A way to express yourself when you want people to hear: The Utilization of Poetry as a Tool for the Empowerment of Marginalized Youth

This study explores the utilization of poetry, study and composition, as a vehicle for the empowerment of previously marginalized urban youth. The study further explores the issues of pedagogy and the role of student voice within the classroom. The research took place in conjunction with a youth intervention summer school program made up of 120 high school students. Forty of these students, between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, participated in the poetry class. The curriculum utilized multi-cultural authors with an emphasis on topics relevant to the students’ experiences and also focused on the writings of the students themselves. The methods employed were participant observation field notes and interviews with a sub-sample of ten students.

Over the course of six weeks in 2003, I taught a summer poetry class in conjunction with a youth employability project for students who had recently dropped out of high school. The summer program gives students the opportunity to catch up on units and potentially re-enter high school the following fall. The curriculum of the class was often reliant on the expressed interests of the students and during the last week of class, the students decided that they wanted the topic to be concerned with “whatever we want to write.” Therefore, I assembled a couple of poems on the urgency and utility of writing from a selection of poets. Included was a poem by Ruth Forman, entitled “If You Lose Your Pen,” which I recited to the students. The last stanza reads:

When I finished reading the poem, one student responded, by saying it was “way deep.” I asked the students, “What is at stake for our authors to speak out about what is going on around them? Why do people write if they believe that their voices will not be heard or that their voices cannot change the world?” I asked the very questions that haunted me throughout the process of teaching and listening to the students’ poetry. However, in the process of trying to conceptualize the “effectiveness” of poetry in the classroom as a tool for student empowerment, these questions of urgency and utility become all the more pressing.

In its initial stages, the chief concern of this project was the integration of political poetry into a high school English curriculum as a way to engage students at risk of dropping out. However, I later realized that this project is much more concerned with the larger issues of pedagogy and voice because without a pedagogical base that values the inclusion of the students’ voices and experiences, the mere integration of poetry would not be enough.

Literature Review

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire outlines his philosophy on “liberatory education,” which focuses on the empowerment of the oppressed, emphasizing individual agency over and against structural constraints. Freire advocates that the educational system seek not merely the integration of people considered to be marginalized but the transformation of the system itself to allow such individuals to claim their humanity within society instead of on its perimeter (74). He outlines “problem posing” education, which places the student within the greater societal framework and motivates the individual to develop critical thinking skills to demythologize reality (83). Freire writes, “Only dialogue, which requires critical thinking, is also capable of generating critical thinking. Without dialogue there is no communication, and without communication there can be no true education”(93).

Similarly, in Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks emphasizes the necessity of the dialogical process to the concept of what she calls an “engaged pedagogy” because it makes space for the inclusion of student experience and puts value in claiming voice within the classroom. hooks places a strong emphasis on the concept of voice, which she states, “is not just the act of telling one’s experience. It is using that telling strategically” (148). Therefore, instead of being a detriment to the academic process, hooks asserts that the inclusion of student and teacher experience in the classroom links “confessional narratives to academic discussions... to show how experience can illuminate and enhance our understanding of academic material” (21). Therefore, the students’ existing knowledge is validated as an important academic contribution to the classroom.

In Radical Pedagogy and Politics of Student Voice, Henry Giroux argues that voice and representation are fundamental to the way students “mediate and express their sense of place, time and history and their contradictory, uncertain, and incomplete interactions with each other and with the dynamics of schooling” (120). hooks also asserts that language is a site of resistance for many students because they are able to manipulate the “oppressor’s language and turn it against itself,” so that the oppressor’s language may be used as a counter-hegemonic tool (175). Similarly, Giroux argues, “language is... connected to an intense struggle among different groups over what will count as meaningful and whose cultural capital will prevail in legitimating particular ways of life” (121).

