This ethnographic study of an American community of high school poets frames poetry 'ideologically,' focusing on the tensions faced by students who were members of a particular community of poets as they constructed social identities in relation to poetry writing. The study begins in the public high school poetry writing classroom at the center of their school poetry writing community and moves outward to include community contexts for poetry writing beyond the classroom--a poetry club and poetry conferences--and the contexts of the students' homes. Seven students who were members of the poetry writing community were followed in depth, and their experiences with poetry writing from family stories of literacy and personhood to circumstances for the writing of particular poems are analyzed in relation to 'ideological' tensions around poetry writing and social identity. Portraits were constructed of each of the seven students to show the connection between poetry writing and social identity. In each portrait, the data analyzed includes: (1) a description of the particular stories linking personhood and literacy in the student's family; (2) what social tensions these represented for the student as a poet writing to fulfill classroom assignments; (3) how in their choices about writing particular poems, students sought to resolve these social tensions; and (4) how students seemed to have positioned themselves as poets of greater or lesser status by the standards of poetry as art in resisting or embodying particular topics or conventions of language. Five types of tensions are identified: (1) those involving the low status of poetry as art in the school (2) those involving the definition of poetry in detached terms which differed from the students' experiences with poetry in contexts outside of school; (3) those stemming from a perception of poetry as an 'effeminate' social practice of literacy; and (4) those involving the use of male-authored texts as models in the classroom, despite primarily female membership in the poetry community. Implications of the study for developing an 'ideological' model of poetry instruction are discussed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-9048 |
| Date | 01 January 1995 |
| Creators | Morrissette, Virginia Franklin |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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