Voices Made Visible: A Reading of Learning Development Poetry

Jen Hayes (London Metropolitan University) This event is an invitation to listen differently. The poems attendees will hear emerged from a doctoral research project rooted in Appreciative Inquiry and arts‑based methods, exploring the skills, identities, and lived experiences of Learning Developers from minoritised groups in higher education. These are not poems written about people; they are poems authored by Learning Development practitioners and have been shaped through dialogue, reflection, and creative inquiry. Created through making workshops and poetic analysis, these poems hold stories of Learning Development as relational work. They speak to confidence‑building and liberation and to working in the margins of institutions while holding spaces of belonging. Metaphors of ecosystems, gardens, nests, and flight recur, not as decorative language, but as ways of thinking, feeling, and knowing in ways that resist reduction to metrics or job descriptions. Spoken poetry shifts the knowledge from the page into the room, from individual reading into shared encounter. This is not a performance in the traditional sense. It is a gathering. It is a moment to pause, attend, and be in community with these words. Attendees are invited to listen generously, to sit with ambiguity, and to notice and share what resonates with their own experiences of learning, teaching, care, and institutional life. These poems do not offer conclusions. They offer possibilities.