Sparking Authentic Research with Poetry
Seniors at City High School collaborated with Logan Phillips, local poet and community activist, as they prepared for a project to address a local community problem. Working with Logan created a spark, a transformative space for students to jumpstart their engagement with issues that most impact them and their communities.
Logan shared performances of his own poetry, explained lines and themes from some of his pieces, and then had students write. They worked with a prompt “Where I Am From” that inspired them to use metaphor, imagery, and description to explore and reveal the intimate details of their own origins. Although not what they expected when a cool poet breezed into the room on that first day, students became more willing to be vulnerable, eventually gaining confidence to perform their own poems.
