Attempting to Narrow it Down

Although I have completed an I-Search for another class in the past, I always seem to think too broadly about a topic. There are so many questions that need answers and I struggle to focus on just one.  

After careful consideration, I decided to follow along with my third choice, “How can I incorporate song writing, spoken word, or poetry into my classroom while still meeting the curriculum? How will these meet the needs of my students: personally and academically?” What would be acceptable uses of poetry and spoken word that would meet with the curriculum? Why are some teachers able to effectively transition from poetry to reading while others skip over it? From what I have seen in a classroom, as well as what other students and teachers have explained, the school curriculum tends to limit what teachers can or cannot do in a classroom. It makes me wonder, if this is the reason why so many teachers just do not bother with poetry in the classroom until the end of the year, where they have to rush through it.

It always bothered me that so many of my teachers jumped over poetry, as it was one of my favorite topics in school. I can only remember one time, in my secondary schooling, where a teacher used a lot of time and energy into making a month’s worth of assignments from poetry and song lyrics. We studied poetry from the old south, which led into our reading of The Bluest Eye. Although that novel was not a favorite of mine, I remember it better than most of the other novels we read in class because we spent such a considerable amount of time on Southern poetry. It was also a wonderful link to the American history class I was taking at the time.

If one teacher was able to do this, why do other teachers struggle to fit it within their classroom curriculum? Is it really the fault of the district, or is it that teachers just cannot find reasonable uses of poetry and, therefore, do not bother?

For my I-Search, I want to find teachers who were able to incorporate poetry effectively into their classroom. If they were successful, what was the topic and how did they incorporate it into the lesson? Could teachers incorporate poetry into any lesson really, or is there a specific format that creates the “good transition” I praised my twelfth grade English teacher for?