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Contemplation, Artful Writing: Research With Internationally Educated Female Teachers
Abstract
In this article, I experiment with artful writing as a means of contemplating research with internationally educated female teachers. In doing so, I sit with, listen to, write from particular moments of the research process. I also compose found poems from words and phrases in the transcripts. My intention is to dwell with particular artifacts, rather than analyze or interpret them according to a theoretical framework. In this work, I consider Deleuze and Guattari’s writing about art and also Shambhala/Buddhist Chögyam Trungpa’s teachings about Dharma art—all of whom contend that art is a form of bodily attunement to and awareness of the physical world through perception, the senses, sensation rather than a means of expressing the self and/or representing something. In a broad sense, I am interested in how the practice of contemplation through artful writing might inform, transform the research process.
... In her autoethnography, Kinser (2012) There are many scholars using autoethnography to produce creative work (Callier, 2011;Hall, 2010;Leavy, 2012;Liamputtong & Rumbold, 2008;Walsh, 2012). Tilley-Lubbs (2011) wrote about her experience growing up as a coal miner's daughter and eventually earning a PhD and teaching at a university. ...
This is a revised version of my dissertation, which I originally published in 2013. Self-sustainability is presented as a foundational practice for creating a more sustainable world. Through an autoethnographic study, the author examines the concept of sustainability and how it can be interpreted through the lens of the individual. Four distinct phases are explored: awareness, permission, change, and intention. These stages were inspired by, and correspond with, four years in a doctoral program at Prescott College. During this time, the author rediscovered her identity as a musician and artist and wove this identity into her personal, professional, and academic life. The author’s path to self-sustainability is traced through storied expression, songwriting, and the dialogic, iterative process of co-creating a method of songwriting called Story-to-Song (STS). Literature and research that examines the importance of creating and sharing identity through different forms of creative expression is explored. Data includes written pieces, songs composed in the STS tradition, and journals. Together, this autoethnography and the research cited suggest that one of the most important steps in the larger field of sustainability should begin with the individual.
... We limited our search to litera- ture appearing on the educational landscape in and after 2010, which is when Lahman et al. published a review on the uses of poetry in qualitative research. Working with Wakeman's (2015) reflections on the varying ways that poetry is generally encountered in research as an organizing framework, we discovered that we could filter the corpus of literature collected into three categories: (a) education research about (the uses of) poetry (e.g., Certo, 2015;Hanauer, 2015;Scarbrough & Allen, 2014;Wandera, 2016); (b) poetry contained within education research (e.g., McKnight, Bullock, & Todd, 2017;Walsh, 2012;Ward, 2011), most often written by either the researcher, the researched, and/or both; and (c) education research represented entirely in poetic form (e.g., Evans, 2018;Weems, 2012). Below are examples of literature belonging to each bracket. ...
Entanglements of power, language, identities, and ideologies perturb Black feminist poets and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) scholars alike. Here, we detail our use of Black feminist poetry to address concerns with rigor in CDA. We marry Black feminist theorizing about language to feminist CDA to illuminate how—for qualitative data analysis—poetry can foster rigor. Poetry also illuminates the suitability of feminist CDA for the Black feminist project of unveiling Black women’s discursive subjugation. Through poetry, we deconstruct and reconstruct initial analysis of data, then construct new analyses from emerging insights. Black feminist poetry provided a pathway for us to demonstrate rigor by (a) engendering precise identification, distilling, and conveying of evidence substantiating findings; (b) enriching researcher triangulation by prompting deepened dialogue—about and with data—to occur for coresearchers; and (c) stimulating reflexivity. We conclude with questions useful for leveraging Black feminist poetry for rigorous, expressly political critical qualitative inquiry.
... The stories gathered for this research, we suggest, merit reflection, deserve dwelling time (Walsh 2012). We were surprised to acknowledge that the content of the stories carried less significance for us than their resonating power as a whole. ...
The article adopts a narrative inquiry approach to foreground informal learning and exposes a collection of stories from tutors about how they adapted comfortably to the digital age. We were concerned that despite substantial evidence that bringing about changes in pedagogic practices can be difficult, there is a gap in convincing approaches to help in this respect. In this context, this project takes a “bottom-up” approach and synthesises several life-stories into a single persuasive narrative to support the process of adapting to digital change. The project foregrounds the small, every-day motivating moments, cultural features and environmental factors in people's diverse lives which may have contributed to their positive dispositions towards change in relation to technology enhanced learning. We expect that such narrative approaches could serve to support colleagues in other institutions to warm up to ever-changing technological advances.
Bereavement-related regret addresses the experience of the "I could have" in a grief context surrounding a deceased loved one. This "I could have" notion of regret emerges from interaction of the "I can" of the past and the "I cannot" of the present. This study aimed to understand six participants' lived experiences of bereavement-related regret through a qualitative, semi- structured interview and two-chair exercise. Hermeneutic phenomenological analysis revealed key features of bereavement-related regret as: (a) tangible and sensed embodiment, (b) an active entity that requests engagement, (c) a permanent yet dynamic presence, (d) a complex network connecting to other people, memories, and feelings, and (e) a dialogical phenomenon revealed between interaction of one's present self and past self. This study demonstrates the promise of a novel method for exploring dialogical phenomena and an expansive understanding of regret as an inherently relational, dynamic invitation to attend to and express our values.
