Cultivating the
Qualitative
Borderlands
Educational Poetics and the Politics of
Inclusivity
Andrew Gitlin
expanding legitimate
knowledge
Where traditional research standards
such as validity and reliability have
remained unchanged for decades, there
is now significant movement within the
field of qualitative research to rethink
those terms with the intent of expanding
the bounds of what is considered
legitimate knowledge and research
practice (Alvesson & Skoldberg, 2000;
Lather, 1994; Wolcott, 1990).
politics of inclusivity in
qualitative research
 Insightful scholars in this epistemological
field have advanced a politic of inclusion
by making the role of the researcher, the
relation between researcher and
research participant, the bounds of
legitimate knowledge, and the groups
who can and should legitimately produce
knowledge more inclusive.
research question
 Is it time to examine the politics of inclusion
and consider what might lie on the other side of
this boundary? To address this query and see
anew the politics of inclusion in many extended
(I use the word extended to suggest that these
methodologies have already pushed against
established qualitative research boundaries)
qualitative approaches, I will use an alternative
political humanist approach, educational
poetics, as a comparative foil.
politics and aesthetics
 Where art is often associated with the
creation of images, the social world, and
culture in particular, also create images.
At times, these images tie us to the past
and at others times these images open
up new possibilities to view others,
relationships, and behavior differently
and more openly.
oppression and freedom
 Without question I have been stuck in the
never ending story of race, class and gender.
The point is not to give these central issues up
but to change my epistemological thinking from
a focus on confronting oppression to both
confronting oppression and engaging in a
freedom quest to utilize imagination, our
inherent human potential, to think beyond the
categories and codes or what I will later refer to
as affirmative culture.
creativity and change
 In this sense, educational poetics links
the understanding of oppression with a
forward looking impulse to be free, to use
our human potential to creatively move
beyond the images, categories,
representations that hold us back from
transcending the common cliche that the
more things change the more they stay
the same.
beyond the past
 Educational poetics moves forward to the
unknown and tries to represent and
create alternative categories, theories,
and forms of representation that provide
a path for a future that hopefully looks
different and more multi-dimensional than
the past which so often is dominated by
hierarchical and oppressive relationships.
educational poetics: from
the borderlands
 educational poetics is a form of inquiry that emerges
from the borderlands between established communities
(e.g., aesthetics and education). Given this borderland
approach, inquirers can see and interrogate (look back
at) the norms, categories, and perspectives embodied
within particular scholarly communities at the same
time as they look out at the social world in ways that
use community differences (again education and
aesthetic communities) to produce new syntheses,
and perspectives that don’t necessarily lie comfortably
within any one established community discourse.
imagination and inquiry
 Imagination, as linked to inquiry, allows
inquirers to extend their approach beyond
getting it “right” (i.e., accurately presenting
reality) to creating spaces in the inquiry text
such that new horizons can be seen and
alternative actions and relationships formed. As
Vygotsky (1998) states, “Everything that
requires artistic transformation of reality,
everything that is connected with interpretation
and construction of something new, requires
the indispensable participation of imagination
(p.153).”
poetics
 By naming an approach to knowledge
production educational poetics, and focusing
on imagination, art, and aesthetics, I do not
mean to suggest that I am a poet or that you
should be. Instead, I am using the word
poetics to describe a process that moves
between inspiration (forms of imagination that
furthers forms of inventiveness) and traditional
views of knowledge, such that reflection on
experience is a process emerging from the
mind /body (Bachelard, 1969, p.xvii).
mind/body
 By calling for a linkage of mind/body,
educational poetics challenges the valorization
of rationality, the knowledge form of the
enlightenment community, as well as the
cultural codes of a research discourse that
separate out mind from the body. Instead,
educational poetics tries to extend the
discourse of the research community, by
seeing as legitimate and desirable more
holistic forms of knowledge.
[re]inventing oneself
 Taken together, mind/body suggests a
process of [re]inventing oneself
(Anzuldua, 1990, p.xvi)–again invention
not accuracy is at the heart of the project
I call educational poetics.
moving toward the
unknown
 When the mind/body become involved in the
knowledge process there can be an awakening
of sorts that moves beyond the press of
everyday commonsense (Apple, 1990, p.84),
such that a new image, a new creation of sorts,
may come forth, one that is not predictable or
knowable in advance. And it is this imaginative
process, which can’t be codified or put into
some causal relation that is at the centerpiece
of educational poetics.
imagination and
commonsense
 Within educational poetics it is desirable to transcend
some of the premises of commonsense. When the
premises of commonsense do not totally saturate our
lens, we exploit the human potential to be free–to
imagine. Imagination is an important quality of human
nature because it can help us look to the future without
that view being totally structured by the past and the
current realities.
