‘Don’t just travel’: thinking poetically on the way to professional knowledge

Abstract

This paper describes how the medium of ‘found poetry’ is incorporated into a doctoral programme for nurses, educators and allied health and social care professionals at the start of their various doctoral journeys. It advocates a narrative practice approach to issues of researcher identity and reflexivity. ‘Finding’ the poems begins with the creation of collages as representational anchors for students to talk about themselves, their professional practice, their hopes and expectations of the doctoral experience, and their research ideas. (Re)presenting their transcribed talk as poetry involves culling and playing with words, phrases and segments, making changes in spacing, lines and rhythm to arrive at an evocative distillation (Butler-Kisber, 2002). This process enables each person to bring stories and/or fragments of experience into critical engagement with others. Poetic thinking functions pedagogically, helping students find a critical voice to enliven and hone their reflexive writing in relation to their doctoral experience and their research positioning. Arts-based methods of inquiry are an ongoing topic of interest in research communities. Found poetry is a useful starting point to explore creative means by which research participants can recount their stories, and equally, by which researchers can witness and disseminate what they have to tell.