Looking Back: Another Year of Poetry Inside Out Teaching Fellows

As we gear up for the start of the 2024-2025 school year, we want to congratulate the 2023-2024 Poetry Inside Out Teaching Fellows for their incredible work integrating translation into their classrooms. Throughout the past school year, we have shared some of their accomplishments and successes with their students and within our close-knit Poetry Inside Out community on our blog, and we want to continue the celebrations right here.

Each year, a new class of Poetry Inside Out Teaching Fellows joins a growing community of teachers, artists, translators, and researchers in deepening their understanding of classroom practices. Together, they strategize the best ways to contextualize learning, inspire student achievement, leverage and affirm students’ cultural identity, develop critical thinking skills, and expand the use of Poetry Inside Out’s cross-cultural world poetry and translation curriculum in classrooms.

By collaborating on research projects, the Fellows work as a group to strengthen the connections between translation and education. All of our Fellows receive a stipend, dedicated research time, and support from a community of like-minded teachers. And this community doesn’t dissipate overnight—last year’s alumni came and participated in this year’s kick-off retreat!

“Seeing presentations from last year’s Fellows was incredibly enlightening and sparked inspiration for experimenting with Poetry Inside Out methods in the classroom… Leaving the retreat felt like returning to the classroom with new eyes, with wind in my sails (rather than sailing into the wind), and with a revitalized commitment to creating engaging activities that promote multilingualism and global citizenship.”
—Yaxha Ruvein

Throughout the school year, the Center visited local Bay Area classrooms (thanks to Lisa Wong and Yaxha Ruvein for letting us stop by!). While in their classrooms, we watched students engage with their classmates as they built poems out of glossary-based translations. We watched students play multilingual word games to find alliterative iterations of different emotions—for instance, the short distance between cansada and ciao! We even watched as our Teaching Fellows put their summer retreat projects into action, showing students how to build accordion books that display a different part of their cultural identities on each unfolding page.

Our 2022-2023 Teaching Fellows continue to improve the program and participate in academic projects beyond the classroom. From presenting at the 2024 Illinois Reading Council(opens in a new tab) Conference and the Celebration of Writing and Literacy(opens in a new tab), to publishing in the University of Pennsylvania’s GSE Journal, fellows continue to go public with their experiences and insights. 

Our Teaching Fellows have become invaluable members of a greater teacher community and we look forward to opening applications this fall for our 2024-25 class. The Fellowship is open to all educators, and experience with Poetry Inside Out is not required. Subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to hear updates!