PERSPECTIVES ON URBAN EDUCATION

FALL 2010 | PAGE 49

Supreme Efforts of Care and Honest Utterance: Grasping the Singular

Power of the Spoken Word in School Spaces
By Kelly Wissman, University at Albany, State University of New York
I knew Joe Cytrynbaum as a fellow
graduate student, a friend, an organizer, and a neighbor. I knew him as the
student asking penetrating questions
of the educational anthropologies we
read in our doctoral courses. I knew
him as a neighbor within our West
Philadelphia surroundings, waving
hello on beautiful autumn mornings
and appearing at weekend get-togethers, instantly transforming them by his
energy, laughter, and warmth. I knew
him as the voice at the other end of my
apartment buildings intercom system
wanting to talk about graduate student
organizing, knowing intuitively and
clearly that electronic organizing is only
enhanced by face-to-face interactions.
I think he must have known, too, that
the sincerity and humanity in which
he approached this work profoundly
shaped the emerging movement and
perhaps, too, that his own enthusiasm
was both infectious and irresistible. I
shared with Joe only a small number of
those charged and beautiful moments.
In the context of his passing, I am
deeply grateful for those moments, for
Joe, and for the opportunity to spend
time in the presence of such light.
I also shared with Joe an interest
in pursuing scholarship that explored
youth work, poetry, and activism, while
also sharing a continued and sober
consideration of research relationships, responsibilities, and subjectivities (Gustavson & Cytrynbaum, 2003)
within work that crossed differences
and that was situated in struggles for
educational equity and social justice.
At the time I was coming to know Joe,
I was beginning to teach and research a
poetry and photography course with a
group of adolescent girls. My research
explored how the young women in
the course drew upon the literacy and
artistic traditions of African Ameri(Wissman, 2009) and social critique
(Wissman, 2007) within an in-school

context. Across the many hours I spent

with the young women reading, writing, and sharing poetry, I was continually moved by the electric force in
the quiet moments of writing and the
hushed silence that overcame us as we
listened to words carefully chosen and
dynamically read. As the spoken words
would become punctuated by sighs of
recognition, laughter, applause, and
sometimes tears. Joe, who coached
a spoken word team, Louder than
a Bomb, in Chicagos Manley High
School, also knew the power of engaging students with poetry. One of Joes
students, Vasawa Thekingofvrworld
Robinson, posted a note to Joe on Joes
Facebook page, writing of his time participating in the Louder than a Bomb:
enty people. where our pads became
skin, our pens became needles. injecting ink. it became an addiction.
it became a habit. the word of the
day youll say. then well proceed to
write about a topic. youll grab your
journal, freestyle your writings.
while you took a bite of some snack
that was organic. seeds, you planted. life, you didnt take for granted.
In my experience, poetry and spoken word are the generative and contagious forces for illumination, inspithat Joes student suggests. It is this
singular and simple power of words
written, words spoken, and words
the students Joe and I have been privileged to work with and come to know.
June Jordan (1998), another poet and
teacher who left us too soon, wrote
that the U.C. Berkeley student poets
with whom she worked approached
the creative and social practice of poetry as an act of faith, a compact, a trust
between poets and listeners, writing:
They believe that someone will

come along
and listen to what they have tried to
say.
They believe that when someone
comes along
and hears what they, the poets,
think
desire, or despise, a trustworthy
conversation will become possible
They believe that important, truthful conversation
between people fosters and defends
the values of democratic equality
They believe that other people deserve
supreme efforts of care and honest
utterance (p. 208)
In light of Joes spirit and lifes
work, I would like to explore here some
emerging insights related to poetry
within public school spaces. These insights are drawn from work I am pursuing with an inquiry group of middle and
secondary teachers who are exploring
the complexities and possibilities of incorporating multimodalities into their
English and Reading support classes.
I have been drawn to consideration
of the poetry and experiences of two
boys who conveyed to me and others in
the inquiry group compelling insights
about the synergy between old and
new literacies, between spoken words
and written words, between individual
creative processes and public performances. Like the student poets Jordan
writes of, their work suggests this faith
in the power of poetry and this yearning toward the kinds of communities
that can be created by, for, and in support of words spoken and words heard.

