A poetic inquiry into lecturers' encounters with technological teaching tools

Abstract

In this study I asked how poetic inquiry (PI) can contribute to capturing the full complexity of lecturers’ encounters with technological teaching tools; and how Actor Network Theory (ANT) and its theoretical relations can help to comprehend how agency plays out during these encounters. I used the performative or reflexive interview technique to interview 12 lecturers from the Durban University of Technology about their encounters with technology. This method created conditions where something poetic could be expressed – truth was performed together by interviewee and interviewer. To understand lecturers’ agency, I analysed virtual interview recordings by creating poetic representations (participant-voiced poems). I prompted conversations by sending interviewees a collection of my autobiographical poems some weeks before the interviews – these poems capture encounters I experienced first-hand as insider-researcher. In preparation for the interviews, I also wrote a series of theory-voiced poems from engaging with the literature. I found that thinking with ANT while writing poetry by way of analysis, enabled me to trace networks of human and non-human actors, to gain a clearer understanding of a world where we perform agency within networks of things. Because I worked like this and deliberately avoided an overall thematic analysis of the body of poetry (which tends to seek common themes), I was able to disrupt patterns and thus the poems foregrounded and articulated divergence, difference, dis-closure – the local textures of actor networks. This study has found that the power of the particular is concentrated by combining the instruments of PI and ANT – this dual strategy has helped the poet-researcher to identify, animate, follow actors and stage encounters. ANT and its theoretical relations worked together with the devices of PI, to illuminate the great variety of ways in which technological things have authorised or blocked the agency of lecturers at the DUT. The strategy of coupling PI with ANT culminated in the development of the ANT-PI question kit, which enabled the discussion of selected poems in relation to theory and methodology. In the kit, each research question is accompanied by a set of theory-focused questions. I prepared the reader for creative engagement from the first chapter, ending with the invitation to use the kit to unlock the poetry collection which concludes the thesis. Having pointed out specific contributions above, overall through affect and form, the study makes a contribution to social science, technology and education, yielding a collection of 46 poems. My scholarly regard for subconscious knowing and the imagination deepened as I trusted these devices continually throughout this inquiry to illuminate truth. I was surprised by the poems and what they revealed. The thesis is a demonstration of the kind of knowing that emerges through fidelity to the belief that imagination is equal to reason.