Strategies
I have various approaches that I will use throughout the unit to discuss poetry and art, and I also have activities that require the students to work with poetry in a rather autonomous manner. I will explain some of my more unique strategies in this section.
This unit requires my students to view and discuss various works of art. In order to discuss art I wanted to use a basic discussion model for most of the pieces we work with in the unit. Another fellow in my seminar introduced me to an approach used by docents at MOMA, and it is known as the MOMA approach. It is really quite easy, and its goal is for students to be allowed a visceral, non–dictated reaction to art. The approach is full of simple questions that encourage the students to be free in their responses, and it allows all students to speak and point out their own observations without being told they are wrong. During the discussion the teacher will work as facilitator only and is not to interject his/her own opinions. So the teacher will ask the questions, listen to responses, and occasionally restate responses just to ensure that the other students have heard them and remember them. First, students are presented with the piece of artwork. The first thing they are to do is simply sit quietly, observe, and examine. They should not take notes or point out things to their classmates. After the observation period the teacher will facilitate the discussion using questions like: What is going on here? What do you see? What makes you say that? Does anyone see anything else? What is this? Once the discussion is complete I am going to ask my students to summarize their thoughts about the visual image in their notebooks. The more this approach is used the better the students will become at viewing the art. Their observations will be keener and their answers clearer. I anticipate that the first few times I run this activity the discussion will take longer, but as their familiarity with art increases this discussion will be briefer and more precise. Additionally, this activity will predominately be used when students are looking at artwork prior to their reading of the ekphrastic response. The reasoning is simply that on the occasions when we read the poem prior to seeing the art the students will have already formulated an idea of the artwork from the poet's response. So they will not be approaching the artwork from an unbiased viewpoint. The end point of this activity asks the students to write the ideas about the art that came out in discussion in their notebooks. The idea is that these notes will help the students remember their thoughts and the thoughts of the class clearly after reading and discussing the poem.
I do have a basic approach to teaching most of the poetry we will be reading. Early in the unit we will view the artwork first using the MOMA approach. Then after the discussion the students will receive the poem, we will read the poem aloud, and then each student will work through the poem quietly. They are encouraged to read through the poem silently several times, and as they read I ask that the students underline words or phrases that they can trace directly back to what they are viewing in the art. Next, and this is still individually, the students will write comments in the margins of the poem comparing the poet's response to the artwork with their own response to the artwork. These are relatively simple activities to ask the students to do independently, but the rationale behind the task is to give the students some confidence working through poetry and at the same time forcing them to focus on the interpretative qualities of the text. After they have underlined and noted things in the margins we will have a discussion about their observations. I will ask questions like: What lines in the poem connect back to the work of art? How? How does the poet respond to the work of art? Where is this evident? How does the poet's response to the art work compare with our response to it (based on our earlier discussion)? Again, this conversation should really be about the students, and the teacher should just be a facilitator. Obviously, if there are serious misreadings then the teacher should correct the class, but at this point the students have not been asked to do any really deep analysis. Mostly they are observing and comparing.
After this portion of the discussion students will pair up with another student to work through the poem one more time looking for literary devices. Each pair of students should look for two or three devices. Once they find the devices they should consider the function of those devices in the poem. What is their purpose in the poem? After the partner work is complete the students will share their work with the class. Obviously many students will have found similar literary devices, so the class may have various interpretations of the function of the devices. During the discussion the teacher should act mostly as facilitator if at all possible; however, this is the point where serious misreading could occur. Also, it is important to constantly ask the students to back up their interpretations with evidence from the text. If they say that the persona speaking is being juxtaposed with the image of the character in the painting, make sure they can explain how with references to text and image. After this portion of the discussion I will point out any new literary devices we have not covered, but which appear in the poem. This way the students will be introduced to the literary terms within a text, giving them a concrete example.
The final portion of this discussion will focus on looking at the relationship between the poet and the artwork, and this is where the ekphrastic theories will come into play. What is the poet doing with this ekphrastic piece? Is the poet creating a new vision of the work of art? Is it reinforcing the work's message? Is it saying something about the artist vs. the poet or art vs. poetry? Is it commenting on the subject of the artwork or giving a voice to the subject? Is the poet evaluating the artist and/or the artwork? This is also the point in the conversation where the teacher could bring in the different theories about ekphrastic poetry and women's ekphrastic poetry. This activity, when combined with the viewing of a painting using the MOMA approach will probably take two 45 minute class periods or one block class period. I will use this questioning approach in various ways throughout the unit, and sometimes steps can be skipped or moved through quickly depending on the complexity of the poem and what I hope my students will get out of it. At one point in the unit I will also have the students complete the entire activity in small groups, and then each group will report out to the rest of the class. This final small group activity will prepare them for the teaching activity near the end of the unit.
