Memo 1 [Basketball and the Poetry Academy]

My initial research drove me to a few dead ends. As much as I find JSTOR to be a valuable source for finding relevant articles and information, it has its share of clutter and unrelated articles. There were plenty of articles surrounding poetry and English in classrooms, but nothing that I was actually interested in. Sometimes, many of the articles that the search claimed discussed poetry never mentioned poetry at all! I found a few that may be a little off tangent from my initial topic but I certainly could apply. 

One article I found was an essay written by Douglas Baker titled “English Language Arts, Basketball, and Poetry Collide”. The title was certainly something that gained my interest, and linked into one of my questions pertaining how teachers could link poetry to other subjects and topics that many students would find relevant. While the article mostly focuses on how basketball and poetry worked in accordance with his teaching strategies, and not necessarily how they linked to the students, it was a starting point. He claimed that the different environments were all like different communities, “each with its own discourse and ‘literate’ practices, or common knowledge that students…constructed with me and learned in order to participate within the particular group.”

Baker was able to ascertain differences and similarities between the poetry club and the basketball team that related to his classroom. “For example,” he writes, “basketball players developed incrementally and were not formally assessed as a team…using that knowledge as a metaphor for assessing students as readers and writers in the classroom, I developed expectations…that encouraged…slower changes necessary to achieve particular goals”. 

If I could find some acceptable data to support my reasoning, that poetry alone can have similar goals in a classroom, much as Baker discovered, I will be able to push this snowball downhill. For now, this is a steep struggle to find applicable data and sort out through the clutter. 

I did find another article, though it revolved around elementary education and not secondary education. Still, it was closer to my topic than the previous one. In Lori G. Wilfong’s article “Building Word Fluency, Word-recognition Ability, and Confidence in Struggling Readers: The Poetry Academy”, Wilfong noticed that many of her students (about half) were significantly below their reading levels. She founded/created an intervention at the school she worked at known as the Poetry Academy, similar to another intervention known as “Fast Start”. She got the idea from the fifth Harry Potter book. 

A brief paragraph in her article describes how the program works.

The student would take the poem home and read it aloud to as many people as possible, gathering sig natures from listeners to verify the reading. The following week's session would start with the student reading the poem one more time to the volunteer to demonstrate mastery of the poem. The volunteer would then introduce another poem, and the cycle would repeat. Figure 1 demonstrates the Poetry Academy cycle.

I felt this article would act as a nice transition into my ultimate question “How can song writing, poetry, and/or spoken word be used in a classroom?” Before conducting any research, I actually developed an idea similar to this, explaining how teachers could use poetry to explain essential reading and writing strategies since most poetry is short sweet and simple. I could use this article to back up my initial thoughts and tie them into further research. I may want to look up more information about this Poetry Academy. 

As I continue my research, I find more and more voices about the uses of poetry and finding that there are many who do use poetry, more than I initially realized. I am curious to explore further.