Wing-Words and Frameways: Materialising the Critical Incident through Poetic Inquiry and Reflective Practice in Doctoral Supervision.

This article is a critical-creative recount of my supervision of a traditional PhD thesis in the humanities in which the role of critical incidents in reflective practice is inspected as a materialisation of reflection. This research seeks to demonstrate how a creative approach to reflection can actuate and capture the critical incident in schemas and narratives in language. As a researcher, supervisor and poet I have been able to consider how the blending of contemporary reflective models can lead to a blurring of the creative and critical boundaries of discourse in order to materialise the critical incident in language, thereby crystallising it for the purposes of reflection of a non-traditional type. It is from this perspective that reflection of the supervisory relationship and its contextual baggage can be re-imagined; crystallizing processes of ‘re-genre-ing’ to suggest a new metaphor for visualizing doctoral supervision.
The paper is in two sections, the first of which is an introduction and background to forms of writing as a performance of reflection and different types of critical-creative discourse and their development. The next section details recent supervisory dialogues and workshops with my current Humanities PhD student. Here, the text re-reflects specific exercises (based on techniques from Fine Art and Poetics) in poetic enquiry with my doctoral candidate, questioning current supervisory schemas to accommodate the performance and dynamism of the supervisory process. Creative-critical vignettes, visual poetic inquiries in their own right, flank each of these sections to demonstrate and perform the materialisation of the critical incident. As this reflection develops, what becomes clearer is the insufficiency of rigid genre (including visual) structures in the recording of research, process, and supervision which are inescapably related to each other in more problematical and pluralised discourses than our current nomenclature permits.