Missed the live webinar? You can now access the recording of “Performing Poetry: How Music Shapes Poetic Analysis”! Held on April 24, 2025, this insightful session led by Catheryn Cofield explored the powerful connection between musical literacy and deeper poetic analysis for grades 6-12 educators. Discover practical strategies to illuminate complex elements of spoken word and poetry, such as cadence and structure, using the universal language of music. Learn how to reinforce key reading skills and enhance student engagement, as presented by music educator Catheryn Cofield. Click the link below to watch the recording and unlock new ways to connect your students with poetry!
About the Author
Ms. Colfield is a first-year teacher serving at Chester Middle School in Chester, SC. She graduated from Anderson University in 2024 with her bachelor’s in Vocal Music education and is currently serving as both a general music teacher and choir director at her school. She believes musical literacy is a key component of any competent music program and one of the greatest tools that a developing reader can have.
What happens when we invite students not only to analyze a poem but to become the poem?
This is the question I return to—again and again—when I think about the role poetry plays in our classrooms. Not just in English class, but across the disciplines. In Science, Math, History, even in research methods. When we bring poetry into these spaces, we aren’t just making room for creativity—we are making space for presence. For embodiment. For students to find language for what has felt unspeakable (Cutts, 2020; Summerhill, 2020). In my NCTE article, Embracing Every Hue: Using Our Narratives to Cultivate Healing (Phelps, 2023), I wrote about the power of narrative and poetry as a form of liberation—especially for young people of color who have been asked to shrink themselves to fit into white-washed educational molds. I believe that poetry invites us—and our students—into the radical act of naming. Naming the joy. The ache. The history. The hope. Across all disciplines, this act of naming becomes a reclamation of self and story.
Poetry as Critical Methodology in Every Classroom
Poetic inquiry is more than a practice; it’s a methodology rooted in resistance. It honors what Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz (2021) calls “The Archaeology of Self,” demanding that students and educators alike excavate the layers of identity, memory, and place that inform our learning and teaching. When I invite students in a science classroom to write a poem from the perspective of a cell, or ask them to personify the periodic table, I’m not diluting content—I’m deepening it. I’m asking them to see scientific concepts as more than formulas on a whiteboard. Poetry offers language for wonder. For awe. For complexity. The student who writes, “I divide, I replicate, I hold multitudes” is learning not only cellular biology but also something about multiplicity, about existing as more than one thing.
Similarly, in social studies classrooms, poetry becomes a site for critical questioning. I’ve seen students use found poetry and blackout poems to confront primary source documents, challenging the omissions of history and unearthing voices buried in the archive. In my NCTE blog post, Exploring Identity Through Poetic Inquiry (Phelps, 2024), I shared how poetry became a bridge for students wrestling with who they are and how they have been shaped by their sociopolitical contexts. These cross-curricular moments show us that poetry doesn’t have to be contained within the boundaries of English Language Arts—it can transform every classroom into a space of inquiry, advocacy, and healing.
The House in the Sky: A Case of Multimodal Poetics
In my various courses for pre-service teachers, I use a poetic prompt called House in the Sky, inspired by Kyle Liang’s How to Build a House (2018). I ask students to imagine a home not bound by gravity—a metaphorical structure that holds their stories, traumas, dreams, and pedagogical values. It’s a practice that invites vulnerability, but also possibility. I’ve read poems from future educators about growing up in food deserts, about navigating linguistic shame, about being the first in their family to go to college. Through metaphor, these future teachers begin to name the invisible architecture of their identities. And that naming transforms how they understand their role in the classroom.
They begin to ask:
What kind of home am I building for my students? Whose stories are centered in the curriculum? Whose pain is ignored? Whose joy is allowed to be loud?
This is the kind of critical reflection that poetry makes possible. It isn’t just an expression—it’s excavation. It’s the start of a pedagogical stance grounded in care, criticality, cultural responsiveness, and radical honesty (hooks, 1994; Freire, 1970; Gay, 2019).
Strategies to Begin
For educators seeking to bring poetic inquiry into content-area classrooms, here are a few starting points:
Science: Have students write persona poems from the perspective of atoms, ecosystems, or scientific innovators. Encourage metaphor to unpack abstract processes—like comparing DNA replication to musical rhythm or memory.
