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ArticlepoemPoetry and Reality in Research in Poetry and Reality

Anne Beate Reinertsen, Oded Ben-Horin, and Katrine Borgenvik

Abstract This is a cross-disciplinary experiment with tensions and pos-sibilities between art and pedagogy. It is an attempt to communicate the challenges of but also the joy of attempting to realize different ways of ap-proaching the meeting points between these fields: performing dramatic representations and shapings of research and advocating for what we want and see needed. Poems, music, and lyrics and layout, graphics, and stream-of-thought writing blend with standard social science discourse, hopefully creating new angles, possibilities, methods, performative communication concepts, and reasonings.

Keywords: experimental and poetic research methodologies, arts-based education, critical pedagogy and school reform

International Review of Qualitative Research, Vol. 7, No. 4, Winter 2014, pp. 465–485.ISSN 1940-8447, eISSN 1940-8455. © 2014 International Institute for Qualitative Research, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. All rights reserved. Request permission to photocopy or reproduce article content at the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/irqr.2014.7.4.465.

466 ANNE BEATE REINERTSEN ET AL.

Suddenly, there is this thin red curly line beneath the questionable word as it is typed, indicating something is wrong. A mistake, a blend, a failure? Genre confu-sion or other intolerable configuration?

Articlepoem? What is it?

Does it exist? Can it be used?

True, we can dismiss the line by clicking “include to vocabulary.”But can we click on us—not necessarily making anything disappear but rather expand on what we already know, what is already there creating more together? Wondering is our business. Anybody out there?

In this Articlepoem Our stream-of-thought from topic to topic essayist poetic type of writing contemplating knowledge, science, and self, hopefully involving you. Scientific article and poem, poetry and reality: Poetry and reality in science and research in poetry and reality.

I’m thinking about real writing, forming stories about happenings in the social room in a way that makes a large number of us interested in them, a form of writing that gives the happenings a form which includes us in the experience. Perhaps we should encourage social scientists to attend poetry classes—stu-dents as well as teachers should attend. (Christie, 2009, p. 52, translated from Norwegian by first author)

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This is our attempt to contribute to the discussion about possibilities and potentials of “exorbitant” and performative strategies in qualitative research:

After methodsAll methods, Methods-of-moreArgumentative and poetic registers at work

—is there an audience somewhere, and what do I do?

Hopefully creating mental pictures and engendering hypothetical scenes in our minds. . . . Thinking more and otherwise. . . . Striving to disturb regularities and spur our scientific and practical imaginations simultaneously avoiding both theo-retical and practical monocultures.

Poetry recitations and other performances are all possible possibilizing MomentsNo words Lack of wordsSilenceAll-of-my-words . . .What they have in common is showing us that we are all individuals.

In Articlepoem, the “research assemblage” or “thinking machine” (Deleuze & Guat-tari, 1984) contains particles, intensities, forces, and flows of components and lines related to philosophy of education and science, school reform, and innovation seen through recent efforts to improve our assessment practices including teachers and students self-assessment competencies, complexity issues and critical research, arts-based education, politicizing, and questions about social justice meeting and linking with other forces and flows of . . .

Happenings

—a virtual node only I am . . . perhaps, yet here is something for us to commence with: an article and a poem, a poetic article . . .

Articlepoem

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Attending Poetry Classes: Poetic Epistemology, Subjectivist Epistemology, Real Writing ‘Realfantast’ Epistemologies

The Knowledge Promotion reform does not promote equality in achievement (Bakken, 2010).

It is a research result. And what do I do?

I interviewed Oliver, a senior high school lecturer in biology and chemistry.

Inclusive pedagogies . . .

The promise of dialogue . . .Teacher collaboration . . .

School reform . . .

Becoming someone something important

Imagine, then, to be singing the sci-ences, performing the science classes (Ben-Horin, 2011), knitting/writing an autobiographic you or a biographic love story about school reform (Reinertsen, 2008, 2009), using and creating poetry for both conducting and reporting social research (Faulkner, 2009), paint-ing a “line of flight” (Deleuze & Guat-tari, 1987), “dancing the data” (Bagley & Cancienne, 2002), silence as speech (Rodriguez, 2011) just to mention a few. Doing research through a wider selec-tion and combination of methods:

Creating something out of different Positions . . .

Engaging and performing in research to build trust and gain insights into people’sown understandingsand experiences— my understanding and experiences— you and me, together.

“Understandings” that is. An example in a poem, singing the sciences, per-forming the science classes . . . Come Oliver. You and me.


And here is an example: Writing a Science Opera (WASO) is a newly developed approach to multidisciplinary and creative science education that brings together the opera genre and the traditional science class. WASO is based on the widespread and well-documented pedagogical methodology Write an Opera, which is led in Europe by the Royal Opera House in London. It is a professional development meth-odology that enables teachers to instruct pupils of all ages during the creation and performance of completely self-written operas. WASO integrates science education into the original methodology by involving scientists as mentors, providing real-world complex scientific challenges on which students will collaborate creatively, creating a need to learn. Scientific information is personally introduced to pupils as inspiration for WASO productions by a scientist, whose function is to lead and inspire an inquiry-based scientific as well as artistic process, thus demonstrating the common impulses shared by science and the arts.1 It is the intention that WASO will be used by readers, be they teachers, school principals, policy makers, etc., in collaboration with artists and scientists. At present, three projects have been real-ized on different schooling levels. Stord Haugesund University College (Norway) is in the process of realizing further projects outside Norway.

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It is a humble, reticent research. Not aiming to find truth but rather to discuss and talk more about X together: An “ethics of discussion” (Derrida, 1988). No knowl-edge with the definite particle. Truth(s) is regional. Truth(s) is paradoxical. Truth(s) might therefore be found in local contextual possibilities, in the research process itself, and in art and poetry, in the sublime, perhaps.

Research needs art The more art, the more research Tears to create and strengthen a consciousness, a structural understanding, and

“willingness” to act.

It is challenging and demanding. The benefit of difficulty, the privilege of sound hesitation, and thinking twiceAll words in quotation marksA weakening but strengtheningA “Derridean rigor” (Derrida, 2002; Lather, 2004).

Disagreement is valuable, and “uselessness” might be of great value Ethics, aesthetics, the smallness of things, and the realization of X in the particular

Poetic researchParadoxical poetic research, Requiring me

Each others’ keys are weconnectionsrelations and participationissues to be lived again and again:Who am I, where am I, how and when (Marcus, 2009, as cited in Denzin, 2010).

Sometimes I do not like parts of me, parts of you—my personal red curly lines, so to speak. But they are there. They are all there. Everyone is, whether I like it or not. Restraining, exclusive, and even arrogant are words that come into mind to describe thinking this knowledge but not that, this logic but not another.

InterestingAmusingHuman

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It is ultimately always about agency or rather “becoming” someone, becoming important, secure, stronger—important to me, to you, to all others. A Deleuzian (1987) type of “uncontrollable becomings”:

Something someone someplace sometime anytime— all of the time

Studying life demands narratives that we can speak and tell our stories through. They might be episodic and temporal, in connection with something or someone else or not. Such might be this forming of interesting stories or stories that make us interested in these…

Happenings

Such might be(come) this “real writing in the social room” (Christie, 2009, p. 52). Becoming a “subject écriture” (Derrida, 1974), that is. You and me co-created—co-created—in/through research: You and me researchers all.

Research important and relevant for people’s lives and my life . . . The type of research I want to do . . . The type of researcher I want to become.

One day per week we teach outdoors. We aim at being a health-promoting school. Our greatest challenge as far as assessment is concerned is to open up the term assessment to include more than grading (Head of department, City Hill High School, October 10, 2010).

Such research is therefore also potentially political and ultimately about asking hard questions about validity, reliability, and knowledge. Not directly, but through this practical, theoretical, artistically and philosophically infused approach and subjectivity.


