Poetry Class Curriculum Overview
By Katie Burrows-Stone
This summer I had my second academic encounter with Linda Christensen’s book, Teaching for Joy and Justice. The thing I love most about this book is its dual emphasis on joy and on poetry. Because one of my favorite genres to teach is poetry, I repeatedly find myself drawn to her chapters on teaching poetry as both a means of infusing joy into writing through tapping into student creativity and as a means of storytelling through a social justice lens.
Last year I detoured from the “test prep” curriculum at my old job to do a 2 week mini-unit on reading and writing poetry, with a culminating poet’s café. I leaned heavily upon Christensen’s text to guide my instruction. In addition to several spoken word poems and other empowering social-justice themed poems, I included one Christensen poem per week including her “Raised by” poem activity and her “Age poem” activity.
These two weeks were hands-down the BEST and most joyful weeks of the whole academic year for my students and for me. I had an epiphany moment as I realized what it can look like in my own practice to “teach the writer, not the paper” and to “build writers by illuminating their gifts, rather than burying them” (Christensen, 4). Students shined as they mastered the identification and application of poetic devices in the poems that we read and wrote. Proud students called me over daily to read their progress on their poems. Kids that had been quiet all year found a voice through their poetry as a way to process, share, and validate their experiences including Eliza’s loss of a loved one; Elena’s appreciation for her strong, independent mother; Anaya’s family’s holiday traditions, Roberto’s identity as a student athlete, and Kiana’s pride in her African American femininity. Even our discipline-minded, 6 foot, 10 inch tall Dean of Students came in as a guest speaker to share his poetry and stir-up excitement about creative expression.
I went home after our culminating poetry slam feeling ALIVE and excited for my students and their potential as creative and critical readers, writers, and thinkers. While I rejoiced in a successful teaching moment, I also walked away from it feeling a certain level of tension and frustration as I considered: How can I better approach teaching writing in a way that not only acknowledges students’ identities, but also allows them to probe their own creative and critical thinking abilities by using writing as a form of communication to share ideas with each other, with the school, and with the community at large? What would it take to create a learning space where, “Teaching students to write with power and passion means immersing them in challenging concepts, getting them fired up about the content so that they care about their writing, and then letting them argue with their classmates as they imagine solutions” (Christensen, 11)? When I learned that I would be teaching a yearlong poetry elective this year, I was eager to revisit Christensen’s text once more in search of answers to these questions through drafting a joy- and justice-infused poetry curriculum.
Below I have included a four-quarter curriculum outline for my high school poetry elective. My context for teaching is an inquiry-driven, project-based magnet school in Philadelphia. This class will be an elective for students who like to write, read, and
perform poetry. Each unit will consist of several assignments in which students read mentor poems and write in the style of them, an activity based on the unit’s essential question, and a culminating benchmark project. Poetry will be regularly shared aloud, digitally, and visually.
Q1: Poetry as a way of seeing – How can the reading, writing, and performance of poetry show unique perspectives?
● Read/Write: Intro to class/community building: “Raised by Poem” (Christensen, p. 1722)
● Read/Write: Place-based and Object-prompt haikus
● Write: Metaphor poems from a character’s perspective in response to literature/history class (Christensen, p.50)
● Write: Object poems in Writing groups w/ stations
● Read: The romantic poets: William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Shelly, Lord Byron and/or Robert Burns
● Activity: Writeathon at Awbury Arboretum, Rittenhouse Square, and/or around the school neighborhood
● Benchmark Project: Photography Prompt Poetry Project – Students take photos, sound clips, or short videos in or out of school of everyday objects/situations from their daily life. Students select a set of related artifacts from their photos and use them as
prompts to tell a story about how they see and experience the world around them. Projects can be presented as a blog, Google slides presentation, or other online platform.
Q2: Poetry as Activism and Engagement – How can the reading, writing, and performance of poetry play a part in engaging larger conversations?
● Read/Write: “For my People” (Christensen, p. 27))
● Read: Langston Hughes poems and “Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry
● Read/Write/Perform: Spoken Word on about Social Issues: Pages Matam "Wings," Alicia Keys "P.O.W," & others
● Activities: Guest Speaker/Present – Brother Jahi (Silivno Alexander) on Hiphop,
Bodegas & Dollar Cabs
● Benchmark Project: Poetry Video Response to current events and current social issues: Students write a poem to engage into a conversation about a social justice issue by creating a 34 minute video presented as digital story with mash up of voice, music,
text, and images.
Q3: Poetry as a way of Knowing and Remembering – How can poetry serve as a way of storytelling for the purpose of remembering?
● Read: Historical Poems to remember events
● Write: The Age Poem Christensen, p. 23)
● Penn Museum: Writing history-inspired poetry with field trip to Penn Museum
● Benchmark: Retelling History in Poetry: Students choose a historical event about which they collect research and create an annotated bibliography. Students then write a long poem or series of short poems to retell the historical even from a specific
perspective. Students may choose modality of final project: poster, video, online publication, artistic interpretation, etc. Students also write a rationale to explain their creative choices.
Q4: Poetry as Exploration – How can poetry serve as creative expression through experimentation and “rulebreaking”?
● Write: Black out poetry with newspapers/magazines
● Read/Write: Shape poetry
● Read/Write: Assorted poems by E. E. Cummings
● Read/Write: assorted experimental poets
● Activity: Art As Prompt Poetry Students
use creative expression as a prompt for their own creative expression with an
emphasis on "breaking rules"
● Benchmark: Independent Poet Study Students choose a poet they have never heard of from list of world poets and award winning poets. Students read 10-15 poems by the author and write 5 journal entries in response to what they have read. Students then choose 3 poems to mimic stylistically. Students write a 1 page rationale to explain why they chose the poems and what parts of the style they sought to preserve/why.
Katie Burrows-Stone teaches English at Science Leadership Academy @ Beeber. Katie joined the Philadelphia Writing Project in 2016 attending the Invitational Summer Institute.