Strategies
Student writing is so often about voice: narrating a private discovery, finding a persuasive argument, exposing some injustice or inaccuracy in our society that needs a remedy, describing a scene, story, or experience, even writing for business purposes and coming across like a professional. Nonetheless, voice for a poet can vary in more interesting ways. When we say voice in poetry we are looking for a perspective as well as a unique spirit, distinct from others. Maybe the voice in the poem is a lost grandmother, maybe it is a mountain, but voice evokes the spirit of the one from whom the words come, and by extension, the poet becomes a mountain, becomes a spirit. Voice can also mean ownership of the subject, of the poem, and of the act itself of writing and having a voice. At Edison High School, as I imagine at any other school across the city of Philadelphia, the nation or even the world, students need to find their voice. They need to be able to express their concerns, their problems, as well as their successes and their love. Contrary to many across the industry that education has become, voice is not found in one language alone. In order to value a student's ideas, we have to validate the student; this does not mean a carte blanche acceptance of everything they do as much as a celebration of their selves, their identities, and their voice. In a bilingual school, this voice comes in Spanish as well as English, so that language minority children can have any opportunity to speak in their own defense. For the marginalized student, as well as for the struggling reader and writer, this type of validation of the student voice is key. For this reason, I chose the poems I did for this unit, as well as the complimentary tone towards the material in the poets' writing. This is best practice for a teacher hoping to find success in an inner city, suburban, rural, or even wilderness school setting. One of the tremendous attributes of the book "Mother Tongue" by Otto Santa Ana is that by "interweaving gripping compositions about the lives of language minority students with critical readings about their education, (it) may sensitize those readers who lived their lives speaking only English, and often only Standard English. Such readers are often unaware of the costs that hurtful English-only and Standard English values impose on other Americans." (Santa Ana, p.4)
Students will need to learn a lot of vocabulary, like sponges in an ocean of language, but this happens naturally out of the relationships we build with them, as well as through direct instruction, guided instruction, and independent practice. "Close Readings", in which each word is explored in short poems like the ones in this unit, allow students to savor, absorb, and digest the practical and the conceptual in reading, and later writing, poetry. Ultimately, this will be explored in depth through the student activities, as we make the journey from Spanish to English and back again, and the invisible meanings of poetry become visible.
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