Miranda Libkin
Pennsylvania State University
Professional Development School
2013 Master’s Paper
Poetry and Performance
Table of Contents
Our Story Begins – Pg. 3-4
Developing The Unit – Pg. 4-6
What Those Who Came Before Me Had To Say – Pg. 6-12
Arts Education – Pg. 6-9
Transmediation – Pg. 9-12
My Students’ Experiences – Pg. 12-25
Growth in Literary Analysis – Pg. 12-19
Growth in Personal Connections – Pg. 19- 22
Growth in Self-Efficacy – Pg. 22 - 25
Final Thoughts – Pg. 25-26
Works Cited – Pg. 27
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Our Story Begins
This winter saw the release of the blockbuster hit movie musical, Les Miserables. As
people flocked to the movie theater, many of them didn’t realize they were witnessing a
somewhat unique artistic experience. The movie musical Les Miserables is an adaptation of a
live musical that is an adaptation of a novel; it’s a double adaptation. I am always intrigued by
adaptation because, thanks to my background in theater, I know how much effort and care goes
into the crafting of these retellings. In the year before I began my PDS internship I had the
privilege of helping create an original piece of theater based on William Steig’s children’s book,
Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. A team of three directors, one choreographer, one composer,
one animator, and five performers came together to bring to life our version of Sylvester. It was
an immensely challenging and rewarding experience. Fresh from the national tour showcasing
our production, I entered the classroom. I never suspected that my experience in adaptation
would give birth to a yearlong inquiry.
As I began my internship I quickly noticed a reoccurring theme in the feedback I was
giving to students. I kept asking them to be more specific in their literary analysis. They would
write something along the lines of, “I feel like the author is trying to say that being poor is
confining.” I would write back, “Why do you think that? Where is your specific evidence from
the text?” Luckily, before my brain became stuck in an endless loop of “be specific, be specific,
be specific,” a game-changing image presented itself to my crazed brain. Three directors, one
choreographer, one composer, one animator, and five performers are gathered around a table. On
the table are three copies of a book all open to the same double-page. There is only one sentence
on the entire page; it is mostly full of the white and gray illustration of a snow scape. “He only
writes five words on this page. Isn’t the image powerful? The wolf and rock are almost
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oppressively alone,” comments the director. “How are we going to capture this bleakness?” As
we were working on our adaptation of Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, we had many moments
just like that one. There was no English teacher looking over our heads telling us to be more
specific. The nature of the art we were creating demanded specificity. In order to make
something new, we had to go back to the text constantly, picking through it with a fine-tooth
comb. Back in the classroom I wondered if there was something there. Would using adaptation
as a lens of study help my students becoming more specific pupils of literature by requiring them
to go back to the text in order to create a performance?
Developing The Unit
In November I had the opportunity to visit a high school in Minnetonka, MN. One of the
classes I observed was an International Baccalaureate (IB) class called Literature and
Performance. The official IB syllabus for the course beautifully explains the intended effect of
the course. It says:
At the heart of the course is this interaction between (i) a conventional literary
emphasis on close reading, critical writing and discussion and (ii) the practical,
aesthetic and symbolic elements of performance… In this exciting, creative
process text is viewed from different angles in a way that goes beyond what is
characteristic of either literary or theatre studies as single disciplines (“Literature
and Performance Guide” 1).
Barbara VanPilsun – the Literature and Performance teacher – told me that she had only taught
the course a few times but that she was always very pleased with the work her students did. She
told me that it made her students “responsible for the content in a way that is deep.” On the day I
was there students presented their concepts for turning one of the vingettes from Eduardo
Galeano’s The Book of Embraces into a piece of theater. As I observed the students during the
presentations I was very impressed; their decisions were specific, artful, and completely
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grounded in the text. In my notes from the class I wrote down that in reply to a question of
interpretation a student said, “We couldn’t find enough information in the text to support that
conclusion.” I followed that statement with several exclamation points and stars. Here were
students engaged in the kind of work I had been struggling to pull out of my students. Not only
were they being specific and detailed literary analyzers, the entire class appeared to be
wholeheartedly engaged in the text. It was this experience that inspired me to create a unit based
on Literature and Performance.
