imagery, emotion, attention, wide-awakeness, opening to the world, and self-revelation. Writing poems as part of the research process enhanced my sensory awareness, my range of imaginative expression, and my insights into the creativity practices of other artists, such as musicians and choreographers: In the Palm House, Botanic Gardens Breathed by the silent cadences of growth and slow becoming, I am a fuent green chromatic, endlessly attuning. After a performance of the ballet “Afterlight” Too alive for refection, too present for deconstruction, I am a cat on warm grass, flling up with sunshine, right to the end of my tail, knowing every body-cell, the heart of each cell pulsing.

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The choreographer says: I used the light as starting point, not music. I make the light in boxes, play with absence, empty space. Paradox of fow and immobility, sound and silence, mind-constructed crates vibrating. Shifting skylight bars across the stage, dialogue of shape and stillness. Ballerina elbows angled, elongating fngers, light carved out between them, etched like ravens’ wings. The spaces between meanings. How might I discern the poem, in a pas de deux with silence, dancing, still invisible, all around the page?

Uses for poetic inquiry: IV Poetic inquiry is, like narrative inquiry with which it shares many characteristics, interested in drawing on the literary arts in the attempt to more authentically express human experiences. In my early stages as a researcher, I had very little confdence about my academic writing abilities, while I was accustomed to expressing myself in poetry and fction: Poetry takes long stretching strides over chasms, the reverence of waterfalls seen from far above. Academic writing has gifted me no wings or courage; I take small steps in unsuitable shoes, following the path specifcally, leaving crumbs for the return. (Note: From research journal) Poetic inquiry is not a turning away from the complexities of expressing difcult ideas in academic language, but an exploration and expansion of the possibilities of language itself. The understanding of language in general and of poetry in particular in the inquiry drew on Heidegger’s notion (1975, p. 192) of the “presencing” aspect of language: it expresses and acknowledges the state of being human. Writing poetry enabled me to be fully present in the inquiry, to bring my imaginative self and my capacity for wonder as well as my analytical self. Creativity conference, Cambridge, 23rd November 2009 Outside the room where meaning’s being created, the sky’s deciding how it might like to be:

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the underbelly of a riverbed transforming through the fowing; or perhaps a winged seed prying loose from deep inside the fesh of day. The light is sliding through the clouds, or possibly the clouds are endsmoke of a light that overheated. The winter trees, inclining, have turned their backs, shaking their heads, pretending they were never present. There is a sense of wonder in many of the poems that I wrote in the course of my poetic inquiry, mirroring the similar wonder and joy which participants demonstrated in the course of the experiential activities in the Creativity in Practice for Educators module. My refections on participants’ responses and on the process of writing the research poems revealed an awareness of the complexity of teacher creativity. Teachers need to be open to possibility and wonder, and at the same time able to scafold the expression of creativity. Releasing the poem In the winter dark, the fne blade of a candle fame. Imagining a river, reeds sharpened by the sun, paper knives to slice the sky, releasing the poem The process of composing poems to convey my thoughts and ideas about creativity and meaning-making enabled me to engage with the capacity of creativity to shift between perspectives, to engage with multiple ways of seeing: Uncertainty Uncertainty about the moon: skysmoke blown across its face, nightbreath from its open mouth, Incense pool of liquid ice, ashes of the sinking day, portal opening into night. Candle Golden spruce in a dark forest. Light at the mouth of a cave.

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Eagle’s wing playing with the wind. Waterfalling yellow silk. Connecting us, a fne gold thread.

Uses of poetry in inquiry: VII Poetic inquiry is always aware of ethical practices in the use of human participants when engaged in poetic transcription and representation of the voices and stories of others. Poetry has been used in various ways in research, including responses by researchers to the process or research themes, and as poems written by, or solicited from, research participants (Brady, 2009, pp. xxii–xxiii). Creating found poetry is a common method in poetic inquiry. Found poetry involves carving away words from the research transcripts until the most evocative phrases remain (Butler-Kisber, 2005; Poindexter, 2002), or of reordering research responses into poems. My inquiry did not involve examples of found poetry in the conventional sense; for me, the notion of the researcher crafting poetry from participants’ words raises ethical questions about the ownership of these words and the transformation of their original intention. The poems in this chapter are all in my own words. I have used the term “found poetry” to represent the unanticipated discoveries and insights which can emerge in the course of research: Found poem Narrative journey, paragraphed by train lines, predetermined aim and destination. But an innocence of sunlight over town and feld and water reconfguring the prose. Unasked for, found poetry. Poetic inquiry takes a range of traditional literary forms, such as poetic monologues and soliloquies, and has developed new ones, such as ethnopoems, anthropological poems, autoethnographic verse, interview poems, and map poems, inter alia (Brady, 2009, pp. xx–xxi). Piirto (2002) outlined the debates about the quality of these poems as literary works, and whether this would enhance or detract from their validity as research data. My own poems are in free verse form, including short ones of eight lines or less, and also longer poems. Each of the shorter poems captures a momentary insight into creativity, refecting its elusiveness: Illumination Slanting light of early morning, softly on the grass,

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sliding down the sides of trees, confguring the path. Illumination temporary, a moment that must pass. A moment shaken free from time A poem that comes like small birds feeding, Observed through glass. Quick, pause, disappearing, sometimes here is there and more than now. A moment shaken free from time; A feather held in stillness on the wind. Some of my brief poems are written in the Japanese form of Haiku, which traditionally consist of three lines (line 1: 5 syllables, line 2: 7 syllables), line 3: 5 syllables), refers to nature and culminates in a fash of awareness: Tiger Intuition is a cave Too resonant for refuge; The tiger must emerge.

Uses for poetic inquiry: XVIII Poetic inquiry is sometimes a phenomenological and existential choice that extends beyond the use of poetic methods to a way of being in the world. As a published poet, using poetry in the inquiry enabled me to express and develop my creative identity and to build on my everyday practices of meaning-making through the medium of poetry. The practice of making poetry as a fundamental aspect of the research process aligns me with researcher/ poet/educators, such as Butler-Kisber (2005), Leggo (2012), and Sullivan (2009), and their investigations of the ways in which poetry and research inform and sustain each other. Engaging with the research process through the medium of poetry requires a capacity for responsiveness and openness to possibility: To be brave enough To be brave enough to listen to this astounding sunrise, saying something that can never be repeated or fully understood. To be brave enough to leave you waiting until you are ready to arrive. To be brave enough to read a poem right through, without being afraid of what it asks of me or makes me leave behind.

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Terraces of supposition Not for me the shortest journey, the simple path that cuts directly through the land. I prefer obliqueness, hedging, space to move around in, terraces of supposition, layered past the naked eye. The landscapes are unreadable, the maps require translation, arrivals reconfguring. In the latter poem, the in-between spaces of knowing are conveyed by the use of gerunds and the continuous present tense. Concrete nouns such as path and landscape segue into metaphors for creative journeying. The tone is confdent, expressing willingness to engage with the liminalities and uncertainties of creativity. Both poems refect on my positioning in relation to creativity; as teacher educator, they provoke me to consider that of participants in the inquiry, and my responsibilities for providing a safe space for exploring their positioning. My refection on the poem above raises further questions: to what extent are teachers free to wander the “terraces of supposition”, and how might they facilitate their students in the process of wandering? The process of writing poems about meaning-making and creativity during the inquiry led to an ongoing practice of attempting to express the inexpressible: Poem I wanted something that was more than I already had, but still uncertain of its shape or purpose, sound or movement, land of settlement or birth. Something moved inside my mind, murmuration of dark starlings, still unready for a roosting place, but endlessly cohering. Observing snow The edges of the world now painted out. How gleaming dark the spaces in between. Chiaroscuro crystal light

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As the poet Jim Murdoch (2014) points out: Like some music The poem makes silence sing, Leads us until we touch Another silence, Even more silence. Poetic inquiry ofered opportunities for problematising the nature of truth and knowing: Truth Trying to explain my story, but the bones of truth are hidden in forgotten graves, all the trees are restless and unstructured, and the narrative sky keeps repaginating. My experience of writing poems to make meaning about creativity leads me to concur with Sullivan (2009) that the merit of using poetry in inquiry is because it concretizes understanding, ofers access to the researcher’s authentic voice, and captures the ambiguities and tensions in the processes of research. The act of writing the poems enhanced my awareness of the complexities and silences of creativity. Coherence What is tenuous lets meaning through. The moon burns through the porous urban night. I like the stillness of the sleeping houses; they all make sense. In the morning, I feel resistant. This intense new sky imagines me somewhere else, or in a painting, always stopping to look, not having to move on. Leaves edged with frost so perfectly specifc: one statement at a time.

