My backstory...
I often feel that I have told my story a thousand times. With every telling I know I shift and move with it, so this is me (for now)! I live a quiet life, I am in my finishing year, so I live in my writing cave. Before I enter my writing cave, in those still moments of the morning, when the harbour mirrors the sky, I wander through the streets with an exeuberant spoodle named Toby #PhdDog
Into the writing cave...
As I lumber my way down the long corridor towards my writing cave, often flicking the lights on as I go or yelling hello to anyone who is in, I begin to bring forward the lived experiences of 12 New Zealand secondary school teachers living with impairments and/or chronic illness. Using an arts-based educational approach (Narrative & Poetic Inquiries) their stories challenge the status quo.They reveal the insitutional, attitudinal, and physical barriers to both becoming a teacher and being a teacher.
The lightening bolt...
There are many points of insipiration for my thesis. The main lightening bolt however came
from Mrs Black, a participant in my Masters' Thesis "I learn stuff". Mrs Black noted in a self derogatory way that she was looked down on by her colleagues because she taught the disabled students and she herself had a visible impairment. This struck a chord with me because having spent a year researching students and inclusive education (including teacher-student relationships) I could not recall New Zealand research that described including the perspectives of disabled teachers. This ultimately led me to my PhD thesis.
Untying knots...
In the second year of my PhD when I was a little disillusioned with the approach I was taking. I began searching for alternative ways to compliment my original design. I ultimately found Poetic Inquiry and Arts-Based Educational Research. This was a revelation for me. The approach combined with Narrative has allowed me to provoke and challenge, to bring forward the feeling from my data and to lay bare the experiences of disabled teachers. My thesis since has become punctuated with poetry!! The ars poetica below is an appendix in my thesis. For me it represents the texture of writing a poem and of creating a research poem. I wrote it before heading to a conference in a challenge to myself to describe my thesis in a series of poems. They were performed (including this one) at Contemporary Ethnography Across Disciplines, Hamilton, New Zealand, 2014.
Ars
Poetica - Research
In the second year of my PhD when I was a little disillusioned with the approach I was taking. I began searching for alternative ways to compliment my original design. I ultimately found Poetic Inquiry and Arts-Based Educational Research. This was a revelation for me. The approach combined with Narrative has allowed me to provoke and challenge, to bring forward the feeling from my data and to lay bare the experiences of disabled teachers. My thesis since has become punctuated with poetry!! The ars poetica below is an appendix in my thesis. For me it represents the texture of writing a poem and of creating a research poem. I wrote it before heading to a conference in a challenge to myself to describe my thesis in a series of poems. They were performed (including this one) at Contemporary Ethnography Across Disciplines, Hamilton, New Zealand, 2014.
Ars
Poetica - Research
Poetry is pleated into the page,
Origami creased and reformed
Tensions turned in
And stitch together stories
Narratives of the ghost of lives
Lived away from the recorder
Puncture into pinpoints of silence
Piercings that braille the
underside
Till the holes and bumps
Fill the blankness
(LJS, 2014)
In the end...
Perseverance, creativity, and passion have underpinned my experience of my thesis journey. You dont have to have all of them to do your PhD but if you persevere you can do it!!
