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

Strategies

Metacognitive Strategies

Poetry confuses people. Confusion is an “epistemic emotion,” meaning that it is categorized with other emotions connected to the learning process.²⁷ It will be a surprise to many of my young students of poetry to learn that being confused is not synonymous with being stupid or slow. If my students are confused during my poetry lesson, all that means is that they are paying attention and that the ideas are novel. Confusion will no longer have a negative connotation in my classroom.

While it has been made clear that this unit involves the teaching of emotion words, specifically teaching emotion words synonymous with frustration will be a special strategy to employ later when students study the ekphrastic poems. Whatever confidence and self-regulatory skills gained will be quite useful in the poetry classroom: Probably all English teachers will note that students suffer a bit of “disorientation” when reading poetry whose syntactical and connotative meanings seem strange and tricky.²⁸ And that disorientation can result in frustration and hopelessness.

The first step toward learning something new and simultaneously developing a growth mindset is actually acknowledging that you are confused. (I will definitely model this throughout the year.)  The second step is determining what elements of the poem So, what are some words for confusion and intimidation? Can you point out the line that caused you such chagrin? I plan to use this method to help students realize what exactly it is that is confusing them: clearly explaining what is confusing (it’s this word being used in a new way; it’s this word I’ve never seen; it’s this weird line break in the middle of a thought) is often the first step to figuring things out yourself.

Arts Integration

This unit utilizes an arts integration model to help students access the curriculum and meet ELA standards but also simply to encourage creative thinking and aesthetic awareness. The arts inspire and energize children in school and out of school.²⁹ Arts integration is inherently multimodal and thus supports different learning styles. For example, the concept of mood in literature can confuse students. However, considering it through a different angle, such as through music or painting, can open up new ways of understanding for auditory and visual learners. Well-designed arts integration strategies are typically more hands-on than traditional pedagogical methods, thus more engaging for kinesthetic learners. Bringing paint into the ELA classroom to explore the color wheel and color’s effect on mood is one example of this.

A wonderfully functional philosophy of arts integration can be found through The Studio Thinking Project, a program affiliated with Project Zero and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This project sought to find out how successful, productive art classrooms work. The researchers at Studio Thinking came to describe the eight habits of the art studio that can be adapted to nearly any classroom (these habits are not hierarchical). What follows the colon for each habit are my interpretations of these habits for this unit.

1. Develop Craft (technique and studio practice): Study how poets write ekphrastic poetry, and to some degree how painters use color; practice writing poems in the manner of the poems we study.
2. Engage and Persist (finding passion and sticking with it): Find a piece of art that moves you on the first museum trip; revisit it on the second museum trip; consider deeply why it is moving to you.
3. Envision (imagining and planning): Discuss your affective response to the art with your teacher; imagine what it is like to be an artist or a poet.
4. Express (finding and showing meaning): Express how you feel articulately; discuss poetry and art; write poetry.
5. Observe (looking closely): Closely read poetry and art.
6. Reflect (question, explain, and evaluate): Draft and revise your poem. Explain the effect the art had on you.
7. Stretch & Explore (play, use mistakes, and discover): Make up new emotion words; play with paint and “color” your emotion lexicon.
8. Understand Art Worlds (domain and communities): Visit the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts twice; listen to the museum educators.³⁰

Using these habits in the ELA classroom can open up the atmosphere, making it feel more free and student-centered. The focus is on the students’ work. I aim to make my method of instruction, especially in terms of the writing workshop, mirror the following description of a successful studio classroom:

...students talk among themselves quietly as they begin to work, and the teacher circles around, watching for teachable moments and zeroing in on individual students with a comment, suggestion, or critique. At a midpoint or the end of class there are often critiques in which students are gathered to share and discuss their work, sessions in which critical judgement and metacognition are nurtured.³¹

I am especially interested in trying a type of critique at the end of each writing workshop day. At these points, students could share with the class or with each other the work they had completed that day.

Choice Topics/ Menu Rubric

Students appreciate choice, and it is necessary for authenticity in a creative exercise. However, I do need to assess somehow. In this unit, students choose which visual art/poem pair they will work on in class and form groups as a result of shared interest. At the museum, students will choose which work of art they will write an ekphrastic poem about.

As they work on their poems, they may choose from a number of criteria on the rubric to work toward. There will of course be some required criteria, such as the ekphrastic nature of the poem, the successful completion of the drafting process including writing conferences with me, a minimum number of lines, the use of two well-chosen emotion words (or the explanation of their affective response in conversation using those words if they choose to let the poem speak for itself in terms of mood), the use of one or two color words, and correct spelling.

However they may choose from a group of other criteria to suit their experience with the art: taking on the perspective of the subject, comparing the art to themselves or something in their life, comparing the art to something going on in the world, having a dialogue with the art, focusing on symbolism in the art, describing the art directly, exploring their own conflicting emotional response to the art, or describing a memory the art evokes. Added will be some options for formal elements like the use of repetition, but also some options in terms of form (would they like to try a sonnet or ballad, etc…).