Learning to Breathe Again: Found Poems and Critical Friendship as Methodological Tools in Self-Study of Teaching Practices

Abstract

ABSTRACT This self-study demonstrates how crafting found poems and critical friendship facilitated unstitching and (re)stitching narrative understanding for purposes of learning from pedagogy for improving practice. Findings extend existing literature by documenting how composing found poems from previous, dissertation research is a tool for inquiry, analysis, and representation for meaning-making within self-study methodology. Two sets of artifacts included the researchers’ dissertations framed as composite stories and drafts of found poems; these data were positioned and repositioned, woven as artifacts, field texts, and representations. We inquired how we might reposition ourselves to hear the multivoicedness of our temporal, personal-professional, and conceptual (con)texts. We asked, how might we utilize a familiar teaching practice to inquire into our lived experiences? How might found poems be positioned as both a methodological tool for analyzing completed research and representing meaning-making from deeply constructed narrative experiences? Found poetry enabled the researchers to evoke the fourth and fifth envisionment-building stances (Langer, 2011a), enabling them to ‘step back’ and reconsider what they know, and to develop deeper understandings that disrupted and transformed understanding. Through self-study with a critical friend, the poem as meaning-making event unfolded before us, weaving new threads, in the space of new tensions, resulting in new understandings. Analyzing and representing data through the process of composing found poems with a critical friend generates the vulnerable-confident; self-other; vision-revision; reading-composing; critiquing-discovering; powerful-empowering; learning-teaching; textual-intertextual; aesthetic-efferent; three-dimensional spaces for ongoing transformation where silent voices are liberated and heard through collaborative self-study methodology.