After various discussions of ekphrastic poetry I expect my students to work in small groups and teach an ekphrastic poem to the rest of the class. When my students are teachers in the classroom they take over the role of teacher completely. They are expected to write a lesson plan, teach a lesson for an entire class period, assign homework, collect completed homework, and grade the homework. This strategy of having the students teach the class can easily be adapted to any unit or subject matter. With fiction pieces I assign student groups a chapter of a novel or a short story to teach, and with non–fiction I will have my students teach a short speech or essay. The basic method works with virtually anything and demonstrates a student's mastery over the subject matter. When asking my students to teach for the first time I give them a sample lesson plan, a checklist of everything the "teachers" are expected to hand in, and a list of the possible texts the students will teach. We review the lesson plans and the due dates, and we discuss the expectations. For this unit I am expecting that during the lesson my students cover at least three literary devices and discuss the structure of the poem. Then I let the students split into groups and pick the piece they are going to teach. I usually aim for groups of four students, and with an AP or honors class I always allow the students to pick their own groups. The next day I hang a sign–up sheet for teaching dates on the door, and the students sign up for the day they would like to teach. I usually plan the first day for the Tuesday following the sign–up day. After they sign up I let the students work in their small groups planning lessons, using the computer to research their poems and paintings, and asking as many questions as they have. I usually only allow for one day of planning in class.
After the planning day we go back to work on other classroom activities, but one day prior to their teaching the students must hand in their lesson plan and sit down with me to review their homework and its corresponding grading rubric. When the day arrives for a group to teach they are given full control of the classroom from the minute the bell rings to when the end of class bell rings. While they are running the class I sit in the back of the classroom with a checklist making note of all of the students who participate. In order to ensure full participation and cooperation for the student teachers I give the students in the class 25 participation points on student teacher days. I have found that this keeps their behavior under control and ensures the student teachers get a class of active participants because these are the easiest points they will ever receive in my AP English class. At the end of class the group should assign the homework, and the students are expected to return it the next day. I do not permit my students to hand in late work to me, and they are not permitted to hand it in to the student teachers. The student teachers then have three school days to check and return the homework to me for my grade book. The group receives a grade based on the neatness of the paperwork they handed in, the quality of the homework assignment and the quality of the lesson they taught. I usually take extensive notes during their lessons, type up the notes, and give each member of the group a copy of the notes along with their grade. Additionally, the day after the first group teaches (they are nicknamed guinea pig group) we have an extensive debrief discussion about what worked well, what could have been improved upon, and what is expected of future groups. I make it well known that when it comes to student teaching the guinea pig group will always receive some leniency on their grade because they are going first and do not benefit from the debrief discussion.
One of my final teaching strategies for this unit is a gallery walk. Gallery walks are standard practice in my school district, and I have found that they are the best way to get the students to view other student's work. After the students have taught their lessons they will be creating their own ekphrastic poems and then writing a two page explanation of their poem. The gallery walk in this unit will have several stages because of the two components of the final product, but most gallery walks I do just have one component. After students have completed their poems I will hang the poems next to the pieces of art around the room. Next the students will be given a set of post–it notes and three reader response cards. Each student is required to read and respond to three poems, and each poem hanging up must be read three times. The students will stick a post–it note with their name on it next to the poem once it has been read. This will ensure the students know which poems have been read and which ones still need to be read. After reading a poem, the students will fill out a response card. They will write one positive comment about the poem and one comment suggesting improvement, then write down a short explanation of the poet's response to the piece of art. These directions are given to the students prior to the beginning of the gallery walk, and once the gallery walk begins the students are not allowed to talk. They are to review and respond to the poems silently. Once they have completed all three responses they will return to their seats. This is normally the entire gallery walk, and would end with the students handing me the response cards and the class having a short discussion about what they saw. I would later give the students the response cards that were completed for their poems.
This gallery walk has two components, though, so this first part would take one 45 minute class period. The next day I would have the explanations of the poems hanging next to the poems and art. The students would have also kept the comment cards they completed. This portion of the gallery walk will ask the students to return to the three poems they read the day before, and then read the explanations for the poems. After reading the explanations the students will fill out the rest of the questions on the comment card. One question asks the student to discuss how the explanation impacted their understanding of the poem. The second question asks the student to evaluate the explanation of the poem and state whether they agree with the approach the poem takes when responding to the painting. At the end of this portion of the gallery walk I will have the final discussion, and the students will talk about what they have read and learned through the process of writing their own poetry and reading other student poems.
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