This article was written on Whadjuk Noongar booja (Country): country that was never ceded. In acknowledging Country and the Whadjuk Noongar people, I pay respects to Elders past and present.
Introduction
The Kia Tonui – Flourish Conference, held in Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington), Aotearoa (New Zealand) at the end of September 2024, was a collaboration between Drama New Zealand and Drama Australia. It drew participants from the geographic breadths of both countries. Against a backdrop of increasingly arid prescriptive teaching methods and curricula, which are indicative of the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) (Sahlberg, 2023) that typifies current educational trends across the neoliberal anglophone world, the conference was an oasis of thought and practice. Personally, it was a ‘prodigal son’ moment, a returning to a pedagogic home after a 30-year absence. Schooled in the affordances of process drama in the mid-1970s, I taught drama, firstly as a High School teacher and then as a community arts worker in the London Borough of Brent before moving to English, EAL/D and then primary education. I currently teach English on a primary B.Ed. course at Curtin University in Western Australia. Although much of my current teaching involves collaborative, co-constructed knowledge creation and the use of drama strategies, the last time I used drama as a continuous method of learning over an extended period was 1994. Like all absent family members, returning home after such a long time engendered anticipation and curiosity: anticipation of what it might feel like to be back in the fold and curiosity about how far drama might have moved-on from my last embrace. Being back in the fold felt as though I had never left in the first place. The conference was warm, welcoming and stimulating. From the outset there was an organic empathic atmosphere; a collegiality of one-ness. But, how far had drama moved-on during my absence? The answer is paradoxical: not far, yet so far.
From the outset I had intended to reflect on my experience of the conference in the form of a found poem. This intention made me feel like an outsider coming inside in the way an anthropologist must feel when they first enter the community to be the focus of their study. Given this positioning of myself, autoethnography as a research method in which personal experience is used to interpret cultural texts and practices (Adams et al., 2017), seemed the most appropriate methodological approach to capture my thoughts and feelings during the conference. Found poetry captures the essential facets of a subject by accentuating the linguistic elements that explicate core knowledge (Edge & Olan, 2020). Poetry more generally is capable of capturing and accentuating the essential meanings of life and, as Aristotle suggested, may be truer than history (Janesick, 2016). Found poetry usually applies to published subject matter authored by a third party. In this instance, however, the poem was to be based on notes taken during sessions attended. Hence, I was positioned ethnographically within the very subject of my study.
As I participated in sessions, the notes I took were a combination of verbatim statements made by presenters and keynote speakers, re-worded interpretations of statements and personal realisations. This inclusion of some of my own statements breaks with the conventions of found poetry (Butler-Kisber, 2005). The assembled linguistic bricolage (Kroll, 2021) of words and ideas was entangled data with the subjective ‘I’ at the centre. I was embroiled in the collegial-construction and re-construction of knowledge of the processes that we call drama, and as such became more participant than participant observer. In this sense, ‘I’ participated in the plurality of independent voices coalescing (Bakhtin, 2013), engaged in the communal exploration of a process of learning in which the embodied, affective and cognitive self-mingled in dialogic spaces with others. As Penwarden & Schoone (2021) note, ‘…the conference…’ can be a space for collaborative and creative sense-making, and critical inquiry. Although unconventional, the use of personal statements in the poem may be justified since I too was situated within the conference space as an active participant. In this respect there is an element of ‘identity poetry’ (Janesick, 2016, p. 36) given that my story of ‘return’, as both researcher and participant, was embedded within a multiplicity of other voices,
Found poetry and ethnography
Found poetry is an arts-based mode of research writing used as a means to inquire, analyse, represent and enhance understanding through meaning-making (Edge & Olan, 2020). It usually involves the re-working into poetic form transcripts of interview data (Sjollema et al., 2012). Although it remains a rare way of representing research, found poetry has been used in educational research (Cahnmann, 2003); research on theatre and performance (Prendergast, 2006); professional learning (Pithouse-Morgan, 2016); and studies of homelessness (Sjollema et al., 2012). It has also been used in interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) in psychotherapy because it lends itself to capturing the essence of contextualised lived experience and people’s relationship to the world (Amos, 2019). The found poem re-constructs existing text as a means of representing intersubjective data that comprises the affective, embodied and cognitive aspects of participants (Amos, 2019). It is, therefore, a useful means of capturing, representing and interrogating lived experience. In this sense found poetry functions as a unifying linguistic bricolage of diverse thoughts, emotions and sensibilities; it captures both the uniqueness and complexity of participant voices (Richardson, 2002).
