Heroes and Heroines of the Harlem Renaissance: An Experiment in Collective Poetic Inquiry

• In Event: Heroes and Heroines of the Harlem Renaissance: An Experiment in Collective Inquiry

Abstract

This paper describes an interactive experience in both aesthetic and poetic inquiry, based on the experience of the authors as teacher educators. One of the authors, and English teacher educator and poet, often uses poetry to make sense of experience and came to poetic inquiry naturally. As a teacher educator she arrived upon ekphrastic poetry as a technique of teaching inquiry to teacher candidates. Recognizing ekphrasis as “an elaboration upon the viewer’s experience and a creative endeavor in its own right” (White, p. 55), she began to experiment with it as a tool for literary analysis.
This collective inquiry project will involve participants being escorted via subway by the presenters from the 2018 AERA conference site to the 125th street station platform to view Faith Ringgold’s mosaic mural Flying Home: Harlem Heroes and Heroines (Downtown and Uptown).
Participants will engage with the mural in a process of aesthetic inquiry (Greene), followed by an experience in ekphrastic poetic inquiry (White) as they explore their various interactions with Harlem in the past and in the present by reading, writing and sharing poems in the home of one of the most beloved poets of the Harlem Renaissance.
Harlem is one of the most storied neighborhoods in New York City—the home of Duke Ellington, Thurgood Marshall, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and numerous other iconic contributors to American arts and letters. 125th Street, the very heart of Harlem, was the epicenter of the Harlem Renaissance movement of the first half of the 20th Century.
Through an experiential lens including drawing, writing and discussion participants will engage in a process of aesthetic inquiry with this subway mosaic at 125th St. station depicting figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Participants will engage in active inquiry and aesthetic education practices inspired by Maxine Greene. Greene speaks of the importance of attending to and perceiving “the qualitative aspect of things” that requires a certain kind of noticing. Through this approach Greene goes on to say that these qualitative attributes become significant “when they are allowed to exist in an aesthetic space.”

Author

• Amanda Nicole Gulla, Lehman College - CUNY