A teacher’s experiences highlighted by a stimulus poem

Abstract

The extract below is from a semi-structured interview I held with a teacher of English, F, at a post-16 college in Malta. It formed part of a pilot study and was the first time I was trialling the interview guide. The interview was conducted in a one-to-one manner and lasted about 45 minutes. It took place after I had observed the teacher delivering a 55-minute poetry lesson to a class of 14 students studying English at Advanced Level and who were about to sit for their examination in less than six months’ time. The teacher had 12 years’ teaching experience and held a Master’s degree in English Literature. I conducted classroom observation by means of an events checklist using interval recording. The purpose of the interview was to explore the teacher’s beliefs and practices in relation to poetry teaching. Towards the end of the interview, stimulus material was used to allow the teacher to elaborate further on her experiences as a teacher of poetry. The stimulus consisted of the poem ‘Introduction to Poetry’ by Billy Collins (1988). When poetry is used in qualitative research it has the potential ‘to communicate findings in multidimensional, penetrating, and more accessible ways’ (Cahnmann, 2003, p. 35). I realised that by incorporating a question on a poem in the interview guide I could better understand ‘the richness and complexity of the observed world’ (Cahnmann, 2003, p. 34). I chose this poem partly because of what Collins (2003) says about poetry and school: ‘all too often it is the place where poetry goes to die’ (p. xvii). By means of Collins’s (1988) poem I wanted the interviewee to provide me with more than her reading of the poem; I was mostly interested in what she thought it said about her teaching experience.