Wiggins (2011) recounts how on reading found poetry based on data derived from open-ended interviews with musicians, other musicians, not involved in the research, reported how powerfully the poetry resonated with their own experiences of playing and devising music. This suggests that the intersubjectivity of participants is not only captured by the poem but that it also speaks to the reader and thereby extends to and includes the reader in the community of knowledge. If this is so, then participants at the conference may find themselves re-living remembered experience of the three days at Kia Tonui - Flourish, and those who were not there may feel themselves included if the temporary community of voices that was the conference speaks to them, emotionally and intellectually. Ultimately, found poetry should speak for itself with minimal additional commentary (Amos, 2019) and, therefore, commentary in this instance is brief. However, as intimated above, readers of this article in this journal are likely to belong to the community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1999, p. 21) that brings to the text a shared epistemological perspective based on shared professional lived experience (Edge & Olan, 2020, p. 15). Here, meanings are transacted through the intertwining of common, or at least proximate, knowledge between the writer and the reader (Rosenblatt, 1978).
It is possible that poetry represents research findings more authentically than prose, particularly academic prose which conventionally removes emotion from data in an attempt to be objective (Richardson, 2004). However, people are emotional as well as cognitive beings and removing emotion from data distorts the reality of being human. Prendergast (2006) suggests found poetry has the capacity to capture the ephemeral nature of performance, as well as the transitory character of time; memory of the past, present experience and future hopes and fears. Drama and poetry share common roots in song and the orality of ritual (Prendergast, 2006) and, therefore, the found poem is an appropriate means of synthesising the three days of the conference.
Qualitative or interpretivist researchers have often been criticised for their seeming lack of objectivity. Found poetry certainly challenges conventional forms of research writing (Patrick, 2016). In response, interpretivist researchers acknowledge researcher positionality and have accepted that both the processes of data collection and data analysis entail some degree of the researcher’s interpretive self. In much the same way, transactional theory (Rosenblatt, 1978) recognises that meanings are made by the reader engaging with the text through the ‘lenses’ of their experiential knowledge. Therefore, claims by positivist researchers to total researcher objectivity have been challenged on the grounds that all research involves choices, decisions and selections that are, to some degree subjective (Maynard & Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010). My subjectivity in this work is explicit; I was both an active participant in conference workshops, recording my own voice, and a collector of other voices. Hence, this found poem includes multiple voices, including my own. In this respect, the poem is perhaps unique both because of its autobiographical aspect and its capacity to resonate the polyphonic voices of presenter and participants at Kia Tonui - Flourish.
Though by no means mainstream, ethnographic poetry has since the 1990s become more accepted in interpretivist research as researchers experiment with innovative ways to represent social reality (Maynard & Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010). Poetry is useful in ethnographic research because it has the capacity to summarise emotional and cultural complexity with honesty and an economy of words. It eliminates the extraneous and, therefore, ‘holds’ the authenticity of observation as insight (Denzin, 1997; Maynard & Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010). As such, poetry communicates deep reflections of lived experience (Downey, 2019).
In summarising the work of Janesick (2016, p. 38), poetry serves four functions in interpretivist research:
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the construction of relationships and community;
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the creation of fresh ways of viewing and making meaning of social reality;
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actively working with curiosity and the imagination to broaden knowledge and understanding of the world, and
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it assists the researcher to gain closer self-knowledge of their positioning in the research process.
As suggested above, whereas positivist research claims to position the researcher as an objective observer, in ethnographic research there is no such pretence. The researcher acknowledges their presence in the process of doing research and in ethnographic poetry, especially autoethnographic poetry, the researcher dwells in the dialogic liminal space in which new knowledge is generated. What often emerges from this space is critical thought as a political act of making and intentionality (Kress & Lake, 2016). Hence, ethnographic poetry provides a means of amplifying marginal voices to a wider range of audiences than research written in conventional prose (Carroll et al., 2011).
