Search results

The emphasis on primary sources and disciplinary literacy skills in not only the Common Core State Standards, but other national curricula (i.e. College Board exams and the NCSS C3 Framework) requires that teachers continue to find ways to integrate these skills into their elementary and secondary classrooms. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper introduces a cross-disciplinary approach that integrates primary source reading skills and the arts to cultivate student literacy and creativity though the writing of found poems.

Found poetry activities based on social studies primary sources allow students to practice literacy skills, engage more deeply with social studies content, and also may encourage the development of historical empathy toward the experiences and perspectives of distant peoples and events.

After reading and analyzing primary sources, students can create and present their found poems in diverse formats which allows for student expression and creativity in the classroom. Teachers can easily modify found poetry activities to meet the needs of diverse learners.

This paper fulfills the identified need to increase literacy skills and incorporate more student participation in the classroom. Using the strategy of student-inspired found poems, primary sources become more tangible and meaningful to students. Found poems offer yet another way to integrate the arts into social studies education.

A survey by questionnaire was conducted in order to obtain details of criteria employed in libraries in the shelving of the works of local poets in local collections or on the main poetry shelves. The general extent of interest in book search and purchase of such works, and provision of venue facilities involving local poets reading their work were also determined. A considerable variation in shelving policy was found. More publicity for the local poet and his work is advocated, together with the ideal of large regional collections, such as achieved by the Northern Poetry Library.

This annotated list represents a selection of outstanding poetry titles published in the USA in 2003 and the early part of 2004.

The authors selected the titles in this list from the 2,100 titles received for the 2004 Poetry Publications Showcase at Poets House in New York City, held in April 2004.

The authors selected titles for this list that would be both accessible and challenging to library users.

This list can be used as a guide to collection development for contemporary poetry.

In November 2002, with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the University of Nebraska‐Lincoln and the University of Virginia embarked on a project to create a unified finding aid to Walt Whitman manuscript collections held in many different institutions. By working collaboratively, the project team is developing a finding aid that is tailored to the needs of Whitman scholars while following a standard developed in the archival community, encoded archival description (EAD). XSLT stylesheets are used to harvest information from various repositories' finding aids and to create an integrated finding aid with links back to the original versions. Digital images of poetry manuscripts and descriptive information contribute to an ambitious thematic research collection. The authors describe the National Leadership Grant project, identify key technical issues being addressed, and discuss collaborative aspects of the project.

Extant research has painted a clear picture of the myriad ways that schools are failing to provide a meaningful education, and meaningful literacy pedagogies, to all youth. Given this crisis shouldered disproportionately by youth of color in urban schools, this paper aims to take a retrospective approach to understanding the lasting reverberations of a high school poetry class on a group of students who experienced urban traumas including but not limited to educational injustices. In contrast to the representations of failing schools, some current research offers various portraits of urban students engaging in empowering ways in classrooms that make critical use of media arts, poetry and hip hop. The questions driving this study are based on what happens once students step out of these alternative classroom spaces. For youth who have dropped out of the traditional system, what was the nature of the writing they produced in an alternative literacy learning space and what relationship did it have to their development as young adults?

Using qualitative case study methodology, this paper explores the memorable writing produced in the context of a high school poetry class by six case study participants to understand its meaning in their lives over time. It is through a dialogic lens that this research makes sense of the relationship between the written words produced by these youth, their actions in and on the world in their early adulthood, and their moments of development as survivors of trauma and as civic actors.

Student discussion of what I describe as touchstone poems revealed how these poems functioned to reorganize experiences and memories for the case study participants that enabled them to feel increased agency in relation to their personal and socio-cultural struggles.

For these students who were perpetually labeled as at-risk, poetry class served as a space where they could collectively engage in positive risk-taking that held meaning in their lives after high school and catalyzed the development of agentive identities.

The purpose of this paper is to engage with challenges the authors encountered in duoethnographic inquiry, including questions about what it means to tell the truth, and the decisions the authors made about what stories to include and exclude. The focus is on the ethical challenges involved in duoethnography and the ways in which the authors chose, and or felt compelled to, overcome them. The authors provide an argument for the need of intimate, eclectic and open-ended inquiry-based research that poses questions, challenges dominant discourses and promotes a compositional methodology in which to explore lived the experience of participants.

The authors’ own duoethnographic process, embedded in an anthropological hermeneutics (Ricoeur, 1991), within a mode of narrative inquiry, developed over a period of three to four months. The authors had a number of formal and informal conversations – some recorded and transcribed, others remembered and reflected on later in e-mails or in draft academic papers. The authors shared articles, e-mailed, conversed with family and examined photos. Reflecting on some of these conversations, the authors were sometimes uncomfortable with the way the stories they shared had the potential to expose aspects of themselves and those the authors are close to. The authors developed fictionalising techniques and poetry in order to tell these stories.

