teaching poetry
Kenner, Hugh. "Teaching Poetry." Teaching Literature: What Is Needed Now. Ed. James Engell and David Perkins. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988. 3-11. (Davis PN70 .T35 1988)
Kenner asserts the need to teach the experience, physicality, and sound of poetry, the way poetry creates meaning within experience, to counteract students' urge to read it silently, take in the footnotes, and "understand" it. Despite a strange hostility toward discussion, a word he either places in scarce quotes or italicizes with disdain, Kenner does make useful points about why students may read poems as though they were just poorly written articles and how to get them to experience poems as poems.
Showalter, Elaine. Teaching Literature. 2002. (Davis PN59 .S49 2003)
(annotation coming soon)
Tedards, Douglas M. "Journal Writing and the Study of Poetry." When Writing Teachers Teach Literature: Bringing Writing to Reading. Ed. Art Young and Toby Fulwiler. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995. (Davis PN181.W48 1995)
This essay presents one way to use journals in a primarily non-major course. Tedards acknowledges student resistance both to poetry and to keeping an academic journal. He discusses his presentation of the journal assignment and the role of the journals in the course (as the basis of group and class discussions and of the essays Tedards also assigns).
Webster, John. "Whose Poem Is This Anyway? Teaching Spenser through the Stanza Workshop." Pedagogy 3.2 (2003): 197-204.
This article is specifically about teaching The Fairie Queene to undergraduates in a survey, but the techniques and challenges discussed are also relevant to other texts and courses. Webster noticed that, though his students praised The Fairie Queene, their written work on it was consistently poor-and he took it as a sign that they needed to be learning something they weren't. His lecture/discussion hybrid seemed to leave students in a passive learning role; here, he describes the stanza workshop format he went on to adopt. The new format involves assigning shorter readings but requiring a response paper for each class meeting. Webster suggests that we, as experts, have a hard time realizing novices' need for a slower pace than we might want. He also reminds us that students tend to feel apprehensive about and alienated from poetry and non-contemporary literature, and that they thus benefit from some control over class discussions and other engagements with the text (including the exam).
Yancey, Kathleen Blake. Teaching Literature As Reflective Practice. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2004. (Davis PE68.U5 Y36 2004)
The title of Chapter 3, "The Delivered Curriculum," refers to "the curriculum that is visible-in syllabi, in reading and writing tasks, in course outcomes and goals" (41). The chapter focuses on a sequence of assignments that, at the beginning of a general education literature course, help students understand their own not-understanding and reading processes, to choose and read poems carefully, and to take on the role of teacher. Basically, each student selects from an anthology a poem he or she likes, one he or she dislikes, and one he or she does not understand, and explains these selections. Then each student writes to a classmate to help that person understand his or her `don't understand' poem (based on the confused student's summary of the poem and account of what he or she does not understand about it), providing multiple possible interpretations of the poem.
Chapter 4, "The Experienced Curriculum: Closing the Circle," presents two assignments: an ungraded group performance of a poem ("reader's theater") and a more formal project in which groups design a pop-up presentation of a novel. The latter, which really is based on VH1's Pop-Up Videos, is designed to make students see connections by reading the text in various contexts and engaging it actively. The presentations (live, web-based, video, PowerPoint, or whatever the students come up with) lead to graded individual essays.