Workshops for Teachers: Reading Poetry, Creative Writing Online

How do you bring diverse voices into the A level English classroom? How can you work within the requirements of the National Curriculum to decolonise your teaching?

Roehampton’s English and Creative Writing academics have devised a series of 60-minute professional development workshops for teachers of KS4 and KS5 English.

Drawing on our own work ongoing work to expand the diversity of voices represented within our undergraduate curriculum, these interactive sessions will be delivered by a specialist in the field and are a fantastic way to explore ideas for adding variety to your own teaching.

Sessions focus on particular set texts as examples, but provide material suitable for teaching a range of A Level set texts, so there is something for everyone in each session.

This session's topic will be on Reading Poetry, Hearing Voices: approaches to teaching poetry as well as Creative Reading and Creative Writing.

Creative Reading and Creative Writing invites students to make the leap from being passive consumers of Shakespeare’s plays and poems to becoming active editors, updaters and improvers (--perhaps) of his work. We’ll play with contemporary methods of creating, detouring and deleting a selection of his most famous pieces. This process will lead to a deeper understanding of the decisions that Shakespeare made as he was writing and raise our own levels of excitement and understanding through interactive creative partnerships with these hallowed texts.

Reading Poetry, Hearing Voices
Reading Poetry, Hearing Voices engages students with poems as representations of accents, dialects, and historic and World Englishes. In this session we’ll explore poems orally and aurally, and explore the ways that spoken and heard poetry can enhance student understanding and engagement with poets from Geoffrey Chaucer to Patience Agbabi. By encouraging students to read with their ears as well as their eyes, we can help them uncover the ways poetry represents and resonates.