Visual and Written Experiments with Poetic Inquiry: Inheriting the Future and the Past of Schooling

This study came out of multiple, displaced returns to my own remembered sites of learning, loosely anchored in the four schools that I attended as a K-12 student in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts and in a suburb of Tel Aviv, Israel. These returns opened up ways of theorizing relationships between my own sociocultural contexts of learning (and teaching) and how I have come to learn through, with, and by poetry. Collapsing constructed distances between present, past, and future states of education as well as distances between academic disciplines, this study brings the question of what it means to learn and know through poetry into multifaceted relation to the (not) teaching and learning of poetry in schools today. Through visual and written experiments with poetic inquiry onto autobiographical sites of learning, I labor to understand what poetic inquiry might do as an educational practice in the context of an unequal system of education which has shaped me and which I can participate in reproducing and/or changing as an educator, scholar, researcher, and poet/artist. Also, through both the form and content of this study, I look to trouble dominant modes of knowledge production and to explore how poetry can work as a way of making new forms of thinking/feeling possible. I intend for the visual images and text to touch on the same plane. Neither is illustrative of nor dependent on the other; instead, each becomes reactivated and reconstituted in relation