Introducing the 2022-2023 Poetry Inside Out Teaching Fellowship
This fall, we’re excited to announce the launch of a new program at the Center for the Art of Translation. The 2022-23 Poetry Inside Out (PIO) Teaching Fellowship is rooted in teaching and inquiry and builds on teacher practice and research. The goals of the Teaching Fellowship are to build a community of students and educators, enhance teacher skills in the area of creative language instruction, and enrich the field of literary education through dialogue-based, collaborative, linguistically-diverse curricula.
PIO’s curriculum is built around translating great poems from around the world, which is an act of discovery that requires close reading and the aesthetic appreciation of poetry and translation and inspires a love of learning. The fellowship offers a deeper window into teaching processes through a supported, project-based inquiry model. Teaching Fellows join a vibrant network of students, teachers, poets, translators, and academics committed to open-ended dialogue about language and literature— participating as both educators and researchers.
Throughout the 2022-23 academic year, not only will Teaching Fellows Develop a culturally responsive, integrated curriculum based on PIO’s key practices; they will also gain transferable classroom skills and strategies. In taking a deeper dive into both translation and poetry, the fellows will gain the skills to integrate both into their practice. They will identify and build classroom structures that support students in learning to agree, disagree, assess evidence, and make evidence-based arguments. They will deepen their understanding of classroom practices that contextualize learning, foster student achievement, leverage and affirm students’ cultural identity, and develop critical thinking skills.
Keep reading to learn more about the fellows and to hear about the launch of the Teaching Fellowship in Washington, DC!
Introducing the Fellows
Brandon Barr has taught middle school Language Arts at Chicago public schools for 17 years. Having studied Spanish as a young adult, he gained an interest in translation while working with bilingual students and families as a teacher. He was first introduced to Poetry Inside Out during the pandemic. Having enjoyed the community that PIO teacher workshops fostered during an isolating time, he looks forward to deepening his work alongside the fellows as classes readjust to in-person learning.
Albert Burford is a a 6th grade Reading, Writing, and Social Studies teacher at Twain Elementary School in Chicago. His priority as a teacher is to help students tap into their natural curiosity, guiding them as they learn about cultures, languages, and people they’ve never heard of. He finds that the most exciting growth and learning happens when students are inquiring and collaborating with their classmates— and that the same is true for himself and the community of teachers he has met through PIO.
Erica Darken has taught multiple elementary grades in Philadelphia over the years, including bilingual 1st grade and 4th grade. She has also worked as a curriculum development specialist in the School District of Philadelphia’s Office of Multilingual Curriculum and Programs, and looks forward to continuing her support of multilingual learners this year as a 5th grade ESOL teacher. She works to honor the home languages and/or linguistic aspirations of her students, and hopes to improve her abilities to implement PIO with a focus on student collaboration alongside her colleagues.
Akela Leach is a 5th grade teacher with eight years of experience in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She values PIO curricula for their accessibility to all students regardless of their academic backgrounds, and is eager to apply the skills gained during the Teaching Fellowship to her interests. She is particularly passionate about indigenous languages, and aims to work counter to the lack of educational resources devoted to teaching about Native American cultures, heritages, and nations.
Lisa Yuk Kuen Yau has been teaching in the School District of Philadelphia for 21 years, and currently teaches 5th grade at the Francis Scott Key School. Yau is a Teacher Consultant of the Philadelphia Writing Project since 2016, a Teacher Representative for the Teachers Institute of Philadelphia since 2018, and a National Fellow of the Yale National Initiative since 2019, with ample experience creating dynamic, new curricula. As a Teaching Fellow at PIO, she looks forward to conducting the research necessary to create a comprehensive curriculum unit based on poetry written by Indigenous peoples of Northern America.
A Warm Welcome in Washington, D.C.
The Teaching Fellowship kicked off in September with a three-day retreat in Washington, DC, where the fellows were able to meet one another face-to-face, discuss their plans and aspirations for the year, and work together on a range of interdisciplinary projects. The retreat also coincided with this year’s Day of Translation at the Phillips Collection, where the fellows were able to familiarize themselves with the broader mission of the Center for the Art of Translation beyond Poetry Inside Out. They attended panel discussions about readership and literary translation advocacy, the intersection between text and image, and the future of children’s literature in translation, expanding their contextual understanding of current debates and new possibilities in the field of literary translation.
Between Thursday, September 29 and Saturday, October 1, Teaching Fellows also engaged in collaborative translation projects, working with poems by Jose Luis Ayala and Elías Nandino to step into the shoes of students working with a Poetry Inside Out lesson plan. They discussed the cultural, developmental, and social importance of bringing poetic translation and multilingual exposure to the classroom, and went over over a series of “Talk Moves” designed to engender complex, encouraging dialogue between students, equipping fellows to implement more alternatives to traditional, recitation-style teaching.
The retreat also included multiple opportunities to explore translation and poetry as they intersect with visual media. Fellows designed accordion books, in which they reflected on the affective and intellectual components of the translation process through stream-of-consciousness text and illustrations. They also visited the National Gallery of Art, comparing their first impressions of twin portraits by Arshile Gorky and practicing stylistic interpretation across different genres and media. These exercises dovetailed well with Word + Image: Where Meaning Collides, a panel at the Day of Translation that featured translators Heather Green and Alta L. Price alongside artists Verónica Gerber Bicecci and Abdulrahman Naanseh.
The launch of the fellowship was a joyful and promising occasion, and we at the Center look forward working with the fellows and supporting their curricular projects throughout the academic year!
We’d also like to extend our most sincere thanks to Anne Germanacos and the Germanacos Foundation for the continued support of the 2022- 23 Poetry inside Out Teaching Fellowship.
