Presentation at HEA-funded workshop ' Kindness, care and love: exploring the hinterland of active learning relationships in Education'. This event offered an unusual way of approaching relationships between students and teachers required to ensure active learning within higher education. The intellectual and academic are not understood separately from concepts of kindness, care and love – rather, there is an inherent interrelationship that teachers must embrace to ensure their students’ active learning experiences. This presentation is part of a related blog post that provides an overview of the event: http://bit.ly/1ng4sEs For further details of the HEA's work on active and experiential learning: http://bit.ly/17NwgKX

1. Explorations into the uncharted
terra incognita: using poetry to
explore joy, passion and beauty in
academic life
Anna Jones
Glasgow Caledonian University

2. Three things in human life are important: the
first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and
the third is to be kind
Henry James

3. We are coming to understand much,
Much more about the universe,
Much, much more.
It is hard not to be excited,
About where we are going,
We don’t know
Where we are going,
It is definitely
Something new.
(Sarah, professor, physics/cosmology)

4. • Teaching and research both highly complex –
intellectual, emotional, practical
McBride (2009, p. 43) ‘It [poetry] questions, it
leaves frayed edges and loose wires. It draws
out the hidden, the spiritual, the underlying
rhythms of life that we swamp with
information, noise and news channels’.

5. Poetry to describe academic life
• allows for the emotional, ambiguous, contradictory
and elusive as well as the analytical.
• At once intellectual and aesthetic.
• It opens up material for the readers that is powerful in
its subjectivity, in a way that is at once subtle, concise,
unique, powerful and new.
• In the words of (Cahnmann, 2003, p. 35), ‘a fresh
language to describe the indescribable emotion and
intellectual experiences in and beyond classrooms’.
• Brings together form and content

6. Poetic transcription
• Transcripts coded for emergent themes
• Extended extract identified
• All digressions removed
• All but ‘essence’ of idea removed
• Words are participants’ own, retain logic and
narrative sequence, speaking rhythm
(Clarke et al 2005; Glesne 1997; Poindexter
2002; Evelyn 2004)

7. Braided time
• Non linear time, time looping back on itself
• Present infused with the past
(Clarke et al 2005)
• Childhood and experiences as a student shape
the way we see ourselves as teachers and
researchers

8. What drew me to law?
You did what your father said.
Did that age ever exist?
I’m pretty old!
I was very obedient
At 16.
Was it interesting?
Mostly no,
Mostly
I was intimidated by it.
Didn’t have the confidence
To do anything else.
(George, professor, law)

9. My father was a rural surgeon.
When I was little,
He took us on rounds,
At Christmas we dressed up
As little nurses,
Took Christmas cards to his patients.
He died when I was young,
I spent my youth thinking
Medicine had killed him,
I didn’t want to be a doctor,
In the end
I couldn’t help myself.
(Claire, professor, medicine)

10. I grew up in a rural general practice.
When I was a little girl,
I operated on the soap,
I found the soap very good,
You could put it back together,
You just had to get it really wet
In the bath.
Medicine was something I knew,
I still don’t know
What do middle managers do?
Medicine,
You are independent,
The 70s were a strongly feminist time,
You could be part of a community,
Rather than just watch things,
You could go anywhere.
(Lisa, professor, medicine)

11. I grew up,
It was the era of moon missions.
I remember
Being sent home,
In 1969,
To watch the moon landing.
I used to make rockets,
And launch them.
The chemistry of the fuels,
The trajectories,
How high they would go,
The massive explosions.
My mother used to buy the ingredients of
the fuel for me.
I couldn’t as a young lad,
Just go and buy these things,
But a middle aged woman,
Wasn’t going to be doing anything
Dangerous
I liked messing around at home,
Fiddling around with the back of the TV
Don't try that at home!
(James, professor, physics)

12. I was on call one night,
Blackberry picking,
With my children,
The dilemma of being called,
In a magical evening.
Resentful of being paged
I was telling my son,
Watch out for blackberry thorns,
He said,
Why should I worry?
If I get hurt,
My Doctor Dave will make me better.
My son’s expectation,
If he gets hurt,
He will be looked after,
This is the patient’s expectation.
And the doctor’s duty.
(Claire, professor, medicine)

13. I want them
To take away curiosity
And excitement.
I try
To be enthusiastic,
About what I teach,
Present the counterintuitive,
The ridiculous,
The absurd,
Which nevertheless is true.
Physics demos that go wrong,
Might explode,
Or make a big spark,
Or injure the lecturer,
The students seem to like that.
(James, professor, physics)

14. • The use of poetry as a form of inquiry places the
personal at the centre.
• This form of inquiry does not attempt to present
the data as objective but quite the reverse,
• Highlighting the intensely personal illustrates the
ways in which we make meaning of experience
• Not generalisable but recognisable and
authentic.