EJ Workshop: Teaching Poetry

This article reports on and discusses the experience of a contrapuntal approach to teaching poetry, explored during 2016 and 2017 in a series of introductory poetry lectures in the English 1 course at the University of Johannesburg. Drawing together two poems—Warsan Shire’s “Home” and W.H. Auden’s “Refugee Blues”—in a week of teaching in each year provided an opportunity for a comparison that encouraged students’ observations on poetic voice, racial identity, transhistorical and transcultural human experience, trauma and empathy. It also provided an opportunity to reflect on teaching practice within the context of decoloniality and to acknowledge the need for ongoing change and review in relation to it. In describing the contrapuntal teaching and study of these poems, and the different methods employed in the respective years of teaching them, I tentatively suggest that canonical Western and contemporary postcolonial poems may reflect on each other in unique and transformative ways. I further posit that poets and poems that engage students may open the way into initially “less relevant” yet ultimately rewarding poems, while remaining important objects of study in themselves.

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TEACHING POETRY IN ENGLISH-MEDIUM-INSTRUCTION UNIVERSITIES IN THE MIDDLE-EAST: A LINGUISTICALLY ORIENTED MODEL

10.21506/j.ponte.2017.2.19 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 73 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Yogesh Sinha

Keyword(s):

Middle East ◽

Teaching Poetry ◽

English Medium Instruction

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Teaching Poetry through Rock Music

English in Education ◽

10.1111/j.1754-8845.1971.tb00348.x ◽

1971 ◽

Vol 5 (1) ◽

pp. 15-22

Author(s):

Tony Hale

Keyword(s):

Rock Music ◽

Teaching Poetry

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Introducing the Visual Art through Concrete Poetry in the EFL Classroom: A Case Study

International Journal of Language and Literary Studies ◽

10.36892/ijlls.v3i4.765 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 3 (4) ◽

pp. 143-153

Author(s):

Chahra Beloufa

Keyword(s):

Visual Art ◽

Research Area ◽

Visual Poetry ◽

Concrete Poetry ◽

The Third ◽

Teaching Poetry ◽

The University ◽

Visual Shape ◽

Learning English

Teaching poetry offers the teacher of literature some basic and active ways to engage students in learning English because of poetry’s rich language which represents an opportunity for learners to explore meanings and be able to formulate creative responses. One must be aware of the fact that poetry includes various types which differ in forms, and each one of these may have a particular influence on students? learning literature; that is why one centralized the research area on concrete poetry or what is called visual poetry too. This study aims to teach students not only to read and listen to a poem but to develop the skill of creativity through rewriting and this ability would be provoked by the visual shape of the concrete poem. One is trying to bring fun in the EFL classroom and particularly during the literature lecture where students are probably bored by analyzing every line and stanza. So, all these aims were to be concrete via a test, observation and questionnaire. These scientific tools confirmed one’s hypotheses about how positive is concrete poetry for the group of the third-year English L.M.D. students at the University of Djilali Liabes, Sidi Bel Abbes

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