The Poetry Vlog: YouTubing, Interviewing, & Going “Live” in the Classroom
by C. R. Grimmer
Published onJun 06, 2023
The Poetry Vlog: YouTubing, Interviewing, & Going “Live” in the Classroom
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The following materials include two videos: a presentation video of The Poetry Vlog (TPV) as presented at The Digital Humanities Summer Institute in 2022 and a sample TPV episode. A text-based critical framing, as well as two sample lesson plans, accompany the sample TPV episode. The presentation video offers the theoretical underpinnings of the project and its history, and the sample episode grounds the discussion in a video framed for student-based audiences. The video example, its critical framings, and two lesson plans are from a seven-episode Critical Edition forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press’s Open Access (OA) imprint, Fulcrum. The project orients itself toward multiple audiences: the text-based critical framing is designed for scholars who are in fields of critical ecocriticism, queer, and critical race theories. The video is designed for undergraduate students and general audiences who are learning about creative writing, ecocriticism, queer studies, and critical race studies. The lesson plans are designed as base templates for scholars and community instructors who need ways to implement the videos in courses that may or may not teach creative writing and critical theory.
Due to the nature of conference proceedings and public-facing presentations on intellectual work, these videos do not expand on the Critical Edition from which they pull. To support navigating the two videos, critical framing, and lesson plans, though, I am offering the below framing. For a theoretical overview of the project, see Video 1.
Video 1: A theoretical overview of The Poetry Vlog, as presented at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) 2022
For the past four years, I have been publishing The Poetry Vlog (TPV), an online series of podcast and video conversations with poets, scholars, and educators. Two questions undergird TPV: what do poets teach us about how to engage in public scholarship through digital humanities network tools? How do we support historically under-represented poets’ increased circulation online while foregrounding concerns about historical erasure often attendant to market-based approaches?
TPV began in 2018 in response to these questions about how scholars and educators might re-examine the literary canon and modes of knowledge production that serve under-represented communities. The project also grew out of my work as a hybrid, poet, scholar, and digital pedagogy-based instructor. As the series developed, educators viewing TPV expressed interest in using the episodes in their classrooms, asking for suggestions about ways to integrate the materials. Additionally, the advent of COVID-19 made visible the need for OA digital and audiovisual publication forms that also function as accessible pedagogical materials.
In response, I began developing a fourth season that integrates brief critical framings and two co-authored sample lesson plans. As TPV argues for and models new research methods that work in coalition with and for authors and their direct communities, I developed seven featured dialogue episodes in Season 4 that facilitate translating between scholar educators and authors’ communities through framing and teaching support materials. Each of these seven episodes features a different guest, from playwright and poet Tommy Pico on indigenous performance to scholar and poet Cameron Awkward-Rich on black trans poetics. Guest speakers discuss poets’ self-positioning on social media, popular critiques of market-based literary circulation, and coalitional “hope” as activist praxis.
To support pedagogical use, a brief critical framing, adaptable lesson plan or syllabus, and list of citational resources (citations within episodes and a list of further readings) accompany each episode, as with the accompanying second video of this paper. Rebecca Taylor (University of Washington) co-authored the lesson plans. Taylor drafted a lesson plan for a literature, cultural studies, or rhetoric/composition classroom. Then, I adapted the lesson plan to a Creative Writing workshop context. Together, we share the original and adapted lesson plans, then revise each based on each other’s insights and feedback. In the full Critical Edition, Molly E. Ubbesen (University of Minnesota, Rochester) joins Taylor and me in creating these lesson plans: Ubbesen creates a first draft that I revise, followed by Taylor annotating our lesson plans with related Open Education Resources that apply similar concepts.
The critical framings, in turn, contextualize the video content within broader fields of academic inquiry. The included example, for instance, features Woogee Bae (Video 2). Bae is a poet, nonprofit arts administrator, and editor. Her video discusses snails and environmentally sound publishing practices as providing new avenues for building caring and sustainable community relationships. Bae is not a scholar in the fields of environmental or queer studies, but her arguments resonate with these fields, offering a lived, material form of knowledge. The critical framing translates her episode content into the context of the scholarly fields of queer environmental studies, otherwise known as queer ecocriticism. The critical framing, combined with the lesson plans, offers different strategies for scholars to introduce complex, niche topics to students new to or curious about how to connect essay-based scholarship with their lived experiences.
