Language Arts - Volume 94, Issue 6, 2017

Culturally sustaining pedagogy is a theoretical approach to teaching and learning that aims to support and foster students' cultural, linguistic, and literate practices. We examine culturally sustaining pedagogy as it is applied to a unit on reading, writing, and performing poetry in an urban literacy classroom. Using qualitative methods, we look closely at how three seventh-grade students explored their hybrid and fluid affiliations with a variety of cultural groups, ranging from religious cultures to local and interest-driven youth cultures. Through engaging in linguistic play, invoking an insider perspective, and leveraging the practices of youth literate culture, the focal students came to see themselves and their peers in new ways. We conclude by offering suggestions for teachers who wish to take up culturally sustaining literacy pedagogies in their own classroom contexts.

This article focuses on the poetry writing of two fifth graders, Long and Colleen, who participated in a month-long Poet in the Schools program. Children were immersed in reading diverse poetry, after which they were given open composing time to write their own poetry. Their poems had a craft sophistication that largely came from poetic structure, that is, how a poem moves, how it travels from beginning to end. Their poems also had emotive material from their own lives—their cultures, families, and histories. A premise of this article is that an emphasis on immersion in diverse mentor texts and poetic structure can help children write beyond the popularized forms of acrostic, haiku, limerick, or cinquain.

The authors describe a three-week poetry unit created with the goal of positioning middle grades students as poets and engaging them in collaborative, multimodal writing. Findings reveal that students were able to reconsider their assumptions about poetry and begin to see the personal value in writing poetry when presented with opportunities to bridge their out-of-school and school literacies.

This column explores the power of reading poetry aloud, the promise of connecting poetry and the content areas, and the value of selecting culturally diverse poetry.

This interview features a discussion with Rebecca Davis, senior editor at WordSong (an imprint of Boyds Mills Press), that celebrates the beauty, power, and possibility of poetry.

In this column, we feature some of our favorite poetry titles for children published in 2016.

A classroom teacher and a picturebook author collaborate to teach primary grade English learners to write poetry in a one-week, science-based Poet-in-the-Classroom unit.