This article is designed to capture our musings on metaphors as we explore our own understandings of our professional identities: a philosopher-storyteller, a psychologist-poet, and a story-seeking-musician. We are teacher educators and researchers each with our own identity and sense of self. We are all women who work as colleagues, but we come from different educational backgrounds, have various research interests, and have our own unique approaches to teaching. We have discovered that during our ongoing conversations about our ‘‘professional’’ identities as teacher—educators, we have this one thread in common: when it becomes difficult to express who and what we are all about, we all reach for metaphors. As we engaged in dialogue about metaphor, we found that we could agree on a holistic and metaphorical identity that permeates all that we do, one that transforms the way we view ourselves and our work of teaching, learning, and researching.
This article discusses the need to engage students and teachers in active poetry writing. The authors document a process of learning how to practice poetry—one that is equally effective for teacher professional development, teacher self‐study, preservice teacher education, and classroom implementation. By actually writing poetry individually, with, and alongside their students, teachers will “learn by doing” and become more effective in teaching poetry in the classroom.
What teachers and students need to know extends beyond simply knowing about poetry; they need to know how to do it and how to appreciate it as a unique form of expression.
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