Video 2: An Interview with Woogie Bae, an example video from The Poetry Vlog. Source: https://youtu.be/JlRIkuJzMhw
The approach of bringing together and translating the knowledge form and terms across disparate disciplines offers new pathways into both fields (poetry and scholarship) for students in classrooms, but also pathways between the scholars and poets themselves. It is not a secret that YouTube and podcast platforms are imperfect, corporatized distributors of knowledge; yet, TPV suggests that they can be useful in extending academic knowledge reach and widening scholarly publication modalities, bringing scholars and poets alike onto platforms where cultural studies scholarship and poetry commentary have rarely been adapted to students’ own unique social media conventions.
Finally, the included videos propose questions for audience participation: the former from readers of the journal or other viewers of the video and the latter for students and general YouTube audiences. This strategy continues the theme of the project, which is to solicit open, social, and collaborative engagement. It acknowledges that as digital pedagogies engage in new social mediums: they have an opportunity to explicitly “conclude” not just with “questions for further investigation,” but direct invitations for further discussion.
The Poetry Vlog (TPV): Critical Edition
Critical Summary of Episode “Woogee Bae on What Environmental Poetry Teaches Us About Community Building”
In “Woogee Bae on What Environmental Poetry Teaches Us About Community Building” (see Video 1), Woogee Bae uses close analysis of snails, composting, and poetry to theorize sustainable community-building and writing practices. Bae is the co-founder and editor of Snail Trail Press, a published poet with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Washington (Bothell Campus), and the Events and Annual Giving Coordinator for Seattle Arts & Lectures in Seattle, WA. Throughout the episode, Bae draws on her experience as a poet, community organizer, and editor to argue for environmentally sound publishing practices that, in turn, inform sustainable community building and writing strategies. Her approach—reading metaphorical and literal snails—applies a “queer ecologies” framework to poetry and poetics, making the episode especially salient for the fields of queer ecocriticism, animal studies, and ecopoetics.
The crux of Bae’s analysis arises from her reading of Eric Sneathen’s collection Snail Poems, published by small press Krupskaya in 2016. Snail Poems follows the small movements of snails, the residues they leave, and their role in composting environmental matter. She describes how snails’ “trails” in Sneathen’s poems and the material world can support a critique of and grief over late capitalism’s consumer-driven impact on the environment and community-building. In Bae’s reading of Sneathen’s collection, snails become a way to look closely at this grief and learn new methods for caring through small acts of difference. Sneathen’s collection contributes to a growing body of literature termed “queer ecopoetics,” a field popularized in the late 2010s by authors such as CA Conrad, author of A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics in 2012. The term’s growing critical reception and popularity has led to re-readings of canonical activist poets from the 1970s to the 1990s as queer and decolonial ecopoets, such as Cherrí Moraga Gloria Anzaldúa (Solis Ybarra 2016, 2020). Queer ecopoetics’ hallmark turns toward found and made kinship that celebrates care across species and knowledge forms alike. The approach contrasts more dominant, normalized forms in late capitalism, such as heteropatriarchal property relations, reproduction, the subordination of feeling to intellect, and the ability to acquire and transfer land.
One of the earlier, popular circulations of the term “queer ecology” appeared in 2010 through a PMLA guest column by Timothy Morton. That same year, Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire came out from Indiana UP with editors Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erikson. More recent theories look to reproduction and its relationship to late capitalism as complicating queer ecocriticism as much as a queer ecology. Sarah Ensor, for instance, argues that dominant environmental rhetoric and activisms foreground preservation, vitalism, and reproduction in service of prolonging and reproducing life, which are also key traits of heteroreproductive family units that obtain capital to pass down through patrilineal lines. Ensor argues that queer ecopoetics, in contrast, “cultivate forms of communal and planetary investment [existing] outside of—and [persisting] beyond—[this] temporality of crisis in which the environmental movement so deeply invests” (Ensor 53). In Ensor’s argument, the temporality crisis sees a continuation of life through reproductive family units as the limit environmentalism continues to reach. Ensor’s work posits a “spinster ecology” that learns from the lessons of queer history, including AIDS, to re-think the terms of care when preservation is no longer the primary goal or even option.
