The Promise of Poetry Belongs to Us All: Poetic Professional Learning in Teacher-Researchers’ Memory-Work

Abstract

“The Promise of Poetry Belongs to Us All: Poetic Professional Learning in Teacher-Researchers’ Memory-Work” by Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, S’phiwe Madondo, and Edwina Grossi builds on the developing scholarship of poetic professional learning in the social sciences by exploring two exemplars of South African teacher-researchers’ poetic engagement with memory and pedagogy. The mosaic pieces by S’phiwe Madondo and Edwina Grossi, which exemplify professional learning by way of poetry, offer windows into poetic explorations of these teacherresearchers’ own memories and histories in relation to varied educational and sociocultural contexts and concerns. The pieces illustrate poetic inquiry as a mode of working deliberately and imaginatively with memories to produce evocative insights into teaching and learning. They also offer encouragement to teacher-researchers who might not have a formal background in the literary arts to start to play with composing poems as research data, representations, and interpretations.