Rationale
Since politics has recently been discovered by a group of Americans that had, up to this point in history, been relatively voiceless—young Black Americans—some educators are taking advantage of the opportunity to assist that demographic in finding a voice and also teaching them that it's powerful and should be used. Many high school seniors and college freshmen voted for the next prospective President of the United States in their local primary elections, thus initiating their roles in a process that once rendered them voiceless. Although my eighth grade students are years away from participating in any similar democratic process, it can't be too early to make them familiar with using their voices. Many of our Black students seldom realize that they not only have a voice, but a powerful one with possibilities.
These possibilities will be realized by using the most compressed form of writing—poetry. Reading and using poetic devices and powerful words will help the students become more accustomed to hearing and using language. Initially to the students, politics will only be words about issues that they may or may not understand. Through the political process, due to unfold this fall, students will understand that a dialogue between them and the people who make decisions needs to begin because they—the students—are important.
With the use of a variety of American authors and poets, I created this unit to help students learn to interpret poetry, express themselves through crafting poetry, and learn to effectively write and speak using their voices. This practice of active self-expression will become their norm, as opposed to simply delivering assignments that have no meaning and don't relate to their lives. The students will write many poems that tell about their experiences. They will read poems that will help them to see themselves in relation to the rest of the world. While the majority of the authors and works studied throughout this unit will be American: Walt Whitman's "I Sing America," Langston Hughes's "I, Too," narrative by Sandra Cisneros, etc., I'll introduce a number of foreign poets as well. One of those is Pablo Neruda and his "Ode to Thanks," which is in our class literature book.
Our students' knowledge of other cultures and historical events is quite limited to what cable and local network producers choose to show them on television. These movies and shows are clearly not representative of everything that goes on in the real world. Poetry, however, authorizes the reader to enter into the essence of other cultures and even one's own. Students will read, write and speak poetry to gain more incite into their own lives. All poetry is open to interpretation. Even narrative poems, that generally tell a linear story, may contain figurative language to make a reader think twice. The reader's own experiences make the difference. An example of this was revealed during seminar while discussing Langston Hughes's "A Negro Speaks of Rivers." We couldn't come to a consensus on many issues like: How many speakers were present? Why the speaker chose to speak of/identify with rivers? Why Hughes chose to change verb tenses within the poem, even within a line? We all had our reasons and answers to these questions. Our reasons for those reasons stem back to our individual identities.
I chose to link this unit of voice with poetry because of the dreamscape possibilities that poetry affords. When writing prose, fiction or non, intricate detail is necessary for the author to deliver his intended message to his audience. Because poetry can be imagined, and is open to interpretation, the author can be discriminating in word choices, details, etc. Prose tends to focus more on character, plot and setting, while the heart of poetry is the language and how it is used to convey messages. Many different readers can experience the same poem differently. According to Robert Pinsky, 1 "…the vocality of poetry, involving the mind's energy as it moves toward speech…also involves the creation of something like…a social presence." Poetry creates a language that invokes a shared public intimacy. By nature, Americans have become so individualized that we are more the same. To some extent, poetry makes us vocal individuals being affected differently by the same work.
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