Political and activistThe “performative turn” (Denzin, 2010).

A questioning relevant for life researchA researcher becoming with dataAnywhere, anything, all

Poetic research, poetic impulses, the poetics of people’s lives. CAP ethnography: integrated, creative analytical practices and creative analytical processes (Richardson, 2000, Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005).

And the presidential promise: . . . No matter who you are and who you love . . .

Those committed to a more conventional realist epistemology might view this line of research as a serious error. But we ask: What is more real?

Writing against normalized conceptualizations of the child, that inevitably counts some children “in” while marginalizing others.

Very realistic to see the fantastic: Realistic and fantastic, being/becoming a realist and a fantast Realfantast.

Inspiration and action: being/becoming an inspiration, an activist Inspiraction.

A research equally preoccupied with the researcher and theory as with practice. Theory and praxis: being/becoming Theoprax.

A research equally preoccupied with presence and absence. Presence and absence: being/becoming . . .

NOW

—“a metavoiced logic of complexities” (Lather, 2010).—“a poetic mode of orientation” (Freeman, 2011).

Curly red lines are emerging all over this passage, but I find myself welcoming them now. . . . “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new” —Albert Einstein

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And tradition too Anti is a dangerous word It does not serve complex

Too polarizedI prefer not (not)

So here is some standard discourseAnd important . . .

Participant Poetic Action Research Twisting and Turning

Most important is perhaps to upgrade people’s self-experiences, help people explore their experiences, make the experiences valid and, through this, make the carriers of the experiences secure. Secure in the knowledge that they, through their lives, have experienced something important, giving them the possibility to understand related themes, and thereby giving them the right to speak in many different arenas. Perhaps the most important role for the social scientist is to create conditions for people to see that they know something. (Christie, 2009, p. 53, translation by first author)

We draw on a particular action research project and collaboration with four prima-ry schools, two secondary schools, and one upper secondary school in Norway. The overall theme and focus is assessment. During the fall of 2009 we had new govern-mental provisions for assessment. They imply a transition from a normative (group-related) to a criteria-based (goal-related and individual) system and an increased focus on formative, in addition to summative, assessment. Division is made between subject matter assessment and assessment of “other development and/or learn-ing aspects” such as social development and relational competencies, work habits, behaviors, and orderliness. The fourth aspect implies increased focus on self-assess-ment and participant autonomy. Autonomy conceptualized as the freedom to make choices, self-determination, self-reliance, and independency.

The primary goal in the particular research project is therefore to offer differ-ent stakeholders, such as pupils and teachers in the classroom and teaching teams, the opportunity to create and participate in autonomy building conversations that

“decolonize” standing assumptions on assessment practices. Decolonizing refers to a process of opening up assessment terms to a practice of deconstructive deferment whereby researchers act as “catalysts” and support a culture of inquiry among stake-holders. Ultimately, the longer-term goal is to strengthen subjective judgment and


inquiry by focusing on how the discourses and interests of teaching teams, teachers, and pupils contribute to the development of assessment criteria in the direction of fluid “next stage practices” rather than a more fixed focus upon “best” practices (Reinertsen, 2011).

We have worked together since 2009 and are continuing to do so. The meth-odology (not) adopted in the research project involves open observation in class-rooms; teachers writing letters to researchers; regular semistructured interviews with teachers, students, and leaders; focus group interviews; document studies; and filming of activities of particular interest. It also involves pupils filming each other and teachers and pupils interviewing each other or engaging and participating in so called “reciprocal peer interviewing” (Porter, Neysmith, Reitsma-Street, & Col-lins, 2009). They also include conversations over “findings” with both teachers and students and conversations over “findings” with fellow researchers.

Teachers’ and pupils’ own interests and choices are decisive. Together we focus on the subthemes they find relevant and in the way or manner in which they want to experiment or try out things. The research processes thus have a strong focus on both substance and methods and are deconstructed, co-constructed, and finally reconstructed through conversation, or rather teachers, pupils, and researcher(s) philosophizing or discussing possibilities together. They are contextualized and built on local strengths, needs, and wishes.

