I will begin by summarizing what I have learned in all of my readings in preparation for this review. First of all, reading is key to all students' success. Secondly, students are most interested when they choose their own subject matter. Unfortunately, students' engagement with reading outside of school continues to decline. Poetry, however, continues to be a resonant art form with students. And, finally, digital technologies present us with an astounding opportunity to alter the way that reading is done in the classroom. After more in-depth analysis, I think it will become clear that innovative ways to engage students with poetry will be very beneficial for our students.
Over the weekend, I was at the beach with my family, including my 2 year old nephew, Jack. And I started to think, what about this generation? Here I sit, laptop in hand, his father on his iphone, his grandfather watching the US Open on television while also checking the leader board on his blackberry. There is stimulation everywhere. When Mickey's clubhouse came on, stimulation was the name of the game. There were multiple plots, with puzzles and teaching moments interspersed, and of course they closed with a big dance number (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wePMYM4av6Q).Even a two year old is inundated with multiple forms of media. So, knowing that the digital world is all about variety, what is the place of poetry, especially older poetry that exists now only as words on a page.
Well, I would argue that students live in a more poetic world than ever before. Everything is more expressive, more condensed. If the words don't pop right off the page, they never make it into an advertisement, or a TV show, or a song. Language has become more condensed, more to the point. OMG, i GTG but BRB, TTYL. Many of the formalities of Standard English have been abandoned or completely abolished. How many "news" articles on ESPN have "Just sayin'." As a whole sentence! Plenty. Just sayin'. Music is more rhythmic, more based in a sort of beat, jazz poetry than the Buddy Holly's sing-songy rhymes of the 50s and 60s. So it shouldn't surprise us that students are identifying more and more with some of our most abbreviated forms of expression. Graphic novels are a great example of a medium that uses text for much of the dialogue and occasional narration or onomatopoeia. But much of the action, scenery, and mood is conveyed in the images, which we gather information from much more quickly than by reading.
The problem is that, even if we accept that students today are not exposed to traditional writing as much as we were as students, it does not excuse our plummeting reading and literacy scores. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, seven years ago 19% of 17 year olds said they never or hardly ever read outside of school. Yet we know that there is tons of textual information coming at students everywhere they turn.
So how do we harness what students are doing outside the classroom and make it work for us in the classroom? As Pam Allyn points out in "Against the Whole Class Novel" our answer should never be to ban those tools in the class. As I mentioned on the class voicethread, Carrboro High School allows students access to facebook, youtube and wikipedia. But how do we take their mere presence on facebook and turn it into a tool for the classroom. How do we stimulate constant academic chatter? Unfortunately, it seems this remains a largely unsolved question, but I know that the first step is to start having students create and publish academic work on the internet that their classmates can see. I know that until I began doing this the previous semester, it had not really occurred to me that the internet could be used as an extended part of the classroom. That twitter and facebook groups and online tools allow us to not only interact with the teacher or professor, but with other students.
In Thibeault's description of recording with students, I could tell that the students were excited just to be using the technology, to be finding new ways to express themselves. It happened to be by recording poetry, sometimes poems that they had actually composed as well. Dreher and his colleague were able to capture the same type of energy.
The only question that I cannot seem to find an answer to is how we can turn some of the interest back to more classic poetry. Perhaps that's my issue. Perhaps it is only because I identify with and thoroughly enjoy reading poetry by Shakespeare, Yeats or Larkin or Eliot, but it would seem to me that there are messages, experimentation, images, and poetics that occur in these forms that do not occur anywhere else. Yes, rap is innovative, it is a way of expressing poetry in the urban vernacular. But I want to tie that back to something in earlier poetry, and then maybe like weaving a thread, similarities between that poem and another by another author can grab the students' attention and we can start assembling a larger knowledge of poetry.
It appears based on the research that reading and introducing students to a larger volume of poetry will work in this regard. At least poetry is short, it can be read quickly and repeatedly. Because as pointed out in Krashen's speech, access to books, or literature is one of the greatest indicators of future success. I look forward to using voicethread because it allows us to leave comments, much like the social media that students are used to (Facebook). It allows for multi-modal expression in that we are using voice to depict a written poem. And it engages with students in a digital medium, further relating to their everyday experience. I also think that showing them additional videos where individuals are modeling what they will do will allow for an easy transition into the activity. Allowing the students to choose any poetic form of expression, including music to record allows the students to take control of the curriculum. It shows them that they have as much to teach me as I do them, and that continues when they record why they have chosen the poem and what it means to them. And finally, asking students to comment on the activity as a whole requires some meta cognitive thinking, because they have to asses what benefit they got from the project. The research, articles and commentaries I have reviewed make me think that this project will really benefit not only the group I work with this summer, but my future classroom. Everything I have read has expressed the importance of expression and engagement, and based upon my own experience, I feel that poetry is the best form of literature for engaging the reader and expressing emotion.
Works Cited
Alexanian, J. (2008). Poetry and polemics: iranian literary expression in the digital age. MELUS, 33(2), 129-152.
Allyn, P. (2011). Against the whole class novel. Education Week, 30(35), Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/06/15/35allyn_ep.h30.html
Dreher, P. (2000). Electronic poetry: student-constructed hypermedia. The English Journal, 90(2), 68-73.
Iyengar, Sunil. National Endowment for the Arts, (2007). To read or not to read: a question of national consequence (Research Report #47). Washington, DC: Office of Research and Analysis.
Lewis & clark graduate school of education and counseling. (2011, June 6). Retrieved from http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/15209560
Mattison, D. (2006). The digital humanities revolution. Searcher, 14(5), 25-34. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
Thibeault, M. (2011). Recording students to bring poetry alive. General Music Today, 24(42),
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