She glanced athwart the glooming flats: creating a ‘live circuit’ between the reader, writer and text in the poetry classroom

Poetry Matters ESRC Seminar Series 2011-2012

25 May 2011

Nicholas McGuinn nicholas.mcguinn@york.ac.uk

The Colonel

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go f--- themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

Six essential semiotic systems or ‘designs’• Linguistic• Visual• Audio• Gestural• Spatial• Multimodal

(Multimodal designs incorporate combinations of other designs - for example, linguistic and visual.)

New London Group (1996) 'A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures', Harvard Education Review, 66: 60 - 92

Moon on the Tides (Poetry Anthology)The poems in this section have been chosen by teachers and examiners to appeal to a range of students. They range from classic texts to brand new, previously unpublished poems from popular contemporary writers.

Each cluster contains poems from the English, Welsh and Irish Literary Heritage alongside contemporary poems which are drawn from across cultures.

The clusters are arranged by themes that have been chosen because they address universal and timeless issues. Each cluster contains a range of styles and genres so that students can consider how different poets have approached these ideas.

Most importantly, the poems have been chosen to engage students in making a personal response and interpretation.

Poems in the Primary School

‘The Highwayman’ (Alfred Noyes)‘On the Ning, Nang, Nong’ (Spike Milligan)‘Jabberwocky’ (Lewis Carroll)‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ (Edward Lear)‘From a Railway Carriage’ (R L Stevenson)‘The Listeners’ (Walter de la Mare)‘The Magic Box’ (Kit Wright)‘The Sound Collector’ (Roger McGough)Revolting Rhymes (Roald Dahl)‘Dog in the Playground’ (Allan Ahlberg).

Poetry in schools: A survey of practice, 2006/07www.ofsted.gov.ukPublished December 2007

Lupins – Seamus Heaney

They stood. And stood for something. Just by standing.

In waiting. Unavailable. But there

For sure.

I sometimes hold it half a sin

To put in words the grief I feel

For words, like Nature, half reveal

And half conceal the Soul within

Tennyson: In Memoriam V

The Thermal Stair – WS Graham

… words make their world

In the same way as the painter’s

Mark surprises him

Into seeing new.

Factual Knowledge

The basic elements that students must know to be acquainted with a discipline or solve problems in it

Conceptual Knowledge

The interrelationships among the basic elements within a larger structure that enable them to function together

Procedural Knowledge

How to do something; methods of enquiry, and criteria for using skills, algorithms, techniques and methods

Metacognitive Knowledge

Knowledge of cognition in general as well as awareness and knowledge of one’s own cognition

Krathwohl, D. (2002) ‘A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy: An Overview’, Theory into Practice 41, 4, 214

TWO DEEPLY SEATED PEDAGOGICAL HABITS:RECITATION AND PSEUDO ENQUIRY

And, as many UK and US researchers have constantly found, one kind of talk predominates: the so-called ‘recitation script’ of closed teacher questions, brief recall answers and minimal feedback which requires children to report someone else’s thinking rather than to think for themselves.

OR

An endless sequence of ostensibly open questions which stem from a desire to avoid overt didacticism, are unfocused and unchallenging, and are coupled with habitual and eventually phatic praise rather than meaningful feedback.

CULTURE, DIALOGUE AND LEARNING: NOTES ON AN EMERGING PEDAGOGY: ROBIN ALEXANDER 2005

Language not only manifests thinking but also structures it, and speech shapes the higher mental processes necessary for so much of the learning which takes place, or ought to take place, in school. It follows that one of the principal tasks of the teacher is to create interactive opportunities and encounters which directly and appropriately engineer such mediation.