Academic writing can take on many shapes and forms. Intent on representing ‘non science’ voices through doctoral research, I undertook a poetic inquiry. In this chapter, I unfold key moments and insights from my journey towards arts-based scholarship, reflecting on how the poem became central to my epistemology, central to my research identity, and central in re/presenting insights in academic writing. My doctoral studies explored alternative education tutors’ lived-experiences of working with young people, excluded from mainstream secondary schools in New Zealand. At the time, I had not considered an arts-based approach for my empirical research, until the day I was caught with the evocative way one tutor introduced himself. His speech was full of earthy words, humour and irony. I created hundreds of found poems as my research data. Each poem became a way of knowing about tutors and their contribution to our knowledge on pedagogy. These poems were not only words written in conventional lines of text, but also manifested in visual performances of two and three dimensions. This chapter gives examples of how poetry became academic text and concludes by considering the possibilities of poetry when published on the page.
In this chapter, I give a personal account of how I found my way to artful academic publishing. Arts-based educational research was not my original plan when I set off on my scholarly career. This was not surprising as I had never been given the opportunity to read, consider, or participate in arts-based educational research in any undergraduate or postgraduate papers; even in research methods papers. Artful supervision, finding arts-based research communities, acknowledging my creative outlook, all contributed to finding my way to arts-based research and publishing. In this chapter I focus on an existential moment, of being found by a poem. I describe how this led to my poetic approaches and give examples from my emerging portfolio of publications. I first need to take you back to one beginning, back to when I was teaching in alternative education centres, and together we will move forward from there.
A Beginning
At this point, I am reflecting back to nine years ago when I embarked on doctoral studies in 2011. At the time, I was clear about wishing to research with alternative education tutors to understand their contributions to our knowledge of pedagogy. I had been working in the alternative education sector as a teacher and provider manager for 10 years. Alternative education providers were established in the wake of neoliberal reforms to New Zealand schooling during the mid-1990s, during the implementation of ‘Tomorrow’s Schools’ policy. These reforms transformed New Zealand’s education system from being “the most centralised and social democratic systems of education in the world” (Gordon 1996, p. 129), to a decentralised system that fostered competition between schools (Tomorrow’s Schools Independent Taskforce 2018). Student assessment became high-stakes, as individual schools’ achievement data was made readily available for the public to view on published league tables. In this competitive environment, vulnerable young people, who perhaps would have benefited from more pastoral care and adept approaches to pedagogy, became disenfranchised from mainstream secondary schools, and some enrolled with alternative education providers. These students reported that they became disengaged from school because teachers did not know them, and the teachers’ lessons were not meeting their individual learning needs (Brooking et al. 2009).
Community groups, youth organisations, Māori social service agencies and churches initiated alternative education programmes in response to increasing numbers of young people being ‘alienated’ from mainstream secondary schools, due to suspensions, exclusions and truancy. These programmes were “no heir to the progressive [education] legacy” (Raywid 1983, p. 191). Rather, their approaches evolved largely in practice. In the early years, at least, the hallmarks of alternative education providers was their informal organisational structures, a family environment and hands-on learning experiences within and beyond the centre. The centres also provided for material needs of the students, such as transport to-and-from the centre, food, outing expenses and stationery. These providers often employed tutors rather than qualified teachers to deliver a holistic curriculum. With no specific qualification at hand, tutors seemed to have a natural ability to get alongside young people, and relate to them—possessing a kind of “vocation for working with wayward youth” (O’Brien et al. 2001, p. 6). These tutors would become the central focus of my research and writing.
In 2001, I was employed as a qualified teacher in an alternative education provider and given the responsibility to work alongside tutors, assisting them with developing an academic curriculum. There was an emphasis on training tutors to utilise formal assessment tools and to help them develop student individual education plans—which you can see laid out in front of me in Fig. 5.1. As I look back, I can see that I was naïve, in trying to transform these tutors into teachers. I had initially approached tutors seeing their lack of expertise was something I could ‘fix’ with the skills I held as a mainstream teacher. I remember the frustration I felt when tutors took their students on long van rides to explore Auckland’s parks, rather than attending to delivering a formal curriculum, or when evaluating tutors’ teaching practice, finding that the warm up game became the whole lesson. Those were my initial observations and perspectives. Over the years, the time spent working with tutors, tinkered on some of my deep-seated beliefs about the nature of teaching. For example, I witnessed that the tutors’ ability to relate with young people with ease provided them with a significant advantage in approaching any teaching task. The tutors were flexible in their pedagogy, not keeping the students seated and still unnecessarily in a lesson. Furthermore, the tutors maintained regular contact with families by virtue of collecting students each day in the centre van. I became increasingly curious about the role of tutors and wondered about their possible contributions to our knowledge of pedagogy. What informs the development of tutor pedagogy? What could we learn from tutors’ inclusive approaches? I sought an academic research pathway to explore this topic.