Exploring Multimodal Literacies in an

Inquiry Community

PERSPECTIVES ON URBAN EDUCATION

ers from a range of rural, urban, and
suburban districts. Over the course
of the 2007-2008 academic year and
summer, the teachers, three graduate
student research assistants, and I met
monthly in an inquiry community to
explore adolescent literacies and to develop teacher research projects. These
teachers, all of whom were members
of my graduate level adolescent literacies course the previous year, developed data collection tools to learn from
their students about their literacies;
analyzed this data; developed curricula
and projects to build on their students
out-of-school literacies and lives; and
utilized digital cameras, digital video,
and movie-making software purchased
with money from a research grant to
engage their students in multimodal
learning. Three teachers worked with
their students to create digital poetry.
One ELA teacher worked with students after school to put on a spoken
word and music event that they called
Java Jive; this teacher also worked
with her students to create a litersocial studies teacher, worked after
school with a group of boys to create
a digital video exploring the Roman
empire. Here, I would like to explore
the experiences of just one member of
the inquiry group, Mira. (All student
and teacher names are pseudonyms.)

Mira and Her Classroom

After a lengthy career teaching English in India, Mira Singh is currently in

her third year teaching in a rural district in upstate New York. Mira teaches
Academic Intervention Services (AIS)
classes for students who have scored
below expectations on the states English Language Arts exam. She is also
enrolled in a local doctoral program in
literacy. She has described her previa New Critical stance wherein authority and knowledge rested within
the text and the teacher. As a result
of her doctoral work, participation in
this inquiry group, and her own professional development pursuits, she
now describes herself as moving with
the times and her pedagogy as being
informed by inquiry-based learning,

multimodalities, and out-of-school

literacies. In interviews and through
writing she has described her goals
to provide students choice, agency,
and ownership and to respond to her
students facility and comfort with
music, images, and nonprint media.
While a participant in the inquiry
group, Mira was also serendipitously
working with another faculty member interested in exploring poetry and
new media. To begin, Mira and her
university-based co-teacher worked
together to create a poetry workshop
in her classroom. The students were
invited to read poems by Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, and
others to explore imagery, tone, and
word choice. Students then wrote
original poems that were workshopped
in the classroom. In order to create a
poem movie, or a digital poem, the
students were invited to choose images
and music to accompany their selected
poem and to record their voices narrating their poem. Using Windows Moviemaker, the students then stitched
together images, music, and spoken
word, working both individually and
collaboratively to orchestrate these
multimodalities (Kress & Jewitt, 2003)
toward the completion of their digital poems. These poems were shared
with the entire class at the end of the
tion of this project, Mira also incorporated digital poetry into her Academic Intervention Support classes on
her own the following academic year.

Michael and Jared

The digital poems of two boys, Michael and Jared, provided compelling
windows into their literacies and lives
for both Mira and other members of our
inquiry community. Both boys were 8th
graders at the time of the study. Michael, who is White, was part of the
troduced. Jared, who is African American, participated in this project the following academic year. Conversations
with both students, classroom observations, and interviews with Mira provide
further insight into the ways in which
the students took up invitations to do
this kind of work and how their engage-

FALL 2010 | PAGE 50

ment re-shaped the social interactions
that initially surprised us, both boys
embraced the opportunity within this
work for reasons that were not tied only
to the novelty of using new technologies and new literacies in school spaces.
In presenting these mini-cases, I am
interested in how the boys embraced
opportunities to pursue poetry in the
service of furthering their own selfunderstanding; of combining words
and images to reach their audience;
and in shaping an in-school space as
one embracing of social interactions
typically not found in school spaces.
ital poem:
http://www.urbanedjournal.org/videos/digitalpoemMichael.wmv
In interviews, Michael recounted
that he loves writing poems and song
and stuff and that he frequently writes
outside of school. This project was his
pursue this kind of digital poetry in
school. He said, It was awesome just
to make something like that! I always
wanted to do something like that, so
it awesome. Asked about the inspiration for the poem, Michael told us,
My house burned down and my poem
was about homeless people...cause
not a lot of people realize the aspect of people and not having homes
and stuff. Michael discussed not
only the process of writing and sharing his own poem, but also what he
learned about other students, saying,
It really showed off peoples creative abilities and like their personalities in what they did in their
workJust that like you never really know how people think or feel
on the inside. Just the way they
look and act on the outside is totally different from the person
inside them, basically.
In discussing the rhythm and intonations of the poem, Michael talked about
in the interview, he provided even more
insight into his writing process, a process Mira explores with great curiosity:
Mira: And when you write, do you

PERSPECTIVES ON URBAN EDUCATION

and of receiving response to his work

see images, visuals?

