HAIKU POETRY FOR CRITICAL REFLECTION@ SOCIAL WORK

The participants comprised the research team, with two former social work students who use haikus to reflect on their practice and two experienced social workers who used haiku to critical reflect whilst facilitating two domestic abuse support programmes. The haikus were used as raw data to be interpreted through reflective thematic analysis to explore the effectiveness of haiku as a form to develop critical reflection on practice over time. Two social work lecturers who facilitate a group for women who experience intimate partner violence and abuse, each week, wrote their reflections in the form of haikus whilst facilitating the ten-week programme and shared these with each other in peer supervision. Two students, one student on the Social Work Masters programme and the other on the BA Social work programme, whilst on placement, wrote up their daily/weekly reflections in the form of a haiku. It should be noted here that each student chose to do this as part of their own practice and shared with the lecturers that they had done this after the fact, and it was at this point that we sought Ethical approval from BU and agreed to collaborate on this reflective paper. A five-stage reflexive thematic analysis process was followed ​(Braun & Clarke, 2021)​. Each author analysed their own and one other’s poems, initially to get a feel for the data (stage 1). Then they each individually coded the four data sets using an inductive process capturing both simple and underlying meanings that arose within all the poems (stage 2). This was followed by a further review of the poems to ascertain the perceived depth of critical reflection within the poems. Then the research team came together on three separate occasions to draw together the concepts found and identify themes. First, to generate initial themes (stage 3), then develop the themes and consider the relationship between themes (stage 4) and finally the reading and naming of themes (stage 5). These were crucial steps and an important part of the analysis because interpretation of the exact word choice for themes was an important part of understanding the meanings of the haikus and much discussion was had regarding the semantics and also the underlying concepts that were found, the use of haiku supported depth of critical reflection and self-professional and sharing haikus with others supported further learning and self-development.