This teaching approach positions the development of reflexive capacity as its methodological foundation. Rather than treating reflexivity as a procedural requirement, the course reframes it as central to how research questions are formed, how knowledge is interpreted, and how researchers understand their relationship to the work.

The innovation operates at two interconnected levels.

Structured Self-Mapping
The course opens with a guiding question: Whose epistemology has shaped who you are? Students engage with this question through sustained reflexive journalling, tracing the cultural, familial, spiritual, and affective sources of their knowledge before they are asked to design research questions. This sequencing is deliberate. By positioning epistemological self-examination as the entry point into research, the course shifts reflexivity from an add-on to a foundational practice.

Poetic and Collaborative Inquiry
Students are introduced to found poetry and collaborative poetic inquiry as methods for articulating positionality. These approaches provide alternative pathways for students to access and express forms of knowing that may not emerge through conventional academic writing.

In one instance, a student working to develop a research question drew on a series of reflexive journal entries. Through a collaborative process, we co-constructed a haiku using language from those entries. The poem captured intergenerational transmission of knowledge, grief, and aspiration in ways that conventional prose had not been able to hold. The student’s explicit consent to include this work in subsequent scholarship reflects the relational and ethical care with which this pedagogical space is structured. The classroom is not treated as a site of data extraction, but as a space for methodological practice grounded in trust and responsibility.

This approach is documented and theorised in a peer-reviewed article (Rogers, 2026), which further situates these practices within broader methodological and epistemological debates.

This approach enhances student learning by:

• affirming the legitimacy of intuitive, symbolic, cultural, and affective knowledge as valid starting points for research inquiry

• developing reflexive capacity as an ongoing methodological practice rather than procedural compliance

• enabling students to construct research questions that are epistemologically aligned with their positionalities and the communities they study

• equipping students with methodological tools such as reflexive journalling, poetic inquiry, and collaborative analysis

• creating a learning environment in which students who have been marginalised within formal knowledge systems recognise themselves as capable and legitimate researchers

Students develop not only technical competence in research design, but also an epistemological confidence grounded in their own lived experience. This foundation supports research that is both methodologically rigorous and contextually responsive within Caribbean and Global South contexts.

The core innovation, positioning epistemological self-examination as the entry point into research training, is transferable across disciplines in which students engage in research involving people, communities, and social processes.

Fields such as education, public health, sociology, psychology, and anthropology all require researchers to critically examine how their identities, assumptions, and cultural inheritances shape the knowledge they produce. The structured self-mapping and reflexive journalling processes can be implemented with minimal resources and adapted across disciplinary contexts.

The use of poetic inquiry as a methodological tool is similarly accessible and adaptable. The accompanying publication provides a scholarly foundation that supports educators in understanding both the rationale for this approach and the ethical considerations required for its implementation.

Together, these practices demonstrate how reflexivity and positionality can be taught as living methodological commitments rather than procedural requirements, producing researchers equipped to work with integrity across complex social and cultural contexts.