Research from the Eye of the Hurricane is a narrative inquiry into (doing) research after experiencing physical trauma. After an accident resulting in a head injury, my approach to life and work had to change. Could I still have a relevant voice as a researcher? Could this voice even have a unique timbre? This chapter describes the experience of being an a/r/tographer after physical trauma, when the brain works differently, part time, and in slow motion. The focus is on exploring research qualities or research design afforded after trauma, in periods of concussion and post-concussion syndrome. Described as narratives and poems, this appears to be a slow and sensuous first-person perspective or design. The main aim of the study is to contribute to knowledge on alternative approaches in qualitative research—even when confronted by life’s changes.
Joanne Yoo is a senior lecturer at the School of Education at the University of Technology Sydney. She has worked extensively across a wide range of subjects in the primary and secondary teacher education programs. Joanne's research interests include developing collaborative teaching partnerships, teaching and writing as an embodied practice, action research and arts-based research methodologies, such as narrative inquiry and autoethnography.
This book contains a collection of different chapters from authors all around the world. They each show and tell how they use poetry and poetic representation in their research in the field of education. They draw on educational issues and politics, as well as on the sensory and lived experience of being educators and poetsPoetry can be both political and pedagogical. It is utilised in research in a variety of ways to enhance, critique, analyse and express different voices in qualitative research projects. A pioneer of this method, Laurel Richardson (1993), described poetry in research as a ‘practical and powerful means for reconstitution of worlds … a way out of the numbing and deadening, disaffective, disembodied, schizoid sensibilities characteristic of phallocentric social science’ (p. 705). Reinersten, Ben-Horin and Borgenvik (2014) argue, ‘[a] focus on poetics … makes both research and conversations less preoccupied with certain activities and more directed toward principles, dilemmas, paradoxes, and possibilities’ (p. 476).
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Research about love in early childhood education and care is rare. Love is difficult topic to research and write about in scholarly contexts. In order to properly explore love in professional contexts, practitioner narratives on the topic were sought through individual, unstructured interviews. A spiral-patterned methodological approach was conceived of to convey the slow, recursive research process, with poetry-writing as a principle method of analysis. Other research activities took place as part of the process of making meaning, including mapping, reflective blogging, autobiographical compositions and thematic analysis. The topic of love was constructed as important in early childhood education and care. The spiral-patterned approach, with multiple methods and time to dwell on the data, was found to be helpful concept in research about affective matters.
This chapter explores the influences of spirituality on the arts and the depth of expression in, through and with the arts. A Canadian perspective frames contextual connections to culture and identity. It is through these artistic spaces of interconnection that affords us new possibilities of being in the world. With what appears to be a commodification of western and Indigenous art in a linear, text-driven society, I also argue for “unsilencing” the discourse around spirituality and the arts in higher education, drawing on what can be learned and acted on in professional practice. As well, I share through personal experience what it means to live spiritually and artistically in the world.
p>Common to poetic inquirers is a sensitivity to the ways traditional qualitative analysis can systematize and simplify, oftentimes generating theories and practices that are out of kilter with our intuitive experience of being in the world. In this paper I look at how the richness of lived experience can be sustained in poetic inquiry, and in so doing, offer the terms fierce, tender, and mischievous as qualities of engagement that are often exemplified in the ways poetic inquirers live and work.</p
An editorial written by the Guest Editors for a special issue of in education on the practices of poetic inquiry. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. www.ineducation.ca
In a recent essay, Walsh (2012) examines “being present to the artifacts derived from research” (p. 271). Instead of analyzing or interpreting as she might have done earlier in her research career, Walsh’s intention is to dwell: She says, “I sit with, listen to, write from particular moments of the research process” (p. 274). In writing the poem below I have noticed how Walsh’s process is similar to my own.
In this paper, I explore practices for opening the heart and offering compassion towards others and also myself in the context of teaching. In doing so, I reflect upon experiences that involve the uneven distribution of “air time” in the classroom; I concentrate on such experiences because, as long-standing sources of irritation for me, I believe they can evoke insights about being present. How, for example, might I invite deeper awareness of my own being in such situations, notice how I am feeling in relation to the students, individually and collectively? How might I become better acquainted with my own resistances? Send love and compassion towards the students and also myself? Through contemplative practice, I observe my mind and habits of being. My aspiration is to teach from a softer, gentler place. I situate this work in relation to the literature in contemplative education, specifically that which offers insights into teachers’ inner work.
