WHAT WAS THE AIM OF THE SESSION?
On the 26th April, 2024 I attended a session led by Sam Illingsworth, a poet and Associate Professor in Academic Practice at Edinburgh Napier who has written and published over 2000 poems. Much of Sam’s work has used poetry to explore staff belonging in HE, particularly amongst teaching staff (The Learned Words website, n.d). Poems can be used in teaching and learning as a creative pedagogy but also in a variety of ways of other ways such as exploring staff and student belonging, the latter being one of the key markers to student success and retention and an area in which Sam’s research has focussed. This workshop aimed to explore the transformative power of poetry in higher education by providing valuable insights into how poetic expressions can enhance reflective practices, teaching methodologies, and professional development and foster staff wellbeing.
WHAT DID WE DO?
The session followed the RAW sequence: Reading, Analysing, Writing (and then performing, if we wished). As part of this, we used the Gibbs cycle, a reflective writing model which in this context provided the vehicle to generate ideas about an experience we had working in HE on which we wished to reflect. One of the benefits of writing a poem to do this was that evidence shows that poems allows more freedom of emotional expression because the author removes themselves when they write.
It is important to note that the writing of poems in this way was not about the aesthetics of the poem itself but more about what they can reveal and how they can help us reflect. In other words, in terms of the epistemological approach, the process was important, not the product (hence a constructionism approach rather than a constructive one). In essence, this means that anyone using this approach shouldn’t worry about the ‘art’ of constructing a poem. As part of this, we talked about what constituted a poem and although there are differing definitions, with some purists regarding specific structures as superior etc., the facilitator used a much freer one, stating that poems can be almost anything that had a sense of a rhythm (clearly, there needs to be some distinctions between poetry and written ‘text;’ for me, as a teacher of academic writing, it was the freedom to express ideas with a poem in a way that had fewer ‘rules’ than a piece of academic writing would, thus liberating the writer to write in a way that explores their emotions and feelings (a large element of the Gibb’s Reflective Cycle).
REFLECTING ON MY PRACTICE: MY OWN POEM
As part of the workshop, I reflected on a past experience I had with a Chinese student who was going through a difficult time and needed some pastoral support. My role was to act as an informal ‘translator.’ As part of this, I felt anxious that I didn’t want to say the wrong thing, and worried that my Chinese language wasn’t as proficient as it has been previously. My poem is written here:
What do I really know?
by Michelle Munn
Our first meeting
I hoped that she’d know
I was there to support her
Another string to my bow?
Will I be able to help with my words?
To help her feel safe and
importantly
Heard
She laughed with me
playful
and that was enough
Even though what she felt
and
Told me was tough
See it wasn’t about me
or
What I could do
But it challenged me
for the good
And what I thought I knew
WHAT DID I LEARN THROUGH WRITING THIS POEM?
As a result, I saw much more clearly than before that my apprehension about my own skills was taking the focus off the student, and her needs. Whilst I needed to choose my words, intonation, and phrasing carefully in order to show empathy, the balance was shifted far too much in my direction rather than her. After meeting with this student, I reflected also on the fact that she did not want to speak her mother tongue with me, perhaps feeling safer in English. My role had been to speak Chinese with her with the aim of getting her the support she so badly needed; however, my perceived ‘failure’ to do this was perhaps not the failure I thought it had been. In fact, giving her the opportunity to speak with me was enough and whether she took that or not was irrelevant. Writing the poem not only allowed me to process these emotions reflectively, but also to have this as a record for the future to refer to should I find myself in this situation again. I found writing a poem a very useful part of being a reflective practitioner.
HOW CAN POEMS BE USED WITH STAFF AND STUDENTS?
Although not the purpose of the session, poems can have a wider reach, as evidenced in Sam’s research in which he used them as a powerful data set in which participants shared their experiences of working in HE and these could also be of studying in HE or, in the case of nurses, aspects of the their work. He stressed that they can provide a rich data since every word written down in a poem is carefully considered by its author.
For those interested in how poems can and have been used with students, the following articles show research that has been done into this:
The Learned Words website – Poetic Reflections on Higher Education: https://learnedpoems.wordpress.com/
Illingworth S, Jack,K. (2024). Poetry and Pedagogy in Higher Education: A Creative Approach to Teaching, Learning and Research. Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press.
Jack K, Illingworth S. ‘Saying it without saying it’: using poetry as a way to talk about important issues in nursing practice. Journal of Research in Nursing. 2017;22(6-7):508-519. https://doi.org/10.1177/1744987117715293
Illingworth, Sam, “Learned words: using poetry to reflect on practices in higher education” published in Times Higher Education (30 Nov 2022): click here to view
