Learning, Teaching, and Researching through Poetry: A Shared Journey

This article describes how a nurse educator teaching in Great Britain facilitated the learning of her students when she used a poem written by a teacher educator from Canada whose research for his doctoral dissertation was a poetic inquiry. The writing of this article itself became a research project as the authors discovered, throughout the process, new understandings of what poetic inquiry is capable of. While considered new in some areas, poetic inquiry has a rich history. Monica Prendergast (2007) prepared an annotated bibliography of over 200 peer-reviewed studies that use forms of poetic inquiry. Both writers of this article have found that by trying to connect the past to the present through poetry, new understandings of self can develop that influence personal, professional, and academic perspectives. The cyber interviewer who poses many of the questions throughout this piece is borrowed, with gratitude, from Mary Gergen and Kip Jones (2008).