“You’re going to be designing and running a poetry workshop at Walter J. Ong High School!”
Wait… what?
Next Thursday keeps crawling forward on my Google calendar. Still so many questions, so much work still to do. We’ve already gone back to the drawing board once, and I am leaving enough room in my expectations in case we must do so again.
No matter what, we will be ready.
With only the bare-bones information about expectations and parameters for the workshop, our team of preservice teachers dove into design. I like poetry, but it was never my favorite subject in English classes, especially when teachers insisted on forcing meter and rhyme schemes down our conceptual throats. God, how that felt like math (a subject that often leaves me befuddled). But, when allowed to explore, experiment, and interact with the words on the pages and the ideas that blossomed beyond them, I could dig poetry. Students can engage with poetry in a great variety of ways, and technical aspects and historical modes may be important for those intending a serious, in-depth study, but the power of poetry comes in the potency of ideas and expression contained within this particular textual vessel.
Reflecting one night on the production of our first workshop idea, I considered if I would enjoy this analysis-based workshop as a student? I think so, and we had integrated such standards as citing strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis, determining themes or central ideas, and determining the meaning and impact of words and phrases. But I had the distinct feeling we could infuse more interactivity and playful stimulation into what shouldn’t be just another day in class for students. How do we keep the higher order thinking while tapping into the “live” learning we have been reading about in Nancy Steineke’s Assessment Live!; how do we design a workshop that will facilitate a “final product...of synthesis, the act of manipulating and transforming knowledge in order to create something new and different” (Steineke 10)?
Thank the gods of wisdom for collaboration. From our original concept of a workshop based around poetic devices and textual analysis, we have evolved our project into a blackout poetry workshop based on Sherman Alexie’s “Hymn.” The latest iteration is still a work in progress, and we have just about a week and a half to get things in working order (hoping that our work is to the satisfaction of our host teachers from WJO High School).
Again, turning to Steineke for inspiration, we can use the “PostSecret Project” activity for guidance. While not exactly the same, both the Postsecret Project and our blackout activity can harness multiple intelligences to some degree: “[taking] evidence and then creating something completely original...employs great imagination and creativity as well as several multiple intelligences: verbal/linguistic, spatial/artistic, and interpersonal” (106). Plenty of work left to do, and, yes, I feel excited, ready, not ready, scared, nervous, and stimulated. Here we go...
