Poetry and Community Mapping in Critical Practitioner Research and Curricular Practices

This paper considers our practice as poets and educators who aim to foster community through creative writing workshops for educators. We draw on the work of literacy scholars and practitioners who emphasize creating a more just world (Freire 1970/2005; Janks 2010; Vasquez 2017), practice collaboration and improvisation in educational spaces (Campano 2007), and recognize the importance of emergence and responsiveness as pedagogical and curricular practices (Aoki 1993; McCoy 2012; Neimanis 2012). Our findings suggest this work has the potential to support “restorative” literacy practices (Johnson 2017) that make space for underrepresented voices to emerge as they resist top-down curricula.

Using practitioner inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) this presentation details how a group of teachers and researchers have used community mapping to produce culturally relevant teaching (Ladson-Billings, 1995). By giving us access to students’ and their communities’ funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992), community mapping has provided opportunities to shift the culture of power (Delpit, 1988) often found in classrooms. As this project progresses, we hope to learn more about our students and their communities as well as articulate how we have turned a pedagogical orientation into practice within our classrooms more fully.

Drawn from a practitioner inquiry conducted with students enrolled in eleventh grade English Language Arts classes at an urban, public school, this research looks to a sampling of identity poetry authored by students and modeled after Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl" to explore how adolescents use writing to construct voices of transgression that counter sociocultural forces that serve to challenge the construction of identity that they seek for themselves. Analysis of these prose poems signals how "ingenuity" and "passion" operate as key conceptual components that can provide a language of description and analysis for conceptualizing the "voice" that emerges in written discourse.