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Indigenized Slam Poetry

Our Team
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Our Team

Kathleen Meiklejohn, Aboriginal Education Teacher

Kelly McCarthy, Grade 8 classroom Teacher

58 Energetic and Enthusiastic Grade 8 Students

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Inspiration

Kelly and I had the opportunity to go see Shane Koyczan live this past Tuesday. Shane is a powerful spoken word poet who is part of the inspiration for our synergy project. Going to see his performance brought forward a few questions about the logistics of our own poetry slam we plan to hold as the community share out of our project. With 60 students participating in our project, one of the main things we need to accommodate is the sheer amount of time it would take for students to present their poetry in front of an audience. One thought is to not have all students present, however, we feel presenting to an authentic audience is a key factor in our project that we are not wanting to give up. Another proposed solution would be to have the students write their poetry in pairs. With such a big project (the poem and the video) perhaps students could present together or one student could present while the other works on the video so both students would have own...

Thinking about our Final Report

In regards to reflecting on where we are at with our final report, Kelly and I have decided to put together a blog post and resource share out of our project. Our goal, is to organize all the resources we used and put them together in one folder that we can then share out on google. We have been spending lots of time reflecting about our project. As this is the first time we have done this, we have learned lots and have several things we would do differently next year! Our goal, in creating this document, is that others can use it to recreate something similar to our project. One issue we seem to be running into is that we made the project scope very large originally, a whole year of indigenizing the curriculum! So we are having troubles focusing the resources to our slam poetry! In other words, despite the fact that we did an origin stories unit, it isn't necessary to do in order to succeed with slam poetry. So we are trying to find a way we can separate the units and make ...

Final Report

Project Description: Participants We originally started with two classes of grade 8 students. The goal was to indigenize their grade 8 english/humanities curriculum. Many of the topics we aimed to cover in english curriculum overlapped with the grade 8 social studies curriculum, therefore we included both. Our project included Kathleen, the Aboriginal Education teacher, Kelly, the classroom teacher, and MANY community members, elders and knowledge keepers. Due to unforeseen circumstances, one of the divisions was dropped from the grant project, so in actuality, our project included one division (approximately 28 students) of grade 8s. Goals There were many goals to our project, but the overlaying goal was to have students engage with the 94 calls to action, write a slam poem in response to a call to action, and create a video to go along with their poem. On a larger scale, we aimed to indigenize the grade 8 english curriculum, teaching students about the im...