January 26 2015

Using Poetry and Fiction Within Teaching Methods:

Poetry can be used as a tool to help students express their learning processes.
Using poetry as a vehicle to encourage learning can allow for a different way to covey literacies. Poetry allows you to cover the long-standing literacy topics in an unconventional way and encourages students to make personal connections to various themes and concepts. This is particularly useful in a history class, where we want students to be able to relate concepts from the past to present day and their own personal daily lives.
Poetry can also help teachers learn how to listen to students in a new way. Poetry can be the means which allows students to show you what they have learned through personal expression and the conventions of performance, whether students are orally presenting their poetry, or simply submitting it for the teacher to read.
Most importantly, as expressed above, poetry works to create meaning. It helps students to connect with a deeper meaning to the content. Students may be able to take out what is important within a subject by personally choosing to connect or relate to the material.

Fiction works in many of the same ways that poetry does in the classroom. Having students create their own stories based on the subject matter can help them gain a better understanding of the impact and importance of the information which they are learning. Like poetry, it makes the material personal and allows them to form their own ideas and relations to the material.

In a history classroom in particular, having students write a poem from the perspective of a soldier serving in the trenches, or as a mother writing her son a letter from the home front, or perhaps a fictional short story about a nurses' experience can all work to get students thinking seriously about the subject matter, rather than the material serving as some isolated information in a text book.
Using poetry and fiction can work in a history classroom to encourage critical thinking skills. By allowing for personal interpretation, reflections, or ideas to come forth through the modes of poetry and fiction, the teacher is now creating an effective form and opportunity for student expression in related topics.

Yet there are some short comings when using poetry or fiction in the classroom:
- How can we effectively evaluate a students learning through the modes of poetry and fiction, as these conventions of writing are often subjective.
-Since these conventions are creative, can we put restrictions on the form and style?

Example of Poetry in a Historical Context:
http://www.greatwar.co.uk/poems/john-mccrae-in-flanders-fields.htm