Editorial
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 4th International English Language Teaching Conference, Penang English Language Learning & Teaching Association (PELLTA), Georgetown/Penang, Malaysia, April 22-24, 2009.
Poetry in Motion: A Multimodal Teaching Tool
Bill Templer, Malaysia
Bill Templer is a Chicago-born educator with research interests in English as a lingua franca, literature in the ESL classroom, and critical applied linguistics. He has taught in the U.S., Ireland, Germany, Israel/Palestine, Austria, Bulgaria, Iran, Nepal, Thailand, and Laos, and is currently at the Faculty of Education, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. E-mail: bill_templer@yahoo.com
Menu
Introduction
Multimodality in lyric miniature
Responding creatively to student resistance
Exploring visualized poetry
Visualized poetry pedagogy: creating activities
Widening the aperture: video songs and ballads, jazz chants
Conclusion
References
Getting learners to enjoy reading and discussing poetry in the EFL language classroom is a challenge for all teachers. Multimodal visual poetry on Internet video – poetry in motion -- is a rapidly expanding genre. It is a superb tool for energizing the reading and appreciation of poems in the language classroom. This paper provides teachers with an introduction to a range of visualized poems, some theoretical framing in terms of multimodality and its pedagogy, and suggestions for hands-on learning tasks and possible classroom-based research. Many of us are far better at retaining words plus images in long-term memory.
The emergence and growth of poetry in motion – combining audio, music, motion graphics, video, photography, paintings -- is the prime focus of Poetry Visualized: http://www.poetryvisualized.com , a new multimodal arts initiative. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43 “How Do I Love Thee?” (1845) is a playful example of an animated Peanuts visual rendering of this classic love poem on the site: www.poetryvisualized.com.
This visual poem exemplifies another prime kind of ‘play genre’ for literature in the language arts classroom in Cook’s (2000) sense of experimental play-centered pedagogies, and is in full tune, I would argue, with Alan Maley’s (2008).conception of the ‘aesthetic approach’ in EFL materials that needs to be inventively expanded in our classrooms, and in teacher education and development. Contrast the Browning sonnet with the Ghana-born Jamaican poet Kwame Dawes’ animated fantasy “Tornado Child”: www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/, which students find powerful and haunting.
On youtube, Poetry Everywhere of the Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org) and Poetry Visualized, more and more video’d interpretations of poems are being uploaded by the week. Teachers will be surprised by how inventive and beautiful some of these creations are, a number designed by students. Browsing there, anyone can discover ever more of their favorite poems, from Shakespeare’s sonnets to classic U.S. poets of the 19th century, such as E.A. Poe, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, figures like Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath and on to contemporaries such as Billy Collins, Naomi Shibab Nye, Lucille Clifton, Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, the current poet laureates of the English-speaking world, Kay Ryan (U.S), and Carol Ann Duffy (Great Britain), and many others.
Many such videos are highly imaginative, combining image, music, the text of the poem, its reading as performance, and aspects of a text’s ‘visual’ interpretation. This also contributes to enhancing skills in ‘visual literacy,’ a core element in the impact of comics and graphic novels (Schwarz, 2002, 2008; Derrick, 2008) on learners, and the entire gamut of video games (Gee, 2003), often in their first language. Multimodality as an interdisciplinary research focus centers on exploring the “multiple modes (e.g. spoken, written, printed and digital media, embodied action, and three-dimensional material objects and sites) through which social semiosis takes place” (O’Halloran, 2006, p. 7; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006). Visual literacy ranges from better comprehending gesture, facial expression, photographs to aspects of performance, use of space, clothing, visual angles and much more. Music may also play a prime role in a multimodal mix. Visualized poems incorporate many of these dimensions, and the present article argues that they can ignite imagination in special ways, tapping students’ multiple intelligences (Puchta & Rinvolucri, 2005; Gardner, 1999), and energizing and sharpening their “emotional literacy” (Goleman, 1995; Upadhyaya, 2008), empathy and emotional competencies. Experience indicates they can motivate reluctant learners, learning to better read reality through the prism of fantasy (Wagner, 1999).
