“Knowing What It Is like”: Dialoguing with Multiculturalism and Equity Through Collective Poetic Autoethnographic Inquiry

Abstract

ABSTRACT:We offer an account of how we, a research team of three South African academics, have dialogued with multiculturalism and equity through collective poetic autoethnographic inquiry. The focus of the article is on our learning through reading and responding to published autoethnographies by three other South African academics. We share our learning about how poetry and dialogue can facilitate a generative entanglement with autoethnographies written by others. The article highlights the promise of collective poetic autoethnographic inquiry for opening up spaces for dialoguing with multiculturalism and equity.

Aligning with feminism: Critical autoethnographic reflections of a profeminist heterosexual male teacher educator

“…[C]ritical autoethnography is a fitting research method that allows autoethnography researchers to use their personal experiences and sympathetic eyes to analyze and critique injustice pertaining to educational contexts. (Marx et al 2017, p. 1) Autoethnographic scholarship is gaining traction in the South African higher education sector and is proving to be a compelling approach to research in the country's multifaceted sociocultural context (see Pillay et al, 2016;Pithouse-Morgan et al, 2017).…”

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“…These include poor undergraduate success and "throughputs" (particularly among students from underserved and disadvantaged communities); slow, if any, alteration of outdated curricula; higher education staff lacking in requisite graduate qualifications; an aging professoriate; and too few new and young researchers (Academy of Science of South Africa, 2010; South African Council on Higher Education, 2014; South African National Planning Commission, 2012). Moreover, the higher education landscape is still shadowed by persistent social divisions and distress rooted in lived experiences of unfairness, oppression, and alienation linked to, among other factors, race, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, ability/disability, and nationality (Pithouse-Morgan et al, 2012;Pithouse-Morgan, Pillay, & Naicker, 2017;Soudien et al, 2008;Timm, 2016). Because past inequalities and injustices have not been seen redressed in substantive ways, heated student protests have been a feature of the post-apartheid public higher education landscape since 1994 (Davids & Waghid, 2016).…”

“…In recent years, student Education, 1997). Hence, our vision of a multicultural higher education community is an expansive one in which a multiplicity of voices and lived human experiences is made visible and embraced as a vital collective learning resource within an enabling, pluralistic environment (Conle, 2004;Pithouse-Morgan et al, 2017;Pithouse-Morgan & Samaras, 2018).…”

“…The next phase of the inquiry involved us, as the TES leaders, composing research poems to evoke and communicate our individual understandings of the participants' analysis as represented in the four pantoum poems. Kathleen initiated this poetry writing process in her capacity as team leader and as a researcher who has frequently used poetry as an individual and collective creative activity (Pithouse-Morgan, 2016;Pithouse-Morgan et al, 2014;Pithouse-Morgan et al, 2017). She hoped to prompt creative analytical engagement with the pantoums by eliciting multiple representations using the traditional Japanese renga and tanka poetry formats (Poets.org, 2004a(Poets.org, , 2004b.…”