This article reflects on the use of poetic inquiry to explore one transcript from a study I did in the fall of 2020 of rural high school English teacher experiences during the Coronavirus pandemic. The exercise was done as a part of my graduate coursework alongside a discourse analysis I was working on using the same data; therefore, I chose to conduct the poetic transcription as an opportunity for reflexivity within the context of my study.
Rationale
I originally chose to interview rural high school English teachers for one primary reason: I was one.
I had previously been unsuccessful with a study in which I had no field experience or immersion with my participants, so I decided to study a context with which I was already familiar. Because of my background and membership as a rural high school English teacher, I had immediate rapport with my participants. In addition, I was knowledgeable about the things my participants were talking about, and I resonated with their descriptions as I experienced the same or similar circumstances for myself. This condition aided my collection of research in the field, but it also provided a potential stumbling block for my own biases to dominate my interpretation of collected data.
As described by Grbich (2013), “poetic inquiry creates a third voice—one that is neither that of the researcher nor the researched but is a combination of the two” (p. 130). In this way, poetic transcription served to facilitate some of my reflexive thought. I created a speaker based on traits of both my participant, Ms. Candice (pseudonym), and myself; and in doing so I became more mindful of the ways in which my perceptions and Ms. Candice’s perceptions aligned, intersected, and differed.
When I first began my study, my intention was to characterize the experience of teaching English at a rural high school during the pandemic. But because I took the direction of a discourse analysis, the interpretive, explanatory framework I started with was moved to the backburner. This poetic inquiry made some space for me to revisit the interpretive arena and develop a clearer picture (or at least, a more clearly articulated interpretation) of what it was like to exist as a teacher during the pandemic—what we felt and experienced on a daily basis. In this same vein Richardson (1993) remarked that
by settling words together in new configurations, the relations created through echo, repetition, rhythm, rhyme let us hear and see the world in a new dimension. Poetry is thus a practical and powerful means for reconstitution of worlds. It suggests a way out of the numbing and deadening, disaffective, disembodied, schizoid sensibilities characteristic of phallocentristic social science. (p. 705)
My understanding of my own experiences and my interpretations of my participants’ experiences have been challenged, confirmed, reified, and reshaped as a result of thinking differently and even artistically about my data. I discuss this further in the final sections of this post.
Transcription Procedures
Initial transcription began following Glesne’s (1999) description that “the process involves word reduction while illuminating the wholeness (my emphasis) and interconnectedness of thoughts” (p. 183). I reread the transcript of Ms. Candice’s (pseudonym) interview and underlined words and phrases which I felt 1.) reduced the original text and were parts of the essence of the interview and 2.) lent themselves to artistic play/emphasis, such as repetitions, snippy comments, and patterns of rhythm. Next, I typed the underlined words into a new document. I did this by hand, as a method to refamiliarize, reevaluate, and reconsider the words and phrases—view them as both partial and whole—rather than copy-and-paste. As I reinterpreted the words and phrases through an artistic lens, I was also mindful of creating a speaker who could represent the essence of what it was like to teach English at a rural Tennessee high school during the pandemic. Though this speaker (described later) designedly shared characteristics of Ms. Candice, myself, and—in my mind and to some extent—all of my teacher friends and colleagues, the speaker was a third voice which represented, from my understanding, the common experience I originally intended to study. As Glesne (1999) described,
Through shaping the presentation of the words of an interviewee, the researcher creates a third voice that is neither the interviewee’s nor the researcher’s but is a combination of both. This third voice disintegrates any appearance of separation between observer and observed. (p. 183)
The speaker I created, I hoped, would illustrate circumstances and events which any rural high school English teacher might read and say Yep, I remember that. I created a word cloud to describe the speaker (pictured below). I used a randomized word cloud for the purpose of presenting the words without any hierarchy—I didn’t want one characteristic to be first and one to be last, but I wanted to present the words as equals, emphasizing the idea that each is a part of a whole. Each characteristic stands alone, and yet it doesn’t. This is discussed later.
Next, I created tables in Microsoft Word in which to transcribe, rework, and play with the data. These tables were within the original document I had made to house my initial poetic transcriptions and this document was used as a workspace for various exercises. For instance, I sorted the data by themes such as working during the pandemic, it may look good on paper but it doesn’t work, and students prizing finances over education. I also thematically paired lines from the transcript with “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred Lord Tennyson (not included here). These exercises were enjoyable and useful in imagining the data in different ways.