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The outsides and insides of things fail to recognise each other, all we know uncertain. Silence Still learning the language of water and trees, well into the winter. Silence makes meaning from phrases of stillness, ellipsis of ice. Branches articulate lines of an epic. Wide manuscript sky.

Final refections When I reviewed my poems, I was struck by the prevalence of metaphors from nature, conveying concepts such as uncertainty, ambiguity, and transition. It occurred to me that my immersion in the mysteries of nature revealed dimensions of my researcher identity, which I had not acknowledged previously: my openness to possibility and my willingness to keep asking questions about the unknowable. In a poem in an earlier part of this chapter, I used the metaphor of “unsuitable shoes” to describe my lack of confdence as a researcher. The process of poetic inquiry illuminated my understanding of the interdependence between my creative and my researcher selves. There were parallels between my original perception of my abilities as a researcher, and that of teachers in relation to their creativity. It was my task as researcher-educator to provide participants in Creativity in Practice for Educators opportunities to immerse themselves in creative experiences, so that they might recognize and celebrate their own creativity.

Note This chapter is based on my doctoral research: Tracey, S. (2014). Making spaces for teachers to explore creativity: An arts-based inquiry. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation), Queen’s University, Belfast.

References Banaji, S., & Burn, A. (2007). Creativity through a rhetorical lens: Implications for schooling, literacy and media education. Literacy, 41(2), 62–70. Brady, I. (2009). Foreword. In M. Prendergast, C. Leggo, & P. Sameshina (Eds.), Poetic Inquiry: Vibrant voices in the social sciences (pp. i–xvi). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

266 Shelley Tracey Butler-Kisber, L. (2005). Inquiry through poetry: The genesis of self-study. In C. Mitchell, S. Weber, & K. O’Reilly-Scanlon (Eds.), Just who do we think we are? Methodologies for autobiography and selfstudy in teaching (pp. 95–110). London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Carlile, O., & Jordan, A. (2012). Approaches to creativity: A guide for teachers. Maidenhead: McGrawHill & Open University Press. CCEA (Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment). (2007a). The Revised Northern Ireland Primary Curriculum Key Stages 1 and 2. Belfast: CCEA. Retrieve October 10, 2018, from http://www.nicurriculum.org.uk/docs/background/ curriculum_review/fnal_webversion_primarypropsals_ks12. CCEA. (2007b). The Northern Ireland Curriculum Primary. Belfast: CCEA. Retrieve from October 10, 2018, http://www.nicurriculum.org.uk/docs/key_stages_1_and_2/ northern_ireland_curriculum_primary.pdf CCEA. (2007c). Assessment for Learning Key Stage 3. Belfast: CCEA. CCEA. (2007d). Key Stage 3 curriculum. Retrieved December 14, 2013, from http://www. nicurriculum.org.uk/TSPC/what_are_tspc/index.asp. CCEA. (2007e). Key Stage 4 curriculum. Retrieve December 15, 2013 from http://www. nicurriculum.org.uk/key_stage_4/ CCEA. (2008). Northern Ireland Curriculum, Learning through play at Key Stage 1. A resource book. Retrieve December 3, 2017, from http://www.nicurriculum.org.uk/docs/key_ stages_1_and_2/learning_through_play_ks1.pdf Craft, A. (2001, p. 48). ‘Little creativity’. In A. Craft, B. Jefrey, & M. Leibling (Eds.), Creativity in education (pp. 45–61). London & New York: Continuum. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Creativity. Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: Harper Collins. Forman, M.B. (1952) (4th Edition).The Letters of John Keats. London: Oxford University Press Hansen, D. T. (2005). Creativity in teaching and building a meaningful life as a teacher. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 39(2), 57–68. Heidegger, M. (1975, 2001). Poetry, language, thought. New York: Perennial Classics. Leggo, C. (2012). Where the wild words are: Provoking pedagogic imagination. In S. Thomas, A. L. Cole, S. Stewart (Eds.), The art of poetic inquiry (pp. 378–394). Big Tancook Island: Backalong Books. Macbeth, D. (2001). On ‘Refexivity’ in qualitative research: Two readings, and a third. Qualitative Inquiry, 7, 35–68. Murdoch, J. (2014). The truth about lies: Silence in the writings of Guillevic and Beckett. Notes Guillevic Notes Open Journal Systems. Retrieve from https://ngn.journals.yorku. ca/index.php/ngn/article/download/39721/35964 O’Driscoll, D. (Ed.). (2006) The Bloodaxe book of poetry quotations. Arset: Bloodaxe. Piirto, J. (2011). How to embed creativity into the curriculum. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Poindexter, C. C. (2002). Research as poetry: A couple experiences HIV. Qualitative Inquiry, 8, 707–714. Pope, R. (2005). Creativity: Theory, history, practice. Abingdon: Routledge. Prendergast, M. (2009). Poetic inquiry is … 29 ways of looking at poetry as qualitative research. Educational Insights, 13(3). Retrieved July 4, 2018, from http://www.ccf. educ.ubc.ca/publication/insights/v13n03/intro/prendergast.html Prendergast, M., Leggo, C., & Sameshima, P. (Eds.). (2009). Poetic inquiry: Vibrant voices in the social sciences. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

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Runco, M. A. (2007). Creativity – theories and themes: Research, development, and practice. Burlington: Elsevier Academic Press. Sawyer, R. K. (2004). Creative teaching: Collaborative discussion as disciplined improvisation. Educational Researcher, 33, 12–20. Sullivan, A. M. (2009). On poetic occasion in inquiry: Concreteness, voice, ambiguity, tension, and associative logic. In M. Prendergast, C. Leggo, & P. Sameshina (Eds.), Poetic inquiry: Vibrant voices in the social sciences (pp. 111–126). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Sullivan. A. M. (2012) Poetry and cognition: An exploration and a suggestion. In S. Thomas, A. L. Cole, S. Stewart (Eds.), The art of poetic inquiry (pp. 86–97). Big Tancook Island: Backalong Books. Torrance, E.P. (1974). Torrance tests of creative thinking. Bensenville: Scholastic Testing Service, Inc.

20 Memory, poetry, art, and children Understanding the past from the present María Esperanza Rock Núñez Universidad de Chile, Chile

The past comprises an accumulation of the experiences of a human group. These experiences transcend time when they are transferred from generation to generation under diferent methods such as oral history, written history or through song, poetry, murals, engraving, or other languages, including virtual languages (Thompson, 1978). Understanding the complexity of time at a particular moment is to observe that transcendence is to analyse the efects of time in our discourses, our language, our daily lives, and our ways of acting and thinking (Bourdieu, 1997; Ricoeur, 2004). Knowing historical events is not enough, we must think about their complexity (Said, 2001). The exciting thing is to observe and analyse what it means for the people who lived an event, to understand how they felt, how they behaved, and how they remember it. The event possibly determined some behaviour or some way of thinking because that is fnally where the real transcendence of a fact begins to operate. Having said that, thinking about the event is not only about describing it in its context, but also about detecting its various reaches, its various forms of transcendence and the human behaviours that are incorporated or excluded from the daily life of subjects (Halbwachs, 1925). In this, we can observe that memory is an experience that will manifest itself in the various possibilities that the subject contains. We know that it is one thing to register an event, and then forget it but, whatever the subject assumes, there is always a record that caused a change, subtle, or profound, which always ends by re-categorising the memory, and sometimes to resignify it (Rock, 2016). Neuroscientists argue that to understand such acts of recording in memory, categorisation, and re-categorisation it is possible to verify that mental representations are not reproductions of reality but are creative (Dema & Abraham, 2016). When we already observe this creative dimension, which is mobile and at the same time fexible, we cannot but understand that it intrinsically exists in an emotional dimension. In the act of registering, this creative dimension is observed. Therefore, the imagination cannot be left aside as a human resource understood as that capacity to

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make present that which is absent (Kant, 2003). It is both an event and an object that will ultimately always be appealing to the resources of the creativity of being. Memory has a high-social component or associativity with the other (Huyssen, 2002), and we can see that it will go beyond the limits of the individual to settle in what we call culture, which will directly contribute to the construction of identity (Berger y Luckman, 1986). Culture in some ways is the product of memory, that is, of the accumulation of collective experiences, of non-spoken or unconscious consensus that cause the synergy of living in a human group, in the same territory, and with common events.

