School Desk

Turning test takers into poets

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In the fervent debate on education in the city, poetry is not foremost among policymakers’ priorities. 

Common Core standards have taken pride of place away from literature, mandating that students read more non-fiction and less fiction as they pass through grade school.

That is not stopping Amanda Nicole Gullaa from teaching her students at Lehman College’s School of Education how to employ poems and paintings in their own teaching when they graduate and become educators themselves.

On Oct. 10, Ms. Gulla led an evening workshop on a form of verse known as ekphrastic poetry.  Ekphrasitc, a word borrowed from the ancient Greeks, refers to any poem that describes a work of art.

Ms. Gullaa touted it as a way for students to commune with the fine arts and express themselves more deeply than through the kind of personal statements they often have to write.

“We’re teaching kids that having a voice is not just about saying whatever is on your mind,” Ms. Gullaa said. “It’s about finding connections between personal experience and central truths about life on Earth.”

Before giving her audience a chance to write poems of their own, the assistant professor at Lehman’s department of middle and high school education presented examples by greats like W.H. Auden along with several poems she had penned.

Ms. Gullaa, the author of a collection entitled A Banner Year for Apples, shared a poem she wrote in response to an ornately engraved 16th-century Dutch rosary bead. The last line of the peom read, “And still the world goes on.”

Ms. Gullaa traced how she continued to develop that theme in a later poem responding to Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” an expansive work that shows people from different walks of life engrossed in their humble tasks while a fabulous myth plays out in a small corner of the canvass.  Mr. Auden wrote a poem on the same painting called “Musée des Beaux Arts.”

“It’s as if we’re entering this conversation that has been going on for thousands of years, and we can be a part of it,” she summarized.

Lehman College’s School of Education, Manhattan College, The IN-Tech Academy, Shant Shahrigian
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