Poetry Matters
Seminar 2: 24th & 25th May 2011, University of Greenwich
Poetry pedagogy 2: the demands of reading and responding to poetry. This will address aim c) ‘fundamental questions concerning the demands that reading, writing, speaking and listening to poetry present to learners and teachers and how these demands are addressed in pre-service education and CPD’. It will focus specifically on research on reading and responding to poetry. It will include 5 paper presentations, a poetry reading workshop and poster presentations.
Abstracts and biographical details
Paper 1: 2.30 - 3.15pm
Dr Joy Alexander, Lecturer, School of Education, Queen’s University, Belfast: ‘Hearing the voice of poetry’.
Immediately after the opening of the Abbey Theatre in 1904, W B Yeats wrote an essay, “Literature and the Living Voice”, which was eventually published in the volume Explorations. Using the blind Irish oral poet, Raftery, as both inspiration and icon, Yeats argues for the restoration of “a way of life in which the common man has some share in imaginative art,” a goal in whose realisation he believed that the Abbey Theatre could play a significant role. His project was to encourage hearers and readers to recreate the “living voice,” to cultivate a “subtle” ear and tongue, and to acquire a “learned understanding” of sound. Yeats concludes his essay by reiterating that “….all the old writers… write to be spoken or to be sung, and in a later age to be read aloud for hearers who had to understand swiftly or not at all and who gave up nothing of life to listen, but sat, the day’s work over, friend by friend, lover by lover.” The participants in this seminar series are similarly united in the belief that teachers and pupils give up nothing of life to listen to literature and, specifically, to poetry.
This paper will focus on ‘reading with the ear’ and its importance for poetry. It will argue that most poems are written to be heard and that Robert Frost’s opinion that “the ear is the only true writer and the only true reader” merits consideration. For Walter J Ong (in Orality and Literacy) digital technologies have engendered an era of “secondary orality” in which the oral and auditory have renewed prominence. Given this context, what pedagogy is appropriate to develop aural appreciation of poetry? I will discuss some of my classroom research and some approaches that I have explored with my PGCE students.
Biographical Details: Joy Alexander was a secondary school teacher for twenty years, mainly in N Ireland, but also for a year in each of Scotland and the USA. She has been a lecturer in the School of Education, Queen’s University, Belfast since 1995, where she shares responsibility for the PGCE English course. She has published primarily on aspects of English as a curricular subject and on children’s literature. Her 2003 PhD thesis was titled ‘Soundings: ‘Listening’ in the English classroom.’ The great majority of her research and writing can in some way be loosely connected to it and to its investigation of oral culture and the auditory imagination and advocacy of the restoration of listening to a proper balance with talking, reading and writing.
Paper 2: 3.15pm - 4pm
Mrs Fiona Collins and Ms Alison Kelly, Principal Lecturers in English Education, Roehampton University: ‘Journeys: Primary student teachers’ attitudes towards poetry and poetry teaching’
In 2006 we initiated the Poem a Day project with BA Primary Education and PGCE Primary student teachers. The intention of the project was to raise the profile of poetry with our students by sharing a poem at the beginning of every taught session on all English courses and modelling active strategies that could be used with the poem.
As the project developed, we noted that many students were working from a limited poetic palette and were unconfident about teaching poetry. Informed by research findings (e.g. Cremin et al, 2008; Ray, 1999) and to explore our impressions, we developed an initial small-scale research pilot with our PGCE students about the impact of A Poem a Day. Moving on from this study, our current baseline research builds on these findings but is broader in scope as we consider the poetry journeys that our undergraduate student teachers make from home, through primary and secondary school to their initial teacher education. Case study material has been particularly significant in exploring the interface between university and school-based training.
Particular issues that have arisen include the need to take into account the shifting sites of learning and identity (Erstad et al, 2009; Day et al, 2006) that configure the student teacher’s experience and the potent force of national initiatives that both prioritise and marginalise areas of the English curriculum.
