What We Talk About When We Talk About Texts: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and Ekphrastic Poetry
This chapter tells the story of an Ekphrastic inquiry into the story of Daedalus and Icarus that continued over the course of several years. Through the lens of this inquiry, we examine the tensions and possibilities between aesthetic inquiry and standard
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Texts: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and Ekphrastic Poetry
In this chapter, we explore our choices of the various types of content we bring into our respective classrooms in high school and in the teacher education program (Fig. 3.1). The choice of materials in teacher education methods courses needs to take into account multiple considerations. While we tend to choose content based on the goal of engaging with ideas, stimulating curiosity, and providing models for student writing, the teacher candidates we work with may not have the same freedom of choice. American schools vary widely in curriculum requirements. Even within New York City, some schools have rigidly scripted curricula while others give teachers free reign to choose books and materials. We do our best to address all of these possible scenarios. Even for those who are required to teach from bland short story anthologies produced by the same corporations that also create and administer high-stakes standardized tests, we teach inquiry-based learning through the arts in the hopes that with enough commitment and imagination, even teachers who are so constrained can find the cracks through which they might be able to slip some creativity. Learning standards for American schools introduced in 2011 as the Common Core Learning Standards and revised in 2017 as the Next Generation Learning Standards have been challenged and criticized because they “devalue literature as art” and that they “devalue © The Author(s) 2020 A. N. Gulla and M. H. Sherman, Inquiry-Based Learning Through the Creative Arts for Teachers and Teacher Educators, Creativity, Education and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5_3
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Fig. 3.1 Word cloud 3
historical context” (Strauss 2016). Our inquiry-based approach teaches reading, writing, and thinking skills by emphasizing engagement with ideas through creative expression. This sometimes requires being open to processes and results that are less predictable than following a template for writing an argumentative essay, for example. Allowing students to engage with ideas across multiple modalities creates entry points for different kinds of learners. In the curriculum development class, we create and examine a semester-long unit of study on African-American history that includes works of fiction, journalism, painting, photography, poetry, and music. It only makes sense to include assignments that invite students to process their interactions with these ideas and materials through the same range of modalities. We begin the unit always with the explanation that we cannot truly understand history in any meaningful way until we learn the stories told by voices that have previously been silenced or marginalized. The graduate students who were invited to respond to texts in any creative way they might choose had a range of different responses to that assignment. We recognize that for some, we were asking them to step far outside their comfort zones. There
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