Finally, I compiled one final poem into a table titled Essence of the Transcript in an effort to provide an answer to the original research question with which I began my study: how do rural high school English teachers who taught during the pandemic describe their working experiences? A polished version of this poem is presented below.
Poetic Representation
This section contains an untitled free verse poem constructed from a transcript of an interview with Ms. Candice, 42, who at the time had been teaching at the same school in Blue Lake County (pseudonym) for 11 years. Though the lines of the poem are taken directly from the transcript, Ms. Candice is not the speaker of the poem. The immediate section describes the created, fictional speaker and is followed by the poem, as well as my annotation of the poem.
Discussion of the Speaker
The speaker in the following poems is neither myself nor Ms. Candice, but is rather a fictional third voice with which any rural high school English teacher who taught during the pandemic might resonate.
Across the board, teaching during the pandemic year was an exhausting, difficult experience for participants and for myself. The speaker then, of course, is overworked, underpaid, and feels trapped in her circumstances, desiring to move on and be someplace where she feels appreciated, but immobilized by inaccess to resources.
In order to express the character of the speaker, I constructed a randomized word cloud (pictured below) of adjectives and descriptors of the speaker. The reader is encouraged to spend time thinking about what each word means as a stand-alone descriptor as well as how it relates to the other descriptors in the cloud. The intention behind the word cloud (and the title/theme of this paper) was inspired by Richardson’s (1993) explanation that
poetic representation reveals the process of self-construction, deferrals and transformations, the reflexive basis of self-knowledge, the inconsistencies and contradictions of a life spoken as a meaningful whole. The poem is a whole which makes sense of its parts; and a poem is parts that anticipate, shadow, undergird the whole. That is poems can be experienced simultaneously as both whole and partial. (p. 704)
The speaker in the poem is full of contradictions: caring and unsympathetic, hopeful and immobile, strict and flippant, chill and angry, ethnocentric and free-thinking. As I searched through teacher interviews for evidence of deficit discourses, I found it necessary to continually remind myself that teachers who propagate unquestioned institutional values and reinforce inequitable structures are themselves, at some level, also victims of those discourses. Through exploring a created speaker who held such conflicting viewpoints, I was reminded that my participants, and myself, were made up of many parts and, like poems, could “be experienced simultaneously as both whole and partial” (Richardson, 1993, p. 704). This stance helped me to refrain from making judgements on my participants and focus, rather, on the power of the institution and the social hierarchies that enforce it.
Before the reader explores the poem, it would be beneficial to spend time considering how the various descriptors in the word cloud characterize the speaker both individually and within the whole. The speaker is never only one thing—though at times she may be oppressive, she is also compassionate. As institution and intuition merge in the perspectives of real-world teachers, such contradictions do emerge as teachers learn and struggle and grow and interact in their classrooms.
The speaker in the poem that follows is a middle-aged, overworked, hopeful, assimilated, free-thinking single mother of two, a PhD student with two Master’s degrees making $34,000 a year at the school she’s been working at for 11 years. She has previously been the Advanced Placement instructor for juniors and seniors, but this year she has been bumped down to freshmen, allegedly because the principal’s daughter failed her class. She is demotivated, angry, and drunk as hell—blowing off some steam after work and dreading the exhausting routine all over again tomorrow. She wants things to go back to the way they were before the pandemic procedures dominated her classroom and her life, and she also wants to get away, move up in the world, and be in a place where she feels appreciated. She is all of these things while also being a dedicated, caring teacher who wants the best for her students and makes sacrifices so that they make gains.
Free Verse Poem
I’ve always been a level 5 teacher.
I’m working triple duty.
All I do is fill out forms.
So many forms.
Forms when I come into work, forms for kids who aren't doing their work, forms for this, forms for that—
It's just incredible.
I’m a level 5 teacher.
Recently my administrator came to see me: I wasn't interacting and teaching enough.
And I told her I can’t interact. I can’t interact with my online kids.
My virtual kids: They never log in on time. The bell rings—they’re fifteen minutes late. I have to stop— reiterate everything I’ve just done.
I’ve always been a level 5 teacher.
I have my desk taped off at 6 feet. A thousand times a day I say “put your mask on over your nose.” The kids, they don’t want to wear the masks. We have Trump flags flying out the back of trucks: that’s what they’re wearing for masks.
