Purpose:
To share a 1) poetic inquiry we conducted to explore in what ways composing poetry might evoke education majors’ motivation and abilities to thoughtfully consider their teaching; 2) inform our audience about how to conduct poetic inquiry and analyze study participants’’ poetry – all topics that remain scarce in the extant literature.

A Priori Questions:
1) In what ways does creating poetry stimulate education majors’ reflections about teaching to K-5th grade children of diverse ethnicities in an after school literacy program?
2) What themes are evident in the education majors’ poetic reflections?
3) In what ways does the content of the education majors’ reflective poems vary with respect to themes (i.e., ideas, values, emotions, insights, concerns, and understandings about self, children, and teaching)?
4) In what ways do the education majors’ prose reflections differ from their poetic reflections?

Data Sources and Analysis Arts-based researchers search for and document patterns in data (Leavy, 2015). Accordingly at the end of the semester, I chose constant comparative analysis (Stake, 2014) as the most appropriate method to analyze the education majors’ poetry.
We believe the act of creating poetry provided an experiential conduit that permitted the education majors’ emotions to emerge (Burton et al., 2013). Views from symbolic consciousness (i.e., the ways we think and communicate through symbols and images) elaborate on this phenomenon (e.g., see Langer, 1948).

Keywords: education major's poetry; arts-based research;poetic inquirt