When was the last time you wrote a poem ?

In Bristol yesterday, I attended a session at UWE led by Mark Jones, which related to a forthcoming article in 'Teaching Geography', written in association with Bernadette Fitzgerald: the PGCE English tutor at UWE.
The article "Town as text" explores the way that urban areas can be described using poetry and other literary forms.

There was a really impressive display of geographical poetry in the School of Education, which Mark had put together, and which related partly to the excellent article on Place by Tim Cresswell published in the GA's journal GEOGRAPHY. I referred to this for my Norfolk GA session "Very flat Norfolk" earlier in the year.

There were some examples of Alice Oswald's river poetry, and some excellent images to accompany them. One poem I particularly liked was Philip Gross's poem on the Severn from his collection "The Water Table".

Mark explored the use of the haiku poetry form: a form which can be used well with students as it is fairly straightforward to develop and rework. I will use some of these ideas as part of my workshop at the SAGT Conference later in the year.
There were some other good ideas for capturing literacy, including street names, 360 degree views and questions.
Mark was interested in the positioning of responses to place on a continuum between English and Geography, and what a response somewhere in the middle of these would look like.

Have you used poetry in your geography lessons ? Please tell me about it....

To show willing, here's an example of a HAIKU I used when teaching about weather and climate a few years back. The students (Year 8) then used VOKI to create an avatar who would speak the lines, and then embed them into a blog for showing to other classmates. It was an ICT lesson, but as always I subverted it to being a geography lesson as well...

Background image by Flickr user old town drafting under CC license....

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