National

Found poems by Helen Woodrow

A found poem is a piece of writing that was not intended as a poem but is given that life by the “finder”. Such poems are created from text designed for other purposes—for example, parts of newspaper articles or dictionary entries, and incidental uses of language such as lists, notes or scraps of conversation. Found poems use the language of the original text.

These found poems are extracted from two published research studies. The first is from Women of Crisis II: Lives of Work and Dreams (1980) by Robert and Jane Hallowell Coles. This is one of many books Coles has authored about the human condition. The second was found in Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms, a classic ethnographic work by Shirley Brice Heath.

Can you imagine the world of knowledge without such interpretive studies? Both would have failed to achieve the gold standard revered in current thinking about educational research as they do not privilege experimental and quasi-experimental designs. Can you think of other rich research that would be cast out by those standards?

Long-term Listeners

For a year or two, we both floundered.
You don’t usually read about all the
confusions that researchers experience,
the shifts in thinking,
the changes of tack.

Maybe some research is different—
a straight line from A to B.
But we zigzagged.

We searched for ways to
write about what we were hearing...
We were trying to learn how to tell
stories—the stories of the people
we were meeting.

From Women of Crisis II (1980) by
R & J Hallowell Coles

For Learning Researchers

By many standards of judgement,
this book cannot be considered
a model piece of....
research.

Educators should not look for
experiments,
controlled
conditions,
systematic
score-keeping...

Nor should psychologists
look for data taped at
periodic intervals
under
similar conditions
over
a pre-designated
period of time.

What this book does do is
record the natural flow of
community and classroom life
over nearly a decade.

From Ways with Words (1983)
by Shirley Brice Heath