1. Imaginary gardens with real toads: Using poetry
as metaphor in our own academic practice
• Catriona Cunningham and Jennie Osborn
• Higher Education Academy
• UWS Learning and Teaching Conference • 20th June 2013
3. “our species thinks in metaphors and learns
through stories” (Bateson, 1994, p.110)
“Metaphor has the power to change our
reality: words affect concepts and “changes in
our conceptual system do change what is real
for us and affect how we perceive the world
and act upon those perceptions” (Lakoff and
Johnson, 1980, p.146).
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Metaphors
4. “We always live with multiple subjectivities, but we
generally conceal the multiplicity behind a few
predictable and typical guises. Poetry invites us to
explore the plural identities of human be(com)ings
constituted in the play of language.” (Leggo, 2004, p.
12)
“teachers, both beginning and experienced, should
learn to know themselves as poets in order to foster
living creatively in the pedagogic contexts of
classrooms and the larger pedagogic contexts
outside classrooms.”(Leggo 2005)
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From narrative to poetry . . .
6. • Gut reactions
• What is it saying – literally?
• Metaphor
• Imagery
• Rhythm/pace
• Who’s speaking
• Who are they speaking to?
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Analysing poetry
7. • We will give your group a poem.
• Read the poem twice to yourself, then once
aloud in your group.
• Respond to the questions on the sheet,
continually returning to your own academic
practice – your professional story
• Group discussion
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Reading and drawing
Hinweis der Redaktion
Change.Connectedness of what has been, how particular patterns and events and unique occasions, encounter here and there, can be woven together. Facts. Interpretations. Story of how things are going, how things have been, and how things are likely to go. Anthropologist:Clifford Geertz,After the Fact (1995) offers metaphor of a parade, capturing change over time, impossible to look at one event or time without seeing the event or time nested within the wholeness of his metaphorical parade. Tentativeness: 1. where we are positioned in the parade. We know what we know because of how we are positioned. If we shift our position in the parade, our knowing shifts. 2. As the parade changes our relative positions change. What we knew at one point in time shifts as the parade moves temporally forward to another point in time. Clanadinin and Connelly, pp. 5-7, 17.
CHANGE:Experiential approach to truth: unites objectivist view that there is a world external to the individual that we must understand and subjectivist view that meaning is always individual to a person. Understanding comes from interaction with environment and others. So truth is constant experience of world ‘out there’ which is separate from us as well as from a recognition that individually, we strive to make sense of this experience creatively such that we can develop understanding and coherence in our lives. Metaphor figures importantly in this explanation for how we seek truth and meaning because it enables us, in part, to make sense of our experiences by uniting our reasonwith our imagination. (Batten, 2012, pp. 16-17)
Why not write poems? Why not create a poem from an interview transcript – surely squatting in someone else’s words is less authentic. We think that by squatting in other people’s metaphors we can make sense of own experience by making it strange. When we read about HE – we are too close, too many of our assumptions are shared and internalized. We skim over the ‘taken-for-grantedness’ simply recognizing a reality that we all share. Or conversely, a recognizable account of academic experience and practice which runs contrary to our worldview or experience is too easy to dismiss – I know what this is but this does not reflect my reality, this is not my context, this is not how I experience academic life, this is not my teaching practice? This is not me.By forcing ourselves to make a home in a strange, perhaps even hostile metaphor, we can make visible our assumptions, attitudes and contexts.“Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.” ~John KeatsWhy not engage critically with educational research articles? Or we don’t recognise the language – we are overwhelmed by ‘gobbledygook sentences’ (Weller, 2010, p.99). Or we rebel against our new and uncomfortable position as novices in an alien discourse of educational research.
Looking at poetry: Robert Frost: poetry is the shortest emotional distance between two points. Most importantly (for today) need to pay attention to your ‘gut reaction’ to the poem, what emotional connection do you have with it? What does it remind you of, what remembrances might it trigger, what personal experience does it speak to, how does it fit with your likes or dislikes? Ask yourself: ‘How do I feel about this? Why?’ What is this poem about – how would you translate it into regular English? What metaphors are used? What does the language evoke? Are there particularly strong images working in this poem? What characters are here? Who’s speaking? Who are they speaking to? What role does the listener play? What’s the story? What is the author trying to say?
Sheila Stewart: ‘Poetry is a call and response. The poet and the listener create the poem in the listening. Learning is like that too’ (p.101)
