Poetry Inside Out Teaching Fellows: A Bay Area Spotlight
This year, two of our Poetry Inside Out Teaching Fellows are based right here—in the San Francisco Bay Area! Lisa Wong and Yaxha Ruvein are incorporating translation and multilingualism into their daily curriculum using Poetry Inside Out as a guiding principle.
Teaching Fellows join a community of teachers, artists, poets, translators, and researchers working to explore and expand Poetry Inside Out as a classroom practice. Together, they enrich the collective knowledge of Poetry Inside Out instruction by developing strategies and approaches in their classrooms and sharing them with other teachers.
The Poetry Inside Out Teaching Fellowship was created to offer a deeper window into individual teaching practices through a supported, project-based inquiry model. Teaching Fellows further their understanding of the program and the practices that nurture students’ literacies and identities and build creative engagement and critical skills. The resulting insights guide Poetry Inside Out’s future and strengthen the program.
We had the opportunity to observe Lisa and Yaxha in their classrooms and take photos of their great work with students. Both are incorporating Poetry Inside Out into regular teaching practices as a way to honor the linguistic and cultural backgrounds of their students while developing essential literacy skills.
In Lisa’s Classroom, the students are all Newcomers—meaning that these high schoolers have been in the United States for less than three years. Her students come from all over the world—Guatemala, Taiwan, Ukraine, and Nigeria, to name a few of their motherlands.
Lisa works with them to expand their English language skills while still honoring their native languages in the classroom.
Lisa began the class day by going around the classroom and asking each student to introduce themselves in whichever language they saw fit. Some students spoke multiple languages, blending their linguistic knowledge into a chorus of hello’s.
Though the class was focused on English language arts, Lisa wasn’t shy about art projects. She started the class by introducing Accordion Books(opens in a new tab), showing them how to properly fold long paper strips into booklets. These books would serve as a way for students to record their experiences, making their thinking visible.
The exercise allowed the students to blend their native languages with English and create beautiful, multicolored booklets proclaiming their favorite elements of their personal identity. One of the students, Owen, had a completed accordion book from last year’s activity, and was proud to pull it out of his backpack right then and there, ready to display as an example for the class.
In Yaxha’s classroom, the name of the game for his 7th grade ELA (English Language Arts) class is choice. Yaxha trusts his students to choose their warm-up activities—providing them with a selection of “do-now’s” to settle them into their seats. His classroom is colorful, playful, and full of excitement. His emphasis on translanguaging (which you can read more about in his individual spotlight!) means that students are allowed to switch between languages as a way to connect more deeply with English.
One of his first activities was all about creativity—and it started with a spilled container of Bananagrams. His students picked a single letter, the letter “A,” and he challenged the students to come up with as many words as possible, with the caveat that they all end in “A.” The kicker? The words could be in any language. We heard “Alabama,” “aloha,” “hola,” and “alpaca” within the first minute of sharing.
They then dove into Mayan poetry, working with historical texts and a newly developed Poem Page for the translation into English. The students were able to frame the poem through cultural and linguistic lenses, learning about the structure of these poems and the importance of translation.
Lisa Wong and Yaxha Ruvein’s classrooms are perfect examples of how poetry and translation can inspire creativity and engagement. From physical activities to mentally stimulating exercises, our Teaching Fellows are hard at work to engage the newest generation of global citizens.
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.
