Sounding Sense: The Place,Problems and Potential of Performance in Poetry

Drawing on a strand of findings from the Cambridge Poetry Teaching Project, a small-scale research study co-ordinated through the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, this article examines contemporary understandings of poetry performance in teaching contexts. Positioning these understandings in relation to past practices, we contend that within contemporary English teaching, the experience of performance is now largely separated from knowledge of poems developed through detailed analysis. Through an examination of theories of poetry and language more generally, we argue that performance should be more fully integrated into poetry teaching, and suggest ways in which a consideration of principles and choices relating to performance has the potential to cultivate the resources of the inner ear and to instantiate a kind of knowledge whose educational value should be given equal status with the analytical understanding of poems that currently drives the examination system.     

Doing,being, becoming: a historical appraisal of the modalities of project-based learning

Any pedagogy of media practice sits at the intersection between training for employment and education for critical thinking. As such, the use of projects is a primary means of structuring learning experiences as a means of mirroring professional practice. Yet, our understanding of the nature of projects and of project-based learning is arguably under-theorised and largely taken for granted. This paper attempts to address this issue through a synthesis of the literature from organisational studies and experiential learning. The article aims to shift the debate around project-based learning away from an instrumentalist agenda, to one that considers the social context and lived experience of projects and re-conceptualises projects as ontological modalities of doing, being and becoming. In this way, the article aims to provide a means for thinking about the use of project-based learning within the media practice curriculum that draws on metaphors of discovery, rather than of construction.     

“Poetry? Of course we do it. It's in the National Curriculum.” Primary children's perceptions of poetry

What can listening to children's ideas about poetry teach us? This article considers ways in which exploring primary‐aged students' perceptions of poetry can inform teachers' work with children. Using strategies from earlier studies in secondary schools, a small‐scale project with Year 6 students revealed their complex and sometimes contradictory ideas. These ideas reflect some of the current debates around the nature of poetry and ways of teaching it. The children's ideas are analysed with critical attention paid to the impact of the view of literacy in England's National Literacy Strategy on the teaching and learning of poetry.     

李金发的现代性体验及诗学意义

本文分两个议题 :一是从现代体验的角度描述李金发的诗歌创作展示了他人无法替代的新的现代性的景观 ,进而论述李金发诗中表现的“审丑”主义构成了一种反思现代性的诗学实践。二是从微观诗学的角度论证李金发诗歌“远取譬”的诗学意义 ,并试图通过李金发探讨比喻与通感的内在关联。     

Re-imagining learning through art as experience: An aesthetic approach to education for life

Abstract

This paper investigates what it may mean to re-imagine learning through aesthetic experience with reference to John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934). The discussion asks what learning might look like when aesthetic experience takes centre stage in the learning process. It investigates what Dewey meant by art as experience and aesthetic experience. Working with Dewey as a philosopher of reconstruction of experience, the discussion examines responses to poetic writings and communication in learning situations. In seeking to discover what poetic writing (as art) does within the experience of a reader and writer it considers three specific learning situations. Firstly there is an examination of a five-year old child’s experience of shared communication through the story of Horton the Elephant. Secondly there is an account of the responses of an 11-year-old child to poetry in a 1950s classroom setting, and later reconstructions of those experiences by the child as adult. Thirdly, the paper extends to intensive writing with 12 to 13-year-old children. The focus is on the process of learning via acts of expression as aesthetic experiences. Through art as experience the child develops perceptions that recover a coherence and continuity of aesthetic experience in art as in everyday life.     

Childhood and Modernity: Dark Themes in Carol Ann Duffy’s Poetry for Children

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 her work to address child readers directly. Since these areas of experience are bound up with issues that have made the meaning of childhood particularly problematic within contemporary society, Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry may be read as an oblique commentary on the condition of childhood within late modernity. The author focuses on strategies used by the poet in representing both romantic love and disturbing emotions for a child readership, assessing the roles played by distancing and estrangement devices in mediating such experience. David Whitley is Lecturer in English in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge University, where he teaches English Literature, Film and Children’s Literature. He is particularly interested in film, poetry and environmental perspectives on the arts. He has published a number of articles, especially on Aesop’s Fables, and has recently completed a book on Disney animation.     

