Education Majors’ Reflections about After-School Literacy Tutoring: A Poetic Exploration

Contemplating one’s teaching has long been an essential part of teacher education. Accordingly, as an instructor of a literacy methods course with a tutoring component, I asked education majors in the class to send me weekly e-mail reflections about their teaching experiences. However, they had difficulty considering their lessons. I knew that poetry stimulated introspections. Therefore, hoping to evoke the education majors’ reflexivity, I requested they create two poems (middle and end of the semester) that portrayed their perceptions and dilemmas related to their teaching practices and lessons. Using constant comparative analysis, I explored the education majors’ lyrical forms. Writing in a poetic voice prompted the education majors’ contemplations. However, rather than focusing on their lessons, their initial poems portrayed their anxieties about teaching while their end of semester poems centered on concern for children. Thus, as is typical in arts-based research, the study afforded generativity (puzzlements meriting additional investigation)