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An Editorial by the Guest Editors for a special issue of in education on the practices of poetic inquiry.

Parents play significant roles in their children’s learning. Part of those roles include making decisions about when and where their children go to school, or, if those decisions are, or seem, impossible, parents make decisions about how they are going to navigate this apparently inevitable relationship—parents and schools. This article explores some decisions two parents made about their daughter’s learning as she headed into school, and during her early school years. The author is aware that not all parents would, or even could, make some of the decisions he made with his partner about their child’s learning. The stories contained in this article are offered not as examples of what constitutes good parenting, or good decision-making about relationships with schools, but as reflective pathways into understanding how difference locates us within expected relationships.

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One of the challenges we face in higher education is knowing who we are as individuals and as communities. Poetic inquiry (Prendergast, Leggo, & Sameshima, 2009) is a way into that knowing, a way of exploring our own identities and our relationships with each other. Poetic inquiry creates a space for evocative knowing. This research project, supported by the Acadia University Research Fund, included two graduate students as co-participants, one graduate student as co-investigator, and a principal investigator. Through writing, feedback, editing, and rewriting, we sought to create poetry that would show our identities as individuals and in relationships with our communities. We met for four three-hour sessions to write poetry, after reading the work of a poet / scholar. For our fifth session, we performed our poetry at a public reading that was advertised throughout the University community. Audience members were given a copy of our chapbook of poetry (Guiney Yallop, Naylor, Sharif, & Taylor, 2009), which included participant-selected pieces from our own work completed during, or between, the sessions.