In her essay, Teaching Reading, Writing, and Outrage, Linda Christensen states, “speaking their languages and telling their stories breaks the pattern of silence and shame that correction without historical... context breeds” (217). When the curriculum fails to recognize the existence of their cultural group, students are made to feel silenced and marginalized (Christensen 209), consequently placing those within the dominant culture at an advantage. hooks takes this idea a step further, contending that “critical pedagogies of liberation... necessarily embrace experience, confessions and testimony as relevant ways of knowing, as important, vital dimensions of any learning process” (89). Therefore, the mere integration of a generic culturally representative curriculum is not sufficient for an inclusive and empowering pedagogy. It is critical that the students feel that their voices have a legitimate position within the classroom as a way to understand the relationship between their experiences and larger socio-cultural and economic-political structures.

The opportunity for students to claim their voices and their ability to communicate a rich and important message is not only beneficial but also fundamental to the empowerment and self-realization of students. However, the vehicles through which the student’s voice may be heard are often left unavailable to those from lower socio-economic backgrounds and culturally or linguistically different backgrounds (Tafolla 273). Many scholars have argued that poetry is a powerful tool in the classroom because it offers students space to express themselves without rules or guidelines (Mayer 51; Michaels 9) and “cuts to the quick of human struggles for freedom justice, recognitions, oppression and power” (Fukuyama 83). The speaker/poet is repositioned within society through the act of naming and/or sharing one’s experience. In Risking Intensity: Reading and Writing Poetry with High School Students, Judith Michaels states that students “prefer poems that give them a little more leeway–that let them burrow to see what the poem has to offer them, not mankind” (9).

The methods utilized in this project were participant observation field notes taken over a period of thirty-one days and post-class surveys. Field notes were the primary source of analysis since they lend themselves well to charting the progress within the classroom, analyzing class work and discussing curriculum choices and effectiveness. Written surveys provided the students’ direct perspectives on their experiences in the larger summer school program and specifically within the poetry class.

The participants in this study consisted of forty high school students between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. The students were primarily Latino, reflecting the makeup of the city, which is over sixty percent Latino. The poetry class was taught twice a day for one hour each during the students’ tutorial period. The daily class structure generally consisted of a check-in period, reading poems that reflected the topic of the day with discussion and a free-write period, as time permitted. The curriculum had an emphasis in contemporary Latino poetry but also ranged from canonical poetry to contemporary “political” poetry. [1]

In the end of the class survey, in answer to the question, “What was your favorite thing about the poetry class?” one student wrote, “The fact that we can express ourselves freely without feeling uncomfortable...” The students’ desire to express themselves was important to the progression of the class because they needed to feel comfortable writing poetry, which requires a certain level of vulnerability. However, to reach the point where the students felt comfortable speaking in class and taking the risk of expressing themselves, a safe environment in the classroom needed to be cultivated. The students needed to feel that their voices were important and what they had to say was not only worth hearing but a necessary addition to the world. For this to be successful, I had to be willing to listen to and be interested in what the students had to say. Furthermore, the language of the students needed to be respected. In this context, “language” refers to both the language spoken at home and also the language that the students use with each other on a day-to-day basis. The validation of the students’ languages did not take away from the “academic worth” of the class but rather established a core of respect for the students. Finally, the students established ground rules for themselves on the first day of class.

Once these general characteristics were established, the students began to feel comfortable breaking their silence about various situations they have faced in their lives, which allowed space to find similarities in their experiences and to engage with these experiences as a group. An example of this engagement occurred during the check-in period; one day a student was called out by one of his peers asking, “She’s pregnant, huh?” The student looked up slowly in shock that his peers knew about his girlfriend’s pregnancy and shook his head slightly in affirmation. The student looked nervous to be spotlighted by the group, so I told the class that we needed to move on. However, the student suddenly started talking about his fears and his doubts about whether it was his child. Surprisingly, almost every student in the class then started talking about what it was like to be a teen parent. I stared in shock as fifteen and sixteen year old boys shared their experiences about teenage pregnancy, and similar experiences occurred almost every day to the point that I had to start cutting the students off so that we could study poetry, striving always to connect the cathartic experience in the classroom with an opportunity of empowerment on the page. On one of the last days of class, a student, who wrote a poem about his brother dying because he took a bullet for him, said, “Man, it just feels good to talk.” These experiences revealed to me the importance of using the classroom to provide a safe space for students to express their concerns and viewpoints and to create community.

