Abstract
This paper explores a set of blackout poems created by a group of ninth grade students in an English classroom in the Oslo (Norway) area with a high percentage of minority students. It is a collaboration between ESL and Arts and crafts. When making blackout poetry, the student “takes a marker (usually a black marker) to already established text like a newspaper article and redacts words until a poem is formed” (Brewer, 2014; Kleon, 2010; Keith&Endsley, 2020). The idea is that these forms of texts bring new and unexpected insights into the world of everyday experience (Butler-Kisber, 2018). The original texts that form the basis for these poems are speeches or comments from online forums with rhetorics critical and often racist towards minorities. By re-inventing the comments/speeches through blackout poetry, new stories emerge. Students re-mediate (Bolter, J. D. & Grusin, R. (1999) these comments/speeches, into their own literature,thus, creating their own poetic voice. Through an art-based approach on the hatred of others, the students take agency (Rudd, 2005; 2017) as well as creating a work of art. This experience is in line with what Dewey considers “art as experience” (1934). Additonally, the blackout poems are analyzed in the framework of reader-response theory (Iser, 1974; Rosenblatt, 1994; Sipe, 2008) as well as aesthetic transformation (Østern, 2008). Furthermore, a discussion of what these blackout poems may offer in diverse learning environments (Kleon, 2010; Petchauer, 2015) and new literacy practices is undertaken.
Presenters
Siri Mohammad RoeAssistant Professor, Teacher Education, Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo, Norway Hilde Tørnby
Professor, Faculty of Education and International Studies, OsloMetropolitan University, Norway
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Visualization, Text, Technique, Multimodality
