Spotlight on Poetry:
Voices of Survival
An interdisciplinary inquiry into themes of identity and survival. Learners critically engage with a variety of global outlooks through active exploration of historical fiction literature and spoken word poetry performance.
Essential Questions
-
How do people survive in harsh environments?
-
How do culture, time, and place influence the development of identity?
-
How can different perspectives help us better understand history?
-
How can different perspectives help us build empathy and find connections?
-
Why do different groups or individuals experience the same event in different ways?
What We Did
In this project, we read stories of human survival, which began with a whole class reading of the book A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park. We then broke into book clubs, where we read books with themes of resilience, hope, and loss. When we finished reading these books, we began the process of writing our own poetry inspired by the stories. Each group chose a theme that they were compelled by in their book and created an original spoken word performance that explores that theme. In theatre, we worked on using our voices and adding movement (tableaux) to tell the story of our poem.
Books we read for this project:
"I loved working with my book club. Even though we're really different we were able to become like family."
In Collaboration With
Callie Sprague, Humanities
Wendy Maples, Theatre
Natalie Padilla, Inclusion
Sarah Ng, Inclusion