 “Imagination separate[s] us from the past as well as
reality; it faces the future.... If we cannot imagine we
cannot foresee (Bachelard,1969, p.xxx).”
foreseeing
 Looking to the future without being overly determined
by the past and present, a type of foreseeing, is one of
the possibilities of educational poetics. While the past
is worthy of all sorts of accolades, as humans we have
the potential to see anew, to look through and beyond
the past in thinking about acting on the future. And it is
this foreseeing that holds the potential for an
educational poetic to contemplate new, unforeseen
directions that, at times, can create a different, more
expansive or multi-dimensional commonsense that can
be argued to represent a form of progress.
educational poetics and a
deep politic
 Paying attention to aesthetics, therefore, allows one to
make a double move that focuses on image making
and places image making within a cultural analysis.
When this analysis is informed by imaginative
inclinations (the essence of an aesthetic orientation to
epistemology), a politic can emerge that helps us
escape the seductive force that draws us back to the
status quo–that being the naturalization and reification
of socially constructed images. And it is the linkage of
this double move (image making embedded in a
cultural analysis) with our imaginative potential that
informs a deep politic, a politic that lies at the center of
the political humanist epistemology I call educational
poetics.
commonsense
 A focus on commonsense as an object of
inquiry may appear strange because
sense is usually associated with what is
commonly thought to be right, desirable,
and the way to live one’s life.
Commonsense is all of that. It is also,
however, a facade, a constraint that we
often drape over ourselves to appear
desirable in one way or another
affirmative culture
 Certain aspects of culture, those that
support culturally stability, what Marcuse
(1955) refers to as the affirmative aspects
of culture, often stand in opposition to the
human possibility of moving beyond the
“is” to imagine and create an “ought”—a
better world in some sense of the word
“better.”
affirmative culture and
resistance
 Often at a societal level conflict or resistance is
viewed as a deviance of some sort that needs
to be curtailed or punished (e.g.,Willis, 1977).
Put differently, it is assumed that conflict and
resistance needs to be policed in some
fashion. However, where resistance or conflict
is curtailed, conformism seeps into local
cultural communities and tends to keep cultural
understandings and practices from evolving.
the double move
 Inquirers should consider making a double move in
their approach to knowledge production. The inquirer
should continue investigating the relation between race
and the curriculum found in schools, for example.
However, additionally the inquirer might also focus on
how the seduction of affirmative culture (the need to
police resistance) and commonsense more generally,
may take the progressive intent of this inquiry project
and turn it back toward reinforcing the status quo. By
having affirmative culture and commonsense be an
object of inquiry, there is a release from the seduction
of the dominant past as the way to see and represent
the world.
relations of freedom
 While living with uncertainty appears to be the
antithesis of progress in our modern world, where all
advancements are defined in terms of measurable
goals and outcomes, educational poetics views
uncertainty as the genesis of progress, for this is where
imagination finds its wings. And it is through
imagination, that one
 “becomes able to break with what is supposedly fixed
and finished, objectively and independently real,
[where one] become[s] freed to glimpse what might be,
to form notions of what should be and is not yet, [and]
at the same time, remain in touch with what
presumably is” (Greene, 1995, p.19).
validity and relations of
freedom
 Educational poetics challenges detachment as
a way to produce objective findings and
therefore valid findings. The validity of
educational poetics is based on achieving a
purpose–a humanistic intent. That purpose is
moving toward relations of freedom. When the
inquiry process moves in this direction, we
should see how imagination can point us to
what is not fully seen, to the value of nonconformism, and ultimately to forms of praxis
that make our views, actions, and relationships
more multi-dimensional as our horizons are
expanded as well
the politics of inclusivity
and educational Poetics
 To say that inclusiveness is important or
even essential to any progressive view of
society is an understatement. It is also
the case, however, that expanding the
center (hooks, 1994) in some ways
doesn’t alter the fact that there is still a
hierarchy and that the hierarchy is one
that fundamentally determines who has
authority to “tell their stories” and who
does not have this authority.
