Building confidence in poetry teaching in Australian secondary education
Submitted by:
Kelli McGraw
Abstract:
There is much in Australian English curriculums about the need for ‘balance’ in text study. But there is little in the Australian or Queensland curriculums to articulate what this balance should look like or seek to achieve. Regarding poetry, although it is a form of literature listed for study in every year of the Australian Curriculum for English, learning about poetry is not clearly linked to the related curriculum content or framework for organising and assessing literary knowledge.
This paper reports pilot and survey data from a project that explored preservice teachers’ knowledge of and attitudes towards poetry and language teaching. Undertaken in 2023-4 in a teacher education course in Brisbane, Australia, the research used pre- and post-semester surveys in two undergraduate units in English education. This presentation will share the findings for the secondary English education cohort, who were surveyed in the context of a 10-week, discipline-specific unit of learning in the fourth year of their Bachelor of Education.
As poetry is an area in which English teachers have been found to lack confidence (Weaven & Clark, 2013), this research importantly suggests that ensuring preservice teachers have experiences of poetry composition, in conjunction with targeted learning about language and linguistics, will improve their confidence in teaching poetry. This improved confidence may be essential for ‘negotiating space’ (Dymoke & McGuinn, 2021) in the curriculum for their future students to be allowed to write poetry at all.
Dymoke, S. & McGuinn, N. (2021). Being allowed: Negotiating space for poetry writing with literature examination students, New Writing, 18(4), 440-451, DOI: 10.1080/14790726.2021.1891257
Weaven, M. & Clark, T. (2013). ‘I guess it scares us’: Teachers discuss the teaching of poetry in senior secondary English. English in Education, 47(3), 197-212, DOI: 10.1111/eie.12016