“Poetry in Parks”: Reading and Writing Poetry to Expand Humanizing Pedagogies, Environmental Consciousness, and Well-Being

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 7:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Arts based educational research and poetry

Abstract

This inquiry builds with Ada Limón’s project You are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, where the poet laureate connects the National Parks with poetry. We wonder as educators – how are humanizing and interdisciplinary pedagogies enacted within, amongst, and beside the trees and natural world? Humanizing pedagogies are intricately connected to the nature around us, to the ways that place and space are dynamic and re-centering our humanity. Poetry offers a way to engage critically, personally, and emotionally with the complexities of being a human in this contemporary moment. We trace our connections through parks, poetry, and the natural world and determine through our own lyric essays how our ecological awareness and poetic and pedagogical dispositions came to be.

Authors

• Alecia D. Beymer, University of Cincinnati

• Mary Neville, Wayne State University