The Teaching of Poetry in School: formal ways to begin with teacher education

Abstract

Summary Life in schools is frequently prey to conventional attitudes, and yet in spite of the constraints upon them in classrooms, teachers are still in a position to defend and nurture individual consciousness, no more so than when they teach the arts. The important questions are about how to do it: they are pedagogical ones therefore. This paper describes an approach to preparing student teachers to teach poetry. Throughout, the emphasis is upon the use of teaching and learning strategies which demonstrate to students, as to children, the value of poetry. Here, students are encouraged at once to engage privately with poetry, and to acknowledge, together, its properties. When considering their professional practice they discover that classroom activity augments, quite as often as it initiates, the processes by which we become regular readers of poems, and sometimes makers of them.