“Every Day Do Something That Won’t Compute:” Student Perceptions of Daily Poetry Practice
Submitted by:
Megan Davis Roberts
Abstract:
This poster session details a small-scale qualitative study considering high school students’ relationship to poetry guided by the question: what happens to student perceptions of poetry when class begins each day with a poem? As a former teacher and current teacher educator, I conducted a series of interviews with a small group of my former students regarding their experiences with poetry throughout their K-12 education and with hearing a daily poem in their high school English Language Arts classroom. While the concept of reading a daily poem is not new, I wanted to investigate the effect of its application.
Embracing a transactional (Rosenblatt (1933/1976) framework, the study focuses on a daily poetry ritual, a literature-based experience that intends to foster personal engagement outside of analytical response. As transactional theory stresses that each reader “comes to the book from life” and will resume it afterward (Rosenblatt, 1933/1976, p. 35), I considered the relationship between the participants and the ways in which poetry transacts with their lived experiences. Though this study aimed to capture trends in the participants' poetry experiences, it also sought to embrace the kaleidoscopic multiplicity of the responses. Data was collected through two interviews, inspired by Seidman's (2019) phenomenological interview series approach, allowing for “both the interviewer and participant to explore the participant's experience, place it in context, and reflect on its meaning” (p. 21).
The study observes pervasive misperceptions about poetry: it’s a vehicle to teach literary devices, it’s old and boring, it must rhyme, it’s only for highly uncomfortable levels of self-disclosure, and it’s rigid and restrictive insofar as to impede creative freedom. The daily poetry practice seemed to consistently fall as the students' first regular poetry exposure. Students reflected on how they now consider poetry integrated with their everyday lives and how the ritual altered the classroom culture in some way that deviated from the norm, be that more open, collaborative, or mindful.
Rosenblatt, L. M. (1933/1976). Literature as exploration (5th ed.). MLA.
Seidman, I. (2019). Interviewing as qualitative research: A guide for researchers in education and the social sciences. Teachers College Press.