This paper adopts an ontological perspective toward asylum interviews. The suggested take refers to the incompatibility of different knowledge systems and experience worlds between asylum seekers and asylum officers. With such a focus, we sketch the parallel functioning of knowledge-claims anchored in two radically different ontological principles. Our analysis starts with the body as a site and source of knowledge through which we critically examine the limits of knowledge sought after in asylum politics. The ontological gap reflects the divide between meaning and significance, self and other, which this paper seeks to mediate through feminist methodologies and ethnographic insight. We suggest that asylum seekers do fill the ontological gap, but not in ways anticipated by governmental practices; their bodies and stories adopt alternative ways of identification and taking action. Thus, the gap is an opening for conceiving different knowledges and knowledge practices within asylum politics and international relations.
Poetic Inquiry: Vibrant Voices in the Social Sciences, co-edited by Monica Prendergast, Carl Leggo and Pauline Sameshima, features many of the foremost scholars working worldwide in aesthetic ways through poetry. The contributors (from five countries) are all committed to the use of poetry as a way to collect data, analyze findings and represent understandings in multidisciplinary social science qualitative research investigations. The creativity and high aesthetic quality of the contributions found in the collection speak for themselves; they are truly, as the title indicates, "vibrant voices". This groundbreaking collection will mark new territories in qualitative research and interpretive inquiry practices at an international level. Poetic Inquiry will contribute to many ongoing and energetic debates in arts-based research regarding issues of evaluation, aesthetics, ethics, activism, self-study, and practice-based research, while also spelling out some innovative ways of opening up these debates in creative and productive ways. Instructors and students will find the book a clear and comprehensive introduction to poetic inquiry as a research method.
Research has extensively documented the employment barriers facing immigrants in Canada. Less attention is paid to the employment strategies that immigrants deploy in the host labour market. To address this gap in the literature, two projects are conducted to examine how immigrant women learn to optimize their labour market outcomes. Both projects employ a combination of life history style interviews and institutional ethnographic analysis. Life history interviews offer women ample space to (re)construct their experiences in relation to the social economic and political contexts. Institutional ethnographic analysis starts with people’s experiences, but aims to explicate the social processes and practices constituting people’s experiences. The studies find that the women often resort to re‐training and re‐education as a means to improve their employment prospects. The women’s educational experiences help articulate them to what I call a credential and certificate regime (CCR), or the social processes and practices that attribute differential values to credentials and certificates produced at different places. I argue that in the era of globalization, CCR helps manage the Canadian labour force with an increasing number of immigrant workers, thereby preserving patriarchal and white supremacist power. The CCR that I explicate is predominantly Canadian centred. It is developed out of gatekeepers’ anxiety towards entrance controlling in various sectors that demand and indeed produce local certificates. The CCR also speaks of a transnational trend of credentialization, which is spearheaded by influential international organizations and companies located in the economic west. Both trends have helped create an expansive training market that is instrumental in feminizing immigrant women’s labour. In this paper, I also show different ways in which the CCR in Canada both services and disservices immigrant women, which makes it imperative to rethink the values and practices of training for immigrant women.
This research/performance text emerged from a study involving internationally educated female teachers who have immigrated to Atlantic Canada. The text features the words and artwork of the research participants as well as excerpts from newspapers, academic writing, and documents about immigration in Nova Scotia juxtaposed so as to foreground the complexity of the women's immigration and integration experiences. Introductory comments provide contextual information about the research project, the participants, and the evolution of, as well as rationale for, the text as performance piece.
This article discusses two distinct forms of resymbolization within an arts-based research process. The particular research outlined herein involves the work of a group of women, including the author as participant–researcher, who investigated difficult experiences in teaching through writing, and who responded to one another’s stories through the use of various artistic media including paint, crayons, modeling clay, fabric, and blocks. The group’s overarching purpose was to problematize the taken-for-granted ways that they
had interpreted such experiences. The two distinct forms of resymbolization outlined in this paper occurred, in the first instance, during the work of the group, and in the second instance, during the author’s process of writing about the research. Through this paper, the author also works toward providing a theoretical framework that demonstrates why resymbolization is a crucial component of this arts-informed process. In doing so, the author draws on the work of feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray.
In this paper, we consider the difficulties that a group of internationally educated female teachers (female IETs) encountered in the process of seeking certification in the Canadian Maritimes. We read their experiences in the context of neoliberalism, in particular how they are positioned in the labour force and also the teaching profession. We consider the material effects of differences such as gender, race, ethnicity, and regional location for the female IETs. Further, we underscore implications for teacher education.
The Chinese have constituted the largest immigrant group entering Canada since 1987. This paper focuses on the paid work experience of Chinese immigrant women from Hong Kong and Mainland China who were highly educated, skilled professionals in their home country. It demonstrates that these immigrant women are being deskilled in Canada and this deskilling is complicated by the contradictory processes of globalization and economic restructuring, with its polarizing effects along axis of gender, race, ethnicity, class and citizenship. Gendered and racialized institutional processes in the form of state policies and practices, professional accreditation systems, employers' requirement for “Canadian experience” and labor market conditions marginalize Chinese immigrant women. As a result, they are being channeled into menial, part-time, insecure positions or becoming unemployed. In order for Chinese immigrant women to become equal and active participants in Canadian society the provision of inclusive programs and policies is necessary.