Exploring Spoken Word Poetry as Critical Pedagogy in Nursing: A Focus on Disability Justice Education

The provision of inequitable, substandard care for disabled patients is perpetuated by ableism and the utter absence of disability-related education within applied health sciences programs. The discrepancy between healthcare provider belief about disability and disabled peoples’ actual lived experiences of disability mandates the exploration of innovative pedagogies which humanize, center the voices of, and situate disabled patients as agents and experts of their own bodies and care. Spoken word poetry is embodied performance poetry that centers the stories, voices, and lived experiences of marginalized people through justice-oriented anti-oppression processes of critical education and liberation. Considering the theoretical alignment, this research study explores the praxis of spoken word poetry as a pedagogical tool in disability justice education for nursing students. Employing a non-experimental cross-sectional design, qualitative descriptive methods, semi-structured in-depth focus group interviews, and reflexive thematic analysis, this study explored junior University of Illinois Chicago Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) student perceptions of a non-traditional transformative spoken word poetry-supplemented pedagogical intervention in healthcare-oriented disability justice education to confront ableism and its impact on the care and livelihood of disabled patients. Data collection from 4 focus groups and 21 participants resulted in three themes and 11 subthemes capturing the following: BSN student participants’ shifts from medical to social model conceptualizations of disability; the pedagogy’s employment of affective empathy to bidirectionally humanize nursing students and disabled people; and imagined futures for spoken word poetry and disability justice in nursing education. Essential next steps for research include multiply marginalized disability community-engaged intervention development and feasibility pilot testing.