Queer ecopoetics bridges queer theory and environmental theory for building out livability without foregrounding reproductive life. Angela Hume and Samia Rahimtoola define the term “queer ecopoetics” in the “Introduction” to a 2018 issue of ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment):
If ecopoetics has opened up crucial questions about how we might best dwell on earth and about the politics of such dwelling, queer ecopoetics orients us toward the affects, kinship practices, and erotic exchanges that shape dwelling as a relational endeavor. In doing so, it draws on poetry’s long concern with the construction of self and other, lover and beloved, to cultivate new forms of environmental sociality. So when Frank O’Hara confesses to his lover, “I wanted to be sure to reach you / Though my ship was on the way it got caught” (217) and when Robert Frost writes, “Good fences make good neighbors” (33), they participate in a poetic tradition in which difference, distance, and otherness are conditions of—not boundaries to—coming into relation. Poetry’s reach mediates distance and desire. In doing so, poetry and the study of poetry inquires into the (im)possibility of relation, suggesting that our attachments may be more oblique and diffuse than we usually imagine. Queer ecopoetics, then, pursues human and nonhuman associations beyond the conventions of heteronormative family bonds and anthropocentric ecological ones. (139, emphasis not added)
Bae turns to the snail—its way of moving with its home, how the trails leave nonlinear remnants of compostable communication and intimacy, their extra-human pace—as a way to create new conventions, both in the writing of poetry and the theorizing of poetry through poetics. The relation between snail and human, but also what is unknowable between the snails and, in turn, between humans, become a moment of hope for repurposing the matter of environment and creative process alike.
Bae’s emphasis on the snail also resonates with Indigenous and native queer ecopoetics theories, a field of work that historicizes contemporary poets through Chicana feminists Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. The field examines how understanding colonialism within this matrix of heteropatriachy, extractive capital, and environment “rejects the Western dichotomization of the human and the natural and […] incorporates indigenous knowledges that predate, and have persisted in spite of, colonization” (Hume and Rahimtoola 142). Bae’s episode can be particularly salient in the context of indigenous and native queer ecopoetics because she looks closely to how “the making of a new home—constructed in spite of oppressive cultural imperatives for ethnic purity, monolingualism, and the patrilineal nuclear family—becomes a work of cultural and poetic invention that creates a more sustaining social and ecological context than the existing culture offers” (134). In this episode, home becomes a way to think about community, kinship, and the writing practice itself.
Because the episode examines ecopoetics by accounting for snails and interspecies lessons, it also activates and practices theories of post-humanism. A popularized example of this form of theorizing relations through interspecies contact includes Donna Haraway. Haraway’s work focuses on the close-to-human, such as gorillas (“Teddy Bear Patriarchy”), and within human domesticity, dogs (The Companion Species Manifesto); she narrates monuments to “wild” nonhumans through a form of gendered violence and domination, but also breeding and training of “domestic” nonhumans through ways of “becoming in kind” for dogs and their humans. These are the companion and less familiar species associated with thinking and seeing alongside and through what is otherwise identified as human. Similarly, The Multispecies Salon, a collection that came out from Duke UP in 2014, edited by Eben Kirksey, showcases “anthropologists [who] have collaborated with artists and biological scientists to illuminate how diverse organisms are entangled in political, economic, and cultural systems” (from publisher summary). Bae’s turn toward the snail and its residues enacts the practices standard among posthuman animal studies, creating space for an analysis of what care forms have become culturally popularized along the lines of slow, less visible environmental violence.
Bae outlines part of the resistance and world-building (or home-building) through a post-humanist lens that explicitly contrasts with a purity-driven rhetoric typical in conservation efforts (Woods 88). Instead, Bae insists on how slime, precisely in its representation as the abject or disgusting, can create new opportunities for care and sustainability. In line with queer ecocriticism, in other words, Bae’s analysis integrates how a queer ecocritical writing and publishing practices might, “rather than aiming to save” an already in-crisis environment, instead help us “to train ourselves and each other how to steward within […] terminal temporality” (Ensor 43). That is, if the environmental crisis is past repair, Bae argues that thinking through different materials and time scales can offer hope for ways we might better live now. In the episode, slime is the residue snails leave behind them, enacting just such a temporality for writing and publishing practices. Bae argues that revision and recycling past work becomes a theoretical frame for queer ecopoetics alongside sustainable printing and distribution practices. In both forms—writing as recycling and publishing as redistribution—Bae argues that horizontal kinships can be practiced that fulfill the promises of queer ecopoetics.
