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Poetry immersion: Reading, writing and performing with secondary students
Abstract
In an attempt to counter the culture of high-stakes testing and the instrumental coverage of poetry, the authors designed and taught a sustained, intensive poetry course to secondary students. In this article they advocate a deep genre study of poetry for students and teachers and highlight important principles from their work that are applicable in a variety of teaching contexts.
... Similar to the position of poetry in United States English Language classrooms (cf. Schillinger, Meyer and Vinz, 2010), poetry lessons in Malta do not feature any poetry writing and students are only encouraged to write about poetry in the traditional examination essay format. Malta's National Cultural Policy (PSTEC, 2011) was intended to address such a lacuna. ...
... 173). Similarly, Schillinger et al. (2010) highlight the sense of dependency that exists between the reading and writing of poetry. Their views are to some extent shared by Bluett (2010), for whom reading poetry for writing purposes "makes one engage with the poem in a very immediate and vital way" (p. ...
This paper examines the place of poetry writing in the post-16 English curriculum in Malta. In presenting the results of a small-scale study adopting a mixed methods approach, it explores the views of teachers, students and an influential examiner. The paper proposes that while there seems to be an appreciation of what creative writing can contribute to students' engagement with poetry, there is at the same time a fear that students may not be capable of writing poetry because of a perceived lack of skills and talent. It also concludes that teachers may resist the teaching of poetry writing, because of a lack of professional craft knowledge and pedagogical skill in this domain.
... As early as 1991 Cox argued in favour of the teaching of creative writing in British schools and emphasised that students should not only be asked to write literary essays but should also be encouraged to tackle a variety of genres, including poetry. Poetry lessons in Malta seem to be very similar to the ones in the United States as described by Schillinger, Meyer and Vinz (2010), in which poetry writing is excluded from the lesson and students are rewarded for how well they can write about poetry. In what might be considered a long-awaited development, creative writing has finally been given some attention by being mentioned in the draft of Malta's first National Cultural Policy, which recognises the significance of students' right 'to be creators of art' (MECYS 2010: 36). ...
... Beach, Appleman, Hynds and Wilhelm (2006) maintain that poetry writing helps students to take on the guise of a writer and to notice the use of poetic language and techniques. Schillinger, Meyer, and Vinz (2010) and Bluett (2010) too appreciate the connection between the reading and writing of poetry and according to the latter the act of reading poetry for writing purposes 'makes one engage with the poem in a very immediate and vital way' (p. 46). ...
This article describes how some basic tenets of shared writing can be applied to a class of 16-year-old L2 speakers of English preparing for a high stakes examination in which poetry is assessed by means of the traditional critical response. It examines how by means of this technique students who have never written any poetry can develop the confidence to write their own poems. By using a poem by Gerard Woodward as an example, this article also demonstrates that creative writing helps to boost students’ engagement with the contemporary poetry they are expected to read for examination purposes.
... Khansir (2012) analyzed the benefits of incorporating poetry in reading instruction. Schillinger et al. (2010) designed and taught an intensive poetry course to secondary students, which led to improved reading performance. What is of interest in the present study is that it contains evidence that may point towards concurrent CT skills, metacognitive reading strategies and general reading comprehension improvement through poetry among YL. ...
Critical thinking and metacognition are two concepts that have played an increasingly important role in education and have been the focus of a substantial body of research related to the skill of Reading (Mohseni, Seifoori & Ahangari, 2020; Navarro, 2021). Poetry, on the other hand, though much discussed and analyzed as a genre, has not been adequately explored as a tool used to foster the development of critical thinking skills and metacognitive reading strategies among Young Learners. The present article attempts to show that the teaching of poetry can have a positive effect not only on Young Learners' critical thinking and use of metacognitive reading strategies, but on their reading comprehension as well. This is demonstrated through the presentation of a poetry project implemented with 16 students, another 16 being assigned to a control group, in a primary education EFL context, over a three-month period and through analyzing learners' performance and attitudes prior to and after implementation. The results reveal that there is indeed a statistically confirmed advantage in the experimental group learners' critical thinking, use of metacognitive reading strategies, as well as reading comprehension.
