Poetry in America For Teachers: The City from Whitman to Hip Hop is a semester-length professional development course designed specifically for secondary school educators interested in developing their expertise as readers and teachers of literature. In this course, available for professional development, undergraduate credit, or graduate credit, we will consider those American poets whose themes, forms, and voices have given expression to visions of the city since 1850. Beginning with Walt Whitman, the great poet of nineteenth-century New York, we will explore the diverse and ever-changing environment of the modern city – from Chicago to London, from San Francisco to Detroit – through the eyes of such poets as Carl Sandburg, Emma Lazarus, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Frank O’Hara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Hayden, and Robert Pinsky, as well as contemporary hip hop and spoken word artists.
Deep study of the poems and poets on our syllabus will provide an opportunity to develop your expertise as a classroom educator. As you develop and practice advanced strategies for studying American poetry yourself, you also will gain rich new resources for the classroom. This course will introduce content and techniques intended to help educators teach their students how to read texts of increasing complexity. The course will meet relevant educational standards for grades 6-12, including the Common Core State Standards.
PROGRAM OBJECTIVES
Poetry of the City is designed primarily for educators who would like to expand their own reading and teaching practice. Specifically, this course will develop teaching expertise relevant to the Common Core English Language Arts (ELA) standards in grades 6-12. Course participants will master advanced strategies for teaching students how to close read complex texts, and, relatedly, for facilitating productive classroom discussion centered on those texts. Specifically, Poetry of the City is anchored in four approaches to close reading literary texts:
PROGRAM EXPERIENCE
Poetry of the City features a combination of video tutorials and conversations, archival images and texts, expeditions to historic literary sites, sample classroom visits, and practical exercises designed to support skills development. In this course you will:
WHO SHOULD ENROLL?
The course is appropriate for educators at all stages of their teaching careers. No specialized scholarly knowledge of American poetry is required.
Course participants are encouraged to enroll with fellow educators from their schools.
A version of this course is also on offer at Arizona State University.
ASU is a comprehensive public research university, measured not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed; advancing research and discovery of public value; and assuming fundamental responsibility for the economic, social, cultural and overall health of the communities it serves.
The rigid and linear design of the traditional U.S. education system does not provide an effective ladder to social and economic opportunity for all learners and is not responsive to the rapidly evolving needs of society.
ASU’s Learning Enterprise exists to foster and grow universal access to social and economic opportunity at every stage of a person’s life. This aim’s fulfillment requires innovative, high-scale education enabled by ASU’s robust knowledge core.
For nearly 100 years, the Harvard Graduate School of Education has prepared smart and passionate individuals to become transformative leaders in education.
The Harvard Division of Continuing Education offers open-enrollment courses, degrees and certificates, and professional development programs.
Teachers as Scholars offers 1 to 3 day content based professional development seminars led by university faculty for public and private school K-12 teachers and administrators.
Second largest in the nation, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) enrolls more than 640,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade, at over 900 schools, and 187 public charter schools.
Cambridge Public Schools are built on a foundation of academic excellence and committed to promoting an environment of social justice.
Founded in 2006, Success Academy Charter Schools is the largest and highest-performing free, public charter school network in New York City.
GCDS is the largest independent elementary and middle school in the country, and all of its expertise and resources are focused on the critical years of a child’s early education.
Driven by the goals and values of its flagship project, Poetry in America, Verse Video Education develops video and accompanying curricular materials in the arts and humanities and beyond, creating a body of educational content capable of reaching a very broad community of learners: formal and informal, online and residential, young and old, American and international. By producing its own projects and creating thoughtfully-constructed and thought-provoking multimedia content for other organizations, Verse Video Education aims to enhance educational experiences, both within and outside of the classroom.