I designed a unit called Poetry and Performance. It was based on the IB class. However, I
only had three weeks rather than an entire semester, and, as the name of the unit suggests, we
used only poetry as our base texts. We studied poems from six American poets by deciding how
we would turn those poems into live performance. In order to scaffold their knowledge of
performance, I broke the genre down into five major areas of decision: space, text, visual
elements, movement, and character. As we studied each poet, we looked at one of the decision
areas. For example, along with Robert Frost’s Poems “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening,” we studied different kinds of performance spaces. The students
then chose the space that would best support a production of one of those poems. Here is a list of
all of the performance decisions and poets and poems we studied along with them:
Space: Robert Frost – “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening”
Text: Emily Dickinson – “I heard a Fly buzz – When I died,” “’Hope’ is the Thing with
Feathers,” and “I died for Beauty”
Walt Whitman – selections from “When Lilacs Last in the Door Yard Bloom’d”
Visual Elements (Scenery, Costumes, Lighting): Edna St. Vincent Millay – “Renascence”
Movement: Lupe Fiasco – “Kick, Push”
Character: Allen Ginsberg – “A Supermarket in California”
For the final project I asked the students to pick one of the poems we had studied and make all
five necessary performance decisions. I learned that an academic word for adaptation of one
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form of media into another form of media is transmediation. My experiences with Poetry and
Performance aligned perfectly with the experiences my observation of Literature and
Performance and the transmediation research suggested I would have. Using transmediation to
study poetry helped my students be specific in their literary analysis, make personal connections
to the poem, and feel confident in their interpretations.
What Those Who Came Before Me Had to Say
Arts Education
I’ve always had the fundamental belief that the arts have an important place in education.
I grew up in a household that highly valued the arts; we saw live theater at least once a month,
visited art museums on nearly every vacation, and spent our summers at Interlochen Arts Camp.
I believe that particular aspect of my upbringing has made me a better problem solver, creative
thinker, and learner. However, before beginning my research my personal story was the only
data I had to go on. Since taking a look at a portion of the work that has been done in arts
education research I have become utterly convinced. The arts should be considered an essential
part of every child’s education.
Over and over again as I’ve gone through my education study I’ve heard people say that
we are currently educating students for jobs that don’t yet exist. The question then becomes, if
we don’t know the specific industries our students will be working in, what should we teach
them? Over and over again I’ve heard these two apparently magical words: “critical thinking.”
Twenty-first century students need to be developing their critical thinking muscles. Well, as I
conducted my research into arts education over and over again I read that the arts help students
become critical thinkers, problem solvers, and innovators. In her 2011 article, “Transmediation
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in the Language Arts Classroom: Creating Contexts for Analysis and Abiguity,” Jennifer
McCormick discusses the well-known arts education advocate, Elliot Eisner:
Following the influential work of Elliot Eisner, advocates for arts education began
to argue that specific cultural forms elicit specific ways of thinking. Eisner (1997)
contended that ‘the forms we use to represent how we think have an impact on
what we think about’ (350) and argued that in a world with increasingly complex
demands, curriculum should ‘give voice’ to all forms of representations: ‘The
three Rs tap too little of what the mind can do’ (350) (581).
Like Eisner and McCormick, many researchers have written about the complex thinking that
working in the arts demands. On a surface level, those conclusions are easy to understand. When
students create something new they have to use several different ways of thinking. They also
have to negotiate the reality that in art, as in life, answers are never black and white. They are
always found in many shades of gray. As Grace Rubenstein writes in her article “Cross-Training:
Arts and Academics are Inseparable,” “In arts, kids learn there’s not just one right answer. They
learn that judgment counts. They learn to connect” (1). Coming from such an arts oriented
background, none of this research surprised me too much. However, I was amazed to learn that
there is evidence that working in the arts actually affects our brain chemistry. “Preliminary
neuroscience research correlates experience in symbolic representation of academic learning
with the neural activity seen when the brain processes information using the highest forms of
cognition, creative problem solving, critical analysis and innovation” (Willis 3). If we are truly in
an age that demands high critical thinking skills from its workers, it’s clear that students should
be getting a strong grounding in the arts.
The arts provide a lot of wonderful benefits apart from critical thinking skills. In
Rubenstein’s article she reports on the strictly academic statistics from Boston Arts Academy a
public school that focuses on the arts as well as academics. Rubenstein writes:
The academy’s students, many from low-income families and drug-impacted
neighborhoods, produce exceptional art for their age – and 97 percent of them go
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on to college… According to the most recent available data, 92 percent of the
academy’s sophomores passed the state’s English test and 80 percent passed
math, compared to 73 percent and 67 percent of Boston students overall (1).
Those statistics are truly outstanding and are in themselves advocates for arts education.
