Teaching Poetry in TESOL Teacher Education: Heightened Attention to Language as Well as to Cultural and Political Critique Through Poetry Writing

Teachers of World English are no longer charged with teaching a fixed set of grammar rules and lexical choices but with teaching creative ways to navigate varieties of English and other world languages according to a wide set of contextual variables. Although there is a great deal of advocacy for teaching creativity and strategy in TESOL classrooms (Richards, 2013), there is little documentation regarding how preservice teachers themselves exercise their own abilities as creative language users. How might students enrolled in a TESOL teacher preparation program respond to a course specifically designed to tap into prospective TESOL teachers' own creativity? In this article the authors present research documenting the implementation of poetry writing courses as part of a TESOL teacher preparation program in the southeastern United States that has attracted increasing numbers of native-Chinese-speaking students. Through qualitative analysis of students' poems, interviews, and classroom observations, we describe the ways in which the poetry writing offered intellectual tools of inquiry (Johnson, 2006), heightening students' attention to the nuances and aesthetics of language (English and Chinese) as well as to articulations of “East-West” learner identity and political critique seldom documented in TESOL teacher preparation scholarship.