Poetic Inquiry Certificate
Limited to 15 participants!
Gain a solid foundation in poetic inquiry, an innovative arts-based research method that uses poetry to explore, interpret, and represent human experience. This 4-week online course provides students with a welcoming, practical introduction to poetic inquiry. Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:
- Define poetic inquiry and describe its key features, purposes, and underlying assumptions
- Identify and differentiate among major approaches to poetic inquiry (e.g., researcher-voiced, participant-voiced, literature-voiced)
- Recognize opportunities to incorporate poetic inquiry into your scholarly work or personal research interests
- Apply poetic inquiry techniques to generate, shape, and interpret qualitative materials across different forms (e.g., personal experience, participant data, scholarly texts)
- Experiment with multiple approaches to poetic inquiry and develop original poem(s) or a preliminary poetic inquiry project
After the course concludes, you’ll be invited to be a featured speaker at a virtual symposium, where you can share your creative work and reflections with fellow participants and celebrate the possibilities of poetic inquiry.
Upon completion, you will receive a certificate and a digital badge that can be uploaded to your LinkedIn account or other social platform.
Join Aaron Hoy, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Excellence in Scholarship and Research (CESR) at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Dr. Hoy is also an Editor at The Qualitative Report.
Why Poetic Inquiry?
Poetic inquiry is an arts-based form of qualitative research that uses poetry as a way of knowing, interpreting, and representing human experience. Leveraging poetry’s attention to language, rhythm, imagery, and space, poetic inquiry invites researchers to engage with data and experience in ways that are both analytic and evocative. For the poetic inquirer, meaning emerges through the interplay of words, form, and silence; as a result, poetry functions not only as a mode of representation, but also as a mode of analysis. Poetic inquirers work with interview transcripts, fieldnotes, personal experiences, scholarly texts, and other forms of qualitative data, shaping these materials into poems that offer affective insights difficult to achieve through conventional academic prose.
While poetic inquiry has become an increasingly visible component of arts-based and qualitative research, opportunities for structured, accessible training in the method remain limited. This course is designed as an introductory, practice-oriented entry point into poetic inquiry. It is particularly well suited for individuals who are new to the method, including scholars interested in integrating poetry into their research or teaching; practitioners who want to incorporate poetic approaches into assessment or reporting; and students or faculty seeking creative, flexible ways to engage qualitative data. Across four weeks, you will be introduced to multiple approaches to poetic inquiry (e.g., researcher-voiced, participant-voiced, and literature-voiced) and will engage in hands-on writing activities that allow them to experiment with each. No prior experience with poetry or arts-based research is required!
Topics
This certificate contains four modules to be completed within the four-week course. It will combine asynchronous coursework and weekly synchronous meetings, held remotely via Zoom.
- Week 1: Introduction to Poetic Inquiry
- You will learn about: definitions and key features of poetic inquiry; poetry as both analysis and representation; an overview of major approaches, including researcher-, participant-, and literature-voiced poetic inquiry
- You will engage in: introductory, low-stakes writing exercises designed to generate material and familiarize you with poetic ways of working
- Week 2: Researcher-Voiced Poetic Inquiry (vox autobiographia)
- You will learn about: using personal experience, memory, and reflection as sources of poetic inquiry; connections to autoethnographic and narrative approaches
- You will engage in: writing exercises that explore poetry as a mode of generating and interpreting meaning from personal experience
- Week 3: Participant-Voiced Poetic Inquiry (vox participare)
- You will learn about: crafting poems from qualitative data such as interview transcripts, fieldnotes, or artifacts; using techniques like deletion, selection, and rearrangement
- You will engage in: writing exercises using participant-generated or other source materials (you are encouraged, but not required, to bring qualitative data to work with; sample data will be provided for those who need it)
- Week 4: Literature-Voiced Poetic Inquiry (vox theoria)
- You will learn about: working with journal articles or other written scholarly sources to create poetic representations; approaches such as found poetry and erasure
- You will engage in: writing exercises that engage with literature as material (participants are encouraged to work with sources of your own choosing)
Registration Questions: Email workforce@mnsu.edu or call 507-389-1094
Training Questions: Email aaron.hoy@mnsu.edu
