This is the fourth installment of the NCTE Citizenship Campaign, a blog series sponsored by the NCTE Standing Committee on Citizenship. This month’s theme is using poetry to spark civic engagement. It is written by Duane Davis.
My first instinct as a teacher of English and longtime member of NCTE was to put this month’s theme together through song lyrics. This would likely have resulted in a deconstruction of the work of Kendrick Lamar, Tupac Shakur, and certainly a mention of Nikki Giovanni’s Poem, “For Tupac.” I also considered an exploration of poetic justice through the lens of the current political assault on education.
Instead, I decided to ditch both of those ideas and use this space to discuss the work and life of the recently fallen poet, Derek Walcott. In the proud tradition of “artist on the margins,” Walcott embarked on a journey to create a myth on the level of Beowulf and Virgil, in his epic poem Omeros. I have been fortunate in my life to have English instructors who exposed me to art that challenged my view of the world, my community and myself. In Walcott I found someone who spoke to the ideas that were circulating in my head: global racial formation and its effects on space, language, and identity. If you don’t know Walcott already, here are some links to explore:
- Nobel laureate, poet and playwright Derek Walcott dead, aged 87 (The Guardian)
- Derek Walcott Bio (Poetry Foundation)
- The Problem with Poetry Students, and other Lessons from Derek Walcott (The New Yorker)
Walcott’s poem is epic and Afro-futuristic and magical realism and intersectional rolled into one. Ultimately, he reminds us through his work that with art at the center, understanding and acceptance can be the norm and not the outlier. It is not enough to observe and comment on society. You have to enact and activate in order to seek the justice necessary for equity and equality.
As educators, we have to remember that our daily choices, from the greeting at the door (for all levels), to the selection of text, to the type of assessments we give, illuminate our beliefs about the world—who we read, how we interact and what we say. To that end, I am also including a few links to national poetry organizations that encourage student voice and often through the subject matter explore issues of equality and justice.
While it is not our job to imbue students with our personal ideology, it is our job to give them the tools necessary to critically understand, reflect, respond and evaluate their world and their own ideology. Poetry is a vehicle for reading and learning the views of others and exploring our own ways of seeing the world.
More Poetry Resources
- “Using Read-Alouds with Critical Literacy Literature in K-3 Classrooms” Wendy B. Meller, Danielle Richardson, and J. Amos Hatch
- Developing Critical Literacy (on the Teaching For Change website)
- Defining Critical Literacy: Why Students Should Understand the Power of Language