References
Cremin, T., M. Mottram, E. Bearne, and P. Goodwin, (2008) ‘Exploring teachers’ knowledge of children’s literature’, Cambridge Journal of Education, 38, no.4, 449-464
Day, C., A. Kington, G. Stobart and P. Sammons (2006) ‘The personal and professional selves of teachers: stable and unstable identities’, British Educational Research Journal, 32, no.4, 601-616
Erstad, O., O. Gilje, J. Sefton-Green and K. Vasbo (2009) ‘Exploring ‘learning lives’: community,identity, literacy and meaning’, Literacy, Literacy 43, no. 2: 100–6
Ray, R. (1999) ‘The diversity of poetry: how trainee teachers’ perceptions affect their attitude to poetry teaching’, The Curriculum Journal, 10, no.3, 403-18
Biographical Details: Fiona Collins is Principal Lecturer in English Education at Roehampton University. She is the MA Convener for English Education and co-ordinates the suite of MA Programmes in the Department of Education. She is a member of the Teachers as Readers research team and has contributed to a variety of publications on children’s literature.
Alison Kelly is Principal lecturer in English Education at Roehampton University. She coordinates the English Education team. She is co-editor (with Judith Graham) of Reading Under Control and Writing Under Control and has recently contributed a chapter on working with classic poetry in the primary school to the third edition of The Literate Classroom (ed Prue Goodwin).
Reading workshop: 4.30pm - 6pm
Dr Nicholas McGuinn, Honorary Fellow, Department of Educational Studies, University of York: She glanced athwart the glooming flats: creating a ‘live circuit’ between reader, writer and text in the poetry classroom
This interactive, ninety-minute workshop will focus upon the third aim of the Poetry Matters project:
To explore fundamental questions concerning the demands that reading, writing, speaking and listening to poetry present to learners and teachers and how these demands are addressed in pre-service education and CPD.
Drawing upon research findings and exemplar material supported by a series of practical activities, we will explore the following questions:
· How is poetry ‘framed’ within the classroom?
· How can we encourage ‘textual affordance’ in the poetry classroom?
· How might engagement with poetry promote differentiated, higher order thinking?
We will explore a number of poems together and undertake some writing ourselves. Workshop participants will have an opportunity to share good practice and to take away a range of practical suggestions for working with poetry in the classroom.
Biographical details: Dr Nicholas McGuinn has been involved in the training of secondary English teachers for twenty years. From 1998 to 2010, he was course leader for the ITT English course at the University of York. In 2009, he received a Vice-Chancellor's award for services to teaching at the university. His most recent book, co-authored with Dr Nicola Onyett of the University of York, is titled 'Secondary English: Planning for Learning in the Classroom' (Continuum 2010). He is now an Honorary Fellow of the University of York and is currently engaged with colleagues from the University of Ulan Ude in the Buryat Republic of the Russian Federation in a project exploring the teaching of Shakespeare across cultures. He is also working on a book about the relationship between English and Drama teaching.
Paper 3. 10.00 - 10. 45am
Dr John Gordon, Lecturer, Department of Education and Lifelong Learning, University of East Anglia: 'Interpreting classroom responses to heard poetry'.
Empirical research concerning teaching and learning around poetry is quite rare, even more so relative to listening to poetry in the classroom setting. The paper suggests possible perspectives for considering such activity, introducing means of representing and interpreting classroom talk-in-interaction where pupils respond to poetry they have heard. It begins with brief description of research applying Conversation Analysis to recorded poems and to conversations about them. The arising data affords interpretation according to the principles of Conversation Analysis itself, but also with reference to other traditions of considering conversation more directly associated with education. The work of Basil Bernstein offers insights according to the ‘pedagogic device’ in operation manifest in the course of teaching poetry. Finally, the work of Douglas Barnes further informs analysis, paying attention to the verbal resources at play in response to heard poetry in the classroom.
Biographical Details: Dr John Gordon is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of East Anglia. His doctoral research focussed on children’s responses to heard poetry. His recent published articles include discussions of poetry in schools for Changing English, The Curriculum Journal and English Teaching: Practice and Critique. He is co-editor of the book Preparing to Teach: Learning from Experience (Routledge), and has contributed to a range of initial teacher education publications. He currently leads the English 11-18 PGCE/Masters course in the School of Education and Lifelong Learning, also co-directing the full PGCE(M) programme.
Paper 4: 10.45 - 11.30am
Dr Joan Peskin, Associate Professor, OISE, University of Toronto: ‘Genre decisions and the reading of poetry: Development through the school years’.
