Embracing Every Hue: Poetic Inquiry, Healing, and the Pedagogy of Becoming

In the aftermath of systemic harm, healing in education must begin with the stories we carry and are allowed to tell. This study examines poetic inquiry as a healing-centered, reparative methodology within a teacher preparation course. Grounded in Black feminist thought, racial trauma literacy, and culturally sustaining pedagogy, it explores four pre-service teachers’ multimodal writing about identity, literacy, bias, belonging, and grief. Through poetic inquiry and layered narrative analysis, findings reveal that poetry supported identity excavation, deepened racial trauma literacy, and fostered vulnerability, witnessing, and pedagogical becoming. Poetic inquiry emerges as a rigorous, relational, justice-oriented practice for humanizing educational research and futures.