With its rhythms, imagery, and grounding in sensed and felt experience, poetry can provide tools for re-connecting with our own complex humanity, our aspirations for our work, and the people around us. Building on work others are doing to support reflection, a sense of being heard, and connection to others for healthcare workers (The Good Listening Project), and on our own prior work with poetry, teachers, youth, and researchers (e.g., The Mattering Collective et al., 2026), we envision setting up a table in a hallway or other public, high-traffic space during the ECTI conference, offering free listening and free poems. We will talk to those who stop at the table about their experiences as educators (with questions like, “Why did you choose to become a teacher?” “If you could describe the last school year in three words, what would they be?” “Is there an aspect of your work as a teacher that really puzzles you?” and “Is there an aspect of your work you would like to have a poem about?”). We’ll write a poem for each person who wants one, reflecting their own words and feelings back to them, and invite them to join our session near the end of the conference. During the session, we will facilitate a space for teachers to share their experiences with each other (using their poems as a starting point), find connections, heal wounds, and reconnect to their hopes and dreams for their practice, their students, and themselves.
In this session, you will:
experience listening and being listened to in a supportive environment.
reflect on ways that their own and others’ teaching is more than a technical enterprise, affecting them deeply and personally.
reconnect to their big-picture aspirations for their work as teachers.
