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12Feb2013
Poetry’s the pill: the experiences of a spoken word educator

Posted by Guest blogger

Spoken word poetry education strengthens students’ literacy skills, engages reluctant writers and develops student voice and emotional literacy. Catherine Brogan, professional poet and spoken word educator, has been using the National Literacy Trust and the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society's Write On poetry competition to great effect through spoken word workshops in a school in South East London. She explains all…

I am part of the ground-breaking Spoken Word Educator project. We encourage students to write from their own experience to make their poetry unique and grounded. Life-writing shows the student that the answer is inside them and reveals to the teacher what is in the students' “emotional school bags”. Spoken word poetry education can give students the skills to communicate their emotions on the page, stage and in their everyday lives.

The Write On competition, which challenges students to write and perform their own poetry on the theme of our society's perception of young people, was therefore a great fit for my spoken word poetry classes. I asked students to think of a specific incident where they were seen in a certain way as a young person, which provoked some interesting discussion. “I was stopped, searched and fined £60 under the terrorism act, but I took the police to court and won”, said one 13-year-old.

We focused on how the students can show, instead of tell, how society's perception of young people makes them feel. I found that students did not automatically include their emotional reactions in their writing beyond generic phrases like, “it made me happy” or “it made me sad”. By equipping students with the skills to paint a picture of their emotions, using tools such as similes, metaphors and personification, they are better able to identify and communicate their feelings.

Poetry is about exploring yourself, your world and your relationship to it. The topic of the perception of young people in society gives students the space to do this. The National Literacy Trust competition values “writing where we can hear the poet when we read it” and a performance that “makes the audience feel something”. This focus on student voice and emotional literacy means the skills gained through writing and performing their personal poetry can permeate throughout the students' lives.

A lot of students see poetry as difficult and irrelevant. Showing hip hop and contemporary spoken word poets and crafting poems based on personal experience such as those created for the Write On competition has helped students find a way in to poetry. At the penultimate session, one of the students eagerly said, “Can I work on it during the week?”. It’s been highly rewarding to see classes of 13 and 14-year-olds go from being highly disengaged and disruptive to excitedly sharing their stories and experiences.

Here's a poem about my experiences as a spoken word educator.

Poetry’s the Pill

Memory’s a flicking child,

Playing frames of phantoms.

Dialogues and montages filed

Produce physical symptoms.

Reruns of violent dramas

With no parental guidance,

Kids’ unchannelled traumas,

Need a receptive audience.

Child fidgets, doesn’t follow.

Tongues gasping for literacy –

Sedated, given pills to swallow.

Sharing scenes flushes anxiety.

Purpose penned in creativity,

Is a stabilizer of memory.

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