Memory manifested in childhood Although historical memory has rarely been studied in children given their young age, it does not mean that children do not have historical memory. As discussed in the previous paragraphs, culture is also an essential part of memory and children, through their incredible ability to imitate the adults that surround them, adopt the culture and record an endless amount of information, which they incorporate with sublime ease. The interesting thing about all this is that children, having, on the one hand, a need for survival and, on the other hand, skills of imitation, have integrated what we can call a system of hierarchy of knowledge acquisition. This hierarchy is directly related to what they observe of the adult world which, for this study, we understand as a flter of absolute importance. It is a flter of information because the child will record in memory frst what is extremely important for survival and that relates to what is relevant to the adults they live with and, secondly, to their behaviour in imitating and adapting body and mind to this adult culture. Under this logic we can begin to understand the importance of studying historical memory with children through the various languages they manage at a young age. Children have the ability to adopt the behaviours and ideas of adults quickly, and to repeat them within their own codes and hierarchies of importance. These are in some ways synchronized with the adult world around them. Therefore, to ask a child about memory, history, or a particular event, is really to observe from the present a past that is already settling in society. This chapter is a ref lection on the use of poetry and art in children’s memory studies. The objective is to value the importance of incorporating the opinions of children and adolescents, whom are often excluded in studies of memory, history, and identity. In childhood they are in the process of forming their identities, but they will be citizens in the near future and it is relevant to listen to what they have to say. The use of art and poetry with young people is an expansive exercise. That is, it allows

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and enables them to use the resources they have on hand to verbalize a particular situation (through poetry) and, on the other hand, have the freedom to express themselves with other media (art) to dialogue in codes and meanings.

Art and poetry as a methodological resource for the work of symbolic compilation of memory with children In his book Poetics, Aristotle argued that there are two human activities: one relates to the contemplative life and another to political life. In his descriptions, he made it clear that the frst is linked to thinking and the other to action. He suggests that artistic creation is the only human activity that provides the fusion of both human activities, given that people must necessarily contemplate, that is, think, before provoking any action to create a work. Thus, with his complete study of Poetics, he carefully observes the metrical forms of dramatic works and comedy, which concludes in the defnition of mimesis, praxis, and poiesis, as the acts performed by a human in artistic creation, thus establishing the foundations of aesthetics. Mimesis is, in essence, the ability to imitate nature and, as humans, at an early age, we also use it as a survival mechanism. In theories of learning, the long- and short-term learning capacity of people is studied and imitation in children’s learning processes is viewed as important. Many theories (including behavioural, Gestalt, cognitive, Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Skinner, and Bruner) distinctly propose that infantile memory will determine in some way their future identity, which will be manifest in diferent ways. It is not necessary to investigate the feld of child psychology in this article, but these theoretical foundations help us to understand the importance of the imitative processes of the world that surrounds the child and, in this sense, culture as a source of stimuli is of fundamental importance for young people. Within this logic, we raise the importance of listening to what young people have to say about history, culture, and identity. If we reconstruct family histories and local histories, we observe that, within the discourses of children and adolescents, these histories are present. If we look at the children, who will be the adults of tomorrow, we already observe specifc behaviours, ways of thinking and perceiving that they will manifest in their adulthood. However, children do not always have the verbal resources to express these things directly. That is why in this chapter we will incorporate art and poetry as the means of communication.

Case study: place and sample This chapter arises from deep feldwork conducted to investigate memory and to mine identity in Lota, a region of Biobío, Chile. This territory in

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colonial times was the location of border confict between the kingdom of Spain and the Mapuche (indigenous peoples). After Chilean independence, this area continued to be a zone of confict between the Chilean Republic and the Mapuches, who still today are fghting for their autonomy. In general terms, the confict dates from the 16th century, so we can hardly cover it in this chapter; however, it is essential to know that there was – and still is – a robust Mapuche presence in the area and in the country in general, and that the frst city built for industrial purposes in that territory was Lota (Rosales, 1877). Lota frst arose as a mining camp and soon became a private city around 1852, the year in which the indigenous confict continued, and there was a particular territorial defnition given that the camp was located in this particular place, that is, in the indigenous territory (Rock, 2018). Scottish, English, Italian, and German immigrants all came to work and contribute technology to the industrial processes generating a particular cultural syncretism, which had already been given by the frst Spanish-indigenous contact of the 17th century. Economic and commercial development, before industrialisation, was directly linked to land and sea. Although the immigrants were always a minority, they were the ones who had the power of decision to dominate the territory and the ways to build the city and to execute industrialisation, which caused them to make an important foreign cultural infuence in the area. The workforce was mainly local and, for more than 200 years, the industry operated with the best production standards of the time, and cutting-edge technology. This region produced coal for both national and international markets, which did not necessarily translate into well-being for those who worked in this place. This city was also private; its owners were the Cousiño family until the state of Chile assumed the administration in what was called Empresa Nacional del Carbón (ENACAR) in the year 1970. In April of 1997, the coal mine was closed once and for all, a process that had been organized since the 1980s in times when Chile was experiencing a military dictatorship. In this period, neoliberalism was installed as a social system and capitalism as an economic system. Privatisation and the free market were propitiated, causing many local industries not to be competitive and to go bankrupt, as was the case in Lota. In 1997 Lota was already a big city, with a population that was suddenly left without a source of work, so it was a blow, not only to the local economy, but also to the ethics and morals of families who for generations gave their lives to the industry. Fieldwork The feldwork for this study was carried out in 2008. The selection used in this paper is related to the past perceptions of the children who still

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live in Lota. Those who were born when the coal industry was closed and only know of their past through those who have transmitted it to them. We worked with public schools in various sectors of Lota Alto, which have a high-vulnerability index. It is known that in Lota, even today, levels of unemployment are very high; therefore, there are important economic and social conficts to resolve. Without delving into this, we wanted to know what the smallest citizens had to say about the past and the identity of Lota’s children who attend basic education (children aged between 9 and 14). As an introduction, an informative theoretical talk was carried out analysing resources of visual ethnographies so that the children could understand relevant concepts such as memory, identity, heritage, and representation. After generating a collective dialogue, the importance of valuing local history was made visible, from their own experiences and their own knowledge, thus promoting mutual respect. After this work, the children received the invitation to write and draw a poem in relation to what is representative for them of their locality and what of this history identifes with them. The ethnographic descriptions that favour all the poems and writings, the hierarchy and how the information is ordered according to the different cultural and historical studies are undisputed, because it gives us a deep background of understanding and, with that, we can write a “representative history” (Rock, 2016). However, there is a relevant emotional load that allows interpreting the writing, not only from the characterisation, but also how the cultural values are transmitted that refect the possible decision-making of a human group. Next, we will transcribe some chosen poems, followed by a brief analysis in order to show examples of possible interpretations and the utility of poetry as a method of social investigation.

Poems and drawings For me, culture is what my predecessors left me, and what I do every day. One of the things that I consider heritage is my school because thanks to the Lota miners who gave all their efort, they were able to do the school (centennial school). (Boy, 12 years old, 2018) The cultural assessment of what the ancestors did, speaks of the knowledge that children acquire when they listen and observe the efort that the coal miners made every day. This had, and continues to have a value. The efort made by the miners shows the children the importance of working hard to achieve (including in education). In this poem, we observe a

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Figure 20.1 Drawing of the centenary school.

cultural value very typical of the coal zone, which is related to the value of formal education. In a network my father gave me an education, food a house where today welcomes us from the cold of winter, giving us the heat the love of a father and his sacrifce. That left in that sea that knocked it down, today I recognize the fshermen of my area Gulf of Arauco. Lota the commune that saw me grow. (Girl, 13 years, 2018) Within the history of jobs in Lota, one of the most ancient is fshing. We observe the cultural value that is related to the sacrifce of dangerous and hard work for a noble good that restores the relationship between education and family well-being again. Although it was debilitated, fshing is still practiced today and is a traditional trade. The reason we can say that it is a traditional trade of Lota is that, not only is it in the history and memory, but also it is still practiced at present and is

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Figure 20.2 Drawing of the sea with fsh, a fsherman with a net and an oar in a boat.

