‘Looking for anchors’ : using reciprocal poetic inquiry to explore the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on our educator-artist selves

Abstract

As collaborative theatre-makers, university teachers, and researchers in South Africa, our symbiotic, interactive relationship has shaped the construction of our academic identities. The displacement caused by social distancing regulations and repeated government-mandated lockdowns, as well as our own shifting circumstances, have forced us to re-examine these academic identities as we negotiate the challenges of working together while not being able to inhabit the same physical space. In this study, we work dialogically, collaboratively and reciprocally, to interrogate our identities as educators in a creative discipline. Using poetic inquiry and reciprocal found poetry, we examined our teaching experiences in the moment of rupture created by the Covid-19 pandemic. We explore how we are (re)learning and (re)imagining who we are as teachers and what we do with, and for, our students, through interrogating our lived experiences in poetic form. In so doing, we recognize how, by accepting fluidity and contingency, having an ethic of care for ourselves and for our students, accepting our vulnerability, and trusting our resilience, we begin to find the positives, and to embrace, rather than resist, the challenges we are facing. Our process of creating our reciprocal found poems and the use of dialogue as a mode of analysis and meaning-making offer a methodological approach that others may find useful in developing their poetic self-study research.