After several years of tweaking the protocols for a student- led poetry project, the call for this issue prompted the author to share what she and her students have learned and are still learning about reading poetry. This includes a now- eighth- grade student, Grace. Grace considers herself a "good" student, eager to learn, but she also…

This case study examined a Romanticism unit within a Year 9 English class in Sydney, Australia. It considered whether popular culture could build connections between students' lives and Romanticism, and whether the process of remixing "high" Romantic poetry with "low" popular culture could foster student engagement. Thematic…

This paper describes how adolescent students responded to a poetry workshop in an English classroom where the content was derived from their knowledge from their various life experiences and understanding of world events. Informed by theories of New Literacy Studies, ethnographic methods of participant-observation were used to document an eighth…

Collaborations and partnerships among schools and community members have been described as a way to provide better educational opportunities for students. Such school-community partnerships have been described as relationships that involve exchange and engagement with mutually defined goals benefiting all participants. However, the process of…

Despite the fact that adolescents benefit from caring adults that participate in their child's education, involvement of families decreases incrementally as students progress to higher grades. Through conversations and observations with students, I have examined how students' perceive these points within a poetry program that was developed for…

Describes a poetry unit for grade 8 aimed toward (1) showing that contemporary music can be termed poetry; (2) involving students in expressing themselves dramatically; and (3) exposing the students to various types of poetry to illustrate how words can be used to enhance their own lives. (MM)

Students become involved with poetry by reading and criticizing a poem written by their instructor. (SW)

THESE THREE TESTS--"REORIENTATION,""TRAVEL LITERATURE," AND "NARRATIVE POETRY"--WERE DESIGNED BY THE OREGON CURRICULUM STUDY CENTER FOR AN EIGHTH-GRADE LITERATURE CURRICULUM. THEY ARE INTENDED TO ACCOMPANY CURRICULUM UNITS AVAILABLE AS ED 010 141 AND ED 010 142. (MM)

Professional Development Schools (PDSs) can potentially affect the quality of teaching and learning of students in Grades K-16. The authors describe the collaborations among teacher education, arts and science, and K-12 classroom teacher faculties involved in a 5-year PDS partnership at Kansas State University. A 15-member language arts team…

This work is one of a series of collections of objectives and measurement items from several subject areas based upon curricular material either submitted by teachers, schools, and school districts, or generated by the Instructional Objectives Exchange (IOX) staff. Contained in the junior high school English literature collection are sixteen…

Describes how an eighth-grade language-arts teacher teaches poetry via performance. Describes how she introduces poetry, performance, and audience. Shows how students (even non-readers and non-achievers) quickly show great eagerness to do poetry with enthusiasm, excitement, and energy; and now perform locally. Includes a poetry portfolio outline…

Describes how students in an 8th-grade rural English classroom were focused and engaged over a 9-week period as they investigated and researched a poem of their own choice by a Native American poet, and wrote a hypertext web of their research journey. Notes that students experienced text in a new way, as a network of links. (SR)

To test whether student tastes in poetry could be modified by a particular method of teaching it, the poetic preferences of 751 eighth grade students were pretested and compared with the poetic choices made by a panel of English educators, 35 student teachers in English, and the students' own English teachers. Consistently, poems selected by any…

Describes how one eighth-grade teacher creates a safe, playful, literate environment for a four-week poetry unit which immerses students in the thoughtful, energetic, productive experience of poetry. Describes introducing poetry, setting up the unit, class activities, a wide range of requirements and assignments, and students' enthusiastic…

"Teacher to Teacher" provides a forum for teachers to share ideas, materials, and activities. In this article, the first teacher describes the effects the well-known novel "Bleachers" (John Grisham, New York: Doubleday, 2003) had on a ninth-grade english class. The novel bought to life the high school culture that the students found challenging.…