There is growing consensus that, for trained readers, poetic-text processing involves a genre decision that triggers genre-based conventional expectations and directs attention to textual devices associated with poetry. I will present the results of think aloud studies which examine how students recognize and process texts in poetic versus prose form at different points during the school years, specifically at the ages of 9, 13 and 17. Analysis of the think-aloud protocols suggests that, in older students, poetry elicits active and meaningful thinking by guiding us to see language in new ways. However, developing the structure of knowledge needed for poetic literacy seems to require a long process of literary education.
Biographical details: Joan Peskin is an associate professor at the University of Toronto and a co-founder and associate editor of the new journal, Scientific Study of Literature (SSOL). She carries out research on cognitive development as well as on the reading and writing of poetry.
Paper 5: 12.00 - 12.45pm
Professor Andrew Lambirth, Debbie Reynolds, Sarah Smith and Susanna Steele, School of Education, University of Greenwich: ‘Leading poetry’: perspectives on the teaching of poetry by literacy coordinators in London primary schools
This paper presents work in progress on a small scale research project undertaken in London that explores the perspectives on poetry teaching of a group of Literacy subject leaders in Primary schools. The affordances of poetry can be rich and empowering. How it is conceptualised and taught is crucial. These leaders of poetry discuss the role of the literacy teacher in a time of further change in primary schools and provide rich insights into ‘what it is like’ (Geertz 1973) to be responsible for poetry teaching today.
Literacy Subject Leaders have the responsibility to lead, monitor and teach poetry in English schools. Their role has been seen (Ofsted 2007) as vital for facilitating good quality teaching of poetry. Issues discussed will include: what value is assigned to the teaching of poetry in the literacy curriculum? What are the perceived challenges and tensions prevalent concerning the teaching of poetry? What are the attitudes of teachers to teaching poetry? How is poetry perceived by teachers and children?
Biographical details: Andrew Lambirth is Professor of Education in The School of Education at The University of Greenwich. Before joining Higher Education, he was a Primary School teacher in Peckham and Bermondsey in South East London. Andrew has been a Principal Lecturer and then Reader at Canterbury Christ Church University before joining the University of Greenwich. Andrew has published widely in the field of the teaching of Literacy and English including: Poetry Matters (2007, UKLA); Primary English (2005, Learning Matters); Creativity and Writing: Developing Voice and Verve in the Classroom (2005) with Grainger and Goouch. Understanding Reading and the Teaching of Phonics; Critical Perspectives (2007, Open University). His latest book is for Sage and is entitled Teaching Early Reading and Phonics: Creative Approaches to Early Literacy (2011).
Sarah Smith is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Greenwich. She leads the Literacy team in the Primary Education Department. Sarah received her initial teacher education in New Zealand and taught there for six years. Since moving to England, she taught in primary schools in Bromley and Kent before moving into Higher Education.
Susanna Steele is a Senior lecturer in Primary Education ( English and Literacy) at the School of Education at the University of Greenwich . She is also Education Associate in Learning and Participation at The Unicorn Theatre for Children where she is currently engaged in research on children’s responses to theatre. At The National Gallery Susanna is involved in the Art into Literacy Project Susanna’s most recent publications include an evaluation of For the Best – a participatory arts project led by artist Mark Storor based on the experience of children and their families living with renal failure. The Unicorn Theatre/Wellcome Trust Available at: annaledgard.com/wp- content/uploads/forthebest_evaluation.pdf
Posters - these will be on display during both days of the seminar
1. Dr Jane Spiro, Oxford Brookes University: ‘Reading from the inside’
This poster will explore the notion that the best way of reading poetry deeply is to write appreciatively. I will pick up a comment made to that effect by Cliff Yates at our first workshop, a comment which all my practice as a teacher and writer confirms. The poster will explore and illustrate the ways in which students (second language learners, and undergraduate students) draw on poetry reading as a stimulus for writing, and how this process leads them back to deeper reading. I will also engage with my own reading/writing practice, and the different writing identities which emerge when one aims to cross the border between being a poet, and being an ‘academic’.
2. Katrina Harrell: ‘An exploration of Secondary English Student Teachers’ views of poetry teaching’
The teaching of poetry has long been associated with difficulty and negativity (Mathieson, 1980; Andrews, 1991; Benton, 1984, 1989; Dymoke, 2002). This research has sought to discover the perceptions of a group of student teachers towards teaching poetry. The findings suggest that although most felt that poetry was important in the curriculum and were in favour of a ‘response-centred methodology’ (Benton et al, 1988:202), many found it problematic to teach in this way.
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