commonsense and
inclusion
 If one is interested in being inclusive and also
moving deeper into politics, a deep politic, to
consider the underlying nature of what one is
being included into, we must be able to see
and challenge these commonsense
constructions–in this case the hierarchy itself,
the construction of what it means to be an
authority ( a form of affirmative culture), and
the intimate connection between inclusion and
exclusion (Popkewitz, 1998).
outward and inward
 Commonsense as an object of inquiry
reconfigures the direction of knowledge
production such that attention directed
outward toward the social world is
complimented with attention directed
inward at the inquirer.
self-critical
 a politics of inclusion, for all its benefits and
importance, does not direct knowledge
producers to be self-critical about their own
participation in the constraining effects of
affirmative culture. If progress is to mean more
than placing the same wine in a new bottle
(Sarason 1971), it is important to not only think
through issues of inclusion, but also consider
the ways we as knowledge producers are
consistently limited, constrained, and seduced
by the affirmative aspects of culture
look-at data
 Within many qualitative approaches in
the field of education the researcher
looks at the data and uses that data to
tell a story. Put directly, in most
qualitative research the gaze is out at
social/cultural life. That directional gaze
is used to collect data. The data is then
used to tell a convincing story
looks-with data
Qualitative research is directed primary
at the “other” rather than looking with the
data ( a two way process of looking back
at our inquiry communities and forward in
inventive imaginative ways), as is the
case in educational poetics, such that the
inquiry process considers all influenced
and participating in inquiry as having a
need.
deep politics
 What a politics of inclusion is less likely to do is
operate at a deeper level to imagine and
reconsider the foundational structures, such as
hierarchies, and the construction of authority,
that influence, constrain, and bound so much
of what we do, think and recommend. I believe
it is the limits of inclusive politics to operate at a
deeper political level that bounds many of the
current qualitative methodologies used in the
field of education
is and ought
 The ought of inclusive politics also does not
require imagination so much as strategy–how
to make current constructions of reality more
inclusive. In contrast, having relations of
freedom, or some sort of freedom be part of a
methodological revolution, directs inquiry
participants to work on both the is and ought,
with the ought emerges from our ability to
imagine a future without that imagination being
totally saturated by our past cultural
understandings.
multidimensional
 The inclusive politics found in many qualitative
methodologies in the field of education also
does little to address how research
participants, both researcher and “subjects”,
may be one-dimensional (i.e., they may be
shrouded by affirmative culture). Seldom
within qualitative methodologies, for example,
have research authors addressed and
challenged their conformism as part of the
research process.
teaching example
 Within the context of exploiting relations of
freedom a teacher, for example, might initially
see being in control as a primary prerequisite
for student learning. Knowledge emerging
from an inquiry orientation that enhanced
relations of freedom would push the teacher to
think through the way control as a prerequisite
for learning might be desirable or in fact an
aspect of affirmative culture (i.e., something
that limits our human ability to imagine and
revision the everydayness of our lives) or some
combination.
Gatto teaching example
 Gatto has started the process of exploiting his
ability to be free. By using imagination and
originality he comes to this conclusion.
 “Genius is as common as dirt. We suppress
our genius only because we haven’t figured out
how to manage a population of educated men
and women. The solution, I think, is simple
and glorious. Let them manage themselves”
(p.38).
politics
 The politic emerging from educational poetics
is potentially different from the inclusive politics
embodied in many qualitative methodologies in
two ways: First, the inquiry process is a two
way process as opposed to a simple looking
out. What this means, in my way of thinking, is
that there is a connection between one’s
expectations for “others” and the expectations
for self or inquirer. Both need to be examined
and, importantly where found wanting,
[re]imagined.
politics and change
 When operating in the borderland
between differences, the point is not only
to acknowledge one’s biases but to see
their relation to commonsense and to
re[imagine] them. In this sense, inquiry
occurring from the borderland between
differences incorporates inquirer change
into the knowledge production process
and the emerging politics.
turning point
 As you challenge commonsense and
affirmative aspects of culture, you will
also be exploiting the human potential to
be free, as you cultivate uncertainty and
use imagination to vision worlds not
totally saturated with past practices,
relations and sensibilities.
Finding more
 Andrew’s book is titled:
Educational poetics inquiry freedom and
innovative necessity. Peter Lang
Publishers (2005)
 Andrew can be contacted at:
gitlin@uga.edu