Developing Students' Appreciation for What Is Taught in School

This article elaborates a presentation made upon reception of the E. L. Thorndike Career Achievement Award in Educational Psychology from Division 15 of the American Psychological Association. It considers how value aspects of motivation apply to efforts to develop students' appreciation for school learning. Currently, we have only limited knowledge about situations that afford opportunities for learning school content with appreciation of its value, how to exploit those affordances, or even their benefits to learners. We need to develop our theorizing about the benefits that students may derive from learning in school and determine what curriculum makers and teachers might do to foster students' appreciation for these benefits. Teaching for appreciation requires ensuring that what is taught is worth learning, explaining the value of this content and modeling its applications, and scaffolding learning by engaging students in activities that allow them to experience its valued affordances.     

加强教授学习技能促进学生全面发展——从“怎样写心得笔记”教学谈起

文章对“怎样写心得笔记”这一校本课程教学作了较为详尽的介绍,并引发对学生是否应该学习并掌握一些学习技能,学校是否应该教授一些学习技能问题的思考。从教学实践看,学习技能课对学生学习能力和学习水平的提高有着积极的影响,学习技能的学习内容已初步形成但还需进一步完善。希望更多的学校关注这一事关学生未来学习和发展的内容的学习。     

国外大学实践教学的模式与借鉴

实践教学相对于理论教学在培养人才的实践能力、创新能力以及学习能力方面具有不可比拟的优势。通过总结国外大学成功实践教学的经验特征,针对我国实践教学弱化的现状,借鉴国外大学成功的实践教学模式来反思我国实践教学,提出以幸福教育的价值取向革新实践教学模式的理念、以培养学生自主学习能力为核心构建实践教学模式。     

Contemporary Art and Art in Education: The New,Emancipation and Truth

This article assembles some ideas on equality and learning in relation to the notions of truth and emancipation. It considers learning as a political act, as defined by Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, rather than, for example, an incremental process of psychological or sociological development. Practical exemplifications will be taken from contexts of art practices and art in education, but the general argument is directed at learning and equality across all human endeavours. The article discusses the idea of the truth of learning as something which ruptures existing frameworks of practice and knowledge and ponders the kind of pedagogies we require to inform effective pedagogic action. To this end it proposes what might be termed pedagogies against the state, or pedagogies of the event, in order to respond to acts of learning that involve leaps of becoming into a new or reconfigured world.     

The Stuff of Legend,or Unpacking Cultural Baggage? Introducing First-year English Literature and Humanities Students to Foundational Literary Texts

This article explores teaching and learning perspectives in relation to a first-year English Literature module on foundational literary texts and considers the value of certain assessment modes. The essay discusses methodological and pedagogical questions and argues that the module provides a contextual platform from which first-year students are able to appreciate issues of cultural and textual transmission. The article concludes that the material and the assessment format contribute to furthering an undergraduate research agenda and provides students with the opportunity to reflect on their own learning.     

Old Perseans and the Great War: a study in the alumni of a minor public school

This article will argue that the current historiography considers the ‘public school experience’ of the First World War too narrowly, and will emphasise that boys from a wide range of establishments experienced the war in a similar fashion to those at elite public schools. It will do this through a case study of the alumni of the Perse Grammar School, Cambridge. By approaching the experience of Perseans in a thematic fashion it will shed new light on how the alumni of schools just below and developing towards full public-school status were affected by the war, an area hitherto not fully explored.     

Pedagogical intersubjectivity,autism and education: can teachers teach so that autistic pupils learn?

Effective pedagogy and inclusive practice are located within the quality of learning relationships and the context-sensitive, moment-to-moment professional judgements made by teachers within learning interactions. In particular, good teachers are able to align themselves with pupils’ subject positions, though this experience of relatedness within learning interactions is a bodily one that is mundane and mostly overlooked. The aim of this article is to explore whether this account of learning, that crucially involves a shared way of being minded, is adequate to describe the learning of pupils on the autism spectrum. Problems with the idea of ‘pedagogical intersubjectivity’ in relation to autism are noted. Using personal accounts of learning interactions and recent micro-level research findings about the competences of autistic children in favourable interactional ecologies, it is argued however that experiences of relatedness in learning should be considered as important for autistic pupils too. It is concluded that a key aspect of good practice in relation to autism and education is that teachers are able to critically reflect on their bodily experiences of interaction with autistic pupils as a way of deepening their understanding and developing their professional practice.     