What works in Nashville doesn’t necessarily work here. They may want to wear masks and do blah blah, blah, but that doesn’t work with our kids in our environment: we cannot breathe.
(deep breath)
I’ve always been a level 5 teacher.
My principal was grumbling: “When I was a teacher I didn’t take a lunch break.” “When I was a teacher I worked multiple hours at home.”
Excuse my language, but, BITCH, I’m working 70 hours a week. What more do you want from me? It’s just incredible.
I can’t function and walk around and talk to kids and follow their guidelines. I just doesn’t work.
I’m a level 5 teacher. We’re supposed to put all of our lessons in Google. But then we have to put our plans in Planbook. And the English department just added a new program and it’s all in StudySynch,
But then we have to use Zoom.
(sigh)
Tomorrow I will probably spend 8 hours reading essays, reading short answers, reading this-question-that-question: those are hours I’m not getting paid for. They’re just hours I’m taking away from my family.
I’ve always been a level 5 teacher.
It’s incredible.
It just doesn’t work.
I’m gonna need more happy pills.
Researcher's Annotations on the Poem
The feeling of “working triple duty” was certainly common among participants and teachers I worked with, myself included, during the pandemic. Forms, forms, forms—the policies (or lack thereof in some cases) implemented by schools, as usual, dramatically increased work for teachers who were already struggling to adjust to new instructional strategies for which they had received little or no training. Regardless of experience or level, teachers I worked with or studied with agreed that they were just being expected to do too much with too little, again, as usual.
My school as well as the school at which Ms. Candice taught used what they called a hybrid model, but was actually just in-person instruction of students present in a classroom with a camera so virtual students could also attend. We were told to teach as we normally would, and we received no training or development in virtual instruction pedagogy. But then as our virtual students’ grades were predictably terrible due to missing assignments and absences caused by internet connectivity, we were simply told to get them engaged.
The situation described by Ms. Candice and here by the speaker of having to stop fifteen minutes into class to reiterate instruction to a virtual student who had just logged on was a daily occurrence even months into the Fall semester. It was exhausting, and even the most experienced teachers I knew felt ineffective in connecting with their virtual students. As I think back, I think this strongly contributed to a negative opinion of virtual instruction which was very common among rural teachers with whom I worked and studied.
The speaker describes an environment rich with ethnocentrism. During the pandemic year, the United States experienced far more than the spread of illness. President Trump’s volatile opposition to Critical Race Theory (CRT) and fascist response to the global Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement echoed in geographical areas dominated by Conversative ideologies and rhetoric. The speaker (and Ms. Candice, and most of the teachers with whom I worked) indicates that there is a difference between big city and small town life—the reality in the city is not the reality here. As I reflect, I see how this notion informed not only a common rural rhetoric that the virus wasn’t a real threat, but also the mischaracterization and criminalization of the BLM movement.
I remember, during the return to campus in the fall especially, White teachers and students complaining about wearing masks saying “I can’t breathe”, which was a common expression of protest at BLM rallies and in the media. I remember being blown away by how tone deaf this expression seemed coming from a White person about a paper mask when the entire globe had watched as George Floyd was strangled to death by the police.
This tone deafness strikes me here again in this poem. The speaker trivializes the safety precautions taken by “Nashville”, effectively providing a contrast between the city folks (who believe in that silly virus and systemic racism) and the folks around here who feel oppressed and suffocated by the CDC regulations. (Literally some of the people in the small town I lived in were ready to riot because the Sam’s Club two towns over required masks.) The concerns and circumstances of others were ignored, and the BLM movement was characterized as criminal and childish by teachers and students who were totally disconnected from that reality.
The speaker claims to know what is best for her students, even while she admittedly struggles to function in the same oppression system. But this is only a part of the whole; in fact, there are times when the speaker demonstrates a caring, sympathetic attitude. Yes, there are deficit discourses present in classrooms. And there is also much learning, encouraging, and unity in those same classrooms. The strategy toward equity and multicultural education, therefore, is not in eliminating teachers but in educating them, trusting that it is their level of awareness rather than malicious intent which overlooks deficit discourses.
I recall the pandemic rhetoric that “we’re all in this together” and how it seemed out-of-touch coming from celebrities and political leaders hunkered down in their mansions while Americans worried about the economy and struggled due to lack of resources. The same thing happened on a small scale: administrators and district leadership tossed about encouraging quips and reminders of our all being in the same boat, but teachers were the ones in the classrooms trying to balance standards, safety, and sanity.
