Creative critical reflection through poetry and prose

Artefacts considered in this paper include poetry and prose from my previous doctoral research with social work students; exploring how they experience, express, and manage the emotional content of practice learning. The poetry includes I-poems, where words of students are taken directly from verbatim research transcripts and reconstructed as part of my sense-making. Additionally, an autoethnographic response via poetry and prose creates a counterpoint and further perspective. This co-construction between my experience and that of student participants promotes authenticity via powerful messages in poetic form. In the context of performative research, these artefacts are best shared. Utilising teaching sessions within a 3-year undergraduate social work programme in the UK, as a performative medium, these research artefacts enable current social work students to explore overarching learning outcomes. Students engage with artefacts as an introduction to qualitative research. Students experience at first hand, poetry and prose as a non-traditional research medium through the methodology of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). This enables exploration of artefacts, promoting a deeper engagement with complex narratives. They discover how poetry and prose present a valuable conduit for tangible emotional engagement and connection. In addition, students develop their own creativity when reflecting on practice, to support critical reflection.