The students also needed to feel that I could be trusted with their poetry, which often contained very personal subject matter. This took longer to develop than their comfort with classroom discussions. This can be attributed to the fact that in class the subjects discussed could be generalized, but in the poems the students were taking responsibility and credit for their work. The trust that the students needed to feel became self-evident when considering the topics the students were writing on. One student, for example, wrote, “I was told that my father had another daughter with another woman. Those words took my breath away... I didn’t know if I hate him, the daughter, the other woman or my mother for staying with him...”

The students also needed to trust that I wouldn’t use their poetry as a way to “get information on them” about their gang allegiances, drug use or criminal behavior. I agreed that I wouldn’t show their poetry to any of the staff. However, the majority of the poetry dealing with sensitive subject matter contained an explicit desire to move on, as in the excerpt of the following untitled poem written by a student:

Like clockwork, the students began to ask daily if they could write in class, something which other teachers at the school found hard to believe, and often this would be the only time I would get poems from them because the majority of the students left directly after school to work. The poems written by the students dealt with everything from divorce to what it is like for them growing up on the “eastside.” One of these students wrote a poem called, “Eastside Boys,” which explores his experiences about growing up on the “wrong side of town.” An excerpt of the poem is as follows:

During the last week of classes, I passed out poems dealing with the urgency of writing for people whose voices are marginalized. I asked the students, “Why do people write poetry.” One student answered, “Do you want to know why I write? I write to get through my day-to-day life. As a release. I know people don’t open up here and I don’t want people talking about my business but sometimes you need a release.” The students used poetry to act as a form of communication, therapy and release. Therefore, poetry became a useful tool for the students instead of a detached genre in an English class.

It became apparent to me a few weeks into class that the students were not only feeling comfortable in class but also starting to engage in class as contributors. The overall empowerment to speak up occurred when the classroom shifted from a structure in which the students expected me to bestow knowledge upon them to a dialogical relationship in which both teacher and student brought different knowledge into the classroom. However, since I told the students that they had the freedom to write whatever they wanted, we often had language barriers in the form of “slang.”[2] Almost everyday, I was asking the students what something means because often the poem would be so full of “slang,” I couldn’t even understand the general topic. However, by validating the students’ day-to-day language they were more willing to speak in class, write and lead classroom discussions.

The willingness to engage with the students’ day-to-day language and daily realities became essential to class participation. For example, one day I asked a student what “hypo” means and he said, “like a ‘loppy’ person.” Another student suddenly got frustrated and said, “Come on, she’s teaching us stuff, so lets teach her stuff.” The student then said that “hypo” means, “tweaked,” or “crack head.” The students then started to break down the different slang that they had defined incorrectly for me before. Much of the slang that they had defined was stripped of the gang context, however, now that they decided that they were going to “teach me stuff.”

The students taught me about gang culture, their perspective on political issues such as racial profiling, police brutality, war and what it was like for them in jail. Many of these lessons would not be in a “lesson plan” format because what they wanted to show me was what life is like for them. Therefore, I had to be open and willing to take risks with the students. For example, one day at the end of check-ins, one of the students asked me how I was and another student interjected, “Do you feel suicidal today? Have you ever wanted to kill yourself? Ever thought of it?” I just stared in shock not knowing where this was coming from and as I opened my mouth to speak the student cut me off by saying, “That’s what they ask us in County when they want to know how we’re doing. They ask, ‘Are you suicidal today?’ That’s all they want to know about us.” The other students jumped in and said, “This ain’t County. Leave her alone.” This student wrote extensively on his experiences in juvenile hall and the fear that he felt about going back, which he saw as inevitable. The lessons of the students came in the form of anecdotes, explanations of personal culture and the passionate voices present in their poetry and dialogue.

