In this post, we share a series of research-based poems created as part of the project “Curriculum Reform for Public Health in the Anthropocene,” funded by a CIHR Planning and Dissemination Grant (2022–2023). The project asked: How do Canadian public health and allied health professionals imagine updating curricula in the face of today’s interconnected ecological and social challenges? It also explored their experiences trying to make these changes happen.

You can find a one-page overview of the project here, including details about the grant team and the researchers who helped create and review the poems: Carlos E. Sanchez-Pimienta, Blake Poland, Maya Gislason, Angel M. Kennedy, Margot W. Parkes, and Andrea A. Cortinois.

To understand these questions, we used a collaborative approach grounded in personal stories and collective reflection, known as collaborative autoethnography (Ratnapalan & Haldane, 2022). We also drew on poetic inquiry, a way of using poetry to analyze and express research insights (Ohito & Nyachae, 2019). Participants included members of the Ecological Determinants Group on Education of the Canadian Public Health Association, along with invited colleagues with expertise in the topic.

The poems you will find here were crafted by the research team from fragments of participants’ journals. The poems became tools for reflection and helped us draft a collective narrative. Later, we shared the poems back with participants to deepen the conversation. We published our insights in a scientific paper, available at the [journal name to be included upon publication]. 

Why poems? Because they capture the emotion, complexity, and imagination behind the words, things that often get lost in traditional reports. Additionally, poems can be interpreted in multiple ways, allowing you to find meanings that may differ from those in the narrative we published in [journal name to be included upon publication]. We hope these poems invite you to pause, reflect, and imagine new possibilities for public health education in the Anthropocene.

[Link to the Appendix within the CJPH paper]

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 References:

Ohito, E. O., & Nyachae, T. M. (2019). Poetically Poking at Language and Power: Using Black Feminist Poetry to Conduct Rigorous Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis. Qualitative Inquiry, 25(9–10), 839–850. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800418786303

Ratnapalan, S., & Haldane, V. (2022). We go farther together: Practical steps towards conducting a collaborative autoethnographic study. JBI Evidence Implementation, 20(2), 113–116. https://doi.org/10.1097/XEB.0000000000000302

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