Each spring, our county’s Juvenile Detention Center organizes a seven-segment poetry workshop for a small group of young male writers. The most rewarding challenge remains: how do you engage students in an education system that has often left them stranded? For many of our students, it can be instinctual to feel aversion toward the teacher-student authoritative dynamic engrained in a classroom setting. So, every week we strive to find new ways to interest them in reading and writing poetry by crafting lessons grounded in comfort, camaraderie, and fairness between student and teacher. Whatever we ask them to do, we do as well. In our final lesson, we don’t teach at all.
We begin every class by dividing the students into table groups, each with an assigned mentor to guide and facilitate the discussion. In one particular activity, each table group is given a poster board and a set of markers. This activity is about giving them authority, so instead of assigning the same poem for everyone, the students choose from three options in their book that play with concepts discussed throughout the workshop. Most recently, we taught from José Olivarez’s book Promises of Gold.
One mentor volunteers to read each of the three poems aloud, and then we read them a second time popcorn-style. For some students, reading aloud is a source of anxiety and, for those who struggle with reading and pronunciation, can belittle them in their social circles. However, hearing a poem aloud and in their own voice better helps them identify sound and rhythm in the language.
Then, as a class, we rehash elements of poetry, taking note of what the students remember from past lessons—repetition, tone (synonymous with attitude), sound, music, imagery, and feeling. The students are instructed to use their poster boards to create a visual “map” of what they notice in the poem they chose that will later be presented to their peers. Today, they are the teachers. There is no right and wrong, only recognition. In groups, the boys discuss what stands out to them, what parts of the poem they want to teach, and they brainstorm together how they can best draw this on their posters.
At the end of the class, each group stands up and shares their posters. We noticed how students found different ways to represent poetic tools, but mostly, we noticed that each group was excited about being the ones standing up and teaching what they knew. We saw their growing confidence, and their joy—two things we strive to nurture through these seven lessons.
From this activity, we realized our students were in desperate need of lessons that flip the traditional classroom narrative. Perhaps beyond a poetry classroom that isn’t within the confines of prison, these students needed an outlet for their intelligence, one that allowed them the freedom to be the teacher, present their knowledge, and explore the poem with more than just a blank notebook and pencil.
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Chelsea Lebron (she/her) is a Jersey-born writer, teacher, and ghost enthusiast with an MFA in fiction from George Mason University. She is a 2022 Cheuse Center MFA Travel Fellow and a 2024 Fulbright recipient. Her work takes an interest in Latino communities, queerness, and all things spooky.
Nicholas Ritter (he/him) is a poet in the MFA program at George Mason University where he is the recipient of the Thesis Fellowship. He is a fellow with Poetry Alive!, a program that teaches creative writing at juvenile detention centers in Northern Virginia.
Katey Funderburgh (she/they) is a queer poet from Colorado. She is a current MFA Poetry candidate at George Mason University. Katey serves as the co-coordinator for the Incarcerated Writers Project and as a Poetry Alive! fellow. When she isn’t writing or teaching, find her with her cat, Thistle.