Ars Poetica Pedagogicas: A Poetic Inquiry into the Teaching of Poetry and Teacher Identity
Submitted by:
Megan Davis Roberts
Abstract:
What is the experience of teaching poetry as a poet? How does a poet-teacher approach pedagogy? This paper features the writings and reflections of high school poetry teachers and takes up poetic inquiry as a research method. Study participants’ teaching settings varied—urban, suburban, public, private, secondary, and undergraduate school contexts, all in the United States. Teacher-participants wrote their own “ars poetica pedagogicas”—meditations on poetry teaching using the form and techniques of poetry as their vehicle for expression, inspired by the longstanding tradition of ars poetica.
Working out of an interpretivist, rather than a positivist perspective, I consider the individual’s process of meaning-making vital (Owton, 2017) and the viability of poetry to serve as the mode with which individuals might enact such an interpretive process. Though poetry is a nontraditional way to collect data and discuss findings, as it “may not commonly be thought of as a source of knowledge, poems are powerful documents that possess the capacity to capture the contextual and psychological worlds of both poet and subject” (Furman et al., 2007, p. 302). I am curious about poet (teacher) and subject (the experience teaching poetry). Pursuing a deeper understanding of the poet/teacher’s experiences, I wanted “to engage with the public-private dialectic to collapse this false dichotomy” (Faulkner, 2020, p. 7) in a way that only poetry—with its associative logic, embrace of porosity, and capacity for multiplicity and nuance—seemed capable of offering to the project.
Though I am also working toward engaging phenomenological and posthumanist diffractive frameworks (Barad, 2007), I am most interested in discussing the limits and affordances of poetic inquiry as a method and/or poetry as data. Key words: poetic inquiry, poetry pedagogy, teacher education
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke.
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). Guilford.
Furman, R. (2007). Poetry and narrative as qualitative data: Explorations into existential theory. Indo-Pacific journal of phenomenology, 7(1), 1-9.
Owton, H. (2017). Doing poetic inquiry. Palgrave Macmillan.