Poetry Inside Out Teaching Fellows share their classroom experiences
On March 14th, Poetry Inside Out 2022-2023 Teaching Fellows Brandon Barr and Albert Burford traveled with our Program Director Mark Hauber to Springfield, Illinois. After a year of research, mentorship, and projects, Brandon and Albert were invited to present at the 2024 Illinois Reading Council(opens in a new tab) Conference (IRC). The annual IRC Conference served as an open forum and exchange of ideas and opinions. This year’s conference theme was “Pillars of Literacy: Skills, Strategies, Joy, and Magic.”
Brandon and Albert both teach in a densely populated neighborhood on the Southwest Side of Chicago, where the student population is 90% Latinx. Both Brandon and Albert rarely use textbooks—since they are both invested in their students’ literary connection to their lived experiences. This helps students then follow their curiosity, allowing them to organically increase their involvement and engagement with reading and writing.
As a result of their Teaching Fellowship with Poetry Inside Out, Brandon and Albert craft activities that encourage teamwork and promote connection between classrooms. Their discussions with a tight-knit community of Fellows allowed them to frequently work together and build activities that incorporate images, text, and video so that all students can fully engage in deep thinking about reading.
When we think about assessment and program impact, we usually think about data and numbers. Did their scores go up? Are they growing at the proper rates and reaching the correct percentiles? Students, however, are not simply numbers. Brandon and Albert discussed this measurement by focusing on the students’ words—testaments to their own narrative. One example anecdote came from their student, Morgan.
At the start of the year, Morgan was a student that her former teachers warned you about. In the first few weeks of school, she was frequently off-task, listening to music when assigned work, keeping her phone in her pocket as the other students turned them in at the beginning of class. She frequently had problems cooperating with other students.
After a few calls home and unpleasant conversations, the teachers had a breakthrough with Morgan. In tears, Morgan told them that one of the biggest reasons she’s been acting out and having trouble with her classmates was the racism she faced. As one of the only African-American students in her grade, she often heard her classmates using racist and hurtful language, employing damaging and dangerous stereotypes in their interactions.
Brandon and Albert knew this issue wouldn’t solve itself overnight, but it needed to be addressed from several angles. They incorporated Poetry Inside Out poem pages that featured themes around cultural identity into their preexisting practices. By introducing students to different pieces of work around lived experiences around the world, students were able to understand more and more about the importance of different lived experiences. Together, they began writing their own poetry and connecting their writing with images from online or from their own homes.
Over time, Morgan’s grades improved, and she changed as a student and as a classroom participant. She grew into herself.
An additional fundamental principle of PIO is culture-building. For students to collaborate with peers, classrooms need to be spaces of inclusion and belonging, with an authentic appreciation for each other’s experiences, knowledge, skills, and cultural and linguistic heritages. Culture-building recognizes that each student draws upon their and their peer’s imaginations, existing wisdom, linguistic and cultural understanding, and personal experiences. Student-to-student and personal internal connections are made, and transformations occur.
Poetry Inside Out (PIO) is a language and literacy-rich program centered on collaborative translation of poetry. A process in which talking, listening, and collaboration are essential. To learn more, please contact program director Mark Hauber at Mark@catranslation.org.
Giovanna Lomanto is a poet and essayist with a tendency to play the same song on repeat until she has memorized every last note. She received her BA in English at U.C. Berkeley and finished her MFA at NYU, during which time she published two poetry collections and two mixed media chapbooks.
