Engaging in Arts-Based Poetic Inquiry: Generating Pedagogical Possibilities in Preservice Teacher Education

ABSTRACT This article uses poetry to articulate a collaborative object inquiry into educational spaces through which we move/d. At the time of this study, we were both teacher educators at a university in South Africa, working in social justice and ecojustice in education and how these intersect with teacher development and professional development. Given South Africa’s history of discrimination and how this continues to manifest in the present, a challenge is to develop ways for students to engage with difficult and complex past experiences and become educators who can collaboratively disrupt, rather than reproduce, oppressive systems and structures in education. We respond to this challenge by engaging in collaborative arts-based self-study methods that enable us to draw on our educational experiences and consider how we might strengthen our educational practices as teacher educators. We specifically employ poetry to engage in a diffractive reading of our experiences and work with object inquiry to foreground where differences emerge and why they matter. These differences are conceptualized as affirmative and productive of creative ruptures. Through exploring these differences, we seek to generate pedagogical opportunities for preservice teachers to engage in critical self-study of becoming-educators and work towards socially and ecologically just futures. We hope to change our practice by employing collaborative self-study to engage in a diffractive reading of becoming-educators. In addition, we aim to generate pedagogical possibilities for preservice teachers to explore their journeys of becoming-educators creatively and collaboratively.