The Spaces In Between

I am very excited to announce that two of my poems, “It was Snowing” and “If I Were Not Afraid,” which were previously published on this blog, have been published in the pedagogy journal Radical Teacher (Feb/March 2019) along with a teaching note about the class activity that led to their creation.

Teaching Note excerpt: “In my International Women’s Perspectives course at Towson University I began every class with a prompt or question that students answered on an index card that I collected. Sometimes this was a content question based on the reading, sometimes it was a prompt to draw a self-portrait (based on Lynda Barry’s pedagogical practice of self-portraits), and sometimes it was an open question about the subject that we would be discussing. This exercise functioned as a way to keep attendance, and to get a sense of how they were engaging with class material. It was also fun to see their self-portraits and the moment of sketching together (I drew on the board too whenever the prompt was for a self-portrait) helped ground us in the classroom together. Although I had not intended to create poetry from these exercises, I found students’ responses to some of the questions to be poignant, powerful, and lyrical, and I felt that they would fit well into a poem format. Thus, began my unexpected creative collaboration with my students, springing from a daily attendance exercise…”

I invite you to the read the rest of the teaching note and the poems here.