To this end, another critical framing available to the episode includes queer ecocritic Rob Nixon’s work on “slow violence.” Slow violence “[means] a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction […] an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all…where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded” (2). Bae repeatedly refers to snails as providing space for contemplating new forms of world-building in part because their movements and trails are difficult to perceive as ongoing and moving in the scale of human time. They both reflect different paces of environmental violence and hope for creating or “composting” new environments. Moving outside a visual spectacle of the future—slime, residue, “snail-paced” movement—allows for the admission of, and perhaps then ethical reckoning with, slow, less visible violence, but also slow, less visible activisms in building community and writing spaces.
The attached lesson plans offer two avenues for student responses: one assumes a theory and literature course, while the other adapts that lesson plan for a course that assigns creative writing or arts-based homework. Across both the lesson plan and its adaptation, the primary author (Rebecca Taylor) and I suggest student-centered lesson plans that help students think through the potentially newer theoretical fields of indigenous and native queer ecocriticism and use arts-based methods for building classroom communities.
Haraway, Donna. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936.” Social Text, vol. 11, no. 11, 1984, pp. 20–64, doi.org/10.2307/466593.
Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.
Hume, Angela, and Samia Rahimtoola. “Introduction: Queering Ecopoetics.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 25, no. 1, 2018, pp. 134–149, doi.org/10.1093/isle/isy014.
Kirksey, Eben, editor. The Multi-Species Salon, Duke University Press, 2014. Kindle Edition.
Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, and Bruce Erickson, editors. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Indiana UP, 2010.
Morton, Timothy. “Guest Column: Queer Ecology.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 125, no. 2, 2010, pp. 273–282, doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2010.125.2.273.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011.
Woods, Derek. “Corporate Chemistry: A Biopolitics of Environment in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Richard Powers’s Gain.” American Literary History, vol. 29, no. 1, 2017, pp. 72–99, doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajw065.
Solis Ybarra, Priscilla. “14 ‘Lo Que Quiero Es Tierra’: Longing and Belonging in Cherríe Moraga’s Ecological Vision.” New Perspectives on Environmental Justice, Rutgers University Press, 2020, pp. 240–248, doi.org/10.36019/9780813542539-017.
Solis Ybarra, Priscilla. Writing the Goodlife: Mexican American Literature and the Environment. U of Arizona P, 2016.
Appendix A: Two Lesson Plans
Lesson Plan #1: “Cultural and Literary Studies: How Ecopoetry Can Explore Concepts of Queering a Text, Dwelling, and Community”
Lesson Objectives: By the end of this lesson, students should be able to demonstrate their understanding of queering a text and the concepts of dwelling and community through the lens of ecopoetry. This lesson is intended to be an introduction to these terms that can be built upon in later lessons and/or student projects.
Possible Lesson Sequence
This lesson could be an introduction to an assignment sequence in which students are asked to use queer theory as a lens to analyze other examples of ecopoetry, literature, PSAs, tweets, advertisements, film scenes, etc. A final assignment could ask students to create their own ecopoetry or another ecologically influenced composition.
Materials Needed:
Projector/screen
Device to project to screen
Internet connection
Post-It Notes
Instructor Preparation: Jigsaws are a low-prep classroom activity that encourages students to interact and collaborate while decentering the teacher in the classroom.
Pre-class student work:
Video: Students should watch The Poetry Vlog (TPV) episode before class.
Research: Students should spend time looking up these phrases on the internet: “queering a text” and “ecopoetry.”
Advanced Reading: In advanced courses that integrate reading literary and/or cultural studies theory, assign students one of the peer-reviewed essays from the “References” made in the video. These are found in visual form in the video and in text-based form in the video’s “References” section within the description.
Lesson Plan (45 minutes)
Approx. Time
Activity
Description
Rationale
~5 min
Warm up: Free Write
Ask students to free write about the homework.
Possible questions to guide their free write:
Based on the conversation between Woogee Bae and C.R. Grimmer, as well as your research, how do you understand the phrase ecopoetry?