The ethnographic poem is a summary, a synthesis, a crystalisation of dynamic interactions, of polyphony; it is an epiphany of the totality of tensions, sensitivities, contradictions and agreements across a community. Ethnographic poetry speaks across temporal spaces, adding to thought and meaning making (Cahnmann-Taylor, 2018). At the nexus of ethnography and qualitative analysis, it attempts to make the experiences of people comprehensible to others (Schwalbe, 1995).
Finding the poem: the compositional process
As shown in Figure 1, I adopted a non-linear method of note-taking. This is my usual method of taking notes and it avoided the trap of structuring the poem around the chronology of sessions attended. On the last day of the conference, I highlighted statements from the ‘raw data’ shown in Figure 1. The selected statements were then transferred to a word document. In compositional terms, this was the first draft, but it remained a random list of ‘raw’ statements.
The advantage of having two screens allowed me to have the emerging poem on one screen and the ‘raw’ data (Figure 2) on the other.
Figure 2: Raw Data.
Laughter is sacrificed to tears
to achieve what is greater
Text to life
Text to text
Text to self
Text to the world
The cultural interface
Changed planet
Radical practice in neoliberal laboratories
Existing in the process of time
Memory, imagination trajectories of power
Expansive philosophy starts with the compost
Unison wave
Seascape morning- waking
Arms swaying as wheat in the breeze
Of an unknown where-ness
Two sides – welcome – rejection
Observe the other
Recreate
Tableau
Circle
View
Balance
Rich variety
Ideas change and grow
A collective prop
Death of a river
Paper leaves perform pledges
to the last tree standing
Visual metaphor
Bamboo – a visual metaphor
For witches, forests, collective identity,
Curriculum contours to
Explore winding roads
On a journey of collective thinking
Purpose
Community
Learn to hold back
Starting point
Difficult ideas
Collective responsibility
Mountains
Trees speak
Collective thinking
Collective understanding
Deconstruction
Ensemble
Recreate
Power in numbers
Spirit in everything
Precarious times of knots
We learn from reflecting
The power you have
Hibiscus flowers crushed
Thelma knew how to be patient
With the boy
How to keep words alive
To believe in pathways
Allow difference to belong
The lesson sinks in with time
Quiet revolution
Teaching is political
Threads to survive in hard times
Though you may be tired
You will never grow weary
The second draft involved the sequencing of statements, using semantic connections and poetic sensibility as guiding principles. Poetic sensibility entailed attention to the linguistic affordances of poetry, such as the alliterative, 'mischief-makers’ in the second line, ‘warp and weft’ in the fourth line and ‘curriculum contours’ in line 31. The conference had been rich in metaphor but rather than simply transpose each metaphor, they were often fused with other metaphors in order to capture a stronger essence of the ‘beating heart’ and intellectual ‘thought-waves’ of the conference collective. One such example is:
'…Weigh marginality in
the language of angels,…’
In the closing keynote, Oscar Knightly had used the phrase, '…the language of angels…'. The purity of the phrase resonated with me.
On one screen the poem gradually took shape like a sculptor’s bust as I cut and pasted words and phrases from the other screen, carefully crafting them until they formed a coherent and cohesive whole. In some instances where there was semantic consistency, this meant inserting new lines between existing lines. In other instances, it required words to be cut and replaced with new words or the paraphrasing of several similar statements. Sometimes insertions caused syntactic bumps and jolts, and lexical surgery was required to restore syntactic flow. Although some phrases have not changed from the raw data to the final copy, the poem is significantly different from the raw data, demonstrating that found poetry involves the careful crafting of language as the writer attempts to capture essences of meaning from disparate sources. As such the poem is intertextual (Kristeva, 2002); it is a synthesis of voices: those of workshop presenters, keynote speakers my own and other participants, captured over the three days of the conference. After many readings and re-readings, workings and re-workings, morphemic changes and lexical shifts, the poem was done, in so far as any text is ‘done’. Now, '…the author is dead… (Barthes, 2009) and the poem stands on its own, awaiting the next creative move, as the reader brings their interpretive lenses to the construction of meanings (Rosenblatt, 1978, 1982).