As mentioned before, on the first day of class, I asked the students what they wanted their class rules to be. One of the students, yelled, “Freedom!” and I asked “freedom to do what?” The students answered, “Freedom to say what we want and the freedom to write what we want,” and at first the students all said that they were going to write about pot and partying. I told them that I wanted them to write as if each poem was a message to the world. A student yelled, “Fuck the world,” and I said, “Okay, but you have to tell it why.” The student then said, “Fuck the pigs.” I said, “Okay but you have to tell them why or else you just sound like a pissed off kid who knows how to cuss.” The student then became very quiet, looked down, and began to write. The resulting poem, entitled Freedom of Speech, described his friend being shot, the complacency of the police and the rage he felt, due to the injustice. After he completed the poem, he got up in the middle of the lecture portion of the class and slammed it on the table next to me, then sat down. This student wrote, like the majority of the students, as if the poem was going to be heard by many people, even though I was the only one that was going to read it. This indicated to me that when the students were given the opportunity to speak out, they would and with passion, even if the platform was merely a piece of paper and the audience merely one teacher. On the survey at the end of the class, I asked, “What is poetry?” One student wrote, “Poetry is a way to express yourself when you want people to hear.”

Limitations

Poetry was utilized as a tool for the students to claim their voices to speak out, process, and come to terms with their traumatic experiences. However, what poetry could not do was take the students out of the environment in which they were trying to survive. The larger societal issues that the students were facing played a major role in the students’ ability to perform in class and stay in school. Many of the students faced poverty and had to work after school to support their families. Many of the students were involved in gangs. Some were arrested and therefore did not come back to school. For example, the student who wrote the poem, Freedom of Speech, was arrested two days later. A few of the students saw jail as inevitable, which came up repeatedly in class. Two of the students in the class were cousins and when one kept bringing up jail, the other cousin desperately asked, “Why are you stuck in jail? Aren’t you out!? You’re out!” Many of the students in the class were very quiet for the rest of class after this exchange and a couple wrote about their experiences in jail during the free-write period following.

Conclusion

After reading over a hundred of the students’ poems and reflecting on the dialogue in class, I find myself repeatedly pondering the questions I eventually posed to the students on the last day of class: “What is at stake for one of our authors to speak out about what is going on around them? Why do people write if they believe their voices will not be heard or that their voices cannot change the world?” I don’t believe there is any simple answer to these questions because each poet takes up a pen for individual reasons; however, Paulo Freire states, “There is no true word that is not at the same time praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world” (60). Therefore, the very act of speaking out is powerful because in the process voice is claimed as valid and vital. The encouragement and inclusion of student voice within the classroom has been demonstrated as critical to the engagement and empowerment of the students within the summer program. However, the inclusion of student voice had to be accompanied by curriculum relevant to the student’s day-to-day experience in order to make the students recognize the class time as useful and not merely a location of regurgitation. Furthermore, in order to continually challenge and engage the students, the curriculum needed to adapt to the students’ interests so that they had a vested interest in the progression of the lesson plan. The particular usefulness of poetry within the classroom was posited on the ability of the students to recognize poetry as a tangible means of expression as well as the art form’s flexibility to meet the multitude of demands placed upon it by students in a struggle to claim their voices.

[1] Many argue that all poetry is political and that the attempt to hyphenate certain poetry as “political” in turn implies that it is not valid poetry. However, in this context I use the word “political” merely to signify that the poetry curriculum contained many poems that addressed contemporary political issues relevant to the students’ reality. For example: police brutality, poverty, etc.

[2] I use the word “slang” in this context with caution because to use the word “slang” in reference to the day-to-day language of any people implies that it is less valid or merely a mutilated form of a “correct” language; the opposite purpose is intended. However, for the purposes of this article, the term is used to make the distinction between Standard English and the language utilized by the students.

Literature Review

Limitations

Conclusion

Works Cited