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Mary Weavena; Tom Clarka

a School of Communication and the Arts, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

Online publication date: 14 March 2011

Weaven, Mary and Clark, Tom(2011) 'Evolution and Contingency: Poetry, Curriculum and Culture inVictoria, Australia', Changing English, 18: 1, 75 — 84

10.1080/1358684X.2011.543513

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Changing English

Vol. 18, No. 1, March 2011, 75–84

ISSN 1358-684X print/ISSN 1469-3585 online

© 2011 The editors of Changing English

DOI: 10.1080/1358684X.2011.543513

http://www.informaworld.com

Evolution and Contingency: Poetry, Curriculum and Culturein Victoria, Australia

Mary Weaven and Tom Clark*

School of Communication and the Arts, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

TaylorandFrancisCCEN_A_543513.sgm10.1080/1358684X.2011.543513ChangingEnglish1358-684X (print)/1469-3585 (online)Original Article2011Taylor&Francis1810000002010DrTomClark [email protected]

This article explores the changing place of poetry studies in the broader Englishcurriculum of Victoria, Australia. Its focus is on how students learning to becomeEnglish teachers engage with poetry studies. Setting this problem within the contextof pedagogical theory and evidence about the evolving Victorian curriculum, wehave interviewed six first-year students to explore their perspectives on the studyof poetry. A clear finding is that exposure to the study of poetry is very limited inAustralia’s secondary school system. A more surprising finding is that students donot clearly recognize their exposure to poetry studies as such.

Keywords: poetry; English curriculum; teacher education

The value of teaching poetry in schools is rarely questioned. Its role and significancemay not always be fully understood but its right to a place in the English curriculum istaken for granted. (Fleming 1992, 31)

Prompted by a concern that poetry may in fact have lost what Fleming sees as ‘its rightto a place in the English curriculum’ – that the era of ‘taken for granted’ may be draw-ing to a close – our research explores the evolving place and purpose of poetry studies

in the evolving curricula of English and Literary Studies. Taking anything for granted

may be unacceptable practice in contemporary pedagogical design (not that anybody

is innocent of it), but that does not mean the education system gains by losing thestudy of poetry, especially if that is because participants in the education system have

lost much understanding of its value.

This article looks at poetry teaching in a contemporary setting to try to make sense

of several emerging trends. It presents original research we have conducted, by inter-viewing Bachelor of Education students who are learning to teach secondary English

classes after graduation. To set this research in its context, we begin by examining ‘the

state of poetry’ in the Victorian senior secondary curriculum in some detail. The

changeable and contingent nature of that curriculum is particularly acute in 2010,

because Australia is about to mandate a national secondary English studies curriculumfor the first time. We note that the study of poetry has fallen away under an approach

to curriculum that has advanced a utilitarian conception of literacy over several

decades. While the UK’s OfSTED Report, Poetry in Schools – A Survey of Practice

(Office of Standards in Education 2007) suggests that pressure from external examsleads to a reluctance to teach poetry, we contend in this article that deeper and more

complex issues may also be responsible for that shift.

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]



76 M. Weaven and T. Clark

One common thread running through the literature that we have surveyed for this

article – through the OfSTED Report, through earlier reports in England and else-where (Benton 2000; Kelly 2005; Thompson and Millward 1994), and through schol-

arly articles about poetry teaching that we have reviewed in preparing this paper and

previously (Weaven and Clark 2009) – is the proposition that studying poetry has

benefits for other aspects of student life and learning, especially the broader range of

communicative skills, knowledge and understanding that the study of English issupposed to cultivate. Most commentators who address the place and purpose of

poetry studies treat it either as the most powerful instrument for developing advanced

language communication, or as one among a select few of such instruments.

