Employing Poetry and Self-Study to Examine Practice and Its Influence on Students' Writing Personas

• In Event: Polyvocal Professional Learning Through Self-Study Research

Abstract

1.Objective
The objective of this paper is to examine my pedagogical understandings of teaching writing and my assumptions embedded in my practice as a creative writing teacher in an alternative high school with a multicultural student population in the state of Virginia, USA. The paper also explores how these assumptions and dispositions influenced my practice as a writing instructor and the development of my students’ writing personas.

2.Theoretical Framework
This study is situated within a critical sociocultural and interactionist view of the classroom as providing the sociopolitical milieu in which writing skills are socially negotiated. In this study I have employed the arts-based self-study methodological process as outlined by Samaras and Freese (2006) to present my way of knowing and learning and the five-foci framework designed by Samaras (2011) as a tool to assess my self-study which includes the following components: personal situated inquiry, critical collaborative inquiry, improved learning, transparent and systematic research process, and knowledge generation and presentation.

3.Methods
Adopting the format of double-poems, I deconstruct and reconstruct my class landscape in narratives that reflect on the actions, events, experiences, observations, possibilities, assumptions, perceptions, voices, and issues being played out within the classroom. These poems explicate how my assumptions, experiences, and beliefs as a writing instructor interplayed with individual students and the collective class.

4.Data Sources
Data sources included my observations, students’ journals, and reflections pertaining to their experiences in the creative writing class and their writing personas.

5.Results
This poetic inquiry gave me a platform to celebrate my students’ perspectives and observe myself as another character in the narrative of writers. Self-study methodology challenged me to critically evaluate and understand my practice while examining the transformation of the self during the research process. This process of situated inquiry initiated the process of learning about the self, learning about my learning, and learning about my students’ learning leading to critical insights and self-critical questioning. The self-study revealed that my writer’s trajectory intersected with my students’ writing experiences and that these refrains in our writing persona narratives highlighted that writers are diverse in terms of their writing dispositions, interests, and abilities and, yet, enjoy some common connecting themes.

6.Significance of the Study
Listening to the voices of the students and their narratives about their writing identities is critical to negating homogeneity, hierarchical structures, and censorship, which can lead to stifling of students’ writing voices. Integrating students’ writings into the curriculum can “develop a critically affirmative language that works both with and on the experiences that students bring to the classroom” and this recovery of students’ “own voices” (Giroux, 1990, pp. 16–17) can mobilize a movement toward situated practice. Teachers can also undertake a self-study project to question “the status quo of their teaching and the politics of schooling” (Samaras, 2011, p. 78) which can involve discussions related to the political, cultural, and ethical contexts of a writing classroom and the development of a writing curriculum that is contextually relevant to their student population.

Author

• Arvinder Kaur Johri, Prince William County Public Schools