“Pay Attention and Take Some Notes”: Lessons on “Citizenship” and Multimodal Instruction From Middle School Youths’ Slam Poems

• In Event: Critical Civics and Citizenship Education

Abstract

The middle school social studies and literacy curricular and research project this paper addresses focused on four research questions: 1) What are students’ concepts of citizenship? 2) How does the use of images in a slam poetry project affect students’ perception of poetry? 3) How does participation in a slam poetry project affect students’ notions of citizenship? The authors—social studies and literacy teacher educators and teachers—called on students to create slam poems using images to highlight themes from their writing, addressing the question “What does it mean to be a ‘citizen?”. The authors examined the products of this project for data to address these research questions, focusing on notions of “citizenship.”

Authors

• Anthony Michael Pellegrino, George Mason University

• Kristien Zenkov, George Mason University