Millennial Learning: April 16-17, 2009
William Van Buskirk
The Poetry Wall: Using Poetic Language to Enrich our Teaching and Transform the Classroom

William Van Buskirk is a Professor of Management in the School of Business at La Salle University. His early studies of organizational culture in the workplace took him to Japan several times in the eighties. Immersion in Japanese language and culture provided a mirror for studies of symbolism, culture and language in American companies. Culture, for him, is best studied from "the inside out" as quality of experience modulated by symbol, metaphor and language. His published work has won prizes at the Academy of Management's Organizational Development track and the Roethligsberger Award sponsored by the Journal of Management Education. Current work focuses on how poetry in the management classroom can mobilize vitality and interest. Together with Michael London and several other colleagues he has developed the Poetry Gallery exercise that is presented at this conference. He is a working poet whose book, Everything that's Fragile Is Important, was a 2007 finalist in the Jesse Bryce Niles competition at the Comstock Review.

The Poetry Wall: Using Poetic Language to Enrich our Teaching and Transform the Classroom

Co-presented with Michael London

As faculty we search for ways to invigorate the classroom and make the content of our various fields come to life. In this workshop we create a “poetry gallery” made up of a host of modern poems to sensitize participants to the power of poetry as a vehicle for building connections between students, finding unexpected depth in one’s self and conceptualizing the content in new and exciting ways. This is not a session for learning how to “teach poetry”. Our focus will be on learning a powerful methodology for using poetry as a tool to enrich a wide range of courses and disciplines.

Session Goals and Activities:

1. Think more deeply and personally about how to bring the vitality of poetic language to the act of teaching.
2. Provide faculty with an opportunity to experience their poetic selves in relation to their individual teaching disciplines.
3. Expose participants to a setting and a sequence of experiential exercises that they can adapt to their own classroom settings.
4. Explore the power of poetic language as a vehicle for enlivening dialogue in the classroom: a venue for deeper voicing of lived experience in the context of (and through) the subject matter.

Participants will enter a room that has been prepared with approximately 50 poems covering the walls. They will be encouraged to walk around, “art gallery” style reading various poems and taking as much time as they need. Live meditative background music will be provided by the workshop leaders. The poets will range from some who are “famous” to song lyricists, to the relatively obscure. Next, participants will be asked to take one poem from the wall to work with during the exercises. This poem should have some kind of special meaning or feeling. Participants will pair up and read the poem aloud. They will discuss why they picked the poem, what it did for them, how they reacted to it. Participants will be engaged via writing, reflection, and discussion.