Poetry tends to be the Cinderella in most EFL classrooms. Based on an empirical study of attitudes towards studying literary texts in English at school and variables in students’ backgrounds among 110 Form Five students at two northern provincial Malaysian high schools, Siti Norliana (2008) found that “students express negative attitudes towards reading poems and novels. Almost 70% of the students find poems demanding, followed by novels, with a total of 62%. Poems are considered challenging as ‘every word has its underlying meaning’, the language is deemed difficult, especially in archaic poems like Sonnet 18. The themes for both genres are seen as ‘dull.’” Her study also suggested that “learners of a higher socio-economic status will also have positive attitudes towards studying literature compared to other students” (p. 5), and this dimension of ‘class in the classroom,’ (Finn, 2009), especially in the case of rural students with little access to reading materials in the home, also impacts on their interest in genres like poetry. She notes: “A total of 85.5% respondents would like to have audio-visual support in learning literature. […] Students suggest using drama, watching videos […] using computers and the Internet to make lessons more interesting” (pp. 9-10).
This paper sketches some concrete ways to begin to incorporate poems in motion in the EFL classroom, from the pre-intermediate level, and even earlier, via ‘jazz chants’ with learners of any age.
For starters, several short visual poems I have used with very positive response are Robert Frost, “Dust of Snow” and Billy Collins: "Walking Across the Atlantic," “The Country,” and “The Dead.” Frost’s simple winter poem about a man and crow in the woods is transformed here into a statement on a young schoolboy, winter hardship and social class in America: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lqOkgq2chY. Billy Collins’ fantasy about breaking free and walking on the ocean’s rolling surface from New York back to Europe is brilliantly illustrated: www.poetryvisualized.com/media/59/Walking_Across_the_Atlantic/.
“The Country” is a modern fable about mice and fire, www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xovLpim_1s
Collins develops a web of surprising metaphors, and insights burnished with humor. “The Dead” is a reverie about the spirits playfully watching over us like guardian angels, “looking down, through the glass-bottom boats of heaven, as they row themselves slowly through Eternity”
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI5Gp3d7Z-4. Activities based on these poems are suggested later below.
Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is one of the most popular poems in the American canon. My Malaysian students all learned this poem in high school, but never saw it in a visualized form: www.youtube.com/watch?v=spXtePd4Whk&feature=related ,
another interpretation, www.poetryvisualized.com ; here with Frost himself reading:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXKuqyvsww8&feature=related. It is about the big decisions we all must make, going our own way. Campbell (2007) discloses she had a copy of this above her desk while a student, a poetic icon in her maturation: “a reminder to me that I had not taken the safe route of going to college in state with most of my friends” (p. 148). The songwriter Dan Samples has a musical version of Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” a classic poem about nature and death: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v-hS86FR-o&feature=related. There are many other visualizations of this poem online, including this memorable reading by Frost himself: www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/.
E. A. Poe
Edgar Allan Poe’s famous love poem “Annabel Lee” has numerous visualized renderings. Students can explore these, compare them, and choose their favorite. One learning task is to ask inquire how they themselves would imagine making a video of the poem. Here are three attempts to visualize “Annabel Lee”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4bb_6MmgZo; www.youtube.com/watch?v=13SLJt-Pq2M&feature=related ; and in an InuYasha manga version: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O9uQDxvzY8&feature=related.
Poe’s dark poem “The Raven” has many video renditions online, some with music, some animated, inviting student comparisons. My Malaysian students all agreed that this is a major new tool for energizing poetry in the primary and secondary schools. Campbell (2007, p. 155) recommends “poetry set to music” as a multimodal teaching angle, mentioning “The Raven” as sung by The Alan Parsons Project, a British rock band (1975-1990), from their 1976 album on Poe’s tales and poems
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raven_(song) ). Here is a strong visualization of the poem, www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFy7XidbnKw and here another: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBq27WcNjZ0.
Kay Ryan, poet laureate 2008-
The current poet laureate of the United States, Kay Ryan, is a lyric voice full of humor, wisdom and humanity, and her short poems are quite comprehensible to mid-intermediate learners. Here she reads, and responds a bit in interview: www.youtube.com/watch?v=czWFAOMNLH0 and www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFCP5dCfynI. My students especially appreciated her poem “Home to Roost,” which is about the mistakes we make and how we reap what we sow. But it is so broad in implication that it can seem germane to some very personal things in your own life, and to current events like the crisis in global capitalism. Kay herself comments about 9/11 in this connection. The text here: www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive.
