Poetry in education

Abstract

For forty years or more, much of the discourse about poetry in education has constructed poetry teaching and learning as an especially difficult professional problem to be solved. The problem has been analysed in many different ways: as a product of inadequate teacher subject knowledge and pedagogical fear; as an inherent problem with poetry and a perception of its methods of meaning-making as elitist and alienating; as a problem of curriculum development, predicated on an inadequate selection of poems in relation to different ideas about relevance; and, in England, perhaps above all, as a problem of National Curriculum prescription. The problem with “the problem with poetry” is that the influential idea channelled research into what the cultural anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot termed a “cultural slot”. In this space, he argued, the research domain becomes self-replicating, anatomising the problem within established terms, the roots of which are rendered opaque over time and historical agency overlooked. By this process, new research can only contribute to “morosely preserving the empty slot itself” (Trouillot 1991, 40). One might argue that the standard conception of the function of a literature review contributes to this dynamic. That is not to dismiss any of the excellent work that has been done to anatomise the challenges (and joys) of teaching poetry in different contexts, not least Margaret Mathieson’s article “The problem of poetry” () and Richard Andrews’ later book The Problem with Poetry (1991). Nor is it to question the ethical commitment of many researchers to developing first rate professional practice. Indeed, we have both written in different ways about “the problem of poetry” (Snapper 2013; Blake and Shortis 2010). For this special edition, however, we were keen to advance a research agenda that goes beyond this slot. We build, of course, on important work by others in our field. The ESRC funded Poetry Matters seminar series (2011–2012), led by Sue Dymoke, Anthony Wilson and Andrew Lambirth, resulted in two excellent books, Making Poetry Matter: international Research in Poetry Pedagogy (Dymoke, Lambirth, and Wilson 2013) and its companion volume Making Poetry Happen: Transforming the Poetry Classroom (Dymoke et al. 2014). These comprehensively re-articulate “the problem with poetry” in relation to contemporary contexts, but also crucially move on the debate by presenting examples of excellent imaginative practice in teaching poetry as reading, writing, and speaking and listening, and exploring what might constitute “transformative poetry cultures”. In the second volume, the editors argue for “a broader cultural vision, a more creative, artistic and engaged approach to literature learning”. They call for practices that connect poetry in the classroom with the renaissance of poetry in public spaces beyond the school, and for a shared experience of poetry that is about creative playfulness, joy and empathy, and which settles with uncertainty and divergent ways of seeing the world. In choosing papers for this special edition of English in Education we hope we have built on the powerful and positive concluding vision of Making Poetry Happen. ENGLISH IN EDUCATION 2022, VOL. 56, NO. 1, 1–4 https://doi.org/10.1080/04250494.2022.2030974