We have become well-familiar with how unpoetic teaching can be. The prevalence, furthered by much recent reform, of a systematic school culture focused on accountability, standardisation, and learnification often renders teaching dehumanised work. This paper theorises a poetics of teaching. We begin considering poetics, focusing on figurative…

This conceptual paper examines the possibilities for restorying the self through drama conventions using narrative poetry as a stimulus. Using the poem "The Terrorist, He's Watching" by Wislawa Szymborska to engage with drama conventions, we illustrate how educators might support young and marginalised people to participate in the…

This paper draws on a survey conducted in 2020-21 in which 163 secondary English teachers in England named a total of 68 individual poems by poets of colour from the global majority which they taught in Key Stage 3 (students aged 11-14). Using the concepts of framing and mental schemas, we categorised these poems by considering which was the most…

This arts-based research explores the place of creativity in the lives of a focus group of teachers of English in an English secondary school who work within an increasingly performative educational system. As well as interrogating the place of creativity in their lives, the study explores how found poetry can be used as a research method to…

The practice of memorising poems has commonly been perceived as outdated in recent years. By the 1980s, indeed, learning poems by heart frequently headed up a list of old-fashioned pedagogies deemed responsible for turning young people off poetry. Yet it would be hard to overestimate how enormous a gap this opened up with the core assumptions that…

This paper considers Daljit Nagra's engagement with concepts of canon and tradition in "British Museum" (2017). Throughout the collection, Nagra provides readers with a multifaceted insight into the ways in which a plurality of 'cultures' and 'traditions' -- literary, historical, political, religious -- inform contemporary notions of…

This paper reflects on the teaching of the unseen poetry element of the English Literature GCSE in 2022. It explores the author's reflections on the successes and limitations of using a less structured approach with a single Year 11 class, concluding that the pedagogies outlined were more successful than previous iterations in terms of pupil…

This study investigates the interpretive approaches of three English teachers working in different grade levels with the same poem, Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer." The researcher sought to learn what the teachers identified as most valuable about studying poetry in school, what interpretive approaches they employed…

This paper considers alternative ways of teaching Romantic poetry to post-sixteen English Literature pupils in England. It explores how practitioners can value tangents developed by pupils' independent thinking when pupils are given the freedom to develop their own ideas. It reflects on a lesson planned to respond to a tangent developed by the…

Stylistics is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic analysis of style in language, particularly literary style. Poetry has been a staple of stylistics. Creative performance of poems and stylistic analysis, however, have rarely been bedfellows. I showcase a stylistics pedagogy for creatively interpreting poetry in higher education…

Although one in five state-educated children in England speaks a language other than English at home, there is little space in the National Curriculum for the expression of this linguistic heritage. In this article, we make the case for facilitating multilingualism in the primary classroom through translingual creative writing, which involves…

The purpose of this study was to consider the issue of "authentic engagement" with texts in the context of KS3 and KS4 classroom English teaching. This article describes an exemplar session on the poem "A Fine Romance" by Roger McGough designed to elicit authentic engagement and provoke personal responses, and reports on the…

Can verse mediate between the educational institution and the wider community of which it is a part? Utilising a case study of a specific taught module, this essay considers whether the performance of poetry as an experiential learning activity has a role to play in the emerging concept of the university as an anchor institution, a term that…

While speaking, reading and writing are identified in the Newbolt Report as components of English and are still acknowledged as such one hundred years later, Reading Aloud, which the Report ranks alongside them, is no longer accorded any prominence. The Newbolt Report connects Reading Aloud with literature and announces it as a method of…

This case study explores how literature, in particular poetry, can be used as an educational platform within the secondary classroom to explore gender identity. A six-week unit of poetry was created as part of a broader project to enable pupils to reflect on their personal and familial experiences of gender, whilst also utilising creative writing…