As a testament to the 2024 conference, the poem has its limitations. It is limited by my selections of language from the many thousands of utterances made over three days. It is limited by the partiality of presence in the sense that I attended approximately a third of all possible workshops and presentations and, therefore, there is much that I missed and not represented. It is also limited by my positionality as a prodigal ‘son’ returning to my pedagogic homeland after such a long absence, and of being an outsider: an English guy with only ten years of Australian enculturation attending a conference in Aotearoa.
Kia Tonui – Flourish
Weavers of meta-narratives,
Nature’s mischief makers,
Ethical oriented trouble-makers,
Advocates for the warp and weft -
The freedom to imagine alternatives.
The power you have for
Radical practice in neoliberal wastelands:
A precarious time of knots -
Trajectories of power in the process of time,
Of laughter sacrificed to tears
to achieve what is greater.
Change the planet,
When there is courage to let go.
Learn to hold back
At the cultural interface;
Weigh marginality in
the language of angels.
Traverse the banal and barren terrain
Of crushed hibiscus flowers,
where paper leaves fall with pledges
to the last tree standing and a dying river.
Memory, imagination, circle, view,
observe the other, recreate balance.
Ideas change and grow, a starting point
For threads to survive the hard times.
A unison wave as wheat in the breeze -
Bamboo – a visual metaphor for
The quiet revolution of text to self;
of witches, forests, a collective us
of communal responsibility
In curriculum contours;
Of seascape mornings - waking
In an unknown where-ness.
Discard the already known,
Keep words alive, believe in pathways,
Allow difference to belong.
Expansive philosophy starts with the compost
And the spirit in everything,
On a journey of collective thinking,
Along winding roads, across mountains,
Through the forests where a tree
Speaks to difficult ideas -
We learn by reflecting.
Poke holes in precarious futures
Steeped in hero narratives.
Entice with tension
The more than human entanglements
of species, belonging, enfolding.
Ignite infinite possibilities with questions
That speak to the subconscious.
Embodied inter-thinking -
Pause for reflection.
The lesson sinks in with time.
A circle back,
A remembering
Of the reason why
This journey was worthy.
Though you may be tired,
You will never grow weary
In the now, shared space of enactment,
Negotiating in the play mode
the crucible of radical imaginings,
Teaching is political.
Discussion of themes
An abiding theme of the conference was ‘advocacy’: how drama specialists were continuously having to advocate for the ‘discipline’, and in her opening address on the first full day of the conference, Dr Christine Hatton had accentuated the point using the phrase, ‘…weight of marginality…’, immediately after referring to ‘… creative work in the neoliberal laboratory…’. Neoliberalism has been a ‘plague’ sweeping across education in the Anglophone world for at least the last two decades. Sahlberg (2023) refers to the iteration of neoliberalism in education as the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM). GERM serves as an apt acronym for a movement that has brought to classrooms an arid didactic pedagogy of powerpoints, silent children, and the erroneously named, ‘explicit teaching’. It is the ‘anti-christ’ of creativity and critical thought. Hence, we weigh our marginality in a language that speaks of higher things – ‘…the language of angels…’. By fusing statements made by Oscar Knightly and Christine Hatton, the poem brings together the beginning and end of the conference in a single epiphany of voices.
If advocacy was one facet of the conference, other themes also wove themselves through the lexical and semantic fabric of the poem: '…crushed hibiscus flowers…', another Oscar Knightly phrase, lent itself to ‘…paper leaves…’ and ‘…pledges to the last tree standing and a dying river…’: these were statements gleaned from one workshop. Being attuned to the fragility of the planet and the indivisible entanglement of all living things was a powerful thematic concern; one that barely existed in its present form 30 years ago. Emerging as an innovative mode of participatory learning in the post-second World War period under the tutelage of Heathcote (1983, 1991), Way (2013), Bolton (1985) Slade (1995) and others, advocates of process drama have perhaps always tended to challenge the materialist socio-political orthodoxy of capitalist societies and have found kinship with post-materialist thinkers (Inglehart, 1981) who valued quality of life, self-expression and creativity above the acquisition of material wealth.
