Compared construction of meaning in poetry for experts (PhD English candidates) and novices (undergraduates or high school students). Found that for experts, knowledge was an important component of poetic communication. Novices had well-developed expectations for understanding poetry as discourse. Experts used productive interpretive strategies to…

Discusses the use of alliteration by authors and poets and presents lesson plans for elementary students that model reading skills with poems and stories that use alliteration effectively. Includes class activities, a worksheet, extended activities including writing poems and tongue twisters using alliteration, and evaluation suggestions. (LRW)

This K-6 social studies activity teaches students about the flag's origin while reviewing literacy skills. Students perform a poem entitled "The Flag We Love," which, in rhyming verse, explains the history and symbolism of the flag. Over eight days, students prepare for the performance, and on the ninth day, they perform a choral reading…

Compares and connects the cosmic awareness emerging in the elementary classroom to adolescent cosmic sensibility embedded in the experience of the Hershey Montessori Farm School. Provides examples of students' poetry to support Montessori's concept of valorization of personality as each individual turns toward maturity. (Author/TJQ)

Analyzes the confusion in the language of political economy in Great Britain that generates and sustains moral infantilism in the civil polity. Critiques the limits of recent approaches to moral education. Sketches the relationship between the use of interpretative understanding and Jungian insights in support of poetry in moral engagement.…

Suggests a careful study of the cultural values and poetics of early Native American songs and poetry can help students better understand these speakers and writers as people and artists. Describes a variety of classroom activities that explore such songs and poetry. Notes that the language is symbolic, making early Native American songs and…

Thomas Sayers Ellis, assistant professor of creative writing at New York's Sarah Lawrence College, is one of many scholars fighting for the soul of Black poetry, a struggle that takes place largely off-campus. Unless one is accepted into a top-level graduate poetry program, such as Boston University's program or the Iowa Writing Workshop, a poet's…

If reading is understood as consisting of multiple kinds of thinking, then listening is one of the most important forms of mental action in which readers engage. Readers must hear sentences in order to make sense of nested syntactic relationships. They also must hear sounds that occur within the text in order to participate in its world, and they…

Recent studies undertaken with sociocultural perspectives on literacy offer a framework through which to explore poetry in youth's lives. This article draws upon works within New Literacy Studies to provide a glimpse of urban high school youth's experiences in a unique program called Poetry for the People (P4P). It identifies some ways in which…

Combined-text picture books unite multiple genres, providing nuanced information on a single topic from the unique lens of each genre. By providing guided practice in reading and writing a combined-text picture book, teachers can help students develop sensitivity to different types of texts, to what they do and how they do it. Such sensitivity can…

In this chapter response, the author revisits young men and women whose voluntary writing and visual literacy practices helped teachers, teacher educators, and literacy researchers rethink the "funds of knowledge" urban youth bring to classroom communities. She examines transformations of everyday spaces into teaching and learning…

In choosing a title for what might well be his least successful long poem, W. H. Auden nonetheless succeeded brilliantly in the far more ambitious task of naming an age. Set in his version of the urban Waste Land, a New York bar, "The Age of Anxiety" probes the dislocations of the modern consciousness as its four principal characters move uneasily…

This study examines the cognitive experiences of children as they engage in creative projects in both dance and poetry. The data includes interviews with fifth graders from an elementary School in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, about their lived experience of writing poetry and creating dances. Students interviewed for this study participated in a…

This reflective article explores a tension between private and public expression of deep aesthetic response to reading, with specific reference to the play of this tension in the public space of the classroom. Implications for teaching are included, most specifically the need to understand the sensitivities and emotional vulnerability of students,…

In this article, the author relates the effectiveness of using poetry in his classroom. He relates how students who initially thought poetry as "sappy" have somehow changed their perceptions as they begin to learn more about it. Through various poems, these students came to see how poetry can be a catalyst for a provocative inquiry…