However, there is another area of trouble for American students that may find part of its solution
in arts education. “Arts integration correlates with students’ increased sustained attention not
only while participating in art-related activities, but also with increased attention span in general
and improved critical thinking” (Posner and Patoine 8; Uptis and Smithrim 14). There are those
who have called attention disorders an epidemic in our society. In my teaching I have often
observed students become distracted by something – usually technology related – after less than
a minute of sustained concentration. Perhaps the arts can be the calisthenics we offer to students’
brains. The final benefit of arts education I read about again and again is one so simple it is easy
to overlook; the arts often make students happy. Many have written about the positive feelings
most students have associated with working creatively. Judy Willis writes that arts related
learning engages student skills and talents that aren’t normally reinforced by traditional
academics. She explains it like this:
When students know they will have opportunities to use artistic, kinesthetic or
manipulative experiences in the course of learning and as part of their learning
assessments, their optimism is renewed. Knowing from the start that they will
create representations of their learning through visual, musical or movement
expressions (ideally with a medium of their choice) is an inoculations against
boredom and low effort (1).
I was greatly heartened by the results of my research into arts education. It’s been clearly proven
that the arts help students with critical thinking skills, academic goals, and engagement.
However, in my unit I knew I would not just be generally exposing my students to the arts. I
would also be asking them to transmediate. So, I looked into the specific research that has been
done on the subject of transmediation. I hoped that this background would help make the
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following Andrew Miller quote live in my classroom. He writes, “Your students can learn the
arts as well as learning through the arts” (2).
Transmediation
As I began looking at the research about transmediation, it was important to me to look
into whether or not there was evidence that it had helped other students be specific in their
literary analysis. After all, it was the lack of specificity in my students’ writing about literature
that had led me down this road to begin with. As much as I believe in arts education, and as
specific as my collaborators and I had been while creating Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, I still
hoped to find specific data that would support my decision to bring transmediation into the
classroom. I was not disappointed. Researchers have found that transmediation helps students
closely examine the original composition as well as promoting organic generation of new
material.
I was interested to learn about the birth of the term transmediation. Charles Suhor coined
it in 1984. In her article “More Than Words: The Generative Power of Transmediation for
Learning,” Marjorie Siegel describes the work Suhor was trying to do:
The term ‘transmediation’ was first introduced by Charles Suhor (1984) as part of
his development of a semiotics-based curriculum. Suhor, a language educator
interested in integrating media and the arts across the curriculum, defined
transmediation as the ‘translation of content from one sign system into another’
(250) and characterized it as a syntactic concept since it deals with the structure of
sign systems and the relationship between different sign systems (Siegel 460).
Synthesis is a word I read a lot during my research into the “translation of content from one sign
system to another.” Students are really synthesizing during every part of the transmediation
process. They are closely reading the original text, processing the important themes and ideas
from that first source, and deciding on the best way to represent those ideas in the new context.
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They are taking elements from separate entities and using them to form a more complex whole.
Siegel explains her response to Suhor’s definition and its potential benefits like this: “Implicit in
Suhor’s definition of transmediation as translation and his discussion of its potential for
enhancing students’ learning is the idea that moving across sign systems is a generative process
in which new meanings are produced” (461). In this generative process students create the new
complex whole. However, I still wondered if this would translate to careful, close reading from
my students. I got my answer in Jennifer McCormick’s article. She explains, “With
transmediation, students must consider how the supporting details of a concept are inherently
connected in one sign system in order to create the structural equivalent in the second system”
(580). This idea took me back to my experience creating Sylvester and the Magic Pebble.
Because we were using the sign system of live theater to tell a story that had originally been
expressed in a children’s book, we had to constantly go back and forth to make sure that we were
still communicating William Steig’s story in the new sign system. Or, expressed another way,
looking at a nearly blank page filled with some puffs of snow and a howling wolf communicates
a very specific emotion. We had to figure out how to communicate that same emotion using our
live, three-dimensional canvas. As McCormick says, “Creating meaning in the second system
forces the author or artist to reexamine the central concept of the original composition” (580).
What we created to help tell the story of the howling wolf was a ballet. As Suhor suggested, our
transmediation process generating brand new emotions and meaning. After reading all of the
theory on transmedation, I was sold. I decided to create a transmediation-centered unit for my
students.
