Experiences with poetry, pedagogy and participant observation ...

International Journal of Education & the Arts Vol. 7 No. 1 16Self and Other in the Poetry Project: Complicating IdentitiesWalsh’s quote leads us to the final point that this project brought out which is thatthe identities of everyone were complicated over and over again. They became blurred andconfused, and shifted frequently along the way, but in ways that did not isolate self andother, but rather, brought them together in some sort of complex world.For example, the reader can probably hear my own rather schizophrenic identity inthis paper. I entered as anthropologist-researcher, as critical educator, as program director,and as a writer. While one may assume I formed part of an American Self with mystudents to be held up to a Mexican Other, more times than not, I identified more with theMexican part of myself which shifts me into some un-nameable place on the biculturalcontinuum. Further complicating this was the fact that one of my students was ofHispanic/New Mexican descent, so she had claims as well to some part of the supposedlyOther Mexican identity.In our discussion of writing about local people and writing from their viewpoints,students also complicated their own ideas about how the local Mexican Other has identitiesthat overlap with the self since many local people speak English, have traveled and studiedabroad, and so on. Finally, as we wrote, I was also sometimes the student and my studentssometimes the teachers in that some of them knew significantly more than I did aboutformal poetry writing.Thus, we ended up with more questions than answers, and were not always surewhere identities and voices overlapped or diverged. I see this however, as the mostpositive result of the pilot project. One would hope that students (and researchers) wouldnot walk away from the field saying that they have figured everything out definitively. Onewould hope that things get more complicated and nuanced. Representing becomes not away to classify, control, or conclude on cultural Others, but rather, a way to engage bothSelf and Other in less binary or oppositional ways that remain open for interpretation andediting.Choosing a Form That is OtherIn choosing creative writing forms, we work, in the words of anthropologist-poetIvan Brady, “against the sometimes academically resistant idea that there is more than oneway to say (and therefore to see) things”. Stated another way, choosing to write in a formthat is Other pushes us towards different forms of literacy.Indeed, this is simply making the ordinary – writing about other cultures – intosomething extraordinary. In the same way that we immerse ourselves in other settings todeconstruct our ideas of what is natural, normal, or valid, we can immerse ourselves intoother ways of writing to expose our assumptions and to reconstruct our ideas about how torepresent culture.If we allowed ourselves to sojourn in Other forms of writing, then like the studyabroad students, we too could re-think cultural representation, become culture-representersto larger and less elite audiences, and serve a role as public intellectuals alongside of our