Fish in and out of water and other reflective poems by educators and students

The reflective poetry project provided us with a springboard to explore and experiment with reflective poetry in Education and in Electronic and Electrical Engineering with our students during the academic year 2024/25.

Our aim was to inject creativity and freedom in writing and expression to develop, foster and grow critical reflection that would be deeply meaningful and connect the poet with their emotions, experiences, dilemmas and learnings in a unique way. Educators reflected with students and this first collection showcases many of the reflective poems created.

We release this open book “Fish in and out of water, reflective poems by educators and students” as an output of the reflective poetry project. We make it available under an open licence to enable the poems to travel further thanks to the generosity of everyone who contributed and hope that it will be useful in some way to others too. 

We learnt that poetry can be a valuable approach for developing reflection to express with greater freedom about our experiences and what these generate within us and around us. More can be done with poetry in the context of reflection for learning and we will continue exploring this area with our students.

As editors this project has enabled us to come closer together through the love for poetry. We learnt about each other and support each other as educators, what moves us, what inspires us and what worries us. Most importantly this project reminded us that we are all human.

We are grateful to Odysseas Frank for putting the book together and everybody who contributed. 

Thank you to all who embraced this project!

Chrissi, Ben, Damian and Hanaa