Since the students completed my Poetry and Performance unit I have reflected
extensively on their work. Without spoiling too much of the next few sections of this paper, I’d
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like to talk a little about two surprises I encountered. As I looked back at my transmediation
research I found that both surprises were touched on in Siegel’s article. The first was a teacher
surprise. As Siegel puts it, “[Transmediation’s] potential as a learning experience can easily be
subverted by closing down the ambiguity that crossing sign systems engenders before students
have a chance to explore it. It will be important, therefore, for teachers and teacher educators to
understand and appreciate the semiosic process at the core of transmediation” (473). As thrilled
as I was to be conducting Poetry and Performance, I did struggle a bit being comfortable with the
ambiguity. In education the model that most students and teachers are used to is the teacher
knowing all the right answers and imparting that knowledge onto his/her students. However,
with Poetry and Performance that model didn’t apply. Three different students chose three
completely different scenic elements for their interpretation of the poem “Renascence,” and all
three students used specific evidence from the text as well as their own emotional response to the
poem to guide them in their choices. Even though one of the students choices were much more
similar to the choices I would make, all three of them had completely valid interpretations of the
poem. It was often a bit uncomfortable to live in the place of uncertainty as I was leading a class.
The students were also frustrated early on in the unit when they discovered that I wouldn’t be
telling them the “right” interpretation of a poem. We all had to become much more comfortable
with ambiguity than is usually supported by traditional education. In the end, I think we
benefitted immensely. The students and I all grew from forcing ourselves to live in a world of
gray.
The other surprising benefit I discovered as I reflected on the unit was how much my
students’ self-efficacy seemed to grow. Seigel explains, “Enquiry models invite learners to see
themselves as knowledge makers who find and frame problems worth pursuing, negotiate
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interpretations, forge new connections, and represent meanings in new ways” (455). As my
students had the opportunity to discuss and then create new works of art, they grew more and
more confident in their ability to interpret poetry. If nothing else, this pattern convinced me that
transmediation is a wonderful tool that I will bring to my future classrooms.
My Students’ Experiences
As I reflected on the unit, I noticed that my students showed growth in three different
areas. Using transmediation to study poetry helped my students be specific in their literary
analysis, make personal connections to the poem, and feel confident in their interpretations. In
the sections below I will use examples from my students’ classwork, journals, and final projects
to illustrate their growth.
Growth in Literary Analysis
As a teacher I think there is little that is more frustrating than having a question
responded to with 26 blank stares. This was almost always my experience when I asked my class
to tell me one of the themes of the piece of literature we were studying. They did not seem able
to respond to that question. I reminded them over and over what we mean when we talk about
theme in literary analysis: the over-arching ideas that frame the story. I would ask them, “In one
sentence, what does the author want us to take away from this work?” No matter what tactic I
tried, I was failing in helping them clarify the idea of literary themes. I hoped that transmediation
would help change that trend, and I was not disappointed. Through Poetry and Performance, I
saw that my students were able to talk about theme with a specificity and clarity that had been
elusive to them earlier in the year.
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The first theatrical decision area that we focused on was space and our first poet was
Robert Frost. The students had to decide on the type of performance venue that would best
support a performance of Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” I first showed them examples of
many different types of theaters, and we discussed the different impacts each would have on an
audience member. After that, I broke the students into groups and assigned them a specific type
of theater to design for the poem. They made the decisions about size and design, but they had to
stick to the type they were assigned. Afterward, each group showed its drawing to the class and
we discussed the pros and cons of performing “The Road Not Taken” in the venue they had
designed. Here is one group’s design:
These students have brought their performance outside. The audience is sitting between two
paths – one that is green and lush and one that is sparse and bare. In “The Road Not Taken,” the
narrator is stopped in a yellow wood so the students wanted their audience to be surrounded by
nature. They interpreted Frost’s line about the path he took, “Because it was grassy and wanted
wear” (8), to mean that it was green and lush while the other path was bare. However, the
students were quick to tell the class that the paths would be very similar in other ways – they
would be the same size and shape. And, because the audience is seated in between the two paths
they would have a good view of the paths and would see that they were both equal in many
ways. The reason my students made that choice is to support the line in the poem “And both that
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morning equally lay” (Frost 11). The students who designed this theater said that the poem is
saying that when a person has to make a decision it’s often impossible to say which will have the
better outcome, but the decision still has to be made. Without me asking them to, my students
had articulated one of the possible themes of “The Road Less Traveled.”