As noted by Ingelhart (1981), there was in the late 1970s and early 1980s a nascent view that continuous economic growth was environmentally unsustainable, but what emerged from this conference was a powerful awareness of how drama, at least in the Antipodes, is now fused with post-humanist and new materialist thinking. The entanglement of all things, human and non-human, animate and inanimate, a ‘mash-up’ ontology in which Cartesian dualism, a pivot of Western thought, is a ‘centre’ that no longer holds, permeated the conference. On reflection, I wonder if the extent of this fusion is also true of societies that do not have indigenous populations, for whom post-humanism and new materialism (Fox & Alldred, 2019) are inherent to epistemologies rooted in ancient histories, or are we more in-tune with Barad (2007) because we are exposed to the knowledges and ontologies of Maori, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples? Have we become more cognisant of the knowledges and ontologies of indigenous peoples because of an intellectualism that shifts human-beings out of their anthropocentric gaze and into the realm of ‘holistic being’; that is, a world in which everything has relational ‘agency’ (Bennett, 2010; Chen, 2012)?
The complexities of such questions are beyond the scope of this article, but are deserving of further consideration in future research. The most salient point here is that drama is functioning in a space that is everywhere and a time that is everywhen. Western Sci-fi devices such as ‘the time-machine’ afford the possibility of bringing past time into present time. In the case of the workshop referred to above, it was to save the last tree and thereby preserve the possibility of future time by altering our actions in present time. Such plausibly fictive scenarios (the possibility of there being a last tree given our current rate of de-forestation) draws the participant into ‘a narrative made visible…’ (Esslin, 1987) by engaging the thinking, embodied and affective self in the 'mess of man (sic) (Heathcote, 1983) and, through ‘interthinking’ (Littleton & Mercer, 2013), and collaborative creative problem solving come to realisations that ‘I’ am indivisible from ‘we’ and that the collective is powerful.
This is what makes drama dangerous and drama specialists – ‘ethical oriented trouble makers’. We are radical practitioners, seeking to unravel the knots of neoliberalism by having the ‘…courage to let go…’ and give students ‘…the freedom to imagine alternatives…’ when neoliberal governments are telling them there are no alternatives other than austerity in the economic sphere and explicit direct instruction (EDI) in the classroom. Counterposed to such sterility, we are an ideational guerrilla army that tires but never wearies of dealing with difficulties because we have an expansive philosophy that bubbles and boils in the crucible of radical imaginings.
We draw on an ancient pedagogy; one that dates back to Socrates but has been revitalised through the work of Vygotsky (2012), Barnes and Todd (1977, 2021) and more recently Alexander (2018), and of course the pioneers of process drama cited above. Dialogic questions are thrown into the crucible where they incite curiosity, deep thought and speak ‘…to difficult ideas…’, but ultimately provide the basis for a cohesive and holistic experience ‘…on a journey of collective thinking…’ in which learners collaboratively construct and ‘…inhabit’ an imagined world… ‘…of seascape mornings – waking - in an unknown where-ness…’, or wander, '…along winding roads, across mountains…’ and '…through forests where a tree speaks…’ of a central tension (Dunn, 2016, p. 134).
Dramatic conflict and its resolution incite emotion and thought. It is in the reflective space that drama, under the skilful guidance of the teacher, is at its most pedagogically potent. And this is what makes us dangerous because we dare to think, and we dare our students to think, in a world of post-truth (D’Ancona, 2017) where X marks the spot of Trumpian fallacious rhetoric sponsored by maverick billionaires. And so, for me there was a circling back through memory of the reason why drama had drawn me to it in the first place. The journey is worthy and it was a joy to spend time with fellow travellers in a land of radical imaginings, with cognisance of the power of our pedagogy. Though you may be tired, you will never grow weary.