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There has been virtually no explication of poetry-writing pedagogy in historical accounts of Australian distance education during the 1930s. The purpose of this paper is to satisfy this gap in scholarship.

The paper concerns a particular episode in the cultural history of education; an episode upon which print media of the 1930s sheds a distinctive light. The paper therefore draws extensively on 1930s press reports to: contextualise the key educational debates and prime-movers inspiring verse-writing pedagogy in Australian education, particularly distance education, in order to; concentrate specific attention on the creation and popular reception of Brave Young Singers (1938), the first and only anthology of children's poetry written entirely by students of the correspondence classes of Western Australia.

Published under the auspices of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) with funds originating from the Carnegie Corporation, two men in particular proved crucial to the development and culmination of Brave Young Singers. As the end result of a longitudinal study conducted by James Albert Miles with the particular support of Frank Tate, the publication attracted acclaim as a research document promoting ACER's success in educational research investigating the “experiment” of poetry-writing instruction through correspondence schooling.

The paper pays due critical attention to a previously overlooked anthology of Australian children's poetry while simultaneously presenting an original account of the emergence and implementation of verse-writing instruction within the Australian correspondence class curriculum of the 1930s.

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.

This study aims to explore how youth poets wrote in a community of practice and how their out-of-school poetry writing contributed toward developing disciplinary literacy.

In this qualitative case study, the authors studied youth’s writing by drafting narrative field notes, collecting student writing and process drawings and interviewing participants.

The authors found that the poets in this study maintained ownership of their writing and engaged in writing processes in ways that reflected Behizadeh’s (2019) conception of authenticity as writing that connects both to students’ experiences, and to the purposes and audiences of their writing context.

This out-of-school context provides implications for how English Language Arts teachers can rethink what disciplinary literacy looks like in classroom writing instruction.

By maintaining ownership of their writing, the youth agentively positioned themselves not only as students accumulating disciplinary knowledge but also as participants in a community of practice.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of some health‐related effects of creative and expressive writing.

Reviews some of the main research studies exploring links between expressive writing and aspects of health, including two new experimental studies showing effects of poetry on mood and immune system indices.

Research studies have involved standard writing tasks and have shown a good range of physiological and behavioural benefits. Example findings include improvements in health and well‐being and enhanced levels of host defences in immune system functioning. Other notable findings include reduced severity of symptoms in arthritis and asthma sufferers. However, writing disclosure may also have negative effects on clients with post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The cognitive‐behavioural bases of “writing therapy” include the informative function of emotions, self‐regulation, re‐framing, and dealing more effectively with negative feelings.

Provides health professionals with an overview of research into health‐related effects of creative and expressive writing, and may encourage sensitive approaches which include writing therapy. The studies of poetry and immune function report some of the first empirical biological evidence for the poetry‐health link.

This paper aims to apply ecological models of agency to understand factors influencing how an eighth grade English language arts (ELA) teacher enacted agency in four moments in the classroom. It focuses on how his language in relation to his instructional choices reflected messaging to his students regarding the learning he intended from his ELA instruction.

The paper applies an existing framework (Biesta et al., 2015, 2017), adding Bakhtin (1981) understandings of language, to classroom discourse supplemented by teacher interviews and other data sources. In looking across these data sources, the paper traces the influence of past factors (i.e. the teacher’s personal and professional history) and future orientations (i.e. goals established in standards and the teacher’s goals for his students) on present instructional decisions. The teacher’s language in the classroom becomes a primary focus for this study, as it reveals the ways in which he drew on specific resources in the messages in his instruction.

In each moment, the teacher’s language could be shown to have motivation in a variety of factors. While influenced by external factors such as the common core standards and standardized assessments, the teacher often enacted agency out of his personal beliefs about making learning personally meaningful for students as grounded in his personal and professional history. Exceptions to this pattern, especially regarding preparing students for writing tests on state assessments, less frequently relied on the language of finding meaning in the learning.

This paper builds on studies of ELA teacher agency through the development of methodology related to an ecological model of agency and Bakhtinian concepts of language focused on the discourse of the classroom. It contributes to understanding the factors at study in an ELA teacher’s instructional agency, which can help teachers and researchers further develop frameworks for describing and assessing the practice of agency in the profession.

This study aims to explore the textual and sociopolitical relationships of kinship writing as 15 youth wrote politically charged poetry while participating in a four-week summer writing program grounded in a Black studies curriculum.

The authors explore the following research questions: How do youth writers draw upon each other’s writing to compose sociopolitical kinship poems when writing about critical issues affecting Black lives? What topics and oppressions do youth choose to write about and how do they write about these topics?

The authors found that the youth wrote across multiple topics affecting Black lives in their kinship poems. These include the appropriation of black beauty, gun violence and police brutality, love and Black lives, the need for equality, negative depictions and misrepresentations of Black people, the neglect and omission of Black lives and suppression of freedom. The youth took up various critical issues in their poems, which addressed what they deemed as most urgent in the lives of Black people, and these selected topics were highly historicized. We also found that the youth used the content, styles and audience of the original poems to pen their own pieces.

Writing with another peer afforded collaborative writing and spaces for youth to read and interrogate the world while building criticality through their writing.

Kinship writing is a genre in which one piece of writing has a relationship with another piece of writing. Kinship writing carries significance in the Black literary community as the history of Black education has been interlaced with ideals of social learning, community, family and kinship. This literary approach contributes to ways Black people used each other’s writings to offer healing, comfort and care in a turmoil filled world.

To explore the funds of knowledge that six emergent bilingual students build upon as they produce multimodal texts, how the practices surrounding these events are mediated, and the role of student agency within an ethnographic social semiotics framework. Ethnographic methods were used to document this yearlong study that included videotaping small group interactions, writing field notes, conducting interviews, and collecting multimodal work samples. The researcher served as a participant observer in a third-grade classroom where she met with students two days per week to interact with mulitmodal poetry. The findings reveal the media-rich popular culture and home digital practices students bring with them to school and the ways in which these resources were utilized for designing multimodal poetry. Several essential factors are discussed including funds of knowledge, role of play and creativity, nonlinear writing structures, and agentive design decisions. Multimodal text making requires a revamping of classroom literacy instruction that embraces multiple modes especially noting the importance of images, central role of experiential learning, and space for student choice thus empowering them as learners.

Since the change to a democratic society and government in South Africa, lecturers and students in higher education have collaborated with community partners to establish sustainable initiatives to enhance students’ social responsibility and benefit communities. This chapter shares insights on a collaborative service-learning project where different arts-based literacies, including art, reading, poetry, human movement and writing were used to enhance reading and writing, culminating in an annual interactive Community Engagement Day on the campus of a higher education institution. The day was organized by a team of staff and students and attended by 50 learners and three teachers from three schools in the area. The chapter describes different stations and activities which included topics such as safety, human movement programs, reading and writing activities and writing of poems. The art lecturer and her team helped each learner to paint a “feather,” culminating in the theme of the day, which was to “spread your wings.” The learners and students completed evaluation forms after their experiences, followed by interviews with lecturers. Data show the value of the day for all participants, emphasizing collaboration across faculties. It shows that true, integrated effective community engagement is built on reciprocal partnerships and collaborative service-learning projects.