Carol Ann Duffy, poet laureate of Great Britain, 2009-
Carl Ann Duffy has many poems appealing to young adults and children. In one unit, I asked students at University of Malaya to read her extraordinary love poem “Anne Hathaway,” which projects the persona of Shakespeare’s wife, talking about her husband and their love: http://tinyurl.com/rbajnt , combined with the poem in motion: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN3tEHV7k2A. In a written activity, my students compared and contrasted the sentiments and powerful imagery in Duffy’s poem with two poems by angry wives in Maley & Duff (2007), pp. 39-40. One of the poems there is the classic “To the Ladies” by Lady Mary Chudleigh (1656-1710), a noblewoman and feminist poet of the late 17th century: www.poemhunter.com/poem/to-the-ladies/. Another is the anonymous poem “Unhappy Housewife.” All deal with the theme of marriage, and the two in Maley & Duff with patriarchy, and the domination of women by men, especially as wives.
Poets for Palestine
A special poet is the Palestinian-American Naomi Shihab Nye, who also writes about Palestine, as in the poem “For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, Age 15.” Mohammed was killed by what the Israeli army called a “stray bullet.” Naomi reads the poem in a video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9xnbyBY7VY (here the text: www.smith.edu/poetrycenter/poets/formohammedzeid.html ). Political but very human and compassionate, hers is a voice in solidarity with the innocent victims of violence everywhere. The poem is a stepping stone to discussing an important global issue: peace and justice in West Asia. Remi Kanazi, a young Palestinian-American poet from New York, performs his poems in ‘poetry slam’ style and with real force and conviction. His “Collateral Damage” treats a topic like Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem on Gaza, but with broader implications for wars everywhere in our time: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSplaZFYRiM. Remi has a growing number of poem performances on youtube, all compelling, and is editor of an anthology of Palestinian poetry in English (Kanazi, 2008).
Hiroshima
Peace is also the powerful focus of Nazim Hikmet’s class poem on the Hiroshima child: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpfRP_DZy1I. The text is simple, haunting, a plea for end an end to war and violence. www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/742.html I have used this video with intermediate-level students, especially on Hiroshima Day August 6.
“I, too, am America”
Given the new Obama presidency, teachers can include a classic short poem of African-American literary tradition, Langston’s Hughes’ “I, Too” (1926). It has now taken on a fresh topicality.
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the
kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--
I, too, am America.
A number of video renditions of this poem are available, here are two:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CUKyVrhPgM
www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC_80SztZKk
“And still I rise”
The poem can be combined with the graphic history by Laird et al. (1997) Still I Rise: A Cartoon History of African Americans. It challenges many assumptions students may have about the history of African-Americans, their social exclusion over centuries and dreams for equality. Schwarz emphasizes that graphic texts can, in unique ways, implement critical literacy in the classroom: “literacy that affirms diversity, gives voice to all, and helps students examine ideas and practices that promulgate inequity” (2006: 62). Commenting specifically on Still I Rise, she notes: “An uncomfortable book for white readers with its unrelenting statements on racism, this graphic novel is informative and well researched and bound to encourage further research” (Schwarz, 2007, p. 8). Students can here construct a thematic bridge to a graphic narrative, here in the form of a graphic-comic history (Derrick, 2008).
