English Language Teaching: Classroom Teacher's Experiments

Techno-poesy: Blending Technology in the Teaching of Poetry

Sujith. S

School Teacher & Research Student

Pantheerankave High School, Calicut, India

In ancient times, the Irish believed that any knowledge or rule of law that did not pass through the heart was dangerous; only poets were allowed to be their teachers and kings. The reverence for verse in Ireland was such that some believed certain words to be so powerful that they could be used only by poets, a notion that has remained steadfast as adults and students alike regard the writing of poetry to be a challenge beyond them, something reserved for the elite. Even reading poetry falls into disfavour as students get older. (Morgan, 1994)

Myth and Reality

The myth of the ancient Irish people cited continues to a certain extent to exercise a sort of tyranny over the generations of teachers destined to teach poetry as if they were ushered in a realm of experience where there have no special role to play, and even if they assume any role of introducing poetry to the aspiring learners, a fear of the unknown and the ununderstandable reigns supreme in the deep recess of their cerebral world. This fear of impotency when deputed to teach poetry steals away a great deal of pleasure and is replaced by a psychological pressure converting the classroom into a disoriented place where both the teachers and students fail beyond any scope of meaningful repair.

Technology and Literature

Technology was believed to be and is still considered to be quite antagonistic to anything that is poetic. The marriage between poetry and technology is said to be unethical, anaesthetic and unnatural. The emergence of new forms of expression in popular culture, and the displacement of reading literature in general and poetry in particular from the ecology of the learner’s reading habits by immense viewing television and other visual media, has meant that young people may be exposed to less literary writing, and read little or no literature outside the formal environment of the school classrooms. The responsibility of the new generation of teachers of poetry is to save poetry through conceiving and designing a much more scientific and practical method by which they can take the learners back to the luminous world of poetic experience. This is easier to be said than done. The bygone teaching style and approach to teaching poetry will certainly be a fruit less exercise before a mass of students who are addicted to technological gadgets.

Teaching with Technology

It is clear that computer technology is here to stay. It is all around us. It has entered our daily personal and professional lives through word processing, e-mail, online libraries, and the Web. We are all using it to varying extents, not because anyone forces us to, but because we have discovered that it is valuable in many areas of our professional life—in facilitating our writing, our research, our communication with colleagues worldwide. It seems, though we are very comfortable with these private uses, we are not with professional use i.e. in the classrooms. Before we can do so, however, several things need to happen. Teachers need to become autonomous in their use of technology. Teachers need to understand how different technologies work, what purpose they serve, and how they can best be used. We need to realize that there are many different types of softwares, to understand what the softwares are designed for, and to discover the underlying pedagogical intent.

It is important to view technology not as a panacea but as a tool. Technology will not replace other tools, such as the pencil, the textbook, or the blackboard. Nor will any one technology replace all others, since no single tool can serve all functions. What matters most is to use each technology for its best features, to exploit its specificity.

Learners the Ultimate e-Gurus

Our students come to school with literacy experiences and skills that remain largely untapped in the classroom setting. They are accustomed to reading texts that combine image, sound, and words, which are often found in digital spaces that are bound up in social practices. Consider how many hours students log on Orkut, Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. How might we help our students further develop their visual and digital literacy skills to think more critically about how images, sounds, and print text work together to communicate meaning?

Poetry is meant to be lifted from the printed page and explored in multi-modal ways like pictures, motion pictures, paintings, audio clips etc. The use of new digital media for reading, writing, and representing poetry encourages an exploration of the relationship between text and image and how images and sound might be used to mediate meaning-making. New media have an immersive and performative potential that encourages students to get inside a poem and play with it. Giving students opportunities to create poems or respond to and annotate existing poems using new media provides them with opportunities to use the technology in meaningful ways.

The Kerala Experience

Now let me relate the situation in the state of Kerala, where there are a lot of innovative experiments in the field of teaching/learning process are taking place. There have always had encouraging results with many of these new experiments. But as seen anywhere, the response of the majority of English teaching fraternity was not always exciting or encouraging. A psychological resistance to accept or adopt anything new could conspicuously be seen with silent protest and meaningless mumbling in the intramural squares of the educational institutions. Sane voice from devotionally committed teachers with the pedantic knowledge of the latest developments in the teaching/learning process professed and practised across the globe could not alleviate the anchoring doubts conquering the less interested in the innovative methods.

The emerging radical ideas as to the teaching/learning process were grossly and deliberately tarred and re-tarred by a section of the teaching community right from the commencement of the implementation of the various programmes such as Cluster Training. Cluster Training is a common platform for teachers from five or eight schools in a locality where they come together to share their first hand experience with the implementation of the methods in the classrooms. These types of monthly get-together of the teachers of different faculties sit subject-wise in the place as declared in advance by the authorities concerned across the state. Though the programme has been well appreciated by the teachers and well wishers at the beginning, the sheen of the same was seen gradually getting dimmed. The excitement was soon replaced by boredom and ennui; may be due to nothing new and original about the style of functioning of such cluster level meetings or by the threatening voice of the authorities that made the teachers antagonistic and immune to such programmes. Sharing of experience gradually became a botheration and a restless activity for many imaginative minds and the less interested were soon found coming to the cluster programmes for the fear of the authority and not for expanding and broadening and deepening their own perspective. In many of these cluster level meetings I have noticed a common phenomenon with most of the teachers of English to seek an escape from any demanding debate on teaching poetry. Most of the teachers feel that motivating learners to read poems is an immense task. But the same teachers when they were introduced to teaching poetry with the help of the hypertext using computers were greatly excited. The discussion in one of such fruitful cluster meeting was to integrate information technology in the field of teaching English. Using multimedia softwares and other such programmes in the teaching could be a costly affair. So, the talks were focussed on using commonly available softwares and creating a kind of multimedia text that would inspire the learners to read, understand and recreate the theme in some other expressions using the latest technology. It was through such dialogues the use of hyper linking came into the fore. Hyper linking allows a teacher create a text that would retain the learners interest in exploring new knowledge by using computers. At this point let us discuss the technical things such as hypertext, hyperlink and the like and how they are used to create hypertext poetry.

What is Hypertext?

Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or key press sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the underlying concept defining the structure of the World Wide Web, making it an easy-to-use and flexible format to share information over the Internet. And a hyperlink is a graphic or a piece of text in an Internet document that can connect readers to another webpage, or another portion of a document. Web users will usually find at least one hyperlink on every webpage. The simplest form of these is called embedded text or an embedded link. In this instance, a hyperlink will show up as a single word or group of words that will usually be marked as underlined, and are frequently blue in colour. Clicking on the hyperlink may take one to another part of the page, or it may open another Internet page.

Hypertext Poetry

Hypertext Poetry is poetry that has had hyperlinks embedded into it by the reader. I learners select a poem and then they add hyperlinks to the poem to help explain their interpretation of the poem. The hyperlinks can link to pictures, words, other poems, and any allusion the line or group of words in the poem brings to the reader's mind.

How can we hyperlink a word?

Select the word in the poem/text you want to hyperlink

Next right click the mouse and click hyperlink.

Then, show the path to the file with which the word is to be linked. Here it is a word file named ‘Plane Trees’ that shown the meaning of the word and its image.