However, far from enjoying a privileged position, poetry has, for some time now,suffered a tendency to be ‘squeezed out’, becoming ‘technique rather than enjoyment

based’, due to particular curriculum and testing regimes (Benton 2000, 86). More

recently, Warner has noted the impact of question-setting on the exams, in terms of

the kind of engagement that students can expect to experience with poetry (Warner

2009). Gordon has expressed a concern of a different kind (Gordon 2008), relating tothe need for children to hear poetry in order to appreciate it fully. Because our work

offers a critical reflection on the educational outcomes and ramifications of various

syllabus decisions, we begin by explaining the current curriculum structure in one

Australian state – Victoria. In seeking a deeper understanding of the role that the studyof poetry plays in education more generally, we are particularly interested to observe

the contemporary pressures towards a more centralized curriculum structure. These do

not currently appear to support the teaching of poetry – but could they?

In some states in Australia, notably Victoria, curriculum and syllabus decision-

making has become comprehensively and deliberately decentralized (Yates and Collins

2010). This, we suggest, has had an impact on the teaching of poetry. Individual teach-ers in Victorian schools are responsible for all syllabus decisions; in curriculum matters

they are guided by a publicly accessible set of standards. Anyone – students, parents

and the wider community – can access this information via the World Wide Web. These‘standards’ are the Victorian Essential Learning Standards (Victorian Curriculum and

Assessment Authority (VCAA) 2005).

When and how various texts, skills and forms of knowledge will be taught is

entirely up to the teacher throughout the compulsory years of schooling. At the oper-

ational level, the school principal oversees this process, and the next level of respon-sibility lies with the school council. All government schools in Victoria are governed

by a school council, which ‘is given the power to set the key directions for the school,and is a legal entity in its own right. A school council directly influences the quality

of education that a school provides to its students’ (Department of Education and Early Childhood Development 2006).

When students enter the post-compulsory level, that is, the final two years of

schooling, both they and their teachers must conform to guidelines set by the Victorian

Curriculum and Assessment Authority. This is the body which offers a list of texts –

again, publicly available – and from this list teachers must choose those ‘texts’ whichthey consider will be appropriate for their students. For advice on text selection, teach-

ers are directed to the study guide, where they are informed of the criteria that the text

selection committee applies when choosing texts for the list. In the following extract,

the terms ‘Units 3 and 4’ refer to the final two semesters of secondary schooling and are generally studied in Year 12 – though there is an option to study these in Year 11

as long as the previous two units have been completed. Again it should be emphasized



Changing English 77

that all these documents are publicly available: anyone with access to the World Wide

Web can read the full list of texts from which teachers must choose, and they can alsoread the criteria employed during their selection.

Across the Units 3 and 4 sequence, English students must read and study at least four

selected texts. The term ‘selected text’ refers to a text chosen from the Text List published annually by the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority in theVCAA Bulletin … At least one of the selected texts in each unit should be an imagina-tive print text such as a novel, a play or a collection of short stories or poetry. (VCAA2006, 23)

VCAA is the body that administers the university entrance examination to which werefer later in this article. There is nothing – at least on the surface – that could be

considered ‘hidden’ or surreptitious about these decisions; there has been a genuine

attempt to make this information public.

The point we wish to stress at this stage is that because novels, plays and short

stories fall into the category of ‘imaginative print text’ they are treated as being inter-changeable with poetry. Smagorinsky refers to the ‘abundant scholarship in semiotics

… [that] has expanded the notion of text to account for all manner of sign configura-

tions’ (Smagorinsky 2009, 523). Medway laments the situation where ‘studying

Sylvia Plath can be assessed and accredited as commensurable with learning some procedure in Hospitality and Tourism’ (Medway 2010, 11). This is somewhat compa-

rable to the current situation in Victoria, where a student can study, for example, a

contemporary novel or non-fiction offering, and this is treated as commensurable with

collections of poems, such as the two offerings for 2010: Kenneth Slessor’s Selected

Poems and Judith Wright’s A Human Pattern – Selected Poems. This situation has not

been imposed by a hostile ‘outside’ authority, as was the case in Medway’s example;those within the English teaching profession have made the decision.