Since the students had now spent a good deal of time with the poem and the spaces, I
asked them to write a journal describing the perfect space for “The Road Not Taken.” In these
first journals I saw a growing specificity and sophistication in their writing. One student wrote,
“I feel as though this poem should be performed in a proscenium theater because the focus of it
is that there is an inner decision being made about what the ‘right’ thing to do is. There is a lot of
ambiguity in the poem about whether the road is not taken by him or by everyone else. Due to
this confusion I want it to be in a theater where all you do is focus on the performance.” A
proscenium theater is a traditional “auditorium” space. The audience faces the stage from the
same direction, which means, unlike other spaces, each audience member is seeing roughly the
same image. Proscenium spaces also often have an arch that frames the stage like a picture
frame. This student identifies the most important theme in the poem and then decides on the
theatrical space that most supports that theme. It is a wonderful example of the effect of
trasmediation written about by Jennifer McCormick. She describes it like this: “The translation
of meaning across sign systems is almost always ambiguous… Creating meaning in the second
system forces the author or artist to reexamine the central concept of the original composition”
(580).
I was very excited by the specificity I was seeing in my students’ analysis of Robert
Frost, but it was too early to know for sure if it was a pattern. However, later in the unit I once
again saw a new specificity in the way my students were analyzing the poems. We spent a few
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days examining the visual elements that accompany a piece of theater. Most productions have
separate scenic, costume, and lighting designers. We used the visual decisions as a way to
examine Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Renascence.” The students brainstormed their ideas
for the scenery, costume, and lighting design of the poem by writing their ideas on huge pieces
of paper hung around the room. We looked at their ideas as a whole class and discussed how
each would contribute to a performance of them poem. After our conversation I asked each
student to design one of the visual elements and write about their decisions. Student C used
water color and ink to make two small mock-ups of a set design for “Renascence.” Here they are:
Student C wrote that she wanted the set to loom very large over the performer in order to make
the performer appear “vulnerable and raw” because of lines in the poem like “Infinity/Came
down and settled over me;/Forced my scream back into my chest/Bent back my arm upon my
breast” (Millay 29-32). In the poem the narrator is literally buried alive so Student C wrote that
she wanted her set to be oppressive. The large black trees and huge moon/sun in Student C’s
drawings would make the performer look very small to the audience. This would help achieve
the vulnerability that Student C was trying to capture. Reading her journal, I was very impressed
with the sophistication Student C showed in her interpretation of this poem. She paid attention to
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the specific words Edna St. Vincent Millay uses and the mood those words create. She then
generated a new piece of artwork to express the ideas of the poem. It is a wonderful example of
the generative process of transmediation as well as the specificity of analysis that I was looking
for in my students.
Another student, Student A, decided to design a costume for the narrator. In
“Renascence” the narrator experiences the turmoil that accompanies beginning to grow up. Many
of my students found ways to address that change and Student A is no exception. Here is her
costume design:
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At the beginning of “Renascence,” the narrator is a little girl who is bored with her surroundings.
In response to her unappreciation, God shows her death and sin and then she is swallowed into
the earth. After her rebirth, the narrator observes, “He whose soul is flat –the sky/Will cave in on
him by and by” (Millay 213-214). Most of the costume Student A designed is white to represent
the innocence the girl has at the beginning of the poem. Student A wrote, “The black lace on the
dress is to represent the more complex or dark thoughts the narrator is developing as she goes
through the poem. However, they are not fully developed by the end of the poem so there is still
a hole in the center of the lace.” Through their designs both Student C and A demonstrated
specific analysis of “Renascence,” and they created beautiful artwork that supported the
storytelling of the poem.
As a final example of the growth my students showed in being able to specifically
identify themes, I’d like to include some of their journal entries from our study of the song
“Kick, Push.” Immediately after studying the visual elements of theater, we changed our focus to
movement. I guided the students in a movement workshop during which we examined the impact
different qualities of movement can have on audience perception. For our movement poem we
examined Lupe Fiasco’s hip-hop song, “Kick, Push.” In “Kick, Push” Fiasco describes the
feelings and freedoms that he has found in skateboarding. The song is full of rebellion,
camaraderie, and love. I asked the students to decide on the movement they would use to capture
the major themes of the poem. I warned them that in live theater it is never a good idea to have a
lot of people on wheels, so skateboarding was not going to be a practical choice for them. Many
of my students chose dance as a more practical alternative to skateboarding. In their journals I
again saw a new specificity of analysis. One student wrote:
I believe this poem has the underlying meaning of freedom and rebellion because
they skateboard regardless of being allowed. This is shown in the poem when it
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says, ‘Just the freedom is better than breathing they said/And they escape route,
they used to escape out.’ I felt as though dance is the best way to express
meanings like this so I chose hip-hop to represent this poem.
Another student was able to go even further than we had as a full class. He wrote, “In the poem it
seems like Lupe is trying to show that as skaters, they are united by the freedom and their love
for skating. With his message of unity, it makes me think that it would be best to have them all
be doing the same dance and have them spread out across the stage to display their freedom.”
