Unprotecting Silence: Critical Poetry in Secondary English Classrooms

• In Event: 61.071 - Sheraton Roundtable Session 10 - Grand Centre
  In Roundtable Session: 61.071-8 - Entanglement of Poetics, Visual, and Auto-Ethnography: Transformative Possibilities of Arts-Based Educational Research

Abstract

As a researcher, teacher, and published poet, in this paper I discuss the importance of critical poetry writing in the Secondary English classroom. I assert that emotion-full, identity laden, sociopolitically positioned stories always exist in school spaces, and critical poetry writing can value, name, and story emotions as part of the learning process. This matters because as educators, we are working with human beings within institutions “defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization” where “our feelings were not meant to survive” (Lorde, 1984, p.39). I explore why teachers must be vulnerable by sharing their own poetry and model this by incorporating autobiographical poems which link to the themes discussed.

Author

• Elise Toedt, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities