Poetic possibilities

'I'm not into poetry' I told Eva, a colleague who was encouraging me to create poems from my research interviews. This paper discusses how a crisis in my doctoral research, which explores lecturers' experiences of teaching in multicultural classrooms, led me to take up Eva's challenge. It reflects on possibilities that emerged to see research and my role as a researcher very differently. Writing poetic stories challenged my long-established beliefs about the nature of social research and created an opportunity to re-vision my response to my colleagues' confronting perspectives. I present one of the poetic stories to show something of my struggle with this lecturer's views, and my efforts to loosen the hold of my positivist beliefs about knowledge. Creating poetic stories opened possibilities for me to explore a new relationship with research and poetry