In this essay, the author asks, "What can the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley teach us about arts education today?" In Shelley's time, no one was yet worried about improving math, reading, or SAT scores. Nevertheless, there was an implication in the rise of the sciences that educators were even then beginning to confront: What, some…

Carol Ann Duffy's three volumes of children's poetry are important and interesting because they emerge from the work of a writer whose adult poetry has persistently associated childhood with dark and difficult areas of experience. This article explores what happens to such challenging material when a poet of major significance changes the focus of…

In order to better understand the worth of aesthetic experience in encountering poetry, fresh perspectives are helpful. This paper introduces the reader to modern stylistics: that is linguistic examinations of "the speaker's meaning" in literature and notes such "scientific" approaches to poetry do find common metaphysical ground with leading…

This article begins by noting the tendency of certain academic practices to arrest thought, and attempts to circumvent that arrestation in the writer by reflecting on her adolescent response to the writings of William Wordsworth. It explores the possible implications of a youthful feeling that poetry is "true", tying this in with Wordsworth's own…

Georgia Heard spent a week with students in New Mexico, encouraging their search for "self-portrait poetry"--poetry in which they saw themselves. She witnessed courage, pain, tragedy, and hope in the choices and writing of those struggling students, and came to learn that at least one among them had found a life-changing outlet.…

This paper is written in a personal capacity and mainly takes the form of a poem--in five sections--composed as a response to some of the ideas in the article by Hannu Heikkinen and colleagues in this same issue of "Educational Action Research": "Action research as narrative: five principles for validation". The poem takes its…

This article argues that poetry written by nineteenth-century British and American deaf poets played an important role in the period's sign language debates. By placing the publication of this poetry in the context of public exhibitions of deaf students, I suggest that the poetry was mobilized to publicly defend the linguistic and intellectual…

Biography is a hybrid. It is history crossed with narrative. The biographer has to present the available facts of the life yet shape their arbitrariness, untidiness, and incompleteness into an engaging whole. The readerly appeal lies in the prospect both of gaining documentary information, scrupulously researched and plausibly interpreted, and of…

Osundare's writing is generally acknowledged as coterminous with the contentious issues of language, style and meaning in Anglophone modern African literature, and because he is seen as representing a generation of African writers, this study highlights and analyzes aspects of Osundare's creative processes of meaning for his thematic project.…

In this article, the author gives some ideas on how to find funding for author and poet visits. Author and poet visits are very important for children of all ages. Young children learn much from meeting real people who write professionally. Good speakers inspire students to write and communicate in an articulate manner while in school and later in…

The stereotype of the poet or novelist working in unappreciated solitude got a workout recently at the Carbondale campus of Southern Illinois University. The 9th annual Young Writer's Workshop brought 30 high-school students onto the campus for four intense days of poetry and fiction writing, critiques, panels and readings. The workshop is one of…

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) has much to teach about arts education. However, the first question that many today might ask is, Should we listen to him at all? Wordsworth, some members of the postmodern academy have determined, was a bad man. He was unkind to his family and friends, they say, and they are uncomfortable with the politics he…

As U.K. school exam results continue to rise, perennial accusations appear in the media of the "dumbing down" of the curriculum and of employers' complaints about school leavers' lack of basic literacy skills. In this context, Andrew Motion, the poet laureate, has raised questions about how to provide an inspiring English curriculum, the…

In this article, the author focuses on the development of a young poet from Bulgaria, Indiana Pehlivanova, who experienced an explosive growth as a poet. Activating memory, myth, and reality, Pehlivanova's imagination wove together what the author terms as "the finest lines I have ever witnessed in youth poetry."

In an era of reductionist approaches to teaching and assessment, this dissertation returns to the fundamental question: "What is the value of writing, particularly poetry writing, in our society today?" The poet's central task, to abstract reality through symbols, requires profound cognitive and emotional work (Vendler, 2004; Steele,…