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preserved as one endless tradition that is derived from the same trade as the culinary practices, which are still carried out thanks to the extraction of the products of the sea. The mines of Lota is a heritage our past before has left me. The mine that today is not working only the chifón del diablo is the mine where you can visit my grandfather told me. Their stories when they worked in the mine and when the explosions happened in the mine, and many people died, and others were saved but most died and the high-altitude hospitals where my mother was born. (Child, 11 years, 2018) In this writing, we can observe the recognition that is made of the courage of the miner, for working in a hostile and highly dangerous environment where many lost their lives. This element is incisive and gives rise to important notions linked to work and the pride of being a miner, along with the cultural validation of this strength. Such contrasts of life or death were part of daily life, which caused a hardening of many emotions but, on the other hand, cold (as we say in Spanish) and direct in the decision-making. The miners came out of the mine extracted the coal and thanks to them we are here today. (Child, 12) This next small poem explains the importance of the mining past, so much that they determine its presence and the whole cultural symbolic body from that coal-related past to a world that is built from industrialisation, which ended up contextualising their lives. My shovel and pillory my grandfather vis used to say that his shovel and pillory was magical, why did I ask? and he answered that they were magical because they helped him day by day to fnish 12 o’clock. who worked and who would help me with my day to live and what I would like to do in my life (Niño, 11 years 2018) The long days of work and the hostile work situation were the reality for many years in Lota. In this place the most important unions (what we

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Figure 20.3 Drawing of a shovel and a pillory.

call, mancomunados) and social-labour movement are present in the political and labour history of Chile. This resulted in the creation of labour laws for the protection and justice of the worker. That an 11-year-old child recognizes this efort and manifests it as an example of life is because he is already

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assuming, not only a recognition of past value, but a behaviour that is directly related to teamwork and the importance of following his ideals. The women did not have life, that is, they did their work at home washing cooking, there was never a salary for them, and the husbands dedicated themselves to their shift all day in the coal mine (Girl, 14 years old) One of the elements that repeatedly appears in social histories is the role of women. This poem and picture not only show the social problems that woman were facing, but is also those of the nation more generally. In the last year, Chilean people have mobilized socially for gender justice; there has been media coverage of the diferent issues and stoppages. This poem above recognizes the injustice that women have sufered, for example, when it indicates “she had no life”, “there was never a salary for her”. These phrases call for a deep refection linked to machismo and the devaluation of women’s roles that have been felt for many years. Lota always in my heart Oh, my dear Lota! That never stops growing, So beautiful and unique that it never ceases to amaze. My heart is in Lota because it is my precious home, I invite you to visit Lota The home of the miners, where grandchildren and legends They murmur all the time. My home is Lota and always will be Well, I invite you to meet him, and I swear you will be surprised. (Girl, 11 years old, Lota) We can see that this girl of 11 years old feels a deep attachment and sense of belonging to the city of Lota, which she says is her home. It is interesting to observe how she makes the invitation twice to visit Lota, a city that she describes as dynamic and full of legends. The Lota mine The Lota mine Full of light my heart, already that there is energy with what can I live going into the mine I was flling my heart

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Figure 20.4 Drawing of a woman folding clothes at home.

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I found a miner that with the efort he took out the coal. He had a bird In a cage, and this He died, the miner alarmed From there it started. (Girl, 13 years old, 2018) The closure of the coal mines was carried out in 1997, although this girl clearly has memories (or has heard stories) from before she was born of the men struggling to extract the coal. On the other hand, the poem describes exquisitely the danger of the miner’s work, reminding us that they used birds to warn of grey gas (toxic and deadly gas that emanated from the earth). The church of the rooster The church is a public place, Which everyone can go, So beautiful and majestic with Perfect architecture The church is such an old place As important and very special (Girl, 13 years, 2018) The presence of the Catholic religion in Lota Alto was very important and, as this poem says, at some point in history it was part of the public good. Today the church is open to anyone who wants to visit it; however, in the last century, the celebration of the Eucharist was diferentiated according to social rank. Today there is greater religious diversity, although evangelicals are the majority group. The interesting thing here is how a 13-year-old girl today perceives the Catholic Church as a public and old place. She mentions its majesty and architecture, yet nowhere does she make a direct link with the Catholic religion, perhaps, instead, observing it as a public place. Within the history of Chile – and Latin America in general – the Jesuit and then Franciscan missionaries were key in the process of conquest. With diverse processes of acculturation and acculturation, cultural syncretisms were articulated that ended up constituting an essential part of the Chilean culture, what we perceive even today: The poor miner The history of Lota had a dark past; the miners died every day, the payment was very little, they did not know that they could not hear them, that they paint the news when the poor person says no. Every day was more stressful, and the miner no longer knows how much his pain is worth (Niño, 12 years, 2018)

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Figure 20.5 Drawing of the church of the rooster.

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Figure 20.6 Drawing of the poor miner.

This 12-year-old boy already knows the dark history of black gold (as they knew it in the age of coal) and the social injustices that went with it. In Chile, there were no labour laws, so the miners had to endure long days of work, with unfair wages. To face this, they had to join together and create systems of collaboration.

Analysis and conclusions For this text, we looked for elements of the social and cultural studies carried out in Lota that were evidence of some of the infnite possibilities ofered by work with children and the use of poetry and drawing as a research method. It is very interesting to observe that children have a lot of knowledge and know very well how to manifest it. The use of other forms of representation (in this case poetry and drawing) is an exploration that opens many possibilities, not only to observe the past from the present, but also to generate projections to the near future. And perhaps the most incisive thing is that,

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by manifesting their knowledge from their emotions, we recognize cultural values and important hierarchies that illuminate how to decode messages and interpret past events in a human way and with a local and present approach and perspective. Both these elements are highly enriching for historical discourse and cultural studies, but also identities generation to generation. We cannot forget that history is a written discourse of the interpretation of the past, of the memory of a people. Incorporating poetic creation and drawing from the description of the past is a precursor of the use of cultural resources (data, symbols, literary expressions, meaning, and emotions) by children. These, then create an important refective exercise, where the memory and the hierarchy of cultural importance (in this case, the life of Miners), determine the children’s creative decision-making. Likewise, these children also refected and analysed prior to the poetic creation, which, in itself, provoked critical thinking. They had to decide what was most important to them and which aspects of memory were a priority. The poetry and the drawings of these children can be considered “deep” descriptions. With deep descriptions, I refer to the possibility of generating interpretations and analysis of the emotional burden of the described topics. This allows us to create hierarchies and categories of data and information collected according to degree of importance. In this same dimension operates the register of memory and traditions that will transcend time and space. The traditional will usually be transmitted by degree of emotional importance according to what causes a memory, an act, or an event. In short, poetry and drawing are signs, symbols, and signifers that help in the interpretation and preservation of the past. The poetry and drawings of the children in this study carried out in Lota evidenced the founding characteristics of the mining identity and its diferent nuances and movements. Poetry and drawing as research techniques enable deep descriptions, and incorporate emotionality. In this article poetry and drawings have made visible the notion that studies of the past can not only be done with vintage documents, archives or old informants, but also that the new generations can deliver decisive contributions that directly impact on the interpretation of past documents. With this it is evident that what we could call a “system of hierarchization of knowledge acquisition at an early age” gives us relevant insights to interpret, not only artistic, but also historical and cultural representations.

References Berger y Luckman. (2001 [1968]). La construcción social de la realidad. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu editores. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1008 [1997]). Capital cultural, escuela y espacio social. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI editores. Dema, P. D., & Abraham, L. E. (2016). La memoria como fenómeno social: los pasados traumáticos. Boletín GEC, (20), 11–35. Recuperado a partir de http://revistas.uncuyo. edu.ar/ojs/index.php/boletingec/article/view/1052

Memory, poetry, art, and children 283 Halbwachs, Maurice. (2004a [1925]). Los marcos sociales de la memoria. Barcelona, Concepción, Caracas: Anthropos, Universidad de la Concepción, Universidad Central de Venezuela. Huyssen, Andreas. (2002). En busca del futuro perdido. Cultura y memoria en tiempos de globalización. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Kant, Emanuel. (2003 [1781]). Crítica de la razón pura. Biblioteca virtual Universal. Ricoeur, Paul. (2004). La historia, la memoria, el olvido. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Rock Núñez, María Esperanza. (2016). Memoria y oralidad: Formas de entender el pasado desde el presente. Diálogo andino, 49, 101–112. Retrieved from https://dx.doi. org/10.4067/S0719-26812016000100012 Rock Núñez, María Esperanza. (2018). Voces de Lota, Relatos de la Ciudad del Carbón. Santiago Chile: Editorial Universitaria. Rosales, D. (1877). Histora general del reino de Chile, Flandes Indino. Said, Edward. (2005 [2001]). In Editado por SChoröder, Gerhart y Breuninger, Helga (Compioladores). Cultura, identidad e historia. En teoría de la cultura, un mapa en cuestión (pp. 37–53). Buenos Aires: Fondo Cultura Económica. Thompson, Paul. (1988 [1978]). The voice of the past. Gran Bretaña: Oxford University Press.

