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

Background

I currently teach at John Dickinson High School in Wilmington, Delaware in the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme, which has been in existence for three years. The middle school is located within the high school building in a wing of its own and was created as an extension to the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme for grades 11 and 12. The Diploma Programme was initiated at Dickinson five years prior to the inception of the Middle Years Programme (MYP).  MYP was implemented to encourage more students to participate in the Diploma Programme.  In its first year, MYP included grades six, seven, eight and this year will be expanding to include grade ten. A continuous sixth through twelfth grade International Baccalaureate Programme will be established at Dickinson in the near future. Our Middle Years Programme will be growing in size this coming school year from about 240 students to the maximum of 300.

Students must apply to participate in MYP. To be eligible, students must be on grade level in both Reading and Math, and must be motivated to learn. I am currently the only Spanish teacher in MYP teaching Spanish 1A (Grade 6), Spanish 1B (Grade 7), and Spanish 2 (Grade 8), meeting with my classes for forty-five minutes every day.

Open-mindedness is one of the ten attributes included in the IB Learner Profile. To be considered open-minded students,  “critically appreciate our own cultures and personal histories, as well as the values and traditions of others. We seek and evaluate a range of points of view, and we are willing to grow from the experience.”¹ Our school population is pretty diverse but the students typically have a shallow understanding of various cultures not only around the world, but also close to home. They need opportunities to immerse themselves culturally in order to appreciate the similarities in our human experiences that on the surface appear to be different. My plan is to use authentic Spanish language texts and Hispanic visual works of art to present students with opportunities to immerse themselves in the Hispanic culture using authentic target language literature accompanied by a culture rich painting. It is my intention to incorporate ekphrastic poetry into this unit so that students can have exposure to Hispanic culture through the personal experiences of native speakers as told in their native tongue. Authentic literature exposes students to culture through the experiences of the author/speaker because the words the poet uses “refer to common experience,” expressing facts, ideas or events referring to certain knowledge about the world that others share. Words also reflect the poet’s beliefs, attitudes, and point of view and those of her/his culture. “Language expresses cultural reality.”²

Incorporating ekphrastic poetry in the target language not only enriches students’ vocabulary in the target language but it increases their understanding of the target language culture(s). Poetry is an integral component of any culture. Poems express the distinctive culture and worldview of the people from where they originated. In the article entitled Multicultural Moments in Poetry: The Importance of the Unique, David Hanauer points out that poetry affords the language learner entrance into a multileveled socio-cultural linguistic experience; therefore, including poetry in the second language classroom aids educators in teaching multiculturalism.³ There is value in the second language classroom that can arise from incorporating authentic target language poetry in order to increase student understanding of the target language culture(s).