Research methods and practice thus mix and blend together. Qualitative approaches, quantitative approaches, or mixed. Comparing and contrasting using different angles and approaches. It is therefore a very broad, uncertain and complex approach. A focus on poetics, however, makes both research and conversations less preoccupied with certain activities and more directed toward principles, dilemmas, paradoxes, and possibilities and then what to do next? In fall 2010, a teacher com-mented in a letter: “It is about discovering and being discovered through assessment.”

We have discussed theory, articles, and books on assessment, classroom prac-tices, reform policies, assessment methods, taxonomies, grades, competence goals, letters, poems, pictures, films, and texts from a local street magazine, all to trigger ideas, thoughts, and performances—new texts and more discussions. On the one hand, we perceive this approach as a way of working with modality and discovering how it can support, contribute, and expand both teachers’ and pupils’ assessment literacy. On the other hand, it is about creating new knowledge that in its turn might give support to working with new strategies in a modern multimodal text universe. As one teacher said in spring 2010, “I must admit: Pupils make better and more interesting films about assessment when I am not there.”

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As far as validity and reliability is concerned, we talk of a movement here “from getting it right to getting it interesting” (St. Pierre, 2011). Simultaneously, it as an exploration of what valid knowledge might be and also what might be valid ways of doing research. Categories and standards are seen as possible meaning only: “a travelling case of possible meanings” (St. Pierre, 2011). A type of research aiming at revealing stigmas, perhaps. A type of research “on the edge of competence” (St. Pierre, 2011). A research/researcher as an origami artist: folding, unfolding, and folding again and again and again and again and again and again and again. A new way of searching, seeing, looking, and listening. Looking and listening poetically. Further, here triangulation is not about member checking but about giving some-thing back, “talking back” to discuss and continue together (Derrida, 1988).

A researcher, a teacher, a pupil observing, interviewing, making inquiries, ana-lyzing documents, making films, counting occurrences, developing preliminary categories and goals, measuring results, continuing to ask questions, and discuss. A researcher, a teacher, and a pupil living—a bit dangerously perhaps. Taking risks, becoming risk takers. Collecting, interpreting, and analyzing data differently in order to contrast and contradict. Gathering data that might concern others, expand-ing the view of what data is: Opening up to other realities but also to others’ realities. Data as language: poems, dream, dance, play. . . . Writing data or translating oneself through research together with others.

Being Un/Systematic About the Research Process

Research objects (X) change as we go along

A research bricoleur (Denzin, 2010, p. 13) or handyman constantly learning to bor-row from different disciplines

I am

A process of decolonization and/or “queering X”

Studying possible connections

Virtual nodes

What is and what is not: Silence and/or nonpresence as important as what is.

Opening up, sitting together, eating together, and using ourselves together with others


Research in collaboration and collaborative research, participant poetic research, a gathering around a text and a relational activity only

Thank you!

No authoritative expressions of reality

Transient manifestations only

postintentional

dreaming

interrupting “lines” in a “rhizome” (Deleuze & Guatarri, 1983, p. 10)

“provoking absences” (Pheland & Sumsion, 2008)

“stories of wonder” (Reinertsen, 2007/2009)

“writing stories” (Richardson 1994; Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005)

Everything and anything connected with X—not—and always

“Becoming with data” (Reinertsen, 2014)

A question was posed by a teacher to her class (17-year-old pupils in senior high school). The question was posed in written form along with 10 other ques-tions. The pupils handed in written anonymous answers: How and why would you like to assess yourself (self-assessment) and/or others (peer-evaluation)? Five out of eleven pupils said that they did not want to assess themselves or others. (Field notes, spring 2010)

difficultdemanding brutal honesty this ethics of rethinking, dreaming always

In our inspired–action–inspiraction research project, there are: • “Dream categories” in which we discuss all things we’d like to see happen-

ing: possibilities, what one might do some day. An expansion of portfolio or assessment repertory/competencies.