Fig. 5.1
In the role of a teacher at an alternative education centre, 2001
Surrender-and-Catch
It was in the early days of my doctoral studies when I began to let go of what I thought it meant for me, to be an academic researcher and writer. Borrowing the metaphor of ‘surrender and catch’ from phenomenologist Kurt Wolff, there was a “suspension of received notions” (1984, p. 85). Initially I was thinking in terms of proving the value of tutors, with “charts demonstrating tutor effectiveness ratings” (Schoone 2014, p. 203). Initially, I considered a comparative study pitting tutors against teachers. What I ended up with was a handful of constellations, a robot, and a series of essences rather than any direct answers. I now find resonance with Pelias’ (2004) longing for academic scholarship to be “more than making a case, more than establishing the criteria and authority, more than what is typically offered up. That more has to do with the heart, the body, the spirit” (p. 1). I could think back on many instances and events that challenged and shaped my epistemology, but I can think of none more profound than when I was found by a poem.
One afternoon, when I was visiting an alternative education centre, I was listening to a group of tutors introduce themselves at the beginning of a meeting. I was caught with how one of the tutor’s spoke and I found myself hurriedly writing down these words on my pad (to note, ‘cls’ refers to Creative Learning Scheme, an alternative education provider):
I found that the tutor’s evocative speech gave phenomenological insight into tutors’ lived experiences, and their pedagogical approaches, in alternative education centres. For example, the use of irony and humour ‘cls panmure1 university’, that the education on offer was on par with a ‘university’, notions that the tutors’ work with ‘gangsters’ inspired students’ personal transformation, ‘turn/in/to’, and that this transformation revealed gender, ‘soft young males and/soft young females.’ Through these 15 words, I discerned a depth of insight. Despite the short length of the poem, it became “a universe in itself” (Dewey 1934, p. 241). Being found by this poem influenced my research methods moving forward, and contributed significantly to my fledgling academic identity.
Jotting down this tutor’s introduction was an act of creating ‘found poetry’. Literary found poetry will “take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems” (Academy of American Poets 2020, para 1). Richardson (1992) and Glesne (1997) were forerunners, using found poetry in research. Richardson, who fashioned 36 pages of text from her study of unmarried mother, Louisa May, into a three page poem using only the words of Louisa May, relied on “poetic devices such as repetition, off-rhyme, meter and pause to convey her narrative” (p. 126). Glesne (1997) interviewed 86-year-old Puerto Rican educationalist Dona Juana and created portraits of her life through found poetry. Glesne (1997) recalled her careful use of the words and phrases of Dona Juana and made sure they were written as “her way of saying things” (p. 205). Leaning on these academic studies for inspiration and direction, I confidently moved forward with undertaking a poetic inquiry with eight tutors in alternative education centres across Auckland.
Poetic Inquiry
Poetic inquiry is an arts-based research approach that uses poetry and poetic techniques to gather, analyse and represent research findings (Prendergast et al. 2009; Faulkner 2020). However, as James (2017) points out, Poetic Inquiry is not a new phenomenon in the sense that poetry is “an ancient method of understanding the world” (p. 23). Within the research context, the inaugural poetic inquiry symposium in 2007, hosted by Monica Prendergast and Carl Leggo at the University of British Colombia in Vancouver, galvanised an international community of poetic inquirers from across the disciplines. The prevalence of poetic inquiry-based research has continued to grow exponentially, and Prendergast (2015, p. 6) has plotted its presence in various fields:
Vox Theoria/Vox Poetica- Poems about self, writing and poetry as method;
Vox Justitia- Poems on equity, equality, social justice, class, freedom;
Vox Custodia- Poetry of caring, nursing, caregivers’/patients’ experience;
Vox Procreator- Poems of parenting, family and/or religion.