What are snail trails? How does that concept intersect with ecopoetry?
In approaching and researching these terms, what was interesting about these concepts, what was new to you, and what was surprising?
What are the differences among dwelling on, dwelling in, dwelling upon, and dwelling with? How do these intersect with ideas of community?
Asking students to research these terms in addition to watching ThePoetry Vlog episode helps them contextualize and personalize these meanings before class.1
Studies show2 that students across a variety of contexts may lack confidence when asked to dive into a discussion activity; free writes can help them activate their ideas and build a sense of confidence before sharing.
10 min
Jigsaw: Phase 1 (Home Groups)
Note on jigsaws: Students are placed into a “Home Group” in which they discuss and learn about a single term/idea. In Phase 2, they are put into a new “Expert Group” in which they lead a discussion about their term to a group of students.
Put students into Home Groups comprised of 4-5 students each. In each group, assign each student a letter, A, B, C, D, and so on.
In the Home Groups, each member discusses an assigned term, drawing on information that they found during their homework and what they wrote during their free write:
Home Group 1 discusses ecopoetry
Home Group 2 discusses queering a text
Home Group 3 discusses concepts of snail trails, community, and dwelling on, in, upon & with.
You can create more Home Groups depending on class goals and discussions you’d like to cultivate.
Visit each group to guide their conversation about their term.
Then show a portion of The Poetry Vlog episode that aligns with the class objectives or discussion.
Have each group take a few minutes to reflect on the video and incorporate any new information into their discussion. Ask students to ensure that all group members are knowledgeable about their group’s term/concepts and are ready to lead a discussion within a new group.
Note that it’s important to mingle with student groups at this stage (Home Groups) to catch and inform any misunderstandings of the concepts.
Jigsaws are a way to decentre the teacher in the classroom,3 and they also let the teacher move among small groups to catch any misunderstandings of concepts and respond to them in a smaller group setting instead of in front of the entire class.
Jigsaws also have been the subject of substantial research,3 which has shown they work to create antiracist spaces, empower students, and help create community and cooperative skills.
10 min
Jigsaw:
Phase 2 (Expert Groups)
Regroup the students into Expert Groups in which all As are in a group together, all Bs are together, and so on.
Ideally, each Expert Group will have one student who has just discussed ecopoetry, one student who has only discussed queering texts, and one student who has discussed concepts of snail trails/dwelling/community.
In these Expert Groups, each student leads a discussion about what was discussed in their Home Group.
You could add on to this discussion by asking students to work together to think about this question:
How has your knowledge of these terms changed from your independent research (the homework), to your earlier discussion in the Home Group, to now?
18 min
All-class share
Ask each Expert Group to share their understanding of these terms with the entire class.
Guiding questions:
What did you discover about these terms?
What do you understand about these terms that you didn’t before doing the homework?
How did our discussion today affect your understanding of the terms?
This is an opportunity to guide the students’ final thoughts on the content, make connections between the video and the concepts that students may have missed, and introduce any connections to these terms that students may be visiting in future assignments.
~2 min
Exit Ticket
Ask students to write any lingering questions on a Post-It Note and stick it to the board on their way out of the room.
These could be anonymous, or you could ask students to leave their email addresses on the note if they want a quick follow-up from you via email.
Exit Tickets are a low-stakes way for teachers to hear from students. Students can be anonymous, which takes the pressure off of them, but could also provide their email in case they do want to be in contact with their teacher.
Lesson Plan #2: “Creative Writing and Workshop Adaptation: How Ecopoetry Can Explore Concepts of Queering a Text, Dwelling, and Community”
Lesson Objectives: By the end of this lesson, students should feel confident exploring how the concepts queering a text, dwelling, and community in ecopoetry can foster creative work responsive to the intersections of identity, community, and environment. This lesson is intended to be an introduction to these terms in a workshop context that can be built upon in later workshops and/or longer-term student projects, such as zines and chapbooks. It also introduces the query of how to produce literary community archives that are sustainable for both marginalized communities and the broader ecological environment.
Possible Lesson Sequence
This lesson could introduce an assignment sequence in which students practice queer theory to create ecopoetry in original writing and “found texts,” i.e., PSAs, tweets, advertisements, etc. Students who create their own ecopoetry may build upon these earlier drafts to create a sequence of pieces (i.e., chapbook or zine).