Both students are demonstrating a real understanding of the song’s themes – freedom, unity, and
rebellion – and at the same time using their knowledge of movement styles to figure out the best
way to get the story of “Kick, Push” told.
In McCormick’s article she writes, “Transmediation and the discussion that accompanied
it provided these young adolescents with the opportunity to look closely at the structure of a text
and articulate the relationship between part and whole” (587). I saw that close examination of
structure taking place in my classroom. I saw it in the space designs for “The Road Not Taken,”
in the scenic and costumes designs for “Renascence,” and in the movement designs for “Kick,
Push.” During one final presentation, a pair of students surprised me with an interpretation of the
horse in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” They had decided that rather
than have a horse on-stage – an often risky decision – they would use a young boy who spoke the
thoughts of the horse. They chose a child because they thought the horse represents an animal
instinct and innocence. One of the lines where they saw this instinct and innocence is “[The
Horse] gives his harness bells a shake/To ask if there is some mistake” (Frost 9-10). The man is
lured by the sin of the woods, but the horse is not. So, my students chose a child because, like the
horse, he is unable to see the allure of the sinful woods. I had never considered this interpretation
of the horse, and I loved that my students surprised me like that. They had become so specific, so
familiar with the text that they created an interpretation that I could not have. It was a surprising
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and wonderful moment in a unit filled with many such moments. As my examples have
illustrated, by the end of the unit in almost every discussion, journal entry, and project my
students were using specific textual analysis to help them demonstrate the themes of the poems.
In that way, this unit was a complete success.
Growth in Personal Connections
As I began Poetry and Performance I hoped that I would see growth in my students’
literary analysis skills. Upon the unit’s conclusion I was very pleased with the specificity they
were showing in their decisions and writing, but I realized my students had grown in some
unexpected areas as well. In previous units many of my students seemed to have trouble
connecting to the texts we studied. Frankly, they showed a real lack of empathy for many of the
characters we had encountered. For example, when introduced to The Crucible they immediately
wrote off characters that didn’t make the choice they would have made. My students didn’t seem
to appreciate the difficulty of the characters’ positions, and they struggled to make any
connections to their own personal lives. However, as I reflected on the students’ journals from
Poetry and Performance, I saw them make deep and meaningful connections to the poetry.
Beginning with Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” felt like a bit of a gamble to
me. I was worried the students had studied the poem so many times before that they would
immediately be put off. However, I didn’t feel like I could teach an American Poetry unit
without including Robert Frost. As it turns out, I was very pleasantly surprised. A little over half
of the students had studied the poem before, but most of them had a renewed connection to it. As
advanced students in the last half of their junior year, they were beginning to think seriously
about their post-high school education. One student talked about whether or not she would go to
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Penn State next year. She compared it to the road that was already well traveled. Her parents had
gone to Penn State, most of her friends would go to Penn State, and she would stay living in the
same town where she had grown up. However, she worried that if she took the road less traveled
by and chose to leave State College she would look back with regret on her decision. I was proud
that my students were putting their own experiences into the poem, and I wondered if that would
carry over into the theatrical decisions they made in their journals. In the case of Student E, it
did. Asked for the best space to perform Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” she chose a
proscenium theater. In her journal she wrote,
I think that “The Road Not Taken” should be performed in a proscenium theater
because it seems like the narrator is telling a story about a time in the past. When I
remember events from my past I always remember them in two-dimensional
pictures. I think this should be performed in a proscenium so that the audience is
seeing the whole performance framed like a picture.
Student E is demonstrating a really sophisticated synthesis of information in this writing. She has
thought through the way she personally experiences memories and brings that together with her
knowledge of different kinds of theatrical spaces and her close-reading of the poem. Based on
those factors she has made her decision about the best place to perform “The Road Not Taken” –
a proscenium theater.
The students continued to demonstrate personal identification with the poems throughout
the unit. Even Student N, who seemed to hate every minute of the unit – he often spent class
discussions staring at his desk and had to be coaxed into any participation – found a poem with
which he identified. I used Lupe Fiasco’s hip-hop song, “Kick, Push” because I wanted to make
sure my students understood that poetry is not an art form limited to dead writers. It is alive and
well, and many of them listen to it every day. “Kick, Push” is a song about the freedom and
rebellion of skateboarding. Student N had talked extensively about his love of longboarding, a
form of skateboarding, so I hoped that he would enjoy studying this song. In class Student N
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didn’t let on any changes in his attitude toward the song or poetry in general, but his journal
reflected his interest. It is also the journal where he was able make some of the most specific
choices he had made throughout the unit. He writes:
I found a connection with this song… because it was basically summing up the
feelings I would get from longboarding. When I would cruise around with my
friends it gave me a sense of freedom from the world around me. Lupe Fiasco
describes how the individual in the song would use skateboarding as away to get
away from things. I think the best way to physically represent this feeling would
be to somehow express it through a dance. I thought that there could be a group of
dancers that are all dressed in black… And as they are all dancing to the music in
sync to one another, one individual could come out of the dance and change the
color of their shirt. This event… [would] show that skateboarding gives him
freedom.