Reading lessons: teacher–pupil interactions with text during three KS1 shared reading sessions

Changes in the teaching of reading during the past decade include a shift away from a previous emphasis on ‘one‐to‐one’ learning experiences to a focus upon more communal forms of learning which place the teacher center stage. With the teacher's role thus highlighted, teacher–pupil interaction in practice has come under the spotlight, with a number of studies raising concerns about the quality of teaching taking place and suggesting this is featuring more traditional patterns of ‘IRF’ exchanges between teachers and pupils, which are limiting to children's learning. This article reports on a small‐scale study into teacher–pupil interaction styles during three Key Stage 1 ‘shared reading’ sessions – an activity in which teacher and children work together on an enlarged, illustrated text, with the teacher explicitly modeling components of the reading process to children. The article considers the more tacit modelling taking place during these sessions and how particular linguistic patterning used by teachers frames reading as an educational and cultural activity in ways that position children differentially in relation to it. In particular, it considers how variation in the use of the IRF exchange can mediate different cultural meanings about what it is to engage with text as a reader.     

Writing like writers in the classroom: free writing and formal constraint

This paper considers how ‘free writing’, derived from the automatic writing of the surrealists, can be used with students in writing poetry in order to emulate the successful practice of established writers. The paper considers how form can be taught, specifically line breaks and stanza breaks, both in relation to free writing and in relation to drafting, and argues that drafting should be considered an extension of the creative act of writing rather than as something which is done afterwards ‘to’ preexisting work.     

Scaffold instruction at the workplace from a situated perspective

This article proposes the need to address scaffold instructions from a situated learning perspective. Based on an empirical study of how apprentice bakers learn their trade, it is claimed that studies of learning at the workplace yield important insights into our understanding of scaffold instructions. Seen from the perspective of the apprentices, scaffold instruction represents access to more responsibility in practice, it supports their identities as future bakers and they learn bodily know-how. When scaffold instruction failed, it was often in relation to situations where the apprentices were placed in marginal positions in the community of practice or in relation to a central workplace situation.     

Malleable Thought: The Role of Craft Thinking in Practice‐Led Graphic Design

This article considers the potential of craft processes as creative engagements in graphic design research. It initially discusses the uneasy history of craft within the discipline, then draws upon case studies undertaken by three established designers who, in their postgraduate theses, engaged with craft as a process of thinking. In doing so, the article discusses craft in relation to embodied creative experience, the culture of learning communities and disobedient thought.     

Poetic Experience: Found or Made?

This article considers the arguments for seeing work rather than response as key to poetic experience, and therefore to the development of such experience in the classroom. This is worth exploring not only in terms of the 1iterature/literacy curriculum, but with respect to the curriculum as a whole, since poetry is often invoked as an important, and under exploited, resource for the development of both cross‐curricular learning and responsible and sustainable citizenship. However, there is a danger of the poetic being reduced in such arguments to a vague and philosophically suspect notion of self‐expression grounded in ‘response’. This can be exacerbated by the adherence to the notion of a pre‐existing Romantic Ego that often characterises ‘personal growth’ approaches to Englis/language teaching.     

An examination of digital game-based situated learning applied to Chinese language poetry education

By gradually placing more importance on game-based education and changing learning motivation by applying game-playing characteristics, students’ learning experiences can be enhanced and a better learning effect can be achieved. When teaching the content of Chinese poetry in Taiwanese junior high schools, most teachers only explain the meaning of Chinese poetry, while it is difficult for students to understand why poets write these poems, resulting in learning confusion. This paper implemented a digital game-based situated learning system based on Tang Dynasty poems for learning Chinese poetry to simulate the situations of hardship encountered by poets when writing poetry in animated form to help junior high school students in Taiwan to have greater understanding when learning the content of Chinese poetry. The research results show that students who used the Gourd Tang Dynasty system in game-based instruction had significantly better learning achievements than students who underwent traditional narrative instruction. Among them, students in the low learning ability group improved in their grades significantly more than students in the high learning ability group in terms of their Tang Dynasty poetry learning. Furthermore, the authors examined the predictive relationships between perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and behavioural intention related to the digital game-based situated learning system for Chinese language poetry. The factor of perceived usefulness was a key factor in the students’ positive attitudes towards the digital game-based situated learning system. There were no significant differences with respect to individual characteristics (i.e. gender, online game experience and digital learning experience). The results demonstrate that this type of system can be widely accepted by students with different learning experiences.