Math: Ask students to write “I am” poems about their relationship with mathematics. Use metaphor to describe concepts like symmetry, infinity, or equations that changed the world. What does a struggle with fractions feel like? How does one narrate a moment of mathematical clarity?
History & Social Studies: Use erasure or found poetry with historical documents to highlight whose voices were omitted. Invite students to write ekphrastic poetry in response to artifacts or photographs from key moments in history.
Research & Inquiry: Incorporate reflective poetic journaling throughout the research process. Ask students to write poems as they collect and interpret data—honoring the emotional, ethical, and embodied dimensions of their learning (Leavy, 2015; Barone & Eisner, 2012).
These practices don’t detract from rigor—they reveal its humanity.
Every Hue Speaks: Radical Love & Healing
bell hooks reminded us that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility” (hooks, 1994, p. 12). Poetry, when used intentionally, can help us tap into that possibility. It invites students to bring their whole selves into the room—their grief and their brilliance, their anger and their aspirations. As I’ve written elsewhere, poetry makes healing possible in places where pain was once unnamed (Phelps, 2024). It makes visible what dominant narratives have tried to erase. So, I leave you with this poem—an offering, a reminder, a declaration:
Every Hue Speaks By Darius Phelps
I am the ink that refuses to dry, the verse that lingers long after the page has turned.
I am the echo of stories once silenced, now rising— unashamed, unshaken.
Do not ask me to shrink into grayscale, to press my voice into the margins, to soften my edges so they fit neatly into a world that fears their sharpness.
I have seen what happens when color is erased, when tongues are taught to whisper instead of roar when truths are bent into palatable shapes for those who would rather not taste their weight.
But here— in the rhythm of our reclamation, in the cadence of our collective breath, we write ourselves whole again.
We name both the wounds & the wonders. We let joy & grief walk hand in hand We let resistance & rest sit at the same table. We let love carve out a home where erasure once stood.
This is the work. This is the knowing.
This is the unbreaking, the unfolding, the remembering of every hue—
every shade of self, every layered truth, every voice that refuses to be forgotten.
& so, we write. & so, we heal. & so, we rise—
in every hue, in every word, in every breath that dares to say: We are still here.
References (APA 7)
Barone, T., & Eisner, E. W. (2012). Arts based research. SAGE. Cutts, Q. (2020). Poetic approaches to qualitative data analysis. Retrieved from https://digitalcommons.tacoma.uw.edu/education_pub/145/ Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. Ramos, Trans.). Herder and Herder. Gallas, K. (1994). The languages of learning: How children talk, write, dance, draw, and sing their understanding of the world. Teachers College Press. Gay, G. (2019). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice (3rd ed.). Teachers College Press. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. Jossey-Bass. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge. Leavy, P. (2015). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice (2nd ed.). Guilford Press. Liang, K. (2018). How to build a house. Swan Scythe Press. Liang, K. (2024). Good son. Sundress Publications. Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world. Teachers College Press. Phelps, D. (2023). Embracing every hue: Using our narratives to cultivate healing. Language Arts, 102(3), 199–204. https://doi.org/10.58680/la202332602 Phelps, D. (2024, December). Exploring identity through poetic inquiry. NCTE Blog.https://ncte.org/blog/2024/12/exploring-identity-through-poetic-inquiry/ Sealey-Ruiz, Y. (2022). An archaeology of self for our times: Another talk to teachers. English Journal, 111(5), 21–26. https://doi.org/10.58680/ej202231819 Summerhill, D. B. (2020). Mausoleum of flowers. CavanKerry Press. https://www.cavankerrypress.org/product/mausoleum-of-flowers/
About the Author
Darius Phelps (he/him) is a poet, writer, and scholar whose work centers the liberatory possibilities of poetic inquiry, culturally responsive pedagogy, and critical literacy. A former elementary school teacher and now professor, he mentors pre-service educators in reimagining classrooms as spaces of resistance, restoration, and radical love. His scholarship amplifies the voices of historically marginalized students, exploring how poetry can serve as both pedagogy and prophecy. Drawing inspiration from Black literary traditions, personal narrative, and student testimony, Darius uses his own poetry to foster healing, identity reclamation, and joy in the margins. His work has been featured by NCTE, School Library Journal, and many others where he continues to advocate for education that honors everybody, every story, and every voice.
