By embracing a self-study stance, teacher educators, teachers, and other professionals re-imagine their practice and contribute to improved ways of knowing and knowledge generation. Self-study of professional practice can be enacted through a variety of methods. Those methods continue to evolve due to the freedom for exploration and invention inherent in self-study methodology. This methodological elasticity has motivated self-study researchers to combine techniques and explore and design new approaches to advance their inquiries as they create improvement-aimed exemplars. Self-study scholars are increasingly using poetry as a literary arts-inspired mode to infuse their data-rich, innovative studies with openness, reflexivity, critical collaborative inquiry, and transparent data analysis, and in an emotive, playful, and powerful manner. The aesthetic, figurative, and rhythmic qualities of poetic language can generate imaginative and evocative understandings of professional learning and practice.
Poetic self-study can intensify self-knowledge, empathy, social consciousness, and motivation on the part of professionals such as teachers, teacher educators, nurses, occupational therapists, and social workers, as well as offer insights into the lived experiences of these professionals. This special issue will explore poetry as methodological inventiveness in self-study research – tracing how and why it is used and its impact. Studying Teacher Education is interested in submissions that exemplify poetic self-study processes to serve as a resource for others. We invite you to share your work in not only using poetry as a tool to generate data but as a self-study research method responsive to and productive for addressing your inquiry. We encourage submissions that consider impetus and implications – both for and beyond the self – to ask, “What difference can poetry make to self-study scholarship?” Manuscripts are invited from self-study scholars working across a range of knowledge fields and diverse contexts.
Manuscript submission deadline 01 August 2021
Special Issue Editors
Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, University of KwaZulu-Natal
Anastasia P. Samaras, George Mason University
Online information links:
Special Issue Call: http://bit.ly/Poetic_Research
