From the Coffee House to the School House: The Promise and Potential of Spoken Word Poetry in School Contexts
By M. Fisher. English Education, 2005
130 citations recorded by the source corpus.
are high school English teachers and their students integrating out-of-school literacy practices such as spoken word poetry in urban school settings? What are the ways in which these teachers and their students are redefining literacy and what it means to be literate? "Your job is to be literate in as many ways as possible," begins Joe as he addresses his "Power Writers" one Friday morning. Joe, a public high school English and music teacher, speaks briefly in the beginning of class so that there is time to hear from every student during "read and feed." Read and feed is an opportunity for each student to read his or her own original piece of writing, generally poetry, and receive feedback from at least two to three peers and one "teacher." Every Monday afternoon, Friday morning and even on some Saturdays, Joe convenes with the "Power Writers." The Power Writers range from grades 9-12 as well as recent graduates who bring their journals and notebooks to participate in a writing class above and beyond their English classes. When Joe discusses literacy with his students, he explains that he wants each of them to become a "jedi of words" building on the concept of a "jedi knight" from the famous Star Wars film trilogy. In the Star Wars trilogy, a jedi knight is the ultimate warrior. In Joe's class, a "jedi of words" is committed to crafting his or her writing, developing critical reading skills and learning how to be articulate in the "language of wider communication" (Smitherman, 2002)1. The "Power Writers" not only compose from the perspectives of teenagers coming of age in New York City, one of the most complicated urban cities in the country, but also from the perspectives of being African American, Dominican, Puerto Rican and West Indian. In another borough in New York City, Mama C urges her high school students, "Use your voice; you can't have powerful words and weak voice."
Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Language and Linguistics, Literature and Literary Theory
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/74ba2d467716b3c9b072709185b482e883b5285a
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Citations in the corpus
- Translanguaging, Coloniality, and English Classrooms: An Exploration of Two Bicoastal Urban Classrooms (2017, background): “Many literacy scholars have pointed to the power of poetry to engage students of color in discourses that denounce colonial and narrow representations of their rich literate practices (Camangian, 2008; Fisher, 2005).”
- A Review of the “Digital Turn” in the New Literacy Studies (2010, background): “For example, there are reports of schools adapting literacy curricula to successfully make stronger connections with the local and popular literacies of youth in recreational contexts, including computer gaming (Beavis, 2004), online chat (Goodfellow, 2004), digital presentations of spoken word poet”
- Toward a Corridista Consciousness: Learning From One Transnational Youth's Critical Reading, Writing, and Performance of Mexican Corridos (2018, background): “Scholars aligned with the New Literacy Studies tradition (Gee, 1991; Street, 1984, 1995) have urged further examination of the power relations surrounding what counts as literacy and whose literacy matters (Alvermann & Heron, 2001; Fisher, 2005; Morrell, 2004; Rubinstein- Ávila, 2007).”