Index

Note: Italicized page numbers refer to fgures and page numbers with “n” indicate endnote. ability 21, 23, 33, 69, 71, 108, 173, 178, 192, 256, 269–70 abstraction 71, 240, 247 academic achievement 106 academic poets 3; see also poets Academic Talent Development Program (ATDP) 117 academic writing 3, 6, 9, 98, 100, 259; see also writing achievement: academic 106; gap 112 activist research 66; see also research Adams, P. 12; Blending in (poem) 173; The insider/outsider (poem) 174 Adler, J. 245 adult education 254; see also education aesthetic good 146 aesthetic philosophy 29 aesthetic quality 37 African American students 112–13; see also students After a performance of the ballet “Afterlight” (Tracey) 258–9 After delivery (Zhang) 144 After Everything (Sharanya) 169–70 Aisea, S. S. T. 212 Alansari, M. 5 Alexander, H. A.: Education as art (poem) 56–7; Teaching (poem) 57–8 Alfrey, L. 100 Algebra (Leggo) 91–3 alienation 41 Allen, J. M. 12; Blood, ink, lives (poem) 213 alternative education 226–35; clinic on the review of 234–5; prose and poetry 228; tutors 227; see also education

ambiguity 21, 49, 97, 192, 247, 265 American Psychological Association 128 amnesia 42 Anderson, G. M. 109, 111 Andrews, T. 123 antin, d. 247 applied research 66; see also research Ardern, J. 79 aria 71–9 Arioso prelude 71–9 Aristotle 270 Ars poetica 65, 79 Art and education (Camnitzer) 53 Art as education/education as art (Camnitzer) 52–3 Artful teachers (Davis) 58–9 Art/i/culate Eye model 257 art of poetry see ars poetica arts and poetry 270 arts-based education 86 arts-based inquiry 30, 36 arts-based perspectives 86 arts-based representations 36 arts-based research 61, 70, 146–7, 166, 266 arts-based work 36, 146 Asian Americans students 112; see also students At the meeting (Fitzpatrick, K.) 102 attitudes 112, 136; see also beliefs attraction 41 audit culture 63, 71, 78, 97, 100 Australia 135 Authentic Movement (writing) 245–6 autoethnographic poetry 183; see also poetry autoethnography 72, 183, 192; see also duoethnography awa (river) 178, 181n1

Index Bachelard, G. 65–6, 68–9 Baker, C. 246 Bal, M. 87 The Ballad of Reading Gaol (Wilde) 6 Barone, T. 97–8 bastardization 166 Bauman, Z. 64 Beard, A. 4 Beethoven (Hope-Gill) 124–5 beliefs 36, 62, 69, 134, 136, 148, 186; see also attitudes belonging and community see community and belonging Ben-Horin, O. 8 benign neglect 42 Benza, S. 135 Beowulf (movie) 127–8 Berardi, F. “B.” 62–4, 71–2, 78, 84 Berg, M. 71 Bhattacharya, K. 12; Yoga in Kolkata (poem) 166 bicultural relationships 183–204 birth 132–5, 139–40, 148 Black, M.: Education as art and discipline (poem) 55; Likelihood (poem) 55–6 Blackboard online learning program 128 blackout poetry see erasure poetry Blending in (Adams) 173, 177–8 Blood, ink, lives (Allen) 213 Bochner, A. 65 Book of life (Sparkes) 47–8 Borgenvik, K. 8 Breathing Spaces (Kennelly) 49 Broudy, H. S.: Imagination (poem) 51–2 Brown, C. 242 Buber, M. 228 Bullough, J. 126 Burchell, H. 212 burn-out prevention 122 Bush, G. H. W. 79 Butler-Kisber, L. 137, 257, 262; Fani (poem) 35; Mayo in spring (poem) 35–6; view on found poetry 229; Walking my mother (poem) 34 The Butterfy’s Ball (Roscoe) 3 Buying a vase (Tracey) 254 Cahnmann-Taylor, M. 137, 146–7 Cambodia 135 Camnitzer, L.: Art and education (poem) 53; Art as education/education as art (poem) 52–3; The fact is (poem) 53–4; Transparency (poem) 54–5

285

Canada 106–11, 117, 135, 156, 163, 165 Canadian Society for the Study of Education (CSSE) 85 cancer and poetry 85–96 Candle (Tracey) 260–1 capitalism 62, 271 Cappella, D. 21 causality 68 challenges 61, 64, 133, 136, 140, 147, 159, 254, 257 changes: curriculum 13; found poetry 23; motherhood rates 132; poetry 124; political and religious 211; self 217; social 135 Charon, R. 126, 129 Chase, S. E. 132 Chevy Impala 90 children’s memories 268–82; art and poetry 270; case study 270–1; culture and 269; feldwork 271–2; historical memory 269–70; poems and drawings 272–5 Chile 270–1, 276, 279, 281 China 133, 135, 139, 148 Chinese students 139; see also students choreographic knowledge 252 The church of the rooster (poem) 279 Clarke, W. C 212 Classroom management (poem) 75, 78 climate 106–8 Closing down the 80s (poem) 76, 79 cluster 34; see also poetry clusters Cocker, C. 212 Cohen, L. 49 Coherence (Tracey) 264–5 Colebrook, C. 251 collage-making 257 collective amnesia 42 college students 136; see also students colonial education 158; see also education colonialism 158, 196–7 community and belonging 106–19; Canada 106–10; climate 106–8; fnding 116–19; United States 110–19 competency 137 Concerns (Zhang) 145 conficts 134–6, 172, 272 consent 146 Constantine, M. G. 109, 111 contemporary education 63; see also education Contemporary Ethnography Across the Disciplines (CEAD) conference 3

286

Index

Crazy Is Good (Piirto) 44 Creative Learning Scheme (CLS) 226–7 creativity 29, 254–65; complexity 256; process 33–4; research 7; teacherfocused inquiry into 256; teaching 256; writing 121–30 Creativity (Tracey) 255 Creativity conference, Cambridge, 23RD November 2009 (Tracey) 259–60 Creativity in Practice for Educators (Master’s in Education module) 254, 256, 265 credibility 24, 36, 65, 147 critical thinking 282 Critique et Clinique (Deleuze) 252 cross-cultural research 177, 179–81 cross-cultural researcher 172–82 culture: audit 63, 71, 78, 97, 100; children’s memories and 269; ecology 135; knowledge 135; oral 21 curriculum changes 13 cynicism 71–2 dance 7, 210–12, 246–7, 250–2; education 238–52; research 241, 245; students 238–9 data-analysis 140 data collection 139–40 data poems 22, 137 Davies, B. 99–101 Davis, J. H.: Artful teachers (poem) 58–9 dawn raids 209, 215, 219n5 Death at Kataragama (Ondaatje) 240–1 decision-making 79, 147, 272, 275, 282 de/colonial poetic inquiry 169; see also poetic inquiry decolonising poetry 10; see also poetry Deleuze, G. 251–2 Denzin, N. K. 7 deSalvo, L. 126 de Sousa, R. 123 The Detroit News 90 Dewey, J. 29, 61–2, 64, 66, 68 Dickinson, E. 128, 228 Didion, J. 69 DiNicola, D. 123 discrimination 111–16, 148 Dodge Caravan 91 Douglas, S. J. 135–6 dramatic performance 7 drawings 274; of centenary school 273; church of the rooster 280; poor miner 281; shovel and a pillory 276; of woman folding clothes at home 278 dropouts 112–13; see also students

