Writing on the Walls: Poetic Transcription as a Research Conversation

Abstract

In this paper, I explore visual displays in elementary schools as more than just pretty pictures, but thoughtful deliberations about what it means to think to see and see to think with teachers. One cannot point to a classroom/school bulletin board and say of a visual display that ‘it is this way’ or ‘it is another way’. Rather, it is through relational connections—utilizing poetry and poetic transcription to engage the multiple voices of the visual with those who inhabit classroom spaces—that one makes sense of what is occurring. It is through a practice of noticing that I, as researcher, endeavour to create and find meaning through a hermeneutic lens. As soon as I think I know what has been captured in the visual displays on the walls, it shifts, moves away, and I am drawn into another question to locate/relocate. This paper seeks to reveal the meaning of these spaces in conversations with a teacher, with and as poetry returned to one another, as a way to make sense of visual displays.