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Foreword Falling into Poetry
Falling is a metaphor for many things: falling in love, as in developing an affinity for; falling down, as in being tripped up unexpectedly; falling into something, as it were, by accident. All three have been a part of Dr. Monica Prendergast’s journey into arts-based inquiry that offers, through a harmony of topic and method, the possibilities for arts-based inquiry to reach a much wider audience than mainstream research practices. One of the challenges for researchers using qualitative methodologies has always been the difficulty of capturing the human emotional responses that are the contexts of much that we report on; what is so clearly present in transcriptions can become neutralized in the scholarly text. “A good piece of arts-based educational research,” write Barone and Eisner (2006), “is designed to enhance meanings to broaden and deepen on-going conversations.” The authors offer a number of criteria for judging the merits of such research. They speak of its “illuminating effect” to reveal what has been hidden or unnoticed, its ability to raise new questions and to focus the reader’s attention while, at the same time, broadening the landscape of application so that new connections may be woven (p. 102).