Ducasse, I.: Poésies (poem) 23 duoethnography 183, 188–9; see also autoethnography Duszak, A. 179 economic theory 73 education: adult 254; alternative 226–35; dance 238; embodied 165–6; higher 63, 105, 132, 134–7, 254; primary 63; public 63; secondary 63, 226; tertiary dance 246; woman of colour in 166 educational outcomes, Faulkner’s poem on 104–5 educational research 62, 64, 68–9, 176; de/colonial approach to 156–8 Education as art (Alexander) 56–7 Education as art and discipline (Black) 55 Education Review Ofce 227 Ekphrasis 8 Eliot, T. S. 9–10 elitism 36 Ellsworth, K. 85 embodied education 165–6; see also education empirical research 85; see also research Empresa Nacional del Carbón (ENACAR) 271 Engels, J. 72 England 208, 230 English immigrants 271; see also immigrants English teachers 124, 128; see also teacher Enright, E. 100 epistolary format 31 equality 132 erasure poetry 233; see also found poetry Erikson, K. 67 Eritrea 135 Esquire 93 Ethiopia 135 ethnic identity 208 ethnicity 176 ethnic minority groups 113 ethnographic poetics/poetry 22, 148 ethnographic poets 137; see also poets ethnographic research 137; see also research ethnographic study 138 ethnographic validity 146 ethnography 41, 137–8; see also poetic ethnography European Americans students 112–13; see also students Evans, J. 126

Index Eversole, B. A. W. 136 Everything in its Path (Erikson) 67 evocative research 239; see also research explorations see poetic explorations expression see poetic expression Expressive Writing: Words that Heal (Evans and Pennebaker) 126 Fa’alavelave – a change of heart (Matapo) 216 Fa’avae, D. 211 fabrication 66 Facebook 140 failure see school failure Fani (Butler-Kisber) 35 Farewell but not goodbye (Worrell) 117–18 Farrelly, T. 209–10 Faulkner, S. L. 8–9, 11, 61, 64–5, 104–5 female graduate students 132; see also students feminism 25 Fiat 124 Spider (2017) 90 Fielding, M. 228 feld poetry 22; see also poetry feldwork 271–2 Finding What You Didn’t Lose (Fox) 126 Fine, M. 196 Finley, S. 36–7 First winter (Worrell) 107 Fitzpatrick, E. 1; A Pākeh ā haunting I (poem) 184–5; Poetic inquiry via Sandra Faulkner (2017) (poem) 14 Fitzpatrick, K. 1, 11; At the meeting (poem) 102; The other places (poem) 7; Pleasure (poem) 101; Writing the university (poem) 98–9; You have to be a shape shifter (poem) 100 Flores, T. 21 Fogarty, K. 136–7 Fonoti, R. 208 Fonua (ties to land) 208, 218n3 foolish failures 100 Forché, C. 66 formal causality 68 formal imagination 68 Found poem (Tracey) 261 found poetry 3–4, 8, 10, 22, 138; creating 261; defned 229; poetic inquiry 23–9; restrictions 33; Reviewer B (Leggo) 87–9; Schoone, A. 230–2; types 137–8; see also erasure poetry; poetry Fox, J. 126 Frank, A. 41

287

free market 271 Frost, R. 128 Fu, D. 136–7 function of reality 68 function of unreality 68 Galvin, K. 8 Gannon, S. 25, 29 generated poetry 10, 23, 137–8; poetic inquiry 30–4; see also poetry German immigrants 271; see also immigrants Glesne, C. 9, 24, 29, 229; That rare feeling (poem) 24–5 globalization 134 Goleman, D. 123 Goulden, M. 135 Grant, B. 192 The Grasshopper’s Feast (Roscoe) 3 Great Britain 135 Greene, M.: What makes it possible? (poem) 59–60 Guattari, F. 251 habitus 41–2, 44, 46, 49 Haiku 262 haka (protest chants) 179 Hall, T. 111, 116 Hanauer, D. I. 138 Hantzis, D. M. 136 Hartnett, S. 72 Harvey, D. 62–3 Hau’ofa, E. 207 hegemony 22 Heidegger, M. 228 Helen Kelly, by her son (Kelly) 75, 78–9 Henare, E. 192 heuristic devices 31–2 Hickey, D. 246 higher education 63, 105, 132, 134–7, 254; see also education The Highwayman (Noyse) 6 Hirshfeld, J. 21 historical memory 269–70 Hofsess, B. 157 Home away from home (Worrell) 109 Honan, E. 100 hooks, b. 189 Hope-Gill, L. 11–12; Beethoven (poem) 124–5; Siesta key (poem) 126–7 How Much I Move project 238, 240–4 humanity 124 Hussey, C. 30–2

288 Index I am Black (Worrell) 113–15 identity negotiations 207–19; Pacifc 207–18; Pasifka 207–10 Ihimaera, W. 210 Illumination (Tracey) 261–2 images: imagined 68; poetic 69; resonant 156–8, 160–5, 169 imagination see formal imagination Imagination (Broudy) 51–2 Imagination (Tracey) 257 imagined image 68 immigrants 132, 134, 207, 271; motherhood 134–5 Impossible (Tracey) 255 India 44, 135, 156–7, 160, 163, 165 indiference 41 indigenous poetry 10; see also poetry individualism 79 I never knew what time it was (antin) 247 infantile memory 270 inferiority 41 informed consent 146 The insider/outsider (Adams) 174 insight transcending 121 inspiration 42, 71, 98 intercultural competency 137 international student(s) 106, 109, 112, 132–3, 137, 139, 147 international student mothers 132–48; immigrant motherhood 134–5; motherhood in higher education 135–7; poetic ethnography 137–8; study 138–40 International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry 22 interpretive poetry see generated poetry In the Palm House, Botanic Gardens (Tracey) 258 intimidation 41, 44 investigative poetry 22, 72; see also poetry Iosefo, F. 210 Irwin, K. 174 Isaiah, J. 106, 109–10 Italian immigrants 271; see also immigrants itself-ness 2 iwi (tribal) 175 Jackson, M. 69 Jenkins, K. 196 Johnson, P. 180 Johnstone, M. 129–30; Pressure (poem) 130 Jones, A. 185, 196 Juana, D. 24

Kafka – Toward A Minor Literature (Deleuze and Guattari) 251 Ka’ili, T. O. 208, 210, 212 k ā inga 211–12, 219n8 karakia (spiritual chants) 179 Kardashian, K. 90 Kauanui, J. K. 208 Kaupapa M āori 174; see also M āori (indigenous) Keat, J. 256 Kelly, H.: Helen Kelly, by her son (poem) 75, 78–9 Kennelly, B. 49 Kenya 135 Kēpa, M. 210 kereruu (wood pigeon) 192 knowledge 78; choreographic 252; cultural 135; unbeknown 46 Kogawa, J. 91 Kuperberg, A. 132 kupesi 212, 219n9 kynicist 72 Labour-Green-NZ First Government 78–9 Lahman, M. 44–5 Languaging the in-between (Tracey) 255 Lather, P. 97–8, 101 Latin America 279 Latino students 112; see also students Lear, E.: The Owl and the Pussy-Cat (poem) 3 Leavy, P. 9 Leggo, C. 3–4, 10–11, 22, 262; Algebra (poem) 91–3; One line (poem) 93–4; Perplexing pedagogy: Pensées (poem) 86–7; Reviewer B (poem) 87–9; Slope of a curve (poem) 95–6; The Spider (poem) 90–1 legitimation 42 Li, A. 5 Liamputtong, P. 135 Liberia 135 libretto 65 Liem, I. I. L. 135 Liggett, T. 189 Likelihood (Black) 55–6 liminality 157–8, 166 Lincoln, Y. S. 7, 36 literary poets 65, 69; see also poets lokaloka 157, 160 Longley, A. 13, 243–4, 247–9 Lota, Chile 270–3, 275, 281 Lota always in my heart (poem) 277

Index The Lota mine (poem) 277–9 Louisa May’s Story of Her Life (May) 42–3 Lund, D. 188 lyric poetry 23, 127; see also poetry Macbeth, D. 257 Madison, D. S. 5 magical thinking 69 mahi (work) 185 Makereti, T. 210 Manderson, L. 150 Manivannan, S. 12, 157, 160, 163, 166, 169–70 Manu’atu, L. 210 M āori (indigenous) 12, 172, 174–81, 181n1, 185–6, 195–7, 204, 234 Mapuche (indigenous) 271 marijuana 78 Marsh, S. T. 12–13, 210; Why I use a poem in every single classroom (poem) 223–5 masculinity 78 Mason, M. A. 135–6 mata (prophetic songs) 179 Matapo, J. 12; Fa’alavelave – a change of heart (poem) 216 m ātauranga (knowledge) 179 material causality 68 material imagination 68–9 maunga (mountain) 178 May, L. 23, 42; Louisa May’s Story of Her Life (poem) 42–3 Maynard, K. 146 Mayo in spring (Butler-Kisber) 35–6 Meaning (Tracey) 254 medical students 121, 123, 127, 129; see also students meditation 121, 165, 169, 242; see also poetic meditation memories see children’s memories; historical memory; infantile memory The Mermaid (Tennyson) 3 Metallic, J. 29 metaphor in poetry 6, 10, 12, 137, 179, 240 Metge, J. 186 Michaels, M. 135–6 Mila-Schaaf, K. 210–11 mindset 62 Ministry of Education 226, 233–4 minor, writing 250–2 A moment shaken free from time (Tracey) 262 momprof 136

