Living in a Different Key: Poetic Inquiry as Educational Research

• In Event: What Is a Poem Good For? The Possibilities of Poetic Inquiry Within Educational Research

Abstract

Purpose
Using poems written as interpretations of data from two different research projects, I will present how the use of poetic practices enables complex interpretations of participant responses and autobiographical explorations.

Theoretical Framework
Current studies in neuroscience have speculated on how humans develop empathy. An aspect of this research describes qualia—those rich sensory details that we experience but cannot fully share with other human beings through language. David Lodge (2002) has argued that the most powerful way to share qualia is through lyric poetry. Poetry can open up experience to unexpected avenues as we try to represent what we have witnessed and it invites imagining with others. Poetry is a crucible that can forge an appreciation for the aesthetic, an ear for rhythm, an attention to the senses, an ethical witnessing of experience, and an awareness of many of the metaphors that have come to populate language. All these qualities can bring greater clarity to the representation of research data.

Methodology
I will be presenting examples from two current studies—one a memoir project with marginalized individuals and the other a feminist examination of a 19th C female photographer’s work—to illustrate how approaching data from the thought processes of poetic creation yield a rich interpretation. Using lyric forms demands a close attention to detail and a careful crafting of rhythm and image choice to present what Zwicky (2006) calls “witnessing.” The poems become part of a “bricolage” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000) approach that uses various writing forms—narrative, biographical, lyric—to demonstrate the complexity of experience, inviting the readers of the research to reconsider interpretations through different lenses. Jose Cedillos, an interdisciplinary scholar and artist, describes the work of the bricoleur researcher as “disentangling perception from information and cognition. The trick is to see what is there, not just our brains speckled onto the environment. Seeing what is there releases information, rather like how, after a moment of stillness, an ecology begins to chirp and quiver again” (cited in Patton, 2002, pp. 401-402).

Significance
Bringing poetic sensibilities into the interpretive work of qualitative research can represent the depth and potential of data. Such work has the potential to transform observer-observed and interviewer-interviewee relations as the researcher works to honor the dimensions of human experience. Particularly when participants have written texts or recounted stories, or when one is doing artistic research, such an approach is important. What emerges from a poetic practice of inquiry are the rhythms of participants’ voices, the sensory details of contexts, and the affective coloring of the data. Even so, Zwicky warns that the project of understanding is never closed. “To try to make sense of one’s life is to gather one’s own and the community’s memories in an attempt to produce some kind of fit, some kind of mutual accommodation. But this project is continually undone by the world, by deep, open attention to the world” (2006, p. 94).

Author

• Rebecca J. Luce-Kapler, Queen's University