Materials Needed:
Projector/screen
Device to project to screen
Internet connection
Google Doc or other shared writing and annotation format that the full class can access.
Student access to adding information to the Google Doc live during class.
Post-It Notes
Instructor Preparation: Create a Google Document or other shared writing and annotation format that the full class can access. Ensure the class will be able to access it during class. Set it up so that it has one page for Home Group (see below) that will be in class.
Pre-class Student Work:
Reading: Students should watch The Poetry Vlog episode before class.
Research: Students should spend time looking up the terms “ecopoetry” and “queering a text” in relation to specific poets, bringing poems and/or poets they come across to class for small group discussion and sharing.
Writing Assignment: Students create a poem using recycled materials from their homes or immediate environment. The poem should have no more than 10 words and use no less than 3 unique materials. Students bring this to class for workshopping. Alternatively, students may opt to heavily revise a prior poem from the class instead of creating a physical poem. By offering students two options, you support a student-centered assignment that enables them to participate in the terms of the homework while ensuring the assignment itself responds to the course texts and practices core tenants of a workshop where students arrive prepared to share in equal measure with their peers.
Advanced Reading: In advanced workshops where students consolidate literary and cultural studies theory with creative practice, assign them one of the peer-reviewed essays from the “References” made in the video. These are found in visual form in the video and in text-based form in the video’s “References” section within the description. In workshops where literary and cultural studies theory is not integrated, but further creative writing is desired, assign either the online edition of Snail Trail Press or work by queer ecopoet CA Conrad.
Lesson Plan (45 minutes)
Approx. Time
Activity
Description
Rationale
~5 min
Warm up: Free Write
Ask students to free write about the Reading.
Possible questions to guide their free write:
Based on the conversation between Woogee Bae and C. R. Grimmer, as well as your research, how do you understand the phrase ecopoetry?
What are snail trails? How does that concept intersect with ecopoetry?
In approaching and researching these terms, what was interesting about these concepts, what was new to you, and what was surprising?
What are the differences among dwelling on, dwelling in, dwelling upon, and dwelling with? How do these intersect with ideas of community?
Advanced Workshops: What friction came up for you between the Advanced Reading, Research, Writing Assignment, and Episode?
Asking students to research these terms in addition to watching ThePoetry Vlog episode helps them contextualize and personalize these meanings before class.1
Studies show2 that students across a variety of contexts may lack confidence when asked to dive into a discussion activity; free writes can help them activate their ideas and build a sense of confidence before sharing.
10 min
Jigsaw: Phase 1 (Home Groups)
Note on jigsaws: Students are placed into a “Home Group” in which they discuss and learn about a single text/idea. In Phase 2, they are put into a new “Expert Group” in which they lead a discussion about their term to a new group of students.
Put students into Home Groups comprised of 4–5 students each. In each group, assign each student a letter, A, B, C, D, and so on:
Home Group 1 discusses how their Research and each members’ Writing Assignment demonstrates a unique aspect of ecopoetry,
Home Group 2 discusses how their Research and each members’ Writing Assignment demonstrates a unique aspect of queering a text,
Home Group 3 discusses how their Research and each members’ Writing Assignment demonstrates a unique aspect of snail trails, community, and dwelling on, in, upon & with,
Home Group 4, 5, and so on: Break up the group 3 topics into subtopics if your class has more than 3 Home Groups.
To track the discussion, ask students to open the shared Google Doc prepared for class (Instructor Preparation) and navigate to their Home Group’s page. Ask students to take notes of their discussion in their respective Home Group page. Emphasize that groups are taking notes, not yet writing formal explanations. Visit each group to guide their conversation about their term. Then, show a portion of The Poetry Vlog episode that aligns with the class objectives or discussion.
Have each group take a few minutes to reflect on the video and incorporate any new information into their discussion and Google Doc notes. Ask students to now add notes on how one another’s Writing Assignments evidence or helps them understand a facet of their term(s). IMPORTANT: students must offer an aspect of each peer’s Writing Assignment. They cannot exclude any one assignment.