Film and print texts are semi-interchangeable on the VCAA’s list. The temptation

for teachers to select films is acknowledged as being so strong that the first piece of advice to teachers relates specifically to ‘film text’: ‘A film text may be selected

from List 1 or List 2 but not both. Students are not permitted to write on more than

one film in the examination.’ No such admonishment is needed to limit the study of

any other type of text. The two other pieces of advice relating to text selection are as

follows: ‘At least one of the selected texts in each of Units 3 and 4 should be animaginative print text such as a novel, a play, a collection of short stories or poetry.

At least one of the selected texts should be by an Australian or about Australians’(VCAA 2006, 23).

From a different direction entirely, Michael Apple reminds us that ‘Texts are reallymessages to and about the future. As part of a curriculum they participate in no less

than the organized knowledge system of society. They participate in creating what a

society has recognized as legitimate and truthful’ (Apple 2003, 182). Elsewhere, we

have extended this argument for poetic texts, using theory from Nicolas Abraham to

argue that poetry constructs a ‘rhythmizing’ relationship of the present to both itsfuture and its past (Clark 2010). Apple explores an example from the 1930s where

conservative groups in the United States mounted a campaign against the ‘socialist,

anti-American, anti-business’ textbook series written by Harold Rugg (Apple 2003).

No such campaign has been necessary against the teaching of poetry in Australia; ithas, when not centrally enforced, just quietly withered on the vine. Significantly,

Apple (2003, 184) also notes that:




The changing ideological climate has had a major impact on debate over what should betaught in schools and on how it should be taught and evaluated … the text has becomethe centre of ideological and educational conflict in a number of other countries

Where Apple could identify clearly the forces that led to the removal of Rugg’s texts,

it is a little more difficult to identify why poetry has fallen from favour in Victorianschools. Our argument is that there are good reasons for retaining it, but we recognizethat ‘the changing ideological climate’ to which Apple refers may hold at least part of

the answer and is therefore worthy of close investigation. In addition, we note the

allusion to the fetish-like quality of educational discourse disparaged by New Zealand

scholar, Terry Locke, as ’the impact of a fetish of discrete, behaviourist, learning

outcomes’. This fetish, he argues, ‘is reflected in ladders of achievement objectives incurriculum statements, and competence-based standards statements in qualifications

criteria’ (Locke 2007, 109). He links it to a decline in the teaching of poetry in

secondary schools in New Zealand, as outlined by O’Neill (2006). From yet another

angle, Dias and Hayhoe contend that ‘a prime cause of the unpopularity of poetry inthe classroom lies in the critical theory that is implicit in much teaching of poetry in

secondary schools’ (1988, 5). This strikes us as a simplistic judgment, but it attracts

many adherents.

What Locke has identified as the fetish of learning outcomes corresponds substan-

tially with some of the findings from the OfSTED Report, where, among other things,it was found that at the senior levels, teachers considered the study of poetry to be a

‘luxury’ and one, by and large, that they have eschewed:

However, once pupils have embarked on their GCSE course, most teachers feel thatthere is too little time in a crowded examination timetable for what they perceive as a

luxury. (Office of Standards in Education 2007, 9)

Currently, Australia is on the brink of introducing, for the first time in its history, a

national curriculum. For teachers of English this means that the content and pedagogyof the English course – issues which are never really dormant – are once again receiv-

ing close public scrutiny (Beavis 2008; Snyder 2008). As described above, curriculum

development in English in Australia has, until now, taken a starkly different course

from that described by Dymoke (2002) where she outlines the ossification of poetry

teaching caused by the centralization of curriculum, combined with the examinationsystem and what has become a surrogate compulsory poetry anthology for the entire

nation. This, she explains, has led to a situation where ‘poetry has become solely, and one could argue, deadeningly, linked with written response on terminal examination

papers’ (Dymoke 2002, 85). Whereas in Australia poetry has gone not with a bang buta whimper, in the UK it appears to have slowly ground to a creaking halt, but by very

different means. Kelly (2005) confirms much that Dymoke reports. Noting the sharp

differences between curriculum approaches in the UK and Australia, is it so curious

that the same essential outcome – a decline in the teaching of poetry – has occurred in

both countries?Curriculum structures and the forces that influence them also come under sharper

scrutiny when a national curriculum is being shaped. Yates and Collins (2010) have

noted that curriculum theorizing in the period leading up to the introduction of this