Michael: Yeah. Yeah.
Mira: You do? Thats part of it?
Michael: Yeah. Like you see it in
your head and you keep going.
Mira: Okay. And does rhythm
come in, too? Or does it come
are writing?

then at the end you bring it all into

one time. I write a little bit and
when I get more I keep on writing.
Whatever comes out, I dont try to
rush it. I just write whatever comes
to my head and if I dont have nothing else Ill just stop and try again.
But whatever I write, I write to like
rhythms and beats.
Through this project, Michael was
able to craft a place for his writing in
school, a practice he pursued outside
of school, but had never brought into
school. In doing so, many additional
opportunities for movements across
boundaries arose. His exchange with
Mira is striking in that they shift traditional roles of teacher and student;
Mira takes a stance as a learner from
Michael and he teaches his teacher
about his writing process. There is also
movement here in terms of knowledge
production: a life-changing experience
was able to travel into school through
this poem and Michaels use of poetry, images, and spoken word communicated to his fellow students how
poetry can make social commentary.
literacy practice was enriched by the
multimodal component that Mira introduced and that he had never pursued before. In fact, after the project
ended, Michael put this poem and others up on Youtube. Digital poetry here
becomes an essential part of Michaels
rich palette of literacy practices, one
both welcomed and enriched by school.

FALL 2010 | PAGE 51

Here is Jareds digital poem:

http://www.urbanedjournal.org/videos/digitalpoemJared.wmv
Unlike Michael, Jared did not consider himself a writer before this project. In his predominantly white rural
school, and as a talented basketball
player, Jared told us that most people
saw him only as a jock, an identity
that he also seemed to embrace. After
the project he remarked, I didnt think
I had it in me to write the poem, so after I wrote I was like, did I really write
that? He noted that he had written
poems before, but only if [teachers]
made me, but not in my free time. He
said that he came to the realization that
poetry is actually kind of fun. That
writing poems is, I dont know, I guess it
could be a hobby or something like that.
Something I could do in my free time.
To Jared, the opportunity to write
a poem and receive feedback was the
most appealing aspects of the project,
not the movie-making component. He
said, I didnt know I could write poems that good, but I guess I can a little.
I dont know. It was just fun to write a
poem and to get feedback on it. Jared
noted that in other English classes students rarely hear poems read out loud.
For Jared, reading his poem and hearnoted in classroom observations that he
played a very active role in commenting on other students drafts, discussing the choice of images, and working
with other students to construct their
poems. Jared noted, I always read my
poems out loud. Im not a stage fright
type of person. Ill read other peoples
poems out loud if they want me to. I just
do that because I like getting feedback
on what people think about the poem.
Asked why he did so, he commented,
cause then youll know what theyre
thinking and you can make a poem
that would suit what theyre thinking.
In this sense, Jareds experience in
the class is valuable to him in terms of
how it opened up a social experience
centered around writing and discussion
in the classroom he had not experienced
before. Jared mentioned the importance of hearing poetry read out loud

much like Michael, poetry opened up

opportunities for social interaction,
for the enrichment of knowledge about
other people and their experiences, and
for the exploration of his own identity
within a broader classroom communiabout his racial and gender identity, the
kind of identity work that their poems
an image of himself where being a poet
and a basketball player are not in conpoem reveal how his work is profoundconsciousness of hip hop, a tradition
that might not be noticeable withfor a young man in this rural school.

New Literacies and Old Purposes:

Reclaiming the Spoken

In discussing new literacies, Knobel

and Lankshear (2007) note that they
involve a different kind of ethos stuff
in that they invite more participatory,
collaborative, and collective ways of
working and more distribution of expertise and authority. Within Miras
class, digital poetry set the stage for a
classroom where participation norms
and traditional ways of knowledge production were upset. Here, students
in and out-of-school literacies were a
bit less dichotomized, multimodalities
were encouraged, and collaborative
and public sharing were encouraged
in marked contrast to the individual
and private writing that characterized
much of the students previous experiences of in-school learning. It could
also be argued that there was space
here not only for a more generative
recognition of adolescents literacies in
school, but also an enrichment of those
literacies, from Michaels newfound
ability to incorporate multimodalities
into his composing process to Jareds
embrace of an identity as a poet and
public commentator and supporter of
other peoples poems. Given the context of this class given its purpose to
work with students who did not do well
on the states standardized test these
attributes seem all the more strik-