I was so glad to see that this student’s personal identification with the poem helped him to enjoy
what we were reading and also to make specific and interesting choices.
Not only were my students forming personal connections with the poems, they were also
having those connections challenged and constantly considering other people’s points. During
the “Road Not Taken” space activity that I described in the “Growth in Literary Analysis”
section, many of the groups were so convinced that their space was the best one for a
performance of the poem that a heated discussion broke out as they shared their spaces with
other groups. In the students’ final journals, I asked them to write about the unit as a whole. They
had to answer one of the unit’s essential questions. In her final journal, Student B was able to
articulate not only her own identification with the poems but also a growing empathy that the
unit left with her. She writes, “Seeing someone else’s point of view on something, especially
something like poetry that can have many interpretations, allows the viewer to build upon their
own knowledge and mindset on the poem and can help them expand on their own ideas.” I
thought this really spoke to one of the most important reasons to study literature, and I was glad
that Student B found that in Poetry and Performance. The act of working in pairs, small groups,
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and large groups as they wrestled with the decisions they needed to make to transmediate poetry
into performance forced my students to butt up against viewpoints that were very different from
their own. I didn’t begin the unit with the goal of promoting greater empathy in my students, but
I am very glad that at least one student noticed that change in herself.
Growth in Self-Efficacy
I must confess that I began my poetry unit assuming that most of my students didn’t like
poetry. However, I realized that was an assumption and didn’t want to generalize. So, on the first
day of the unit I asked my students to take out a piece of paper and choose a number between
one and five that characterized their feelings about poetry. They wrote one sentence describing
why they had chosen that number. There were more positive feelings about poetry than I was
expecting, but there were certainly some very negative responses as well. Of the negative
responses there were two very distinctive patterns that emerged. The first set sounded like this:
“I don’t enjoy reading poetry because I think it is boring and I hate analyzing it.”
“I enjoy reading poetry, but… I do not enjoy analyzing it like we often do in school.”
“I don’t like finding deeper meanings of things that aren’t necessarily there.”
“I don’t enjoy poetry because it doesn’t teach you anything and you are trying to put a
meaning to something that was probably not even thought about by the author.”
The pattern that I found interesting in these types of responses was not just that they didn’t like
analyzing poetry but that they didn’t trust the analyzing that they were “forced” to do. The
students didn’t seem to believe that the meanings English teachers told them could be found in
the poems were actually there. Here are some examples from the second pattern of answers:
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“Sometimes it is enjoyable, but not often as I don’t understand many different types of
poetry.”
“I don’t like poetry because it is hard to interpret. It can often be confusing.”
“I don’t feel confident in my ability to analyze it.”
In this second pattern the students share that they find poetry hard to understand. This set made
me wonder about my students who reported that they didn’t like poetry, and it really made me
wonder about those that seemed so distrustful of poetry’s “deeper meanings.” I wondered if
perhaps they were all really saying the same thing. Poetry is abstract, subjective, and sometimes
convoluted.
These two sets of answers made me think that the experiences my students had
previously had with poetry had left them feeling disempowered. They had little confidence in
their ability to analyze poetry for themselves. I would never have expected that working with
poetry through transmediation would have an effect on my students’ self-efficacy either way, but
after reading my students’ final journals I am convinced that many of them left the unit feeling
much more confident in their abilities to read and analyze poetry.
The students wrote a journal for each of the poets we studied in class. In those journals
they detailed the choices they would make for one of the elements of performance: space, text,
visual elements, movement, and character. In their final journal, I asked them to collect all of
their previous journals and then reflect on some of the following questions:
 How have you grown in your thinking about poetry? About performance?
 What discoveries did you make throughout the unit?
 Did you love every minute of it? Hate every minute of it?
 Was this unit easy? Was it challenging? Etc.
