Publishing Student Work

I’ve written a bit previously about the importance of having students publish their own work. Recently, I read a report on poetry that really managed to put things into perspective for me about why students who have the ability to publish their poetry in some form or another are more likely to enjoy poetry and be motivated to write more.

Nancy Womack, in her report “Teaching Poetry to Adolescents: Nine Principles Plus One,” discusses the fact that many, perhaps even most people in America today, don’t enjoy or read poetry much. The fact remains that we still study it in schools and that poetry is part of our Core educational standards. So we ask students to read poetry from a bunch of dead guys and drill their heads full of vocabulary that is totally meaningless to them. Really, what job is going to require knowledge of onomatopoeia? (Mine is, but that’s irrelevant). What we as educators don’t want is for students to come into our class, read a couple of poems, write a little analysis of figurative language as described by Frost to symbolize the love of humanity within a snowy field, etc., etc., and then leave. One of the most important things we can give our students is an understanding of why we teach what we teach. One of the best methods to do that by is to have students have their own unique, hands-on experiences with poetry.

Expression through poetry helps students to internalize information. If students are encouraged and influenced to write a piece that they’re proud of, they’ll need to know the methods to get there. Womack suggests keeping student poetry in labeled files throughout whichever unit you choose to teach, so that by the end of the unit, students essentially have a portfolio of work to evaluate and share as they please. Womack keeps a bulletin board in her classroom with pieces from famous authors such as Shakespeare or Milton. As students write work that they deem to be successful, Womack places student pieces on the board for the class to see. Womack refers to this juxtaposition with canonized authors and poets as an “ego boost” for her students. I imagine that this sort of publication would work well in conjunction with parental communication—realizing that your student has had his or her work displayed in the classroom would add a sense of accomplishment.

Womack’s major claim is that students enjoy being, and want to be introspective. If we can remove stigmas and misconceptions surrounding poetry, students will take the opportunities we give them to build meaningful relationships with language. The attention that comes from publishing a piece of poetry is different from other forms of attention, because it relates back to a specific accomplishment, where a goal was set and then followed through with to make a piece that the student was proud of. So giving students time to think and write introspectively, whether with or without prompts, is invaluable.

Something that Womack didn’t mention but I consider impactful would be maintaining the folders of student work, even as students leave. Digitally or on paper, having work written by students can provide a valuable classroom resource for years to come. Students may be more inclined to read student poetry, and because it was written by other adolescents, students may find the works more engaging and relateable to themselves. At this point, students are also reading previous peers’ poetry as a model of simple strategies available to them as writers, as well as being exposed to the kind of ideas that teens may struggle with or encounter but not yet be able to express.

 I think Womack’s ideas for publishing are good; I also think many of them could be updated for the 21^st century.  Using technology that almost everyone has in today’s world, we can record student readings of poetry and publish them digitally. As a teacher, I would want at least my class to have access to the readings, but I also think some of the parents might be more involved if they could see the progress of students, so I would either publish poem readings on a blog or on something like a Youtube channel.

Keeping student records will provide you with easy pre- and formative assessments for poetry and for subsequent units, and it will prove to the students that they have improved, how they have improved, and that they had the dedication to finish a large and complex project.

Womack, Nancy. "Teaching Poetry to Adolescents: Nine Principles Plus One". 1975.