Connecting Poetic Inquiry and Playful Higher Education

This session aims to present and discuss higher education playful learning and the use of poetic inquiry for conceptual understanding and collaborative reflection. Throughout the session, the participants are invited to write their own playful poetry, try a variety of poetic activities - and to connect their writing in a collaborative long-form poem.
The sessions draw from three years (2020-23) of empirical and interventionist studies framed by Design-Based Research into playful higher education and collaborative practice. Here, numerous experiments with reflective writing have been tested and developed - with developments from introspective reflections to still more poetic and collaborative reflections. This session highlights research and student experiences and practices of playful poetry, and how it enables playful conceptualisations and reflections while becoming a medium for new communicative and collaborative participation strategies. It approaches ‘Poetic Inquiry’ (Faulkner, 2019; Galvin & Pendergast, 2019) as a range of research methods that emphasise alternative modes of expression to allow for communicative, embodied, and aesthetic depth. These approaches display potential in students’ playful collaboration, conceptual exploration and reflective thinking together. The sessions wrap up with an open discussion of applications within higher education pedagogy - and probably some more poetic writing.

Time: 60 min.

Faulkner, S.L. (2019). Poetic Inquiry: Craft, Method and Practice (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351044233
Galvin, K.T. & Prendergast, M.. Poetic Inquiry II – Seeing, Caring, Understanding (2016) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6300-316-2