Education
Critical Metalinguistic Engagement and the Role of Listening in Poetry Inside Out
Document Type
Book Chapter
Abstract
This chapter explores the notion of critical metalinguistic engagement in the context of Poetry Inside Out (PIO), an innovative humanities and literacy program. In PIO, students translate poetry from around the world, from their original languages, into English, using tools such as a translator's glossary, poet biography, and collaborative translation cycles. They engage deeply with language and go on to write original poems and create their own art, deepening their understanding of the poems/poets, themselves, and each other. PIO both requires and engenders “Special Listening,” which means listening with ears, eyes, mind, one's history, culture, languages, and actively and interactively trying to see “behind” what others are saying. In this chapter, we narrate how an intergenerational research group, including multilingual youth researchers, developed the concept of Special Listening, explicate its meaning, and offer several empirical accounts of it and its connection to critical metalinguistic engagement, using data from secondary ESL classrooms. We highlight the complexities of Special Listening and ask what motivates it in classrooms (for both students and teachers), while acknowledging that the deliberativeness, care, and interest in one another that are required are not easy to achieve in classrooms. We end by suggesting that Special Listening is all the more important in our current sociopolitical and educational climate, which too often works to delegitimize the identities, languages and literacies, and narratives of multilingual youth. And we acknowledge that the deliberativeness, care, and interest in one other that are required are not easy to achieve in classrooms.
Publication Title
Pursuing Language and Metalinguistics in K–12 Classrooms: A Framework for Critical Engagement
Publication Date
2024
ISBN
9781003334804
DOI
10.4324/9781003334804
Keywords
linguistics, metalinguistics, Special Listening, multilingual
Repository Citation
Park, Jie and Michaels, Sarah, "Critical Metalinguistic Engagement and the Role of Listening in Poetry Inside Out" (2024). Education. 7.
https://commons.clarku.edu/faculty_education/7
