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Rebekah Hiles entered the basement classroom of the Wick Poetry Center and was immediately greeted by familiar faces. An Early Childhood Education major with a passion for (and minor in) creative writing, Teaching Poetry in the Schools wasn’t their first class in that room, and neither was it for several of their classmates. Brimming with excitement, they caught up with their old friends and got to know their new classmates. The group was then presented with an open-ended question by their professor Charles Malone: “What are each of you looking for from this class?” 

Teaching Poetry in the Schools is a class offered by �Ը������� University’s Department of English that gives students of any major the opportunity to participate in Wick Poetry Center’s Outreach Program. The course teaches college students how to teach poetry to students between third and twelfth grade—then they go out into the community in pairs and teach them! At the end of the semester lies the annual “Giving Voice” performance, which celebrates the primary and secondary school students that never fail to impress and inspire their KSU student teaching artists. In anticipation of this year’s “Giving Voice” April 28th, I sat down with Rebekah, a student worker at Wick, as they organized their students’ collage poems, and listened to them talk about Teaching Poetry in the Schools. I also asked two other students from the class about their experiences. 

Rebekah and their classmates learned several ways to teach poetry each Tuesday and discussed how poetry fosters literacy, empathy, and creativity within kids. Each student in Teaching Poetry in the Schools was encouraged to utilize whatever methods spoke to them to reach the young people they’d go on to teach. Within a few weeks, they were creating and presenting their own lesson plans in class. Armed with a teaching partner, Matt, Rebekah was sent to two schools local to Kent: Theodore-Rosevelt High School and Walls Elementary School. For their first lesson in February, Rebekah read Laura Cronk’s poem “My Cat” to their fourth grade students, followed by a workshop where they prompted them to write about their favorite animal. Later that afternoon, Rebekah and Matt taught together at the high school. "At the beginning,” Rebekah told me, “it was hard to get them to want to be creative and take themselves seriously as writers (especially with the high school students). However, as the weeks go on, the students have gotten more and more creative and the quality of their writing reflects that!” 

As the class continued, Professor Malone monitored the growth of his students as teachers, writers, and people. The class became a close-knit environment that supported one another throughout the semester. It was around this time that he brought in a series of guest speakers to discuss their own unique craft with the students, such as the poet and artist Kathryn Cowles. As Rebekah carefully put a student’s blackout poem in their folder, they recalled Cowles’s visit to Wick. “Kathryn Cowles did a lesson on blackout poetry with us and I was inspired to create a lesson on collage poetry because of her. I had a set of cards that I didn’t need but was sentimental about, so I cut them up and started making poems out of them last semester. Repurposing items like that led me to the medium. After her talk, I realized collage poetry would be both a method of creative expression and a fun craft for the kids. It unlocks a form of creativity from working with what you’ve got that you don’t always get from traditional writing. It was really nice to meet her.” 

Some of the students in TPITS are English majors, others were education majors, and some were neither. Some of the students had never written a poem for fun before this class. Their diversity strengthened the community they built in the class, because they all came together for the sake of going into the community and teaching young people how to express themselves through poetry. The students of TPITS wrote a variety of poetry, specialized their teaching methods, and approached being a poet differently. Taylor, another student in TPITS, sees being a poet as a philosophical approach to life, wherein one keeps a close eye on everything—real or intangible—and puts it into words. She goes on to say “I think of poets as their own kind of historians, through whom we document our ("our" meaning humans) ability to think and feel through words!” Meanwhile, Rebekah thinks about poetry as a “tool for self-expression and creativity—a way to explore everything and anything, including poetry itself.” 

I nosily glanced over Rebekah’s shoulder, reading some of the collage poems. Their group of fourth graders had written poems that ranged from fun and summery to biting and thoughtful. I was in awe at how well they expressed themselves, leading Rebekah to emphasize the importance of creative expression and individuality in poetry. They wanted to give their students the opportunity to express themselves freely, which they felt even traditional art classes often missed. I could tell, by the clarity and earnestness of the poetry, that Rebekah’s students had a solid grasp over their feelings and the ways in which they could express them. 

Some of the Wick Poetry Center’s goals are to promote the literary arts and to support developing poets, and neither of those can be accomplished in a vacuum. In TPITS, the Center acts as a direct bridge between KSU students and the wider community they live in. Serving the children of Kent through developing their creative expression, literacy, and individuality was the primary, and seemingly only, goal. When I talked to people who actually worked with school kids all semester, I realized that the community the TPITS students formed with one another also helped them grow as teachers and writers. I learned more about their bond from Ivory, another student in TPITS: “Community is the most important thing, especially in an educational setting. There is not one person who can teach all by themselves; they need help working on their lesson plans, handling a difficult moment with a student, and just sticking together through the hard, stressful moments of teaching. I believe that I wouldn't have had such an amazing experience with this class if it weren't for my teaching partner, Ryan.” 

Forming these bonds reinforced the students’ abilities to reach out and change the outside world. Taylor recalls a moment that is emblematic of the real-world impact Teaching Poetry in the Schools has on Kent’s community: “One week, I taught a lesson plan that focused on four unique forms of poetry, and the young writers had a choice to write an ode, abecedarian, ars poetica, or elegy. After about 5-7 minutes of writing, one of the students asked me to come read her poem; she had written an ode for me, and the last two lines were ‘Every Monday you helped. / I started to feel confident in what I wrote.’ It was SO touching, kind, and beautifully written, and it truly made a positive impact on the way I think of myself as a teacher!” 

Now, the semester is nearly over. Students from local schools ranging from elementary to high school will be reading the poetry they made during Wick’s outreach this upcoming Tuesday. Their teachers from TPITS couldn’t be prouder of their growth over the course of these last few months. Ivory shared some of her takeaways from the semester, saying "I think that the kids of this generation are going to prove us so wrong as they grow up. I think the main role poetry serves is showing that things can be left to interpretation and that no interpretation is wrong. The students gave so much more enthusiasm to writing their own poetry than I thought they would, which was refreshing.  The kids are going to be okay.” 

Rebekah also has faith in the next generation. “I think about ways I can get my students to think and explore and just be themselves. I find that is the most important thing.”