It was in this section of the final journal that many of my students reported feeling much more
confident in their ability to read and interpret poetry. Some of the students simply said they were
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more comfortable with poems after being exposed to such a wide variety. However, many of the
students connected transmediation to their new ability to analyze poems. Student B writes:
Focusing on poetry in terms of theatre was very helpful in having a better
understanding of the poem as well. Having to think of ways to represent the poem
in movement, space, text, lighting, and design really made me think more deeply
about the message the author was trying to speak through his or her poem and
helped me grasp not only a better understanding of it but also multiple views on
its meaning and purpose.
I think I may have verbally exclaimed, “Yes” when I read this part of Student B’s journal. It was
almost as if she was quoting some of the transmediation research I had read. However, she was
writing of her actual experience, which is even better. Another student wrote about her increased
self-efficacy at the same time that she unknowingly answered a nagging question of mine.
Student G writes, “Transferring a poem from a written text to a performance expanded my
knowledge of both poetry and performance, about which are two concepts that I did not know
much before. The performance aspect of this unit forced me to dig deeper into the meanings
behind every poem – a technique I will surely use later to study poetry.” One of my remaining
questions about the unit is whether or not the students will find their new analysis skills
transferable. Most literature teachers probably won’t ask them to transmediate each text that they
study into performance. So, will their new skills transfer when they are no longer in the midst of
my unit? I was glad to see that Student G believes that the practice she got into “digging deeper
into the meanings” in each poem will transfer. One final transformation of self-efficacy that I’d
like to share comes from Student N. On the first day of the unit Student N is the one who wrote,
“I do not like to read or write poetry, and I especially don’t like to reflect on it.” In his final
journal Student N still gives himself a two out of five in regards to his interest level in poetry, but
he also admits to a growth in his thinking about it. He writes, “After this unit I learned a lot more
about poetry. I never really looked at poems like we did in class. And I think by doing so made
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me realize how much thought can be put into what the poet is trying to convey to the audience.”
I’ll take that comment as a strong recommendation for the power of transmediation.
Final Thoughts
In the course of my research, it was suggested that I take a look at an article written by
Gilbert T. Sewall called “Lost In Action: Are time-consuming, trivializing activities displacing
the cultivation of active minds?” As the title suggests, it’s a scathing article about the projects
and activities that from Sewall’s point of view are replacing “real” learning. He writes,
“Traditional classroom activities and content lose out –crowded and trimmed in order to
accommodate projects. There’s only some much school day, and projects and activities consume
time greedily. To make room, time allotted to reading, writing, listening, critical dialogue, and
directed inquiry inevitably shrinks. Serious learning takes a back seat” (1). During my threeweek unit students were asked to complete several projects and activities. They drew, performed,
and one pair of students even created a shoebox diorama. I’m sure Sewall would be devastated to
learn that an American Poetry unit for Advanced 11th graders was filled with such frivolity.
However, as I’ve proved in this paper, the transmediated projects my students worked on created
an incredibly intellectual space for “reading, writing, listening, critical dialogue, and directed
inquiry.” According to Sewall it is only during direct instruction that “students work to unearth
meaning; to evaluate, interpret, compare, extend, and apply; to analyze their errors, present their
findings, defend their solutions; to attend carefully to what others say; to get their thoughts down
clearly on paper; to understand” (2). During Poetry and Performance there was very little direct
instruction and yet my students grew in every single one of those areas. Through their work on
this unit my students were able to truly develop as analyzers, empathizers, and overall learners.
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Although I wasn’t doing a lot of direct instruction, I was constantly asking my students questions
to help them refine and define their interpretations. In that space I created an environment of
inquiry that allowed my students to feel more and more confident in themselves as poetry
scholars. Unlike Sewall’s accusations about the flabbiness of teacher-leadership in project-based
classrooms, my classroom felt like the one described by Jennifer McCormick. She writes,
“Through questions and direct comments, teachers encourage abstract association and logical
reasoning. They help students hypothesize from the central concept of a composition to discern
the meaning of distinct compositional elements” (580). If my students lost anything due to this
activity-based unit I have yet to see it.
Though my experiences with Poetry and Performance were overwhelmingly positive, I
am left with questions. Will the students’ new found specificity in literary analysis transfer to
their study of other texts? Would teachers without my background in theatre feel comfortable
running this unit? Have my students missed out on an aspect of the study of poetry that I don’t
see because I’m so close to it? Here’s what I know for sure: if given the opportunity I would
choose to run a unit like this again in a heartbeat. During Poetry and Performance my students
were much more specific in their text-based analysis than they had been in previous units. My
students showed great empathy in their reading of them poems. My students became more
confident in their ability to understand poetry. For now, that’s all I need to know.
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