What Poetry Can Do (MRA 2024)

MRA (Michigan Reading Association) Mar 17, 2024 | 1:30 |Banquet 8

What Poetry can do

Creating a healing community for teachers and students in secondary education Jennifer Guyor Jowett, St Gerard Stefani Boutelier, Aquinas College

We feel joy when our poetry serves others. In this session, teachers will experience poetry’s transformative healing power, through its words, in the writing, reading, listening, and responding, for themselves and their students. The presenters will offer takeaways grounded in poetic healing as a form of moving toward greater joy as well as ways to carry that healing into a joy-filled classroom.

Jennifer Guyor Jowett 30+ years 7th/8th grade ELA Author, Into the Shadows Creator, #DogEaredBookAward MI Teacher of the Year semi-finalist 2024

Stefani Boutelier, PhD 20+ years- 7-12 ELA, Higher Ed, Teacher Educator Ed tech PD facilitator ISTE Certified Educator

teacher-poets

2:10 Crafting Community

1:45 Finding Self

1:55 Poetry Dump

1:30 Introduction

{poem}ing together

1:35 Letting Go

2:20 Writing Joy

• Predictability
• Flexibility
• Empowerment
• Connection

• What do you need to let go of today? Is it grief,

pain, or sadness? What are the words you do not have yet to help you let go of this?

• What do you need to say? (List as many things as necessary)

• What are the injustices you swallow day by day in your

professional and personal lives? Do you attempt to make others’ grief your own and then exhaust your capacity? (List as many as needed)

• If we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for

language and definition, ask yourself: “What’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?” What does this truth look like with our students? Can we make these questions kid-centered? How might this support trauma-informed practices?

Check-in with Yourself*modified from Lorde's questions

Letting Go of Grief

JJ

Process

on this day

Remember

finding self

• Listen to the audio
• Read through poems
• Spend time within them
• Name favorite lines or write remembering and wishing lines of your own

Ruth Forman

Joy Harjo

Opening a Door

Poetry Dump

Post-It Poems

Crafting Community

JJ

Enta Kusakabe developed this verse form by liberating the traditional form of the Tanka. Think about what brings you joy and liberation. Use that as a basis for your own Gogyohka. You might begin with the line, “Oh, if teaching had the same amount of joy as…”

gogyohka

Oh, if teaching had the same amount of joy as...

Share out & Reflect

Thank you for joining us

Jennifer Jowett jagjowett@gmail.comStefani Boutelier smb009@aquinas.edu