The Essential Question that guided our projects’ focus was:
To what extent can poetry be found in every day life?
Poetry is an innate part of our lives, and accessing it allows us to access parts of ourselves, build critical individual and communal narratives, and process our life’s experiences. As we engage with poetic thought, we offer ourselves new perspectives and ways of being and come to an understanding of both our inner and outer worlds.
At the conclusion of the project, students responded to questions related to the identified Standards:
Students will be able to identify literary/poetic terms such as narrative, alliteration, imagery, metaphor, simile, mood
Students will be able to articulate a broadened emotional vocabulary to better communicate ideas within a personal narrative and with each other in class discussion.
Students will be able to utilize narrative storytelling, making considerations for audience and genre
Students will be able to edit and revise works of their own and their peers’ poetry
Students will be able to perform poetry in front of an audience, paying attention to tone, volume, projection, and other performance qualities.
Idaho Humanities Goals and Objectives
The Loud Writers’ Project will specifically address the following Idaho Humanities Goal and Objective for students in secondary education:
Theater Performance
Goal 3:3 Communicate through theater with creative expression
Objective: Create a dramatic work that expresses personal understanding, opinions and belief.
Loud Writers’ additionally addresses the following Language Arts Standards as established by the state of Idaho for children in high school:
The Writing Process
Standard 3: Acquire pre-writing skills
Objective: Match format to purpose and audience
Objective: Generate ideas using a variety of strategies
Objective: Acquire skills for revising a draft
Standard 4: Writing Applications (Creative Writing)
Objective: Acquire expressive writing skills
Objective: Write original creative works including prose and poetry
Impact
Workshops took place with a variety of local schools with a focus on students who have dropped out or are at risk of dropping out of traditional high school, are struggling in a traditional school setting, and/or are teen parents. All students had a goal of achieving a high school diploma.
Students enrolled in English courses at all Boise, Nampa, and Meridian area institutions were eligible to participate in the workshops. Most class sizes are approximately 15 to 30 students, with some classes combined. Ultimately the project will provided local at-risk and disenfranchised youth a constructive means to find connection, inclusion and engagement in their larger community. Our teaching methods honored the need to differentiate instruction in these classrooms, working to meet the needs of each student individually. Creative projects are particularly useful in offering students the ability to take ownership and offering teachers the opportunity to meet students where they’re at to help them grow.
Reflection
Despite the challenges of COVID-19, we were able to use the additional time to train 4 new Teaching Artists, ensuring they were proficient in classroom management, and usage of Idaho State Common Core standards, to create a relevant and engaging curriculum. These teaching artists have been able to meet consistently with their groups of students virtually to maintain relationships. Additionally, this has created an opportunity to generate new curriculum for the program and innovate on previous lesson plans to make them even more widely accessible to students. The students who participated found that this program was an important relief from the difficulties of navigating online school and the world during a pandemic, and mentioned numerous times that it helped them regain the sense of personalization their schooling had previously.