• “The really difficult category”: This is a category including discussions of undecidedness, dilemmas, and paradoxes that cannot be solved “once and for all” and therefore must be repeatedly discussed in relation to concrete cases.

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• “What the heck category”: A category or categories for things that are almost too much to cope with, unjust, revealing, stigmatizing, eye-opening for par-ticipants or issues we have to discuss more about and for which we some-times must ask for help.

One cannot speak about evidence, findings, and results, butabout magical realism or magical realistic moments,

moments in which critique is inscribed thus on and on

And the poems

The songs

The words

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Performative Participant Action Research and Value Increase

The dissimulation of the focus.The dissimulation of the cause-effect relationship. Life is not clear and obvious. Neither are learning, reform, and research. Nothing is seamless—why would we think so?

A truly artistic, performative turn is not perfect, but unique. Profoundly different. Action research, research in action, actionresearch in action in research . . .

“Waste” used as artistic raw material. A thing or theme given artistic value through being modified, placed in a new con-nection and signed by an artist (teacher, pupil, researcher— your choice).

Upgrading “worthlessness” and waste might prove pivotal and value increase through art: Schools, teachers, and students developing narratives or stories they can speak and/or tell their stories through—and research/ers . . .

Student: “Actually, we evaluate ourselves and others all the time. It is, however, not a method or through methods, I think. Formative assessment . . . hmm, I’d call it Back For The Future assessment: BFTF assessment.”

Language to describe continuous change.

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More and Ending

No, simple matters don’t concern our friendShe spells herself deauthorized, sensual knowledge unknownIn phrases invisibly pathed for the trendIdeas continuously regenerated, alive to be known

Matters of simple have never concerned her She flowed life’s river to reach for the heart of thingsArticlepoem, she thought, a personal time, different from any otherShe ripped open the time she was in, a new space to place herself in, where no other could

“Welcome,” she heard upon entering her self-creation“Must you always take so long?” she smiled to both parts of herself

Note

1. See http://www.soundmusicresearch.org/Poster_OBH_29112012.pdf

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status og foreldres utdanning (NOVA Rapport 9/2010). Nova – Norsk Institutt For Forskning Om Oppvekst, Velferd Og Aldring. Retrieved from http://www.nova.no/asset/4069/1/4069_1.pdf

Ben-Horin, O. (2011, May). Poetry in research in poetry. Performed at the Seventh Internatio-nal Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, Urbana, IL.

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CA: Stanford University Press.


Faulkner, S. L. (2009). Poetry as method: Reporting research through verse. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Freeman, M. (2011, May). Qualitative inquiry and the self-realization of psychological science. Paper presented at the Seventh International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, Urbana, IL.

Gershon, W. S. (2010). Entertaining ideas and embodied knowledge: Musicians as public intellectuals. In J. A. Sandlin, B. D. Schultz, & J. Burdick (Eds.), Handbook of public pedagogy: Education and learning beyond schooling (pp. 628–638). New York: Routledge.

Lather, P. (2004). Applied Derrida: (Mis)reading the work of mourning in educational research. In P. P. Trifonas & M. A. Peters (Eds.), Derrida, deconstruction and education: Ethics of pedagogy and research (pp. 3–16). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

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About the Authors

Anne Beate Reinertsen is a professor in education at Queen Maud University College, Trondheim Norway. She is preoccupied with practical philosophy of education issues, sub-jective professionalism and postconstructivist qualitative research methodologies. (E-mail: [email protected])

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Oded Ben-Horin is an associate professor of music at Stord/Haugesund University College, Norway. He is musically active as a vocalist, composer, and lyricist in cross-disciplinary science/music settings, among others. (E-mail: [email protected])

Katrine Borgenvik is an assistant professor in the Department Art and Craft at Stord/Haug-esund University College, Norway. She is also active as a visual artist. (E-mail: [email protected]).

The Pink-wheeled Bike—Takes Two, Three, and Four

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