One goal of school science learning is to apprentice students into the discipline. As teachers, we engage students in the multiple ways they can leverage the discourses of science so they can understand the ways science explanations can be structured and communicated to others. The Framework for K12 Science Education also suggests that students need to be aware that they are thinking scientifically.
All of this means that we need to provide learning opportunities that bring the literacies of science into the classroom in ways that help make this apprenticeship accessible to all students. It also means that we have to be clear with students when they are using these different literacies. One example of literacy in science is the development and use of models to represent, explore, and explain phenomena. Models are more than just drawings handed in at the end of a lesson for a grade. Modeling supports student learning by uncovering areas that need more clarity, encouraging question-asking, and motivating investigation. Modeling as a sharing practice also allows all students to see assorted, unique, and sometimes powerful representations of the same phenomenon. This sharing of initial and then developing models gives all students access to different ways of thinking.
One example of an initial model related to a high school unit is included in Figure 1. The model documents multiple relationships and uses many representations including drawings, arrows, various scales, and even a drawn set of thermometers. In this model some relationships that would help to fully answer the question “Why are the sea levels rising?” are not included. This is an initial model and it helps students to see what they don’t yet know and imagine the investigations they would create that would provide evidence for adding those ideas. While creating this model in a group, students shared their ideas in writing and orally, grappling with what they had previously learned to explain their initial ideas. Literacy around modeling is also developed as groups of students identify the critical relationships and representations to be used collectively within the models.
Following the development of small group models, teachers are encouraged to create a class consensus model. By negotiating meaning, through whole group scientist talks, of various representations to show relationships (such as various arrows or lines, words, and system components), students engage in the powerful talk of scientists. Sometimes, students are provided lists of words or components to include in their models. However, this teacher-guided practice steals students’ opportunity for science literacy development. Rather, if we are guided by the idea that we want to position students as apprentices to the work of science, then we need to engage them in (scaffolded) opportunities to flex their developing understanding of the literacies of the field.
Modeling is a disciplinary literacy that needs to be supported in the classroom and should grow over time. The progressions of learning suggested in the Framework clearly indicate that modeling doesn’t wait until high school. Kindergartners can model pushes and pulls and over time these models become more sophisticated until physics students include vector diagrams and equations as part of their modeling to explain. The phenomenon might not even change – perhaps physics students are still modeling pushes and pulls, but the level of sophistication of students’ mental models and drawn models will grow.
As a literacy, modeling needs to be about representations of relationships. Students’ models are not static but made dynamic by showing others how they see the relationships in the world and then capturing those relationships visually. In any unit of study and with any phenomenon, initial models are likely to lack some of these powerful relationships. This inability to model how the world works highlights potential student questions and investigations to be conducted. Knowledge developed through the investigations is then used to update and perhaps defend the next iteration of the model. The model in Figure 1 will change as students learn more, add more relationships, and increase their mechanistic understanding of why sea levels are rising. Because this is high school, students will also answer the question at different scales, using their developing understanding of changes at the molecular level.
Modeling is only one of eight Science and Engineering Practices identified in the Framework for K12 Science Education and used in the NGSS. It has become a beneficial part of science learning and science disciplinary literacy. In addition to seven additional Practices, the Crosscutting Concepts offer a lens into disciplinary literacy in science. We should continue to investigate how these literacies of science can support students as they grow in their ability and interest to explain the world like scientists.
Reference
National Research Council. 2012. A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/13165.
About the Author
Mary is the Executive Director of the Michigan Math and Science Leadership Network and a leader of the Disciplinary Literacy Essentials initiative in Michigan. She has authored textbooks, provides NGSS professional learning and leadership support across Michigan and the US. Currently, Mary is a co-PI on an NSF grant called Learning in Places. When she’s not organizing, writing or providing learning opportunities she can be found working elbow to elbow with science teachers in the classrooms.