289

Moon, P. 180 Moss, P. 228 mōteatea (traditional chants) 179 motherhood: in academia 134–7; challenges 140; in higher education 135–7; immigrant 134–5; rates 132 multiple social identities 137 Murdoch, J. 264 musicality 21, 241, 251 My frst haiku (Worrell) 111 My shovel and pillory (poem) 275 mystery 21 myths 179, 197 Nabobo-Baba, U. 209–10 narrative 7; habitus 41; poetry 23, 26, 72; research 239 Narrative Healthcare Program 121 Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Medicine (Charon) 126 narratology 121 National Geographic 123 National-led Government 78 Native American students 112; see also students Negative Capability 256 neglect 42 negotiations 105, 210–11, 241; see also identity negotiations neoliberal/neoliberalism 6, 62–4, 71, 73, 79, 97–102, 228, 271 New (Tracey) 258 New Zealand 78, 80n2, 135, 147, 176, 179, 181n1, 207–12, 215, 217, 218n4, 226, 228, 241 New Zealand Arts Curriculum 241 nonalienating sociology 70 Non-native (Zhang) 142–3 Norris, J. 188, 191 Northern Ireland 256 November frst (Worrell) 108 Noyse, A.: The Highwayman (poem) 6 Núñez, M. E. R. 13 Observing snow (Tracey) 263 Oceania 207 October fourth (Worrell) 108 Ode to the embellisher and the slasher (Stonebanks) 28–9 Odyssey 21 OECD 64 Ofcial Information Act 233 Ogbu, J. U. 116, 135 O’Hara, F. 246–7

290 Index Ondaatje, M.: Death at Kataragama (poem) 240–1 One line (Leggo) 93–4 online learning program see Blackboard online learning program Only touch (Sparkes) 48 oral cultures 21 oriori (lullabies) 179 The other places (Fitzpatrick, K.) 7 overture 61–4 The Owl and the Pussy-Cat (Lear) 3 Pacifc 207–18 Pā kehā (settler) 12, 172–6, 178, 180, 185–6, 189, 195–7, 204, 230 A Pākeh ā haunting I (Fitzpatrick, E.) 184–5 Palangi 207–8, 218n1 Parini, J. 173 Pasifka 207–10, 230 A pastiche on kindness & empathy (Rinehart) 77, 79 pedagogical poetry 8; see also poetry Pennebaker, J. 126 Percer, L. H. 30 perfectionism 44 performance poetry 4–5 performance theory 29 Perplexing pedagogy: Pensées (Leggo) 86–7 The person I know (Worrell) 109 persuasiveness 36 Petersen, E. B. 99–101 philosophy: aesthetic 29; creativity 256; education 209; neuroscience and 124 Phipps, A. 251 photo inquiry 257 Pieper, I. 61 Piirto, J. 44; Crazy Is Good (poem) 44 Pink, D. 128 Pitt, B. 90 Pleasure (Fitzpatrick, K.) 101 pleasure, defned 100 Poem (Tracey) 258, 263 poemish 42–8 Poésies (Ducasse) 23 poetic ethnography 137–8; see also ethnography poetic explorations 172–82 poetic expression 7–8, 70 poetic image 69 poetic inquiry/inquirers 8–9, 10, 14, 21–37, 105; across qualitative research 173; approaches 22; categorization 137–8;

data-analysis 140; de/colonial approach 158, 160, 169; defned 257–9, 261–2; ethnographic studies 133; found poetry 23–9; generated poetry 30–4; poetry clusters 34–6; qualitative research 173; quality 36–7; researcher 146; rigor 36–7; usage 257–65 poetic meditation 155–70; After Everything (Sharanya) 169–70; embodied education 165–6; practice-based inquiry of art-making 166–9; re-citing 158–60; resonant images 156–8, 160–5 poetic performances see bicultural relationships poetic representations 41–9, 173; advantages 43; not-quite poetry 42–8; poemish 42–8; subversive research 101 poetic research 239 Poetics (Aristotle) 270 poetic sensibility 9, 61–79; aria 71–9; libretto 65; overture 61–4; recitativo secco 65–9; recitativo stromentato 70–1; sanata 61–71 poetic thinking 240 poetic transcription 22, 24, 26; see also found poetry poetry: art and 270; cancer and 85–96; construction 138; conversations 5; to create moments 177–9; decolonising 10; defned 255; within education 62; education research 9–14; within ethnographic writing 66–7; indigenous 10; metaphor in 6, 10, 12, 137, 179, 240; pedagogical 8; political 8; prose and 228; reading 61, 71; as reclamation of indigenous expression 179–81; representation 9–14; research 7–9; re/turning institutional voices to 233–4; re/turning tutors voices to 230–2; talanoa 213–15; teaching 70; thinking 71; uncertainty 102; use by researchers 22; writing 8–9, 31–2, 67, 71, 91, 123, 137, 147 poetry clusters 10, 23; poetic inquiry 34–6 poets 2–4, 9–10, 12, 14, 22, 29, 30, 36, 45, 49, 128–9, 137, 159, 257; see also sensible poets; teacher poignancy 21, 23, 29 Poland 208 political and religious changes 211 political poetry 8; see also poetry The poor miner (poem) 279 Portrait of a family (Worrell) 118–19

Index Portugal 135 positional refexivity 257 post-colonial 196–7 poststructuralism 25 pou 181n2 pounamu (greenstone) 234 Poyrazli, S. 106, 109–10 practice-based inquiry of art-making 166–9 pragmatic mindset 62 pregnancy 132–5, 138–40, 148 Pregnancy (Zhang) 143–4 Prendergast, M. 1–2, 8, 10, 22, 29, 173, 257–65 Pressure ( Johnstone) 130 primary education 63 primary schools 70 privatisation 271 process-based learning 128 product-based learning 128 prose and poetry 228 Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle (Bullough) 126 psychosocial theory 11 public education 63 Putting my father down (Stewart) 32–3 qualitative research 7, 21, 42, 44, 241 quality 37; aesthetic 37; art form 36; poetic inquiry 36–7 ‘Raggle Taggle Gypsy O’ 3 raids see dawn raids randomized control trials 98 raranga (weaving) 179 reading poetry 61 receptive mindset 62 recitations 156, 156–7 recitativo secco 65–9 recitativo stromentato 70–1 re-citing 158–60 reductionism 62 refexivity 21, 36–7, 65, 105, 257 Reid, M. A. 136 Reinertsen, A. B. 8 relationships see bicultural relationships Releasing the poem (Tracey) 260 representations see poetic representations research: activist 66; applied 66; arts-based 61, 70, 146–7, 166, 266; creative 7; cross-cultural 177, 179–81; dance 241, 245; educational 62, 64, 68–9, 176; Ekphrasis in 8; empirical

291

85; ethnographic 137; evocative 239; narrative 239; poetic 239; poetry 7–9, 22, 61, 65, 69–70, 72, 146–7, 173, 192; poets 36; qualitative 7, 21, 42, 44, 241; sociological 68; writing 240 researcher poets 36, 49 resonant images 156–8, 160–5, 169 re/turning institutional voices to poetry 233–4 re/turning tutors voices to poetry 230–2 Reviewer B (Leggo) 87–9 rhythm 8, 21, 26, 91, 122, 147, 179, 245 Rich, A. 2 Richard, V. 44 Richardson, L. 3, 8, 14, 22–4, 36, 42–5, 66–8, 146, 148, 173, 229, 240 Riddle, S. 100–1 rigor, poetic inquiry 36–7 Rinehart, R. E. 9–10; A pastiche on kindness & empathy (poem) 77, 79 Rogers, M. F. 132 Roimata Toroa (tears of the albatross) 189 Rorty, R. 123 Roscoe, W.: The Butterfy’s Ball (poem) 3; The Grasshopper’s Feast (poem) 3 Roy, A. 73 ruminations 85–96 Ruminations of a graduate student from a tropical country living in a temperate climate, doing written homework using a tape recorder (Worrell) 111–12 Rynne, S. B. 100 Samoan 209, 211, 214–15, 217, 230 sanata 61–71 Saunders, L. 251 Sawyer, R. 188–9 scholar poets 2, 4, 8, 14; see also poets school failure 113 Schoone, A. 13; found poetry 230–2 Schwalbe, M. 66–8 Scottish immigrants 271; see also immigrants secondary education 63, 226; see also education secondary schools 70 Seeber, B. 71 self-assessment 63 self changes 217; see also changes self-therapy 21 semi-structured interviews 140 sense 252 sensibility see poetic sensibility sensible poets 61–79; see also poets

