Overview.
“The domain constructed:
Finds its fulfilment in its users
Users and activities act as one
Thus giving this domain a meaning:
A sense of being built.”
(“Man Decides” by Anshumali Baruah)
Context and Pedagogy
Students of literature have always been taught poetic form as a mandatory component of the curriculum. In our experience however, it is rare to see students engage in formal analysis beyond curriculum requirements, and if they do, their study is often cursory and unsubstantial. This thus reveals a gap between ‘knowing’ and ‘applying’ their understanding of poetic form. The title of our poetry package, FORM // FUNCTION, visually reflects the ‘gap’, but also suggests the pertinence of bridging the two. This package is designed with this ‘bridging’ in mind: to assist our fellow educators in advancing their students’ interaction with poetic forms from rudimentary awareness to productive application and appreciation. Students should not only be able to identify, define and appreciate poetic form, but also confidently use their learning to supplement their reading experience of poetry and consequent critical analyses. They should also attain a conceptual understanding of the relationship between form and function, and be able to transfer and apply this understanding beyond the study of literature, and on to the other texts of their lives.
The package is designed for a Secondary Three express stream class of about twenty students. As is suggested by the 2019 Literature Syllabus, students entering Secondary Three should have attained all introductory and advanced KSDs under all four LOs. We acknowledge that this objective might be compromised by time constraints and practical difficulties in teaching literature at Lower Secondary. We further recognise that the teaching of poetry at Upper Secondary focuses on the Unseen Poetry component of the O Level examinations, with its heavy emphasis on practical criticism and a corresponding knowledge of literary devices. With these factors in mind, this package is foremost aimed at reinforcing LOs -- specifically, LO2 and the corresponding lens of Appreciating Style, as a scaffold to the study of Upper Secondary poetry. We suggest that LO2 is best attained by starting with form, since formal elements often encompass a substantial number of literary devices, and will better strengthen the knowledge and skills students need for practical criticism at the Upper Secondary level. Apart from the package’s consideration of application, evident in the consistent employment of the pedagogical strategy Gradual Release of Responsibility (GRR), we also believe that a study of form is necessary in order for students to gain a holistic and nuanced appreciation of poetry. Students’ mastery of formal analysis will enhance their appreciation of ‘how different aspects of a writer’s craft combine to have an impact on their experience and interpretation of literary texts’ (Curriculum Planning and Development Division, 2019). FORM // FUNCTION should thus be enacted in its entirety early on in Term One of Secondary Three, covering four double-period lessons with each one dedicated to the study of one poetic form.
In our unit plan, we have attempted to implement concept-based instruction (Erickson, 2007), which argues that students are best able to transfer and apply learning when lessons are designed for them to arrive at conceptual principles. This translates to keeping the definition of ‘form’ in abeyance; the lessons move in a spiral progression from more ‘structured’ forms (the Petrarchan Sonnet and the Villanelle) to less ‘structured’ ones (Concrete poetry and Free Verse). We argue that the gradual absence of fixed poetic ‘rules’ challenges students to engage with poetry beyond superficial identification of formal features. Further, each lesson includes poems that either conform, negotiate, subvert or seemingly does away with ‘form’. The lessons thus cohere around a thematic question that students are encouraged to continuously consider: how does form, or the lack thereof, enhance our experience and interpretation of poetry?
Lesson 1: The Sonnet
Instead of the familiar Shakespearean sonnets that students may have encountered in Lower Secondary, this lesson comprises a study of Petrarchan sonnets by Edna St Vincent Millay and Christina Rossetti. The main pedagogical approaches used are informed by the Principle of Literature Teaching and Learning. The pre-activity introduces the concept of ‘form’ through popular music, encouraging students to discern meaningful connections between literature and their everyday lives. Engagement is also promoted through group work in a main activity that requires students to share responses to a sonnet through group whiteboarding and presentation. Differentiated instruction is further incorporated in these activities through cooperative learning strategies, including deliberate groupings and assigned roles that enforce positive interdependence and personal accountability. To elicit quick and informal responses from students, the lesson activities cycle through simple dialogue and writing tasks, while a consolidatory puzzle activity and homework exercise act as final assessment evidence for the teacher.
Lesson 2: The Villanelle
Students will be introduced to three seminal Villanelles and, with modelling and facilitation by the teacher, appreciate how a poem’s observance and/or subversion of poetic conventions can contribute to its overall intention and effect. To reiterate the salience of appreciating poetic forms, students will create a Mentimeter Word cloud by recalling prior knowledge of poetic devices and features, and subsequently watch a video extract of a TedEd talk by David Silverstein about the effects of and intentions behind poetic patterns. The lesson will progress from teacher-directed modelling using Dylan Thomas’s conventional Villanelle “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”, to teacher-guided facilitation with Sylvia Plath’s adapted Villanelle “Mad Girl’s Love Song”. Guiding questions in the respective worksheets will consistently remind students to consider and analyse formal features in relation to the poem’s content and thematic concerns. Students will then be given a take-home assignment on Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” to independently practice how to supplement their understanding of the poem with analysis of its form.
Lesson 3: Concrete Poetry
After having been taught about ‘structured’ forms, the unit plan shifts towards an exploration of how form in general works with content and context to generate meaning. This lesson introduces students to concrete poetry, in which the visual form itself has visible links to the poem’s meaning and content. The lesson opens by drawing from real life through a photograph of a map-like artefact from Caldecott MRT station. The subsequent Think-Pair-Share and main group work activities help students inductively co-create meaning from the starting point of their own childhood experiences and knowledge of Singapore. Throughout the lesson, explicit teaching, teacher modelling, and making thinking visible are utilised to scaffold students’ learning. Students will finally practice independently analysing a poem’s concrete form and content in their take-home assignment, which has similar themes to the last poem covered in the lesson.
Lesson 4: Free Verse
Rounding off the unit plan, students will be introduced to a variety of contemporary free verse poetry, and will be encouraged to understand line breaks, stanza breaks, and suggestive use of punctuations as modes of form. In the pre-activity, students will engage in personal expression by writing a free verse poem, after which they will participate in a Think-Pair-Share activity to share and make meaning out of each other’s poems. The texts selected for this lesson vary widely in length and stanza structures in order to expose students to the openness of free verse forms, and to ultimately illustrate that formal analysis can be productive and meaningful regardless of the poem.
How to Use This Site
Our hope is that this site will help mitigate the fuss of toggling between slides, poetry sites, videos, worksheets, and more.
Each blog post follows the structure of a lesson, so teachers need only pull up the site in class and scroll along. All the resources required for your lesson are linked and available for download at the bottom of the blog post.
References
Curriculum Planning and Development Division. (2019). Literature in English Teaching and Learning Syllabus: Lower and Upper Secondary. Singapore: Ministry of Education.
Erickson, H. L. (2007). Concept-based curriculum and instruction for the thinking classroom. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
