From certainty to wonder: Found poetry as a post-intentional phenomenological approach to EMI professional identity

Research on teacher identity in applied linguistics has generated rich accounts of educators’ professional experiences. Yet, less attention has been paid to how creative analytic approaches can illuminate processes of professional becoming. This article explores the methodological potential of found poetry, informed by post-intentional phenomenology and guided by wonder, as an approach to investigating teacher identity. Using English-medium instruction (EMI) as an illustrative context, I present a methodological exemplar based on three educators’ accounts of critical incidents shared during an EMI webinar. I propose a two-phase analytic process: a holistic phenomenological phase that cultivates attentive engagement with participants’ narrated experiences, followed by a poetic-analytic phase in which found poetry is used to sustain that attentiveness through poetic composition. Rather than treating professional identity as a stable or coherent construct, this approach attends to moments in which pedagogical certainties give way to uncertainty, relational openness, and new understandings of teaching, learning, and knowledge. Guided by wonder as an epistemic orientation, the article demonstrates how found poetry functions not merely as an alternative mode of representation but as a mode of analysis capable of making visible tensions and processes of becoming that may remain less accessible through more conventional qualitative approaches. Beyond the EMI context, the article offers applied linguistics researchers both a practical methodological process for integrating post-intentional phenomenology and found poetry and an epistemic orientation that values uncertainty, ambiguity, and wonder as resources for investigating professional identity as an emergent, relational, and affective process.