... Beach, Appleman, Hynds, and Wilhelm (2006) maintain that poetry writing helps students to adopt a writer's stance and notice the use of poetic language and techniques. Schillinger, Meyer, and Vinz (2010) and Bluett (2010) too appreciate the connection between the reading and writing of poetry and according to the latter the act of reading poetry for writing purposes "makes one engage with the poem in a very immediate and vital way" (46). ...
This article discusses the relationship between poetry and liminal places and revolves around an interview with the British poet John Rice. Rice is a children's poet and for a time he occupied the post of Glasgow's subway poet-in-residence. The interview explores the educational implications of such a post and examines Rice's views on children's creative writing. This article argues that the writing of poetry is an activity that should be encouraged more enthusiastically in primary and secondary schools given that it offers a number of highly significant benefits for young people.
This study consists of independent variables, namely work culture (X1) and work stress (X2) and the dependent variable (Y) is the work effectiveness of employees of PT Trakindo Utama Palembang branch. The results of initial observations and interviews with the human resources division of PT Trakindo Utama, several factors that affect work effectiveness are work culture and work stress. Work culture is a set of assumptions or belief systems, values and norms developed in an organization that is used as a behavioral guide for its members to overcome problems of external adaptation and internal integration. One of the principles of work culture that can be used is the 5S principle which consists of aspects of seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu, setsuke which come from Japan and have been widely used in many large companies around the world. Based on the results of interviews with the human resources division of PT Trakindo Utama in addition to work culture which is the influence of work effectiveness, work stress can also affect employee work effectiveness. The cause of stress is anything that causes stress, which is commonly referred to as a stressor. The sampling method was purposive sampling with a sample of 60 respondents with multiple linear regression SPSS software version 26. The results showed that work culture had a positive and significant influence on work effectiveness and work stress had a negative influence on work effectiveness at PT Trakindo Utama.
This article considers the influence that assessment exerts on poetry education. By means of research conducted in a post-16 educational context in Malta, it shows that teachers’ and students’ practices in the poetry lesson are determined by the kind of examinations that candidates sit for. When the mode of assessment is constituted solely by the traditional essay test that excludes students’ personal response, their engagement with poetry might be impaired and teachers’ role becomes highly pronounced. The article demonstrates how assessment plays a key role in governing teachers’ and students’ practices in the classroom. However, it is also argued that other factors are equally responsible for their approach to poetry.
The aim of this study is to review research on poetry reading pedagogy in secondary education from 1990 to 2015. Today there is little research on poetry teaching in Sweden and thus little guidance for secondary teachers. Therefore, this study thematically analyses peer-reviewed articles from English language international journals. Articles were retrieved through a systematic literature review. The results show that many researchers suggest personal response pedagogies mainly developed from Louise M. Rosenblatt’s work. Further, a progression of poetry interpretations seems to require explicit teaching throughout the years of secondary education. Also, current educational politics, heavily influenced by neoliberalism, impose high-stakes examinations that challenge poetry curricula. Teacher education needs to address this issue. Minor themes found were: ontologies in relation to teaching poetry reading, and poetry reading as identity formation/tool for social critique. These could be possible areas for future research.
This paper discusses a research project undertaken to examine teachers' perceptions of creative writing in the senior English curriculum. It was a case study undertaken in a state high school in Melbourne under the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE). The project investigated the challenges facing English teachers as they prepare students to write creatively in VCE, the impact of high-stakes testing on creative writing, and the impact of teachers' epistemological beliefs about writing on their teaching of creative writing. One key finding was the way in which distinctions are made between writing taught at the senior levels and conceptions of creative writing in the junior years of high school. The study also revealed the paradox that teachers find it difficult to facilitate good writing development within high-stakes assessment environments.
The chapter commences with an examination of research that documents children and young people's spontaneous language, and then examines studies that focus on the relatively untapped potential for creativity within the official language and literacy curriculum. Next, it reviews empirical work that connects to teachers' creativity in and through language in the classroom, noting the limited research-base in this area. The challenges involved in educators' building on the creative language resources that students bring to school and the consequences for curriculum and pedagogy are also debated and new research directions outlined. Finally, the chapter closes by recommending that the research community affords increased attention to the creative language capacity of both the young and of those who teach them.
This article explores the views of children's poet Michael Rosen in relation to poetry in education. It is based on an interview in which Rosen not only discusses the significance of encouraging young people to engage with poetry at school but also analyzes a number of threats to poetry's place in the English curriculum. This article identifies parallels between Rosen's views and current education research and shows how in both cases there is a clear awareness of how certain educational policies risk undermining the value of poetry's contribution to young people's learning experience.
This article discusses a small scale project investigating the role of writing poetry in order to strengthen pupils' responses to reading and analysing poetry. This takes place within the context of preparation for a question on unseen poetry in a high stakes examination, in a contemporary climate where creative responses to poetry are reported to be less prevalent than analytical responses within an assessment-focused curriculum. The project investigates strategies to inspire pupils to write their own poetry and to analyse the work of their peers in order to ‘put themselves in the shoes’ of the poet, supporting them in preparing for the examination question. It also involves teacher-modelling of the writing and reading processes to support pupils in feeling part of a reading and writing community.
Steven Z. Athanases describes a unit of studying poems through performance where students spend time looking deeply into a single, chosen poem. The processes of preparation and reflection result in increased understanding of the poem's meanings.
The use of group work in classroom second language learning has long been supported by sound pedagogical arguments. Recently, however, a psycholinguistic rationale for group work has emerged from second language acquisition research on conversation between non-native speakers, or interlanguage talk. Provided careful attention is paid to the structure of tasks students work on together, the negotiation work possible in group activity makes it an attractive alternative to the teacher-led, “lockstep” mode and a viable classroom substitute for individual conversations with native speakers.
Research that is not theory d driven, hypothesis testing, or generalization producing may be dismissed as deficient or worse. This narrow conception does an injustice to the variety of contributions that qualitative research can make. In this article I draw upon studies conducted by means of qualitative research methods in order to demonstrate the breadth of desirable outcomes.
This article draws upon data collected in a five-month study of primary grade writers to illustrate dimensions of variation in how young children orchestrate or manage the complex writing process. The observed children, all members of an integrated urban public school classroom, varied in the degree to which they focused on the diverse message forming and encoding demands of the writing activity and in when they maintained that focus. These differences may have existed, in part, because of differences in how the children made use of the available sources of support for their composing; that is, they differed in the degree to which other symbolic media (pictures and talk) and other children shaped their individual writing efforts. The children's composing behaviors were consistent with their apparent intentions and with their styles as symbolizers and socializers in their classroom. Viewing differences in children's ways of composing from the perspective of linear or uniform conceptions of writing growth may mask the holistic sense of each child's behavior.
Tracing the broad movements in the teaching of English--both in theory and in practice--from its origin as a subject during the 1880's to the present day, this book focuses on the aspect of the teaching of English which has absorbed the greatest amount of teacher's time, energy, and enthusiasm: the teaching of literature. Chapters, following a chronological pattern, are "Early Traditions,""The Birth of a Subject,""A School for the People,""Science and the Teaching of English,""A Framework for Teaching,""Narrowed Goals,""An Academic Model for English,""Winds of Change," and "Afterword: The Problems Remaining." Appendixes covering important dates in the teaching of English, offerings in English in the North Central area from 1860 to 1900, requirements in English literature for college entrance from 1874 to 1900, the most frequently anthologized works from 1917 to 1957, the growth of English from 1900 to 1949, and major officers of the National Council of Teachers of English from 1912 to 1974 are included, along with a selected bibliography and an index. (JM)
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