Poems about Works of Art, Featuring Women and Other Marginalized Writers

Background and Rationale

“...bringing cognizance to the realm of feeling has an effect something like the impact of an observer at the quantum level in physics, altering what is being observed.” -- Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence

I work in a middle school in Richmond, VA that serves grades 6-8. The racial composition of our school is 79% black, 17% white, and 4% Hispanic, of more than one race, or Asian. Although our school is not yet accredited, incremental growth in state testing scores has created an atmosphere of hope. I teach seventh grade ELA to four classes of about 20 students. I will have a combination of honors, standard, and inclusive classes to teach. Honors classes typically have students whose SOL state standard test scores are >430. Standard and inclusive classes are the opposite, and contain many students who read below grade level.

About 70-80% of my students are disadvantaged, and research has shown that if all students entering middle school are at risk for disengagement and emotional distress, disadvantaged students are probably the most at risk. SEL is potentially a very efficacious strategy of intervention for at-risk students. Research into the most successful teaching in disadvantaged schools highlights curricula that incorporate students’ background knowledge, create time and space for introspection and expression, and involve work that students feel is relevant to their identities and lived experiences. Research also shows that positive, trusting relationships with teachers plays perhaps the most important role in student success.³

Teaching students new ways to describe their moods and emotions, thus creating space to discuss and validate those feelings in class discussion and in their ekphrastic poetry, connects SEL to language arts, metacognition, and art appreciation. Firstly, such discussions allow my students and I to share our personal experiences, bonding and building trust. Next, the process of writing ekphrasis, indeed creating any art, involves “channeling emotions toward a productive end,” a state of activity the psychologist Daniel Goleman encourages for building emotional intelligence.⁴ Moreover, there is a good deal of research supporting the idea that the metacognitive process of naming an emotion can diffuse its (negative) power over behavior and self-concept.⁵ My goal is not at all to minimize my students’ emotional responses, but to help them utilize them as a way of seeing, a form of knowledge, and a source of creative expression. There could be direct benefits in their reading and writing and indirect benefits in their relationship to themselves.

More anecdotally, my desire to help students verbalize their emotional responses to art and poetry as a strategy for interpretation comes from my observation of students clearly having strong feelings about a poem or painting, but not knowing how to talk about it or write about it in a way that satisfied them. My students have come closest when relating any narrative elements in the work to occurences in their own lives, which I will continue to encourage, but it is my belief that just as often something less immediate draws them in. Students can use their newly acquired language of color and emotion to form increasingly articulate interpretations of the works they encounter. They can feel proud of the cognitive leaps they make, coming closer and closer to a more conceptual understanding of otherwise stale, prescriptive literary terminology like “mood.”

I hope that my focus on and validation of student responses to art in the museum, as well as to the works I present in class can live up to Louise Rosenblatt’s assertion that “When the student feels the validity of his own experience, he will cease to think of literature as something that only a few gifted spirits can enjoy and understand in an original way.”⁶ As I work on the unit, a voice in my mind reminds me of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s implicit caution to teachers who belong to the dominant culture. My striving for a positive, non-hegemonic approach to literary, aesthetic, and emotional education may be yet imperfect. I am a white, middle-class teacher. While no expert, I have grown up appreciating the fine arts through some moderate exposure with my family and through a personal predilection toward creative writing and art making. So, while this unit is not explicitly about dismantling dominant power structures, it does seek to empower students to value their own interpretations of the world, to decide for themselves where meaning lies.