Engaging Enver Creek Secondary in PhoneMe poetry
This week, the members of the PhoneMe project team were thrilled to be invited and so warmly welcomed to Enver Creek Secondary School in Surrey. We had the privilege to work with many English classes over the course of the day, ranging from grades nine through twelve. Teachers and students greeted us with kindness and a great deal of enthusiasm to play with poetry, and it was a delight to spend artful time with them.
Each class began in the school’s auditorium where students and their teachers generously came to learn about the PhoneMe project. We provided an overview of our passion for innovative spoken word poetry, showed them our interactive map, discussed how anyone could become a PhoneMe poet, conducted a demonstration for how to submit to the project, and concluded the presentation with our own Dr. Kedrick James’ inspiring poetry performances. Our aim was to educate and excite students to contribute — hopefully to come to see the PhoneMe project as an outlet for inspiration for anyone, anywhere, and at anytime.
In the second phase of the class, we moved back into classrooms where members of our team conducted smaller poetry workshops using our newly generated poetry template. Because this template is designed for poets to contemplate significant places and spaces in their lives, we observed students thinking and working on pieces about a variety of different locales. Students poetically explored everywhere from the solace of their bedrooms, to critically and creatively considering McDonalds as a work site, to extoling appreciation for basketball courts, Jamaica, Honduras, and Mexico — just to name a few examples. What we especially appreciated over the course of the day was how not only were the students so receptive to our invitation to experiment with poetry, but further, many individuals provided invaluable feedback on how to improve the prompt for future teaching sessions. As a result, our project was greatly enriched by the experiences we had of working closely with the educators and adolescents at Enver Secondary.
By the end of the day, we left the school with a wonderful experience and promises from students to phone in their poems — we are very much looking forward to listening to those! We are so grateful to this school community for hosting us this week, and a special thank you must be made to Mr. Paul Dhillon, for the lovely invitation to Enver Creek.