The forms of poetic inquiry are similarly diverse, including creating found poetry from research transcripts, writing poems as a reflective and reflexive approach during research, writing poems as a way of inquiry and using poems in concert with other arts-based methods (see Faulkner 2020).
In particular, found poetry has played an important role in research by bringing the voices of marginalised groups to the fore, a feature of much poetic scholarship (Schwartzman 2002). As Lahmann and Richard (2013) observe, many research poets work with “materials from potentially vulnerable participants” (p. 348). From a literary perspective, the use of found poetry to express the voices of the disenfranchised has historical precedence in the work of Charles Reznikoff. Reznikoff, concerned for inhumanity within the United States justice system, created found poems from legal records dating from between 1885 and 1915. These found poems demonstrated the essences of a system fraught with “accident, injustice, and disaster” (Poetry Foundation, para. 37).
Through my poetic inquiry I created over 150 found poems from tutors’ words and phrases found in interview transcripts, in notes from observing tutors interacting with students and each other in alternative education centres, and from a performative workshop I held with tutors where they explored their identity by creating a robot tutor (see Schoone 2015b). Like the first poem I experimented with, each found poem I created was a window into viewing tutor practices. Furthermore, given their language was bereft of education jargon, the poems became a revelation of tutors ‘dwelling poetically’ (Heidegger 1971) and an opportunity to explore education through other voices. For example, I found the tutors saying:
Each of the poems was an aesthetic rendering of thoughtful labour, but not an end in themselves. For me, it was not so much that I was trying to create poems for solely aesthetic merit, but rather it was the act of creating found poetry that generated knowledge. Leavy (2010) contends that rather than asking: “Is it a good poem?” perhaps we should ask, “What is this poem good for?” (p. 184). Leavy (2010) remarks, “A research poem is good for what it discloses, and is a poem by its artful enclosure” (p. 184). From a New Zealand artist perspective, Theo Schoon is quoted as saying, “To hell with making art. What you do is experiment. What that experiment leads to is quite inconsequential. The only thing that it leads to is knowledge” (1982, cited in Skinner and Lister 2019, p. 7). Thus, the poem in research is not present for mere decoration, but a means to see into the world.
I have become critical of utilitarian approaches to found poetry in research, and averse to the idea that poems can be written (or found) on demand. On the first count, the choice of poetry in research needs careful consideration, within the development of the research conceptual framework. For me, found poetry was my method in a phenomenologically-based research that sought to understand the lived experiences of tutors’ poetic dwelling. We are because of poetry (Heidegger 1971). On the second count, in my experience, the poems found me. This was my initial experience in the alternative education centre. As Buber (1996) remarks, “the Thou meets me though grace – it is not found by seeking” (p. 26). In terms of found poetry, the poem calls from within the text, such as from research interview transcripts, for my attention. In order to hear the poem’s call, however, the poet researcher needs to be attuned to the deeper rhythms of the logos. Leggo (2008) writes:
Poetry invites a way of uniting the heart, mind, imagination, body, and spirit. As a poet I grow more and more enamored with the echoes of wonder, mystery, and silence that I hear when I attend to the words and world all around me. (p. 167)
James (2017) writes that poetic inquiry is the love of words, and the understanding that this love can create a tree of knowledge. Poetically, I consider:
It is hopeless trying to write a poem
It is better just to get on in life and
Wait for the poems to email you
(They usually wait until night-time, when your head hits the pillow)
While other words are asleep, and dreaming anagrams
A company of insomniac words, messages you with
“I want to play”
From: Adrian Schoone < adrian.schoone@aut.ac.nz>
Sent: Monday, 9 December 2019 10:38 PM
To: Adrian Schoone < adrian.schoone@aut.ac.nz>
Subject:
The poem is my episteme
Looking through the
Jewel I see its beauty
Refracting, remaking
Real.
A methodology that privileges attentive waiting, dwelling, being found as much as re/searching, and poetic distilling and re/presenting, in the pursuit of ‘beauty/remak[ing]/Real’, challenges notions of research within neoliberal university contexts where, “claims of truth try to triumph over compassion, try to crush alternative possibilities, and try to silence minority voices” (Pelias 2004, p. 7). The poet has a critical voice, and as Brueggemann (1989, p. 3) contends, “poetic speech is the only proclamation worth doing in a situation of reductionism.”
