Poetic Insight into Student Motivation and Experience

Poetic inquiry is an approach which has been gaining popularity as a qualitative research method. This paper presents transcription poems (Miller, 2019) which have been generated using data from a project looking into student experiences of interrupted study. Sixteen mature undergraduate students studying part-time at a distance learning university were interviewed about their experiences of having a break from their studies. The resulting transcripts were indicative of emotional complexity around their attitudes to study, the situation which interrupted their studies and decisions to pause or resume. Such nuanced emotion can be lost when reporting the summaries of student situations whereas turning to poetry can (arguably) provide a more authentic representation. This paper seeks to demonstrate the power of poetic representation as an analytic means to portray student experiences. Using the exact words from interview transcripts gives authentic voice to the participants in portraying their lived experience allowing the reader or listener an embodied experience where they ‘feel with, rather than about a poem’ (Faulkner, 2020)