292 Index sexual identity 227 Shore, C. 63 Shumei told me what happened during her son’s 15-month check-up (Zhang) 144–5 Siesta key (Hope-Gill) 126–7 Silence (Tracey) 265 Siméon, J.-P. 70 Simon, J. 255 Simons, H. D. 116 Skype 140 Slope of a curve (Leggo) 95–6 Sloterdijk, P. 71 The Slow Professor (Berg and Seeber) 71 Smith, B. 8–9 Smith, S. 136–7 Smith, T. K. 62 social change 135; see also changes social equity 36 social identity 136–7 social justice 6, 36, 65 social life 62 social research 8, 42; see also research social transformation 132 sociocultural competency 137 sociological research 68; see also research sociology 64, 67, 70, 72 Somalia 135 Spain 271 Sparkes, A. 8–9, 43; Book of life (poem) 47–8; Only touch (poem) 48; Watching a script unfold (poem) 46–7 The Spider 90–1 Springer, K. W. 136 sprints 30–1 Spry, T. 4 Staford, W. 123 Stay home! (Worrell) 115–16 STEM 251 Stewart, M. 31–2, 34; Putting my father down (poem) 32–3 Stewart, N. 242 Stone, N. 137 Stone, R. 233 Stonebanks, M. 26–9; Ode to the embellisher and the slasher (poem) 28–9 Story (Tracey) 255 students: African American 112–13; Chinese 139; college 136; dance 238–9; dropouts 112; engagement 121; European Americans 112–13; female graduate 132; international 106, 109, 112, 132–3, 137, 139, 147; M āori 178; marginalized 226; medical 121, 123,

127, 129; minority 113; opportunities 62, 208; outcomes 108; public secondary education 226; researchers and 64; Taiwanese 139; underrepresented groups 113; university 136; see also international student mothers substitute teacher 78; see also teacher Sudan 135 Sullivan, A. 29, 37, 257, 262, 264 Surrealist Movement 23 surrender 1–2 Swisher, M. 136–7 Switzerland 135, 208 Taiwan 139, 148 Taiwanese students 139 talanoa 207–11, 213–15 TalanoaMā lie 210, 219n6 Tallec, O. 70 Tamanui, V. 12 taonga (treasure) 234 tatatau 211–12, 219n7 tatau 207, 211–12, 214–15, 218n2 tauhi vā 207, 209–12 teacher/tutors 11, 78, 89, 105, 112, 124, 128, 175–6, 208–9, 226–7, 229–30, 233, 238, 252, 254, 256–7, 260, 263, 265 Teaching (Alexander) 57–8 Teaching in the 1980s (poem) 74, 78 Telling Tales in Sport and Physical Activity (Sparkes) 43 Teman, E. 44 Tencent 140 Tengan, T. K. 208 Tennyson, A. L.: The Mermaid (poem) 3 Terraces of supposition (Tracey) 263 tertiary dance education 246; see also education Te Whā nau-a-Apanui 181n1 Thailand 135 That rare feeling (Glesne) 24–5 The fact is (Camnitzer) 53–4 theoretical research 66; see also research thinking poetically 61 This is a Poem that Heals Fish (Siméon and Tallec) 70 Thompson, H. S. 65 Tiger (Tracey) 262 Tillich, P. 71 Time (magazine) 123 tipuna (my ancestors) 178 To be brave enough (Tracey) 262 To ‘big’ Alan (Worrell) 109–10

Index Tolman, E. C. 111 Tolman Hall (Worrell) 111 To Mrs. Fraser (Worrell) 110 Tongan 208–12, 215, 230 toxic masculinity 78 Tracey, S. 13; After a performance of the ballet “Afterlight” (poem) 258–9; To be brave enough (poem) 262; Buying a vase (poem) 254; Candle (poem) 260–1; Coherence (poem) 264–5; Creativity (poem) 255; Creativity conference, Cambridge, 23RD November 2009 (poem) 259–60; Found poem (poem) 261; Illumination (poem) 261–2; Imagination (poem) 257; Impossible (poem) 255; Languaging the in-between (poem) 255; Meaning (poem) 254; A moment shaken free from time (poem) 262; New (poem) 258; Observing snow (poem) 263; In the Palm House, Botanic Gardens (poem) 258; Poem (poem) 258, 263; Releasing the poem (poem) 260; Silence (poem) 265; Story (poem) 255; Terraces of supposition (poem) 263; Tiger (poem) 262; Truth (poem) 264; Uncertainty (poem) 260; Understanding rising greenly (poem) 258; Waiting (poem) 255 transcription see poetic transcription Transparency (Camnitzer) 54–5 Traue, J. 186 tribalism 79 Trinidad and Tobago 106, 110, 116 Trump, D. 132 trustworthiness 36 Truth (Tracey) 264 Tukutuku (poem) 189 tukutuku panel: weaving of 191; in workshop 190 tukutuku-tuurapa (weaver’s panel) 189 Turkey 135 unbeknown knowledge 46 uncertainty 102, 138, 166, 207, 256, 265 Uncertainty (Tracey) 260 Understanding rising greenly (Tracey) 258 United States 12, 44, 79, 110–19, 132–5, 137, 139, 148, 163, 165, 233 University of British Columbia (UBC) 85 university students 136 Unlacing our Sentences/Letting the Letters Run Ahead of Me (dance-education research project) 245–50

293

Uotinen, J. 46 Upon returning to the US to pursue a doctoral degree as Trump got elected president (Zhang) 143 US Bureau of Labor Statistics 134 US Census Bureau 134 values 63, 72, 135, 172, 186, 212, 245, 272, 282 Van Maanen, J. 41–2 Vietnam 135 Vincent, A. 8 Virginia, T. 192 voluntary consent 146 waiata and mōteatea (song/chanting) 179 waiata tangi (laments) 179 Waiting (Tracey) 255 Walking my mother (Butler-Kisber) 34 Watching a script unfold (Sparkes) 46–7 A Weaver’s desire (poem) 191 weaving of tukutuku panel 191 Webber, M. 172, 211 WeChat 139 Week 9: back to America (Zhang) 141 Week 20: boy or girl? (Zhang) 142 Weiser, D. 61 Wendt, A. 210 West, J. 66 whaikōrero (oracy) 179 whakairo (carving) 179 whakapapa (lineage) 175, 178, 185–6 whakatauki (proverbs) 179 wh ānau (family) 175, 185 What makes it possible? (Greene) 59–60 whenua 175, 178 Whitman, W. 122 A Whole New Mind (Pink) 128 Why I use a poem in every single classroom (Marsh) 223–5 Wilde, O. 6 Williams, J. L. 62 Winterson 46 The Wizard of Oz (movie) 125–6 Wolf, K. 2 woman of colour: in education 166 Woo, Y. Y. 133 Wormser, B. 21 Worrell, F. C. 5, 11; To ‘big’ Alan 109–10; Farewell but not goodbye 117–18; First winter 107; Home away from home 109; ’I am Black 113–15; To Mrs. Fraser 110; My frst haiku 111; November frst 108; October fourth

294 Index 108; The person I know 109; Portrait of a family 118–19; Ruminations of a graduate student from a tropical country living in a temperate climate, doing written homework using a tape recorder (poem) 111–12; Stay home! 115–16; Tolman Hall 111 writing 238–52; forms 242; How Much I Move project 238, 240–4; the minor 250–2; Unlacing our Sentences/Letting the Letters Run Ahead of Me (dance-education research project) 245–50 Writing as a Way of Healing (deSalvo) 126 Writing the university (Fitzpatrick, K.) 98–9

Yoga in Kolkata (Bhattacharya) 166 You have to be a shape shifter (Fitzpatrick, K.) 100 Zhang, J. 136–7 Zhang, K. 12; After delivery (Zhang) 144; Concerns 145; Non-native 142–3; Pregnancy 143–4; Shumei told me what happened during her son’s 15-month check-up 144–5; Upon returning to the US to pursue a doctoral degree as Trump got elected president 143; Week 9: back to America 141; Week 20: boy or girl? 142 zynicist 72