New Directions
Not satisfied with conventional approaches to found poetry in research, I continued to “exploit the power of the form, to inform” (Eisner 1981, p. 7). Found poetry, represented as lines on the page, took me so far. I found, however, that some of the printed and found words were buckling under the pressure of their linear demarcations. I needed to set the words free in performances of visual enactment (see Schoone 2019b). Hence, in the spirit of taking hopeful risks, I created a series of concrete (or visual) poems in two and three dimensions. These took the form of, cardboard and linoleum prints (Fig. 5.2), constellations (Fig. 5.3), cut-outs (Fig. 5.4), (Fig. 5.5) is erasure poetry (Fig. 5.6) is robots and woven text (Schoone 2019a). Each was an attempt to engage with concepts and ideas aesthetically, in tangible and embodied ways, with the hope that these concrete poems will open new understandings to audiences that extends, also, beyond the academy. For example, with the cut-out plans for a robot, I invite the readers to engage with academic text in embodied ways. I write “This alternative way of engaging with academic text fits the context of my research on alternative education” (Schoone 2017c, p. 210).
Fig. 5.2
Cardboard print. “AE’s like Facebook. You post on each other’s walls” (Schoone 2015a)
Maximus, the alternative education tutor (Schoone 2016)
When a Poem Is Published
While publishing arts-based research within qualitative and arts-based circles is usually welcomed, a significant challenge facing arts-based researchers is publishing, performing, and/or presenting research to the disciplinary areas that was the focus of their inquiries. Some audiences may see arts-based material as inaccessible. Perhaps some people do not know how to critically appraise what is presented. I recall the workshop with tutors, who were confronted with a robot that they would need to programme as a tutor. The tutors were:
Nonetheless, I found ways to bring my scholarship to the fields of inclusive education (Schoone 2017a), alternative education (Schoone 2016) and social pedagogy fields (Schoone 2020b). It is with some trepidation I submit poetic scholarship for publication, particularly in journals that do not have a history of publishing research with arts-based research methods. Recently, I received feedback from a journal submission that suggested I ‘get rid’ of the poems. It is, however, I feel, the author’s responsibility to assist audiences to engage with the work. I have found that when I bring the reader on the journey in which I carefully build a case for the poem, a clearing space is created for the reader to participate in the poetic proclamation and for them to “hold to the deepest roots of hearing” (Galvin 2013, cited in Schoone 2020, p. 6). One exception when I launched directly into the poem, is found in an article published in the International Journal of Inclusive Education. A concrete (visual) poem performs the article’s abstract (Fig. 5.7). I chose this approach, to spark the reader’s curiosity, leaving the article’s title and key words to provide explanatory scaffolds.
Fig. 5.7
Article abstract in International Journal of Inclusive Education (Schoone 2017a)
When poems are ultimately published, this is a beginning and not an ending for the poem. Leggo (2008) considers the poem is a ‘textual event.’ Thus, the poem continually creates and recreates in a performance with the reader. Rosenblatt (1986, p. 166) contends that the “physical text is simple marks on the paper until a reader transacts with them” (p. 123):
Each reader brings a unique reservoir of public and private significances, the residue of past experiences with language and text in life situations. The transaction with the signs of the text activates a two-way, or, better, circular, merge. (p. 123)
The poet-scholar provides the poem as a proposition. The reader makes their own sense of a poem’s meaning, by linking the insights that shine to form a constellation (Schoone 2017b). It is exciting for me, as a poet-scholar, to hear how others have made their own sense of the poetic offerings, and what new learnings the poem evokes. For as James (2017) remarks, poetic inquiry “admits to the fallibility of a singular expression of truths about something” (p. 23).
Conclusion
Being found by the poem has helped provide me with an authentic voice in the academy, and a unique approach to researching and publishing. I identify with Guiney Yallop’s (Guiney Yallop et al. 2014) experience, when he stated, “I had to reawaken the poet to become a researcher” (para. 10). This was an unfolding experience that began in an alternative education centre, almost ten years ago. Back then, I used to apologise for poetry in my research, uncertain of how the poems would be received. I now reflect on how I have come to privilege the poem’s place in scholarship to provide:
