Polyvocal Play: A Poetic Bricolage of the Why of Our Transdisciplinary Self-Study Research

ABSTRACT

We have come to conceptualize our transdisciplinary, transnational, and transcultural interaction and reciprocal learning through self-study research as polyvocal professional learning. Our conceptualization of polyvocality has made visible how dialogic encounters with diverse ways of seeing, knowing, and doing can deepen and extend professional learning in self-study research. For this collaborative self-study, we created a poetic bricolage composed of frequently used words in three of our published research poems as we asked, “Why? Why does our work together exist? And why should anyone care?” What emerged became an organic abstract of the impetus for our collaborative learning over time. Through inventing a poetic bricolage, we were able to make visible and available how our multiple interests, practices, and methods have come together to support fluid, dialogic co-learning, and re-learning. Discovering the why of our work included unearthing our gravitation toward transdisciplinary scholarship, which offers university faculty a wide range of possibilities for co-learning and co-creativity. Our demonstration of methodological inventiveness in action through poetic bricolage will be useful to others interested in exploring the promise and tensions of plurality, interaction and interdependence, and creative activity in self-study methodology.