ABSTRACT
Seamus Heaney’s biographical poetry is inspirational, and particularly the poem ‘Digging’, as he describes, with unremitting admiration and joy, his close observations of the detail of the skills employed by his father and his grandfather at work on the land. His work, though, is not to join them, or to follow their trail but to create a timeless record of it, as the final lines above show. Heaney watches the activity in the fields outside his window and without engaging in the physical acts creates a link between the known and the nearly known, the act of writing. In the act of understanding the two teachers in this study, by creating a
complex overlapping method for narrating the data and its analysis, there is a place for understanding my own identity as the author and architect of the work and indeed it may be important for all researchers to look at what is ‘peculiarly ours’ (Allport 1955: 40). My autobiographical notes here set the scene for a research study that binds together teachers, learners and personal enquiry.