Advanced Workshops: Ask students to now add to their notes how the Advanced Readings (the Literary or Cultural Studies theory and/or the paired poet, CA Conrad) further contextualize, complicate, or clarify their understanding of their term(s). When adding in the readings, ask students to cite specific passages, pages, or poems.
Optional: If students finish early, ask them to now add their Research findings to the notes.
Ensure that all group members are knowledgeable about their term/concepts and have used each other’s Writing Assignments as examples. Ensure that they are ready to lead a discussion within a new group.
Note that it’s important to mingle with student groups at this stage (Home Groups) to catch and inform any misunderstandings of the concepts.
Jigsaws are a way to decentre the teacher in the classroom, 3 and they also let the teacher move among small groups to catch any misunderstandings of concepts and respond to them in a smaller group setting instead of in front of the entire class.
Jigsaws also have been the subject of substantial research, 3 which has shown they work to create antiracist spaces, empower students, and help create community and cooperative skills.
By adapting the jigsaw method in a creative writing workshop, students can practice workshopping that supports innovation and builds confidence over critique and error-based feedback. This builds on recent studies around how to facilitate antiracist4 and community-based5 writing workshops.
Asking students to make sure each peer has one facet of their Writing Assignment integrated encourages a democratized workshop setting. Instead of implicitly valuing some peer’s work over another’s, each peer’s work has its successes highlighted in equal measure, demonstrating how different facets of craft and student work differently function with the course terms and expertise.
10 min
Jigsaw:
Phase 2 (Expert Groups)
Regroup the students into Expert Groups in which all As are in a group together, all Bs are together, and so on.
Ideally, each group will have one student who has just discussed ecopoetry, one student who has only discussed queering texts, one student who has discussed concepts of dwelling/community, and so on.
In these regroupings, each student leads a discussion about how their peers’ Writing Assignments and Research evidenced the concepts from their previous group. They have their Google Doc notes to reference if they forget names or details.
Remind students that they need to anchor their explanation of their Home Group Findings with one example from each peer in their Home Group. This ensures each assignment has one positive attribute brought to the class in relationship to the terms.
18 min
All-class share
Ask students to return to the Home Groups. Ask the students to share their understanding of the other Home Group terms and other examples from other Home Groups’ Research and Writing Assignments.
You could add on to this discussion by asking students to work together to think about this question:
How has your knowledge of these terms changed from your independent Research (the homework) to now?
Then, ask students to return to the notes they have taken on their respective term(s). Have them revise the notes into a shared working definition of the term(s). Remind students that the working definitions must cite one unique example from each of their Home Group’s Writing Assignments.
Guiding questions:
What did you discover about these terms?
What do you understand about these terms that you didn’t before doing the homework?
How did our discussion today affect your understanding of the terms?
What new techniques for creating poetry and objects as poetry did you learn from your peers’ assignments?
If you have time, have each Home Group share their final working definition and examples with the class. If you do not have time, assign the full Google Doc as reading for the next class.
Note on time: If your class meets for a shorter period or you want to allow more time for any parts of this lesson plan, the final step can be assigned as homework, either as remote collaboration in the Google Doc or in-person.
This is an opportunity to guide the students’ final thoughts on the content, make connections between the video and the concepts that students may have missed, and introduce any connections to these terms that students may be visiting in future assignments.
This is also an opportunity for students to hear and see which aspects of their creative work interact with the terms and generate inspiration for their peers, building confidence in their creative practice and stronger relationships and reading skills with their immediate classroom community.
Students return to their Home Group to strengthen their relationship with their immediate peers, with whom they shared their Writing Assignment, with the broader context of how other groups completed the homework and processed course information. This facilitates groups expanding their collective approach to the coursework while maintaining and building on the trust of sharing their Writing Assignment and early thoughts with the Home Group. If your course requires long-term group projects or smaller writing workshop groups that stay consistent for the quarter, this ensures that students still experience and work with peers in other groups from the course.
~2 min
Exit Ticket
Ask students to write any lingering questions on a Post-It Note and stick it to the board on their way out of the room.
These could be anonymous, or you could ask students to leave their email addresses on the note if they want a quick follow-up from you via email.
Exit Tickets are a low-stakes way for teachers to hear from students. Students can be anonymous, which takes the pressure off of them, but could also provide their email in case they do want to be in contact with their teacher.
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