There was very much a sense that the whole world of education had changed (and some administrators seemed not to understand this) when schools reopened in the fall, and, though teachers I worked with and studied with were vocal about the overwhelming stress of working overtime and feeling responsible for enforcing impossible safety precautions (you can bet I still had 35 students in my “socially distanced” classroom), the rules, regulations, and paperwork only continued to increase for months into the Fall semester.
An additional reason the fall return to school was so difficult for both students and teachers was the absolute technology and software overkill. Rather than streamlining and using just one or two computer programs, my school used multiple overlapping programs like Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams. Students sometimes accessed class content through different means in each of their classes. This was overwhelming and difficult to keep up with for students and for teachers, especially on top of the expectation that teachers would virtually stream every single class, every single day. With too many programs to keep up with, most of the teachers I worked and studied with had no time to for grading and lesson prep during the school day, and if these things did get done, it was because the teacher sacrificed personal hours.
Throughout the poem the speaker refrains the line about being a level 5 teacher. This is to emphasize the point that even some of the most experienced, confident teachers were out of their element teaching during the pandemic, not because they were incapable, but because they were untrained in virtual pedagogies and overworked by the district. The speaker also repeats the expression “it’s incredible” throughout the poem to describe the workload and expectations to which teachers were held. There was, especially during the fall semester, a ubiquitous sense that there was no way teachers could possibly accomplish everything they were expected to do. Of course, teachers responded to this problem in different ways—some by working themselves sick, and some by just avoiding work altogether. The speaker’s claim that it “just doesn’t work” is an observation gained by hard-earned experience. Though Ms. Candice was probably joking during her interview about needing more “happy pills”, this was also a real trend I noticed as I worked and gathered data. Nearly all of the teachers I knew (myself included) used some type of substance, be it Xanax, marijuana, alcohol, or anxiety medication, to combat stress.
Conclusion
Ultimately my creation of and interaction with this poetic transcription of a teacher interview which I also, separately, analyzed for deficit discourses served to refine and add to my thinking and understanding, largely because I spent dedicated time considering the feelings associated with my participant’s and my own experiences, rather than focusing on only the words and the power dynamics those words communicated.
I worked creatively and artistically to explore some of the common feelings associated with teaching English in a rural high school during the Coronavirus pandemic, and in doing so I was reminded of the humanity of my participants, as well as the many experiences, sensations, and attitudes I shared with them. In doing so I have cultivated a stronger divide between the interpretivist approach in poetry and the post structuralist paradigm in discourse analysis.
Using poetic inquiry, I have looked at the parts within the whole and considered ways in which teachers, including myself, work to perpetuate deficit discourses unwittingly. This has led to a renewed focus, for my discourse analysis, on the structures which enforce power relationships and how they can be resisted. Richardson and St. Pierre (2005), citing Foucault, suggested that the act of writing creates a playground in which “we might loosen the hold of received meaning that limits our work and our lives” (p. 969) and challenge the unquestioned perceptions we have previously held. Writing is, therefore, a method of inquiry and can be used to produce new knowledge by different means; and writing annotatively about the poem, I found new insights and also worked to let go of some biases and judgements I held.
As I have recalled ways in which I, being in the same situations as the speaker of the poem, also contributed to deficit discourses in my classroom, I am reminded that in order to work toward equity and eliminate deficit ideologies in Tennessee's rural public schools there must be structural change; therefore, rather than continuing the trend of placing too much responsibility on teachers, I will be mindful in communicating that caring teachers like Ms. Candice perpetuate discourses not because of meanness or moral failure, but because of not being aware of these discourses since they are embedded and perceived as self-evident.
By analyzing the parts through various lenses, I have a stronger idea of the whole and am more equipped to thoroughly describe the discourses my study has identified and ways in which teachers themselves may be marginalized, underappreciated, and immobilized by the power-laden structures they resiliently work within.
References
Glesne, C. (1999). Becoming qualitative researchers: An introduction (2nd ed.). Longman.
Grbich, C. (2013). Qualitative data analysis: An introduction. Sage.
Richardson, L. (1993). Poetics, dramatics, and transgressive validity. The case of the skipped line. The Sociological Quarterly, 34(4), 695–710
Richardson, L. & St. Pierre, E. A. (2005). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.). Handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed.). pp. 959–978. Sage.
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