A poetic inquiry on passive reflection

This chapter emerges as a surprise, as we have come through this writing to understand that critical to arts-based collaboration or participatory research is mindful attendance to the in-between-relational-spaces of tensions, absences, learning and curiosities that are revealed through reflection over time. Over the last few years, the five of us have collaborated on a variety of arts-based research projects, bringing poetry, drama, and dance to understanding education and our experiences as educators working with pre-service and graduate students in faculties of Education and Social Work in post-secondary institutions. In our collaborations, we have invited each other into ongoing conversations about our ways of being (Wiebe & Guiney Yallop, 2010), particularly how multiple art forms have been part of our engagement in and presentation of our work across discourses. Poetry has been a way to return to, reflect on, and share significant moments in our lives (Wiebe & Margolin, 2012); it has been a way to understand how we make meaning in our unique educational contexts (Wiebe & Fels, 2010); and it has provided the means and form to represent our collaborations provocatively, a way to disrupt the comprehensible, a space to re-imagine culturally-bound knowledge processes (Wiebe & Snowber, 2011).