Incorporating Poetry Writing With Southeast Asian Refugee Children’s Picture Books

• In Event: Disrupting the Single Story: Transformative Children’s Literature for Social Justice

Abstract

Spoken Word performer Patricia Smith (2010) urged teachers to be the “keeper of the second throat,” which means to “teach [the children] to speak aloud, to keep on speaking, to scream and to sing...And find a way to introduce all those children who wait for you to that second throat” (p. 210). In this regard, poetry gives students a way to “name and mourn” the issues occurring in their lives, as well as space to voice their protest of intolerable conditions and their vision for possibilities of a different future (Christensen & Watson, 2015, p. 166). Indeed, writing poetry can be a powerful expressive vehicle for students and families who are navigating a sense of belonging and home in a land that is so different from that where they came. Although we see the intersection of different cultures and identities perhaps more readily in immigrant, refugee, and first-generation students, any of our students can be dealing with as “a fundamentally discontinuous sense of being” (Said, 2000, p. 177)—or conflicting notions of identity and belonging in their lives.

In this session, we explore ways teachers connect four commonly taught poetic genres to better explore the intersectionalities (Collins, 1990; Crenshaw, 1989) in texts and students’ own lives through two cultural insider-created (Văn & Ngai, 2021; Yang & Kim, 2019) Southeast Asian (SEA) children’s picturebooks about the refugee experience. We begin with the “Where I’m From” poem and “Photo Poem”, both powerful writing experiences that can promote our work and support social justice and critical literacy development. We then explore the “I Was Raised By” poem as a tool that asks students to reflect and celebrate the people in their lives who “raised” them. Honoring the collectivist foundations of Asian cultures (Kuo, 2013), this poetic form uproots a Western perspective that champions individualistic and colonizing ways of being. Additionally, we examine the “What If” poem as an act of creative and critical wishing. Requiring one to acknowledge the current situation and create an alternative reality, critical wishing becomes as an act of empowerment because it evaluates and rejects the current reality, challenging and demanding a new one. Finally, we demonstrate how picturebooks about SEA refugee experiences can elevate student writing, focusing on the following lines of inquiry: How does poetry impact the way we preserve our stories? How does poetry impact the way we process our emotions?

First-generation Filipinx poet Angela Peñaredondo explains, “Writing was a method of survival, an immediate form of creative expression that enabled me to articulate and make sense of my own feelings of isolation, displacement and invisibility” (Barrett, 2017, para. 11). Through this exploration of poetry writing with SEA picturebooks, we argue that teachers can elevate the practices we are already familiar and comfortable with to ensure we are not just teaching to write poetry, but that we are teaching students that their voices matter. Using picturebooks about SEA refugee experiences are effective tools to support this work, so we can truly be our students’ second throat.

Authors

• Victoria Gill, Lesley University

• Grace Enriquez, Lesley University