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Teaching Poetry: Strategies For Lecture, Seminar and Independent Student Work

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52 views

Teaching Poetry: Strategies For Lecture, Seminar and Independent Student Work

teaching poetry http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/resources/poetry/strategies.php

Uploaded by

Failan Mendez
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Teaching Poetry

Strategies for lecture, seminar and independent student work


It is sometimes difficult to know what strategies might work well, particularly when a
lecturers own experiences of learning poetry were less than positive or are now only
faintly recalled. A good first step in preparing to teach poetry is reflection. Do you
enjoy poetry? Do you read it for pleasure? Do you go to listen to live poetry
performances? A yes answer to any of these questions probably means you approach
the task of teaching poetry with a good measure of confidence that in turn fosters
confidence and enthusiasm in some of your students. But consider your no answers as
well. What do they tell you? Pose such questions to your students to gain an
understanding of their attitudes towards poetry and to devise routes into poetry for
them.

Reflect
One way to gain an understanding of students attitudes towards poetry is to ask them
to keep a reading log or a diary. You can browse the ESC website (put reading log or
diary in the search box) for several examples of how lecturers have used logs and
diaries with their students.

Borrow
There is plenty of good practice that can be borrowed from how poetry is taught within
the secondary sector and we are big fans of the English and Media Centre (EMC)
and The National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE).
The EMC has free resources and print publications available for purchase:

The Poetry Pack: Exploring Poetry at GCSE and A Level by Barbara Bleiman
which includes a DVD, classroom strategies and a selection of poems from
different centuries and cultures;

Studying Blakes Songs

English All Sorts which is a compendium of strategies for ideas for teachers,
not limited to poetry. It is also worth browsing the English and Media Centres
online resources too.

NATE has a very useful collection of articles from the back issues of their magazine.
Generally you have to subscribe to the magazine, but we have received permission to
reprint some articles as PDFs. These will become available shortly.

Experiment
Multi-media tools are currently making teaching poetry at university level very different
for the present and future than it was even at the end of the twentieth century. The
resources below have been featured in WordPlay magazines IT Works! column by
Brett Lucas. Explore the back issues for more ideas.
When exploring the historical context for a poem or a group of poets, why not create a
multi-media timeline with Dipity? Its a free, online time creator that is very easy to
use. It allows you to create a timeline on an interactive web page and either save it
online or embed it in your own website/web page/online course using JavaScript. You
could create one for use in a live seminar or lecture instead of PowerPoint. It is also
possible to attach your own photos and link to YouTube videos as well as add
geographical info. Think about how this could be used with texts/authors or themes you
are working on that have would benefit from a visual perspective. There are many
examples
to
browse
on
the Dipity website.
JISC Digital Media focuses on providing all the information you might need when using
digital media (i.e. moving image, still image and sound) in your teaching. There are
tutorials on topics like uploading images/video to popular websites like Flickr and
YouTube, optimizing large images, creating your own image archives, basic audio
editing, where to find copyright-free images, etc. The site details a comprehensive
range of training events, contains a useful blog highlighting new trends in digital media
and even has a helpdesk offering free advice!

Link poetry to film and media studies and the other creative arts
Connect reading and analysing poetry to Creative Writing, English Language and to film
and media studies. This can be as straightforward as encouraging students to
experiment with how poetry sounds when spoken aloud. A quick visit to the Poetry
Archive in seminar or lecture, or as part of a brief assignment can accomplish this.
You could also explore the BBC Motion Gallery together with your students. This is a
step-up from YouTube or Google Video into the world of professional motion pictures.
This collection is available through JISC and the BBC Motion Gallery. It spans 70 years
and contains more than 20,000 clips. The JISC Collections license for this resource
allows staff and students to search for, download, edit and use footage in student
assignments and projects, show reels, rsums, competition entries, presentations,
course packs, Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) and deposit footage in learning and
teaching repositories such as JORUM and the forthcoming Humanities based collection HumBox.
If you interested in connecting poetry to a wider range of the creative arts consider
using PRISM, the interdisciplinary learning website produced byPALATINE (the Dance,

Drama & Music Subject Centre). PRISM allows lecturers and students to view and
assemble collections of exemplar works from the subject areas of dance, music,
theatre, architecture & design, art and film in some of the influential art movements of
the modern period in Europe and the United States. Works, productions and artifacts
are grouped by movement (or ism). Exemplars are contributed by subject specialists
and each one is accompanied by a rationale that includes examples of how the work
might be used in learning and teaching across the creative and performing arts. The
resource also allows users to save material in a password protected area and upload
new coursework to the website.

Get writing
Get students to be active readers by experimenting with the forms they are studying.
One example would be an assignment where students are asked to compose a sonnet if
they are reading a selection of sonnets. This type of assignment works well as a
formative task, thus freeing student and lecturer from any anxiety about quality and
assessment.

Read differently
Another active reading task can be designed around asking students to choose a
metaphor or simile from a poem and then compose a new poem around it (see B.
Knights and C. Thurgar-Dawson Active Reading Continuum 2006). Working in a
particular form often reveals its complexities and beauty more effectively than just
talking about it. It can also lead to so-called deep learning. If these types of exercises
seem like a radical departure from your normal pedagogical practice, try incorporating
them in small doses to seminar, lecture, group work, individual work, online, or face-toface learning. They need not be time-consuming and you can choose to formally assess
them or not. See Ben Knights article Reading, Writing and Doing English: Creative
Critical Approaches to Literature in EnglishDramaMedia Issue 12 (17 21), October
2008

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