Joyful Reading: Poetry Explorations

Hacking the Poem (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

These are a few engagements I will be doing with administrators and teachers during this week as we engage in explorations of poetry.

Annotating the Poem from Mary Ann Reilly / Blueprints for Learning, Inc.

Reading Poetry with Middle School Students from Mary Ann Reilly / Blueprints for Learning, Inc.

Exploring History through Visualization, Interpretation, & Poetry Making

This is a slideshare I will be using with middle school history teachers later this week.


Blurb from Slideshare: In this informative slideshare, uses drawing to explore the Ballad of Birmingham. This is followed by an interpretation of the poem as created by a student for her AP class. At the conclusion of this slideshare are methods to create blackout newspaper poems and found poems using a newspaper account of the Birmingham Church Bombing from September 1963.

let it go

Brick City (M.A. Reilly, Paterson, NJ)

let it go – the
e.e. cummings

let it go – the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise – let it go it
was sworn to
go

let them go – the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers – you must let them go they
were born
to go

let all go – the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things – let all go
dear

so comes love

On Brilliance and Necessity and the Problem with an Autonomous Model of Literacy (AKA Common Core)

Empty Lot (M.A. Reilly.  Harlem  2012)

"I love those who yearn for the impossible." - Goethe

I received this tweet early this evening from Heidi Siwak (@HeidiSiwak) that included a link to an important post, Creative Solutions are No Accidents. (Please take a moment to read.)

I stopped what I was doing and read the post and then reread it and then thought: There's such scholarship and generosity--inquiry and curiosity in Heidi's work as a teacher and learner. What I so appreciated in the work and processes Heidi describes is the occasioning of thinking and problem solving, alongside community that she composes. Complexity cannot be caused. At best, it can (sometimes) be occasioned. Such understanding, especially when actualized, represents a major shift in teaching. We move from what should and ought to happen to what might or could happen.

We dwell in possibility (A fairer House than Prose...).
Heidi's work exemplifies such a shift.


Her work reminds of this important shift we also need to be thinking about when working with teachers:

The overt (and perhaps even tiresome) obsession in the U.S. with the Common Core has redirected professional attention and critical resources almost exclusively on the endless naming and renaming of content to be learned. How many ways can we say, "Pay attention to text while reading and writing"? (You can hear the drone even from great distances sounding: Close reading. Evidence. Rigor. Complex Text. Close reading. Evidence. Rigor. Complex Text and so on...)  These words and phrases are empty as they are fashioned out of a belief of an autonomous model of literacy instead of recognizing literacies as being inherently ideological.

Brian Street who first coined those phrase (autonomous and ideological) explains:

The ‘autonomous’ model of literacy works from the assumption that literacy in itself – autonomously – will have effects on other social and cognitive practices. The model, however, disguises the cultural and ideological assumptions that underpin it and that can then be presented as though they are neutral and universal ... The alternative, ideological model of literacy ... offers a more culturally sensitive view of literacy practices as they vary from one context to another. This model starts from different premises than the autonomous model – it posits instead that literacy is a social practice, not simply a technical and neutral skill ... It is about knowledge: the ways in which people address reading and writing are themselves rooted in conceptions of knowledge, identity, being. Literacy, in this sense, is always contested. (Street, 2000, pp.7-8).

Discerning key differences between autonomous and ideological models of literacy helps us to understand situating teaching as a causal act and understanding teaching as attempts to occasion learning.  Heidi's work (as described in the post) illustrates the creative scaffolding necessary to occasion learning that happens within social practices of the classroom--where 'conceptions of knowledge identity, being' are present and contested.  It's a messy, complex place.

Forgetfulness (M.A Reilly, 2010)

When I read about the intellectual and social spaces Heidi's work with children opens, I remember what it means to teach as a learner, not merely as a player cast in someone's already determined epic. What passes as teaching excellence in these CCSS days is paltry stuff--something akin to cheap magician tricks. How could such mimicry ever escape the paralysis that comes with the philosophical belief that literacies are neutral, universal: Repeat after me: Close reading. Evidence. Rigor. Complex Text. Close reading. Evidence. Rigor. Complex Text? It is as if meaning of these terms remained universal, unmoving, untouched--not something emerges as it is being made. Bakhtin described such phenomena well when he wrote: “[d]iscourse lives, as it were, beyond itself, in a living impulse toward the object; if we detach ourselves completely from this impulse all we have left is the naked corpse of the word” (1981,  p. 292). In so many ways, the resurgence of CCSS certainty is as Bakhtin (1981) describes epic: a poem about the past” told by “a man speaking about a past that is to him inaccessible” (p. 13).  
In contrast a living impulse describes well the classroom Heidi shares with students as they create and deconstruct--test constraints that confine and liberate. The means to thoughtful inquiry is composed, not copied.

No simulacrum there.

This is the great stuff of teaching--learning.
The trial and error.
The making of failure and more failure and within that the opening of  big, big space where ideas bloom wild and becomes named alongside critique.

Oh, to be a learner there.

Cited Works:

Bakhtin, MM. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Street, B. (2000). ‘Introduction’ in Street, B. (ed.) Literacy and Development: ethnographic perspectives. London, Routledge, pp. 7–8.

Drawing Your Way Into and Out of a Poem

Eavan Boland reading.

This is an sample of some work I will be doing with administrators and teachers later in the week focusing on comprehension and poetry.  The poem, This Moment, is authored by Irish poet Eavan Boland.

Are You Walking Out? Newark Students Plan Walk Out on April 3

This video posted by Newark Students Union explains (to some extent) why these students plan to walk out of school on April 3.  They post (via Google Docs) 11 reasons why students should walk out. Posted here.





What do you think?  Do students' voices matter?  Is there a way we need to listen?  To respond?

First Chorus

from here. 

I plan to work with the idea of first chorus during the next month. Such a provocative opening to muse about.  Thanks to Heidi Siwak (@HeidiSiwak) for mentioning, Creativity from Constraints.

"First chorus" is a musical term for an initially played melody that provides the notes, chords, and keys used in the variations or improvisations that follow. For example, Mozart used the traditional melody Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star as the basis for 12 variations. First choruses in other domains also supply components to be recombined and changed. In painting Seurat and Signac used Monet's mosaic-shaped brush strokes as a first chorus for developing the dots of pure color that characterize Pointillism.

Patricia D. Stokes PhD. Creativity from Constraints: The Psychology of Breakthrough (Kindle Locations 82-85). Kindle Edition.