English: Poetic Pedagogy

Performance Oral interpretation Language rhythm Dialogue

Creativity Listening Classroom interaction

Teaching literature

Texts of all kinds are explored in classrooms for the study of language and literature. The goal for Poetic Pedagogy is that students get a chance to sense and experience the artistic text before they analyse and reflect on it intellectually. We can investigate the art with aesthetic awareness and bring the text alive if we read it aloud to each other, listen to that specific interpretation, and respond intuitively to what it communicates in terms of feelings and experiences. It is not presentation of subjects in the rhetorical tradition, nor dramatisation, but realisation in time and space of a human experience. And it is very engaging.

My PhD dissertation, Poetic Pedagogy: Language rhythm and oral interpretation. Proposals for a new text theory and pedagogic reflection (POETISK PÆDAGOGIK. Sprogrytme og mundtlig fremførelse som litterær fortolkning. Forslag til ny tekstteori og til pædagogisk refleksion) University of Copenhagen 2009, investigates and suggests ways to creatively work with the written and spoken word in the classroom. The dissertation also gives tools for an interactional analysis of classroom dialogue related to the text analyses that occur as students negotiate an oral interpretation. The subject of the classroom dialogue is interpretation of and speaking fiction and imagined scenes and persons. The classroom dialogue in this form of teaching has a particular mixture of arguments for sounds and details, voices and imitated speech in handling the feelings in the text, combined with arguments for differences in the global text interpretation.

Frede V. Nielsen, the professor of music education at Aarhus University, argues that learning comes along with realisation and comprehension by doing, if we do art together. It happens when we are socially and functionally coordinated in bands or orchestras, connected with each other and the music to study the best and most precise expression for our understanding of the work of art. In the outset of Poetic Pedagogy we insert directly the musicians’ ideas of musical creation and instrumental performance as similar to the process of reading and interpreting literature as a joint creation of text performance in the classroom: We use our body and voices as instruments, and we need our experiences and feelings to investigate what is going on in the text. That means that we need to realise our vast experience with language and we need to exercise our listening skills.

Besides giving competencies in reading, speaking, listening, and interpreting art, it sharpens the consciousness for language and communication in the everyday life, too, and it sharpens an awareness of what the other is expressing. That is, at the same time we exercise listening skills in a very concrete physical sense (as in prosody), we also exercise listening skills in a relational sense. We listen to each other.

Subpages (2): English: Oral Interpretation English: The Aesthetic Experience