Duoethnography engages with method that reveals truth as layered, contradictory and necessarily intersubjective. It is this tentative and contingent nature of truth that augers for a hyper-consciousness of the relationship between transgression and transformation. Using fictional ways of knowing: poetry, scripting and metaphor; and the usual technologies of research: anonymisation, de-identification; and drawing on notions of redaction and under erasure the authors found safe ways to represent particularly challenging issues. The process involved intimate revealing – small stories that the authors shared here to argue for the importance of the affective in transformative educational research.

The authors continue to work in uncomfortable places and suggest that ethics often involves irreconcilable and incommensurate discourses which cannot always be accounted for in normalised codes of ethics. The authors argue that this tension provides an important on-going ethical encounter where, as researchers, the authors continue to generate and implement creative and innovative methodologies.

Throughout the paper the authors have suggested ways to challenge the linear, logical and the predictable as the authors wrestled with how personal narratives may reveal personal truth and transformation that may open ways for larger transformative actions.

The purpose of this paper is to present a case study which describes reference and instruction outreach programs promoted by the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Library. Direct‐2‐U Reference, Crash Courses, and Drop‐In Tours reached out to students in innovative ways to encourage non‐library users to see what they were missing and to give current library users even more choices. Direct‐2‐U Reference provided opportunities for students to get research help on their own turf. Librarians offered assistance at several locations across campus, combining the benefits of face‐to‐face reference with the convenience of getting help without going to the physical library. Library Crash Courses promoted subject‐specific assistance without the formality of in‐class instruction. Drop‐In Tours allowed curious students to figure out the layout of the library and get answers to their questions.

This case study describes researching alternative services, and includes practical information on how services were implemented. Information is presented about ongoing evaluation of the outreach programs that improved the direction, marketing, and overall success of the programs.

The outreach programs promoted by the library reached additional users, provided more options for patrons, and improved the visibility of the library campus‐wide.

This case study will be of interest to other academic librarians wanting to provide library services outside the library. It builds on the existing literature regarding library outreach services.

We argue this method of inquiry better represents the participants' learning, lives and experiences in the formal neoliberal education system prioritising performativity, categorising and ranking students.

The paper explores using poetry as a research method to reveal the learning experiences of adult learners, who have often had disruptive experiences of the formal schooling system and return to study in community-based education spaces. Inspired by Laurel Richardson’s transgressive technique of presenting sociological data through poetry as method, we use poetic representations of these learners' lives alongside case study research methodology. The research was conducted in conjunction with Neighbourhood Houses in Victoria, Australia. Qualitative data were generated through conducting multiple case studies of learners across various adult community education (ACE) sites. In this research, some case studies were presented in the traditional method of writing biography, others were written in the form of found poetry, which we refer to as data as poetry and text. The paper uses found poetry through participant-voiced poems written from interview transcripts. We argue this method of inquiry better represents the participants' learning, lives and experiences in the formal neoliberal education system prioritising performativity, categorising and ranking students. Our findings highlight the benefits of using poetry to communicate data in case study research as it effectively represents the experiences of adult learners' lives in a creative and concise form, transgressing normative practices of writing education research. These poetic representations of data reveal learner experiences in an embodied and agentic way while providing readers with a deep and rich understanding of these crucial adult learning spaces.

Our findings highlight the benefits of using poetry to communicate data in case study research as it effectively represents the experiences of adult learners' lives in a creative and concise form, transgressing normative practices of writing education research.

This research paper is empirical research and has not been submitted elsewhere for publication.

Contemporary poetry is a rich landscape of voices and visions. With over 1,300 new poetry titles to choose from each year, how can librarians make the best acquisitions for their communities? Two resource lists from Poets House ‐ a 35,000 poetry library and literary center ‐ offer a starting point. “1996 Poetry Publication Showcase Suggested Titles” highlights a wide variety of selections from Poet House’s annual exhibit of all the year’s new poetry books. “Where To Find Poetry Reviews” gathers information on directories, literary journals and Web sites that review poetry on a regular basis. These materials were originally distributed at the 1997 American Library Association Conference, where Poets House exhibited the entire 1996 showcase and presented poetry readings and a panel discussion entitled “Building Poetry Audiences in Community Libraries”.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the use of poetry by family carers as a way into the inner world of a person with late stage dementia, consistent with their values, preferences and experiences; enhancing the wellbeing of both the person with dementia and family carers.

The use of poetry is being increasingly recognised as valuable in improving wellbeing for people with dementia. Poetry has an intrinsic quality which is well-suited for people with dementia: it does not require following a storyline and therefore can be enjoyed by those with no short-term memory.

The paper describes the benefits to both family members and the person with dementia; the use of poetry opened up expression of deep emotions, improved communication and enriched family relationships.

Use of poetry by family carers with people with late stage dementia is under researched in the UK and further study of the impact of this intervention would be beneficial.

Poetry can be used practically in both small groups in care homes or community settings and also one to one by family carers. Of especial value are poems that have been learnt by heart when young.

Finally, the paper also draws attention to the positive lessons we can learn from people with dementia.