Poetry and the Meaning of Life

by David Hanauer, Dyanne Rivers

Overview

A poem can explain the inexplicable and express the unexpressed. This is how reading poetry enhances understanding and writing poetry helps students say things that they could not say in any other way. And it's why David Hanauer believes that poetry deserves to play a central role in classroom literacy programs.

In Poetry and the Meaning of Life, David explains how teachers can use poems to help students understand and express important thoughts, feelings, and experiences. He does this by discussing theories of reading and writing and relating these to vignettes that demonstrate how real teachers in real classrooms have used poetry to put these theories into practice — with emergent and beginning readers, with mature readers, and with English language learners. The book concludes with a clarion call to teachers to use the transformative power of poetry to encourage their students to search out the meaning in their own lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780887511066
Publisher:	Pippin Publishing
Publication date:	04/22/2004
Series:	Pippin Teacher's Library Series , #38
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.04(w) x 8.97(h) x 0.27(d)

About the Author

David Ian Hanauer, PHD, is associate professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His interests encompass literary theory, cognitive psychology, educational literacy, and applied linguistics, and his research has included empirical studies of poetry, poetry reading in a variety of settings, graffiti, the narratives of migrants, cross-cultural understandings of the parables of Jesus, the construction of moral points in fables, and the role of literature in language teaching. He has published extensively in a variety of journals and has taught at Tel Aviv University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Purdue University.

Table of Contents

	About Poetry	7
	Why Poetry?	8
	What Is Poetry?	10
	How Does Poetry Work?	12
	When Does Poetry Work?	15
	Poetry with Emergent and Beginning Readers and Writers	18
	Shared Poetry Reading	18
	Poetry Writing	26
	Summing Up	32
	Poetry with Mature Readers and Writers	33
	Reading Poetry	34
	Writing Poetry	44
	Summing Up	54
	Poetry with English Language Learners	56
	Learning a Second Language and Reading Poetry	58
	Reading Poetry with English Language Learners	60
	Writing Poetry with English Language Learners	70
	Summing Up	78
	Poetry, Literacy Instruction, and the Meaning of Life	79
	Constructing Meaning through Poetry	80
	Poetry and the Meaning of Life	87
	Bibliography	89

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