Listening to lessons learned from lockdown: catering for the insights of individual participant voices analyzed particularly through poetic inquiry

The article focuses on English language university students and a pilot study undertaken at the University of Verona to investigate changing study strategies during the pandemic. This article will present key findings from the study. We begin with a brief summary of the frequency analysis of two questionnaire answers, which has been more amply described elsewhere (Hartle 2022), but our main focus is a qualitative analysis of poems constructed from three participant transcripts of open answers on the same question naire. This slightly unusual approach, known as PI, is an emergent arts-based method ology (Vincent 2018). In this approach the use of poetry reveals the participants’ words and thoughts, and, indeed, arts-based methodologies are often employed in the social sciences to give voice to the disenfranchised. The underlying, themes provide insights that are at times surprising and may shed light on factors such as space, time and hu man relationships, which are not always explicitly expressed when focusing on study. Finally, we suggest some practical implications for teachers and materials developers.