"Between This and That Window": Exploring Students' Terminal Illness Through Found Poetry

• In Event: Lived Experiences and Exceptional Futures

Abstract

The existential experiences of students who live with terminal illnesses challenge conventional research approaches and compel scholars to seek alternative methods to approach and document it. This paper explored the experience of school-age youth mortality as it appears, sparsely, in scholarly sources, primarily in the context of special education. The exploration utilized an art-based research approach to document the struggle to understand this experience through the medium of found poetry. It is research through creativity to capture the experience of temporality and transience by juxtaposing perspectives of dying students, their families and colleagues, school staff, and educational scholars.

Author

• Robert Niewiadomski, Hunter College