They can then go on to another poem, watching the video of Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise,” from which this graphic history takes its title. The full poem is here www.poemhunter.com/poem/still-i-rise/. It ends:
Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's miraculously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
Here a visualized interpretation of the end of the poem
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik4bnjUCTbE&feature=related. The full poem, Maya reading: www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqOqo50LSZ0&feature=related. It is a lyrical springboard for discussing African-American history, especially in the light of the present conjuncture of change. Maya spoke on Nov. 5, 2008 about Obama’s victory in an interview on CBS about her feelings as an African-American poet the morning after Obama’s historic victory: www.thirdage.com/books/maya-angelou-im-so-proud. So a teaching unit can build from a visualized poem to a graphic history, on to another visualized poem, and then a short video overview of African-American history since 1952, which ends with the poet in a memorable interview. It can also extend out to a classic animated poem about slavery by Lucille Clifton, “Mulberry Fields” www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UnLStD-pYk , or to slam poetry like Daniel Beaty’s “Knock, Knock,” a very powerful piece: www.youtube.com/watch?v=nktBsI0PYPs. Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me” is a powerful short lyric of courage, “born in Babylon / both non-white and woman”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM7q_DUk5wU Her “homage to my hips” is in a similar more playful vein: www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMChVe6IKsw
Gwendolyn Brooks
Among the poems my own students at U of Malaya love most is “We Real Cool” by African-American poet Gwendolyn Brooks, about “cool” guys who drop out of school, hang around the pool hall, “lurk late, strike straight” and “die soon”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SU9TTWhegc. Here a young Afican-American mimes in a striking pose as Gwendolyn reads her own poem: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWxFiFsxikg&NR=1 A young Black girl gives her own talk about how the poem impressed her: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UdlHmUJ5Mo It is also instructive for students to listen to other young people telling how much they love certain poems and why, here responding to the poem’s brevity and message: For personalizing a student’s relation to text, it is of course also effective to just watch or hear poets reading their own poetry, much available on youtube and at the Poetry Foundation video section online.
Sylvia Plath
A striking poem with visualization is Sylvia Plath reading her classic “Daddy”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM , as is her reading of “Lady Lazarus”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=esBLxyTFDxE . Sylvia is one of the most singular voices in modern American poetry, and recorded these poems in 1962, shortly before her suicide in 1963.
Shirley Lim
In Asia and Africa, students can also find videos of poets from their own countries who write in English, or other languages, such as Shirley Lim, and her famous poem “Monsoon History”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxiQmJ1ZjMA This video, prepared by students in a multiliteracies training course at the English Language Teaching Centre, Malaysian Ministry of Education, proved especially fascinating to our Malaysian students – it embodies an indigenous voice, with imaging that is evocative. Indigenizing poetry in the ESL classroom is another key desideratum of a curriculum that seeks to better connect with students, their life worlds and identities.
• Multiple visualizations: comparison and analysis
Among the many possible activities building on poetry videos, students can compare different visualized versions of a given poem they like, and also discuss the kind of video they would make if they could, as suggested in Campbell (2007, pp.164-165), with ideas for setting, animation, costuming and music. Some students may wish to try their hand at doing such a video. Campbell finished her book before the blossoming of youtube, but her pedagogy foresees the creation of videos for poems like Dickinson’s “Because I could not Stop for Death.” She asked her students: “So, if you were making a video of this poem, what would Death and Immortality be wearing”? (ibid.). Today there are numerous versions of this poem on youtube; here one example: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MWFKbWJg_4 A Dickinson poem extremely popular with young adults is “I’m Nobody”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF3BfOvF2bc ; the poem is framed in a video narrative by Chinese-American teen Yina Liang. In my experience, students really like this presentation, because Yina talks about her problems as a teenager growing up in an immigrant family in an Atlanta/Georgia suburb, and relates her life very personally to the Dickinson poem: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWdBz7a_2uA&NR=1 For Shakespeare, students can compare Sonnet XVIII: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrcvMou01Xo&feature=related with David Gilmour’s version as a song: www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Osse7w9fs&feature=related
• Drawing a visual response
The National Association of Comics Art Educators has numerous exercises, articles, handouts, study guides and syllabi at its web site (www.teachingcomics.org ). Students can respond to poetry by drawing what the poems evoke in their imagination, a special form of “graphic reader response.” Drawing their own comics to tell the basic narrative of a text or to invent a comic of their own (Carter, 2008) is a form of active multimodal production by students that is worth far more hands-on experimentation. Such visual responses go far beyond the visualizing activity “Sketch to Stretch,” which often entails a small drawing or sketch to reflect some mood, metaphor or emotion in a tale (Dennis-Shaw, 2006). Comic-making “stretches” visual literacy skills further. A high school class practice-taught by one of our 4th-year teacher trainees in metro Kuala Lumpur recently produced a number of graphic responses in comic panel form to poems they had read, several quite imaginative.
