Ashley Marino
In the English classroom, students often are required to do more analysis than research. In today’s internet based society, research should play an integral role in every classroom regardless of content area. As high school seniors, students should have already been given tools to lead them through conducting successful internet research. They have practiced finding key points of stories, and using textual evidence to support their claims. In other content areas, they have created their own wiki pages, edited pages, and posted links to class pages. Students have learned about the different stylistic techniques used when writing poetry. This activity will combine these two skills, requiring students to research a poet of their choice in order to create their own online biography. They research that poet’s work and then decide which stylistic techniques they use most often, posting exemplars on their wiki biography. They must explain their choices using evidence from research and the context of the poems. Many poets have different background experiences; often times these experiences affect their stylistic choices. Stylistic choices can also be made when trying to set a specific tone, or vividly describe an environment. Students must answer the question: Are this poet’s stylistic choices a result of their background, or are they directly related to the context of specific poems? This two day lesson is designed to be part of a poetry unit that will eventually lead to an assignment asking students to create their own poem using the same stylistic techniques as their researched poet.