Foreword : research literacy : supporting teacher research in English language teaching : special supplement I

Abstract

This poem is a succinct reflection on educational research. One of the first things I learnt on my research journey as a doctoral student was that in order to hone my understanding of the teaching and learning of poetry I had to position myself as a curious observer of the processes that teachers and students engage in as part of their negotiation of poetic texts, including ones by Shakespeare. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Moth tells Adriano that his knowledge about how to woo women with song was purchased by means of a small amount of observation. Like Moth, I discovered that knowledge about my area of interest was best acquired by means of those proclivities associated with the act of observing the world. My PhD was meant to build my expertise about a complex set of interactions in the poetry classroom, but unless I had developed the inclination to engage in observation and inquiry it was unlikely that I would have succeeded.