A spectrum of learning tasks
Teachers looking for a diverse spectrum of possible activities can explore Maley & Duff’s (1989) rich array of suggestions, especially “preparing for the poem” (pp. 17-34) and “working into the poem” (35-69). My students, as teachers soon to be, have found their discussion of “poetry’s unique advantages” in TEFL classes (pp. 8-16) particularly cogent and convincing. Maley & Duff (2007) also offers many good selections for activities with poetry, including clear and compact lesson plans. Collie & Slater (1987) have useful suggestions on “warm-up” and “follow-up” learning tasks on several poems (pp. 226-246), including Wole Soyinka’s “Telephone Conversation” and Theodore Roethke’s “My papa’s waltz,” a classic though controversial poem in the modern American canon; Roethke’s poem has sparked a number of visual interpretations on youtube.
Useful are also the activities centering on examining imagery, sound and figurative language described by Campbell (pp. 155-163), and learning to “converse with poetry” through dialogue journals (pp. 154-156). One ‘reader response’ learning task she details is called “live the lines”: she describes in detail how she got her students to experience the possible meaning of Whitman’s classic line “I loaf and invite my soul” at the beginning of “Song of Myself.” Campbell’s students engaged in various kinds of quiet observation and then wrote in class about how they had discovered ways in effect to “step back, slow down, and really listen to one’s inner voice” (p. 167).
Pupils at a secondary school in metro Kuala Lumpur read the poem “Prayer of the Tree” by Samuel Alodina (Ghana) in connection with learning about the ‘Chipko movement’ to save trees in India. The poem is here: http://new.unep.org/geo2000/pacha/forests/forests3.htm. They then made a collaborative class poster, signed by each student expressing thanks for something trees give them in their everyday life. Students were encouraged to watch the video on Chipko: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYuCkn_Pw3E. They also could think about doing their own video of such a poem, some in a class will have these skills.
• Honing multiple intelligences
In a meditative imaging activity, after viewing the poetry animation of Collins’ “Walking Across the Atlantic,” students can imagine they themselves, eyes closed, are walking across a vast sea. Students are then asked to describe in a paragraph, or a small group exchange, what they saw in their mind’s eye, the sounds they heard in their inward ear, the tactile sensations they felt in this meditation on crossing the Atlantic “on foot” [!]. They are instructed to allow their imagination to “create the situation […] as vividly as possible. Focus on what you can see, hear and feel” (Puchta & Rinvolucri, 2005, p 119). Alternatively, they can imagine they are the mouse who discovers fire in the animated poem “The Country,” and can write or speak a kind of interior monologue by the mouse: what she may feel and “think.”
Collins’ animated poem “The Dead” can be compared with Dickinson’s visualized poem “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” since both thematize the ultimate question. Students can be encouraged to write a paragraph, perhaps even discuss in small groups how they feel about death, how they have experienced the death of friends, loved ones, animals. They can attempt to articulate some thoughts about life’s meaning, spiritual or otherwise. Both poems engage what Gardner calls “existential intelligence”(Gardner, 1999, pp. 59 ff.). The visual poem “The Dead” also evokes images of protective spirits of the dead hovering nearby, a belief common in many traditional Southeast Asian cultures.
After watching visuals of Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” students can be asked to imagine a journey they go on, with an imagined landscape passing by around them. Later they come to a fork in the road, and look down what becomes “a road not taken”: “You think about this turning but decide against taking it (Puchta & Rinvolucri, 2005, p. 133). After finishing their journey through an imagined landscape, students are asked to draw a picture and write a page about that road not taken, and the landscapes they saw, heard and felt.
In both these activities, they are also activating what Gardner has termed “naturalist intelligence” (ibid., p. 11; Gardner, 1999, p. 48), which develops a powerful sensibility for the natural world.
Another imaging activity asks students to listen eyes closed to a video poem, such as Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” with spoken text and music, and then write a paragraph about the pictures they saw “as they listened, the smells they experienced, the feelings they had, the daydream they went into” (Puchta & Rinvolucri, 2005, p. 30), or their thoughts and wonderings. Then students in small groups can share what they have written. They can also act out a mini-drama based on the poem. All this engages them more deeply with the text, and with modes for its visualization and enactment, honing “emotional intelligence” and empathy (Goleman, 1995). One fascinating prism is applying insights from the unique drama pedagogy of Dorothy Heathcote (Baj, 2004), guiding learners to “understand human experience from the inside out,” evoking “the drama of our humanness” (Wagner, 1999, p. 25), but that extends beyond this paper’s scope.
