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New Alchemy: Using Poetry to Reimagine Disciplinary Knowledge

True understanding may entail a forgetting of what one knows. And poetry may be an ideal vehicle of this forgetting. The act of writing a poem can take the poet on a journey where preconceived ideas and norms are suspended so the world can be seen anew (Barnstone, xii). This might work for professors and students as well. Professors and students are intimately connected with their disciplines. This disciplinary knowledge becomes the reservoir for the creative endeavor, but the reservoir is much deeper than disciplinary knowledge; it entails an individual’s experiences, hopes, anxieties, and dreams. As a professor-poet, I suspend the boundaries of what I believe to be true and tap into the reservoir of this raw stuff to create a poem. I also have my students do this. The goal of this assignment is for students to produce something creative and not totally bound to facts, but rather something that uses facts and theories to provoke more questions (Barone & Eisner, 3). Below are the directions I give to my students and an example for them.

Poetry Assignment

Use the readings this week [insert your subject here] and any other theories we learned that might be helpful.

  1. Make a list of important concepts and vocabulary of this discipline, field, or topic (e.g. assessment, constructivism, etc.)
  2. Reflect on these terms and ask yourself what they mean, how they can be interpreted (or misinterpreted), and how different people might interpret these ideas. Also ask yourself how you can creatively position or even creatively misconstrue these ideas to create new questions.
  3. Write a poem! Consider the concepts and your reflections and write a creative piece using these terms (see my example below). This does not have to rhyme. Just put the concepts together in creative ways and/or tell a story or leave the readers with questions. Remember, this does not have to be “true.” It can and should be a creative piece that provokes the reader’s thoughts.
  4. Please comment on two other people’s poems on the discussion board.

Example

In the example below, I creatively reworked ideas related to the topic of assessment. Assessment and measurement are obviously important topics for educators and society in general. In the poem, however, I challenge this notion and suggest that the act of measurement forces us to exclude many important facets of our lived existence. The alchemist reference may suggest that we need to transform our paltry assessments into something much greater to truly measure our worth (but alchemy was a failed science, so…). But these are only my interpretations. What do you think the poem means?

The Alchemist

Measure this
Measure it with a test
Or an inch
But these measurements
Are fossils
Relics of a modern time
When measurements comforted
And gave hope
But now
The scholars are beggars
And curators
And
The alchemist takes her throne
Teach us to turn
Poems into gardens
And rulers into suns
Teach us to turn
Coins into stars

Works Cited

Barnstone, Willis. To Touch the Sky: Spiritual, Mystical, and Philosophical Poems in         Translation. New Directions, 1999.

Barone, Tom & Elliot Eisner. Arts Based Research. SAGE, 2011.

Angelo J. Letizia is a professor of education at Notre Dame of Maryland University in Baltimore, MD. He has published three books of poetry, all with Silver Bow Press. He has also published in numerous literary magazines and journals. His current research interests are arts-based research, citizenship, and leadership. 

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