Cultivating historical consciousness in the history classroom: Uncovering the subtleties of student meaning making with the help of found poetry

This article explores student meaning making in a Grade 11 US history unit on the Second World War. The 10-lesson unit was designed as an experiment that aimed to apply an instructional model of historical consciousness to a classroom context. Although the notion of historical consciousness has gained significant interest in the field of history education, translating it into educational practice remains a challenge. In this study, it refers to a disposition to make meaning of the past for oneself, which is manifested in three meaning-making abilities and processes (Boix Mansilla and Gardner, 2007; Nordgren and Johansson, 2015; Rüsen, 2004). To study the manifestation of historical consciousness in the learning process during this unit, I employed found poetry on collected classroom transcripts and observations, as well as student work. I turned to this qualitative, arts-informed method when I realised the analytic methods that I had employed so far failed to capture important subtleties of students’ historical consciousness emerging from the data. In this paper, I present and discuss the results of my analysis, offer a rationale for using found poetry in history education research and reflect on the need for relevant and meaningful school history.

Rhetorical Questions and Ruminations

Transitioning from graduate student to early career faculty can often provoke uncertainty and questioning. This study explores the rhetorical and revealing nature of such questioning (i.e., Am I really this lost? Am I in the right place?). Utilizing methods from arts based research (Barone & Eisner, 2012), specifically poetic inquiry (Prendergast et al., 2009; Richardson, 1992), we created found poetry around rhetorical questions from our existing collaborative autoethnographic journal. We frame our findings with a selection of poems to provide insight into our lived experiences of transition. The question poems illustrate that our first year as assistant professors were preoccupied with managing tasks, balancing work, avoiding burnout, building relationships, and discovering how to belong in the new context. While rhetorical questions do not necessarily produce answers, questioning in a collaborative space allowed us to explore the struggle, complexity, and ambiguity of academic identity construction as early career faculty.

Pull of Words

Poetic inquirers immerse themselves in the flow of life, listening for art in the ordinary world, offering a response through voice and written word. The biennial International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry, which draws poet-scholars from across disciplines and the world, showcases the artful use of poetry in research as a method of inquiry. In this article, the Fifth Symposium on Poetic Inquiry is relived by two attendees who interrogate found poems they each created from presentations and performances. The poems are brought together as a means of researching each author’s respective approaches to creating found poetry. In this article, the authors converse about their methodological frameworks: phenomenology and metaphor/ narrative. Central to this dialogue is how the found poem is listened for, and how artful responses are made to the pull of words. The authors conclude by considering the ethics of rehousing others’ words and the challenge this inquiry presents to our own private sense-making in academic conferences.

Stir: Poetic field works from the Distant Voices project

In this brief research note I discuss and share from, Stir (2020): a collection of poems that were written while I was the research associate on the Distant Voices project based at the University of Glasgow (2017–2021). These poems reflect on my experience of doing ethnographic research in carceral spaces, and are written from the perspective of an outsider with a pass that allowed access for a limited time only. The collection is open access and available to read online. The note situates my project within the context of poetic practice in the social sciences. Inspired primarily by feminist scholarship, I also draw on actor-network theory to describe my research process as one of ‘translation’. The note also touches on historical anxieties about the legitimacy of the approach and the sociological preference for ‘found poetry’. I reflect on some ethical and creative questions that arose for me in writing poetry as social research, including representing research participants, use of pronouns and authorial voice, and emotions and research. I also discuss the affordances of working creatively with ethnographic materials, and the role of poetry in pursuing social change.

Poetic Juxtaposition, a Method for Connecting Data, Theory, and Every Day Texts

In this article, I explore an experimental form of writing I term poetic juxtaposition. Drawing from Glesne’s poetic transcription and Prendergast’s use of found poetry as literature review, I define poetic juxtaposition as the creation of research poems that artistically combine qualitative data, excerpts from theoretical texts, and words from every day and popular culture texts. To illustrate the technique, I present three poetic juxtapositions from a critical parent child autoethnography and describe the processes that lead to their creation. The three poems demonstrate how I utilized poetic juxtaposition to make sense of data, establish emergent themes, achieve crystallization of findings, and present my work to a variety of audiences. I conclude by suggesting how this technique might be taken up by others.

The Cryptographic and Metaphysic Nature of Liberatory Pedagogy

The initial purpose of this research sought to explore the following: What does it mean and what does it look, function, and feel like for an educational activist of color to fight for the liberation of others, but to also fight for the liberation of themselves? I also questioned and explored how one shares the spirit, metaphysics, and operationalization of liberatory pedagogy without jeopardizing its proliferation in spaces of plausible and probable oppression. In this article, found poetry was developed from participants’ responses and surfaced as a cryptographic method that coded the kinetics of liberatory pedagogy across disciplines.