PERSPECTIVES ON URBAN EDUCATION

ing. Rather than crafting the class in
the image of a traditional remedial
course focused on skill-building, Mira
instead invited engagement with poetry, images, and spoken word. This
decision correspondingly shifted focus
isolated skills to embodied knowledge.
In many ways, though, what occurred here was not only due to new
or multimodal literacies, but also due
to the invitation to engage with the
most traditional mode of communication: orality. Both Michael and Jared
spent little time with us talking about
the technology or the software or the
process of choosing images for their
digital poems; rather, both were much
more expansive when talking about
the composing process of their own
poems and about coming to know others in the class through listening to
both Michael and Jared expressed despoke frequently to how the project
enabled a different kind of knowledge
about themselves and other students.
in new literacies to one of the oldest
art forms, the students were not taken
in by the new tools or technology for
their own sake, but by how those tools
could be used in the service of meaning making and community building.
To me, Mira, Jared, and Michael
suggest that to study adolescent literacies requires an openness, a collaborative commitment, a dedication
to learning with and from students
and other teachers. In discussing her
experience, Mira noted, I was a student, teacher, researcher, all in one.
That really, really helps and we should
be open to this as teachers. The insights we learned from Jared and Michael emerged not only from Miras
classroom, but also from a community
of other teachers supporting Mira in
her work, and from Michael and Jared
themselves. Michael, for example, responded to our question about what
he would suggest to other English
teachers based on his experience with
the digital poetry project in this way:
The typical English class is taking a few notes, reading the book,

the book. The thing we did in Ms.

Singhs class was more open discussions and more creative, instead of
like pen to the paper work, more
philosophical, if I can use that word?
Michaels work and the responses to
it remind me that at the heart of English education should be the drive to
communicate and to wrestle with large
ideas. Along with Michael, I continue to
think we could be a bit more philosophical in our teaching and research of adolescent literacies as well as a bit more
participatory, if I could use that word.

Yeah, Yeah, I Hear That

My time in this inquiry community

has reinforced my sense of the importance of contexts for both students and
for teachers to be a part of participatory communities, to write, to speak,
and to be heard. Within words written,
words spoken, and words heard possibilities can emerge for understanding,
for change, for compassion. In considering Joes life and legacy, I continually return to June Jordans (1998)
description of her student poets, her
proclamation that they believed everyone deserved supreme efforts of care
and honest utterance (p. 208). Joes
sister, Pamela Cytrynbaum, recounts
compassionate listening to her, saying:
I would bring him the most toxic
feelings, my most unproud moments, my ugliest pain, and he
would be just like with his students:
Yeah, yeah, I hear that. Somehow with this incredible alchemy
brain sharpness he would just turn
me all around. (Schmich, 2009)
From students seeking out poetry slams in urban centers to rural students pursuing work of depth
and complexity in their marginalized
and sometimes stigmatized remedial courses, Joe is an inspiration
to work with deep integrity to create
contexts for young people where their
words are nurtured, brought forth,
and heard. However ephemeral and
however fragile those moments and
spaces are, I believe they are of singu-

FALL 2010 | PAGE 52

lar importance to our students and to
our democracy. They require the commitment that inspires the best community organizers and the boldness
that is at the heart of all poets. Carole
Maso (2000), an eloquent and poetic
voice on writing, love, and loss writes:
As we dare to utter something, to
commit ourselves, to make a mark
To incorporate this dangerous and
fragile world. All its beauty. All its
pain. (p. 179)
To Joe, in humble recognition of all this beauty of your
life, of all this pain at your loss.
Dr. Kelly Wissman received her
Ph.D. in Reading/Writing/Literacy
from the University of Pennsylvania in
2005. Prior to completing her doctorate, she held various and often overlapping roles as an educator, qualitative
researcher, and after school program
facilitator. Dr. Wissmans research
interests include literacies and literature in the lives of urban youth, gender and education, photography and
literacy, and out-of-school literacies.
She shares a complementary interest
in feminist approaches to the teaching and theorizing of childrens and
young adult literature. Her research
has been supported by the National
Council of Teachers of English Research Foundation and two grants
from the Faculty Research Awards
Program at the University at Albany.

PERSPECTIVES ON URBAN EDUCATION

FALL 2010 | PAGE 53

REFERENCES

Gustavson, L. C. & Cytrynbaum, J. D. (2003). Illuminating spaces: Relational spaces, complicity, and multisited ethnography. Field Methods, 15 (3), 252-270.
Knobel , M. & Lankshear, C. (2007). (Eds.). A new literacies sampler. New York: Peter Lang.
Kress, G. & Jewitt, C. (2003). Multimodal literacy. New York: Peter Lang.
Jordan, J. (1998).

acts. New York: Doubleday.

Maso, C. (2000). Break every rule: Essays on language, longing, and moments of desire. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint.
Robinson, V. T. (2009, July 14). A teacher. A mentor. A legend. Facebook posting.
Schmich, M. (2009, July 15). Brothers death hits harder than most. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved October 20, 2009:
http://archives.chicagotribune.com/2009/jul/15/news/chi-schmich-15-jul15
Wissman, K. (2007). Making a way: Young women using literacy and language to resist the politics of silencing. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 51 (4), 340-349.
English
Journal, 98 (3), 39-45.

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