The version by Dan Samples of Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (see above) is a superb example of poetry into song. A natural further step is to explore songs and their texts directly, in animation, such as the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.” www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZSFnqo19Bw from the film Yellow Submarine. Compare the film version with this visualization: www.youtube.com/watch?v=24v4d3eZaK0. Ballads, a rich Internet genre, are another poetic focus. Many traditional American ballads and folksongs are contained in the Max Hunter Folksong Collection: http://maxhunter.missouristate.edu/ , such as Child Ballad #84: “Barbra Allen” http://maxhunter.missouristate.edu/songinformation.aspx?ID=1176 ; compare with a video version by Bob Dylan: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyrXJP1WMJA. Labor songs are another rich lode, many now with video, as here in songs at a strike action in Indiana in May 2008 sung by labor activist Anne Feeney: http://tinyurl.com/qv5qla . Can jazz chants (Graham, 2006) form a kind of bridge in EFL for students to working with poetry in new ways? Students can experiment, inspired by this kind of video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bIPzRPEhTM and chants by Carolyn Graham www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxbjLVTc_MY. Such chants engage the body as well as the mind and voice, and could be done to simple poetry, such as haiku. Action research is needed.
Students and teachers can experiment with visualized poetry in motion in the classroom. In various modes of classroom-anchored qualitative and quantitative research (Burns, 1999), educators can examine how poetry visualization can become a powerful tool for student motivation, enhancing proficiency in language, and sheer fun in opening students up to lyric poetry and ballad more broadly. Case study is another window of qualitative inquiry, looking at the “particularity and complexity of a single case, coming to understand its activity within important circumstances” (Stake, 1995, p. xi;.). Carter’s (2007, p. 24) call regarding graphic novels also holds for visual poetry: “More success stories are needed, particularly via practitioner-based essays detailing use of graphic novels in actual classrooms.” One excellent under-utilized approach is to use focus groups to elicit student response; they can interact in small groups as they discuss their experiences working with poetry in motion with the researcher/moderator (Flick, 2006, pp. 189-203).
Teachers can also look at particular aspects of multimodality (Bateman, 2008; O’Halloran, 2006; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006), and how word and sound cum image in dynamic fusion act to shape and enrich multiple literacies (Schwarz, 2007; 2008) and engage multiple intelligences (Puchta & Rinvolucri, 2005; Gardner, 1999; Wagner, 1999), schooling emotional intelligence and emotional
literacy (Goleman, 1995; Upadhyaya, 2008) in the EFL classroom. The website of Poetry Visualized can serve as one prime compass for future explorations in these still largely uncharted waters of poetry pedagogy, and that of the Poetry Foundation and its video series Poetry Everywhere in the United States another. A natural link can be forged from lyric poetry to the multimodal genres of popular song, folksong and balladry. Some of our students are remarkably knowledgeable about such music, and all love it.
Can students be more readily ‘turned on’ to poetry through work with visualizations? I am certain they can. Let’s experiment!
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Schwarz, G. (2006). Expanding literacies through graphic novels. English Journal, 95(6), July. NCTE. www1.ncte.org
Schwarz, G. (2007). Media literacy, graphic novels and social issues. Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education, 7(4): 1–11. www.okstate.edu
Schwarz, G. (2008). Balancing literacies: Using graphic novels for many literacies. www.okstate.edu
Siti Norliana, G. (2008). Learner Background and their Attitudes towards Studying
Literature Malaysian Journal of ELT Research, 4: 1-17. www.melta.org.my
Stake, R. E. (1995). The art of case study research. Thousand Oaks/CA: Sage.
Upadhyaya, P. (2008). Emotional intelligence in teacher education. Allahabad: Anubav.
Wagner, B. J. (1999). Dorothy Heathcote: Drama as a learning medium. 2nd ed. Portsmouth/NH:
Heinemann.
Please check the How to Use Technology in the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Literature course at Pilgrims website.
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