National curriculum has been based on: ‘a combination of a rather utilitarian and progressivist, child-centred mind-set on the one hand, and a growing impact of

‘evidence-based’ auditing and bench-marking on the other’ (90). This, they say, has



Changing English 79

resulted in a striking separation of content from the curriculum: ‘the dislodging of the

curriculum from a base in content knowledge into procedural knowledge … isunmistakeable’ (93). Where, in such a climate, should the teaching of poetry be

located, and what are the ideological influences behind such a positioning?

The body overseeing the implementation of the national curriculum in Australia

takes direction from the National Statement on the Educational Goals for Young

Australians (MCEETYA 2008). In a series of pronouncements outlining the need for a national curriculum, there is a predicable and not unwelcome emphasis on literacy

‘as a cornerstone of schooling for young Australians’ (MCEETYA 2008, 5) and this

sits alongside other statements about boosting economic capacity and international

competitiveness as measured by benchmarks set by the Organization for EconomicCooperation and Development (OECD). What we would contend, however, is that

any definition of literacy needs to be able to accommodate the subtleties and the

strengths that Terry Eagleton notes are present when poetry is taught. Eagleton sees

poetry as ‘the most ‘semantically saturated’ form of writing we have, yielding more

information in a condensed space than any other kind of text…’ (2007, 57). Incomments reminiscent of Freire’s insistence that, in order to be fully human, we must

act upon the world (Freire 1970), Eagleton goes on to establish the study of poetry as

a way of learning about how to act upon the world (2007, 68–9):

So it is as though poetry grants us the actual experience of seeing meaning take shape asa practice, rather than handling it simply as a finished object. … Poetry is an image of the truth that language is not what shuts us off from reality, but what yields us the deepestaccess to it. … It is the very essence of words to point beyond themselves; so that to graspthem as precious in themselves is also to move more deeply into the world they refer to.

As part of our background research we looked to the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority’s Exam Assessment Report. Every year the VCAA Exam

Assessment Report provides information on the texts students have written on in the

exam. As far as we are aware, no authority has collected data on the extent to whichVictorian students may be studying poetry texts during Years 11 and 12 but not writ-

ing on them during the exam. It is possible therefore that the figures below, relating

to the popularity of poetry texts in the exam, are not an accurate reflection of the texts

that students are studying throughout the year. They are, however, the best that we

could access, and they do reflect what happens in the exam.From 2001 through to 2007, poetry rated as one of the least popular texts in both

Part 1 and Part 2 of the exam (VCAA 2001–7). Changes to the English Requirement,introduced in 2006 (VCAA 2006) appear to have had little impact on this situation.

The exception to this is 2005, where poetry is not mentioned among the least popular texts for Part 1, but is still in that category for Part 2. Given that only two poetry texts

are offered, this means half of the poetry falls into this category year after year.

In 2006 and 2007 Victorian teachers wishing to study poetry with their Year 12

students had a choice of either Paul Kelly’s song lyrics: Don’t Start Me Talking:

Lyrics 1984–2004 or Sylvia Plath’s Selected Poems (Table 1). 2006 and 2007 are notonly significant for the inclusion of contemporary song lyrics on the Victorian Certif-

icate of Education (VCE) list. They are also the two years where the Exam Assessment

Report provides the names of not only the least popular texts, but also the texts on

which students who achieved the highest mean score had written. The texts for whichstudents received the highest mean marks in 2006 (Section 1, Parts 1 and 2) were:

Sylvia Plath: Selected Poems; Tess of the D’Urbervilles; I for Isobel ; The Plague; and




The Quiet American. The texts for which students received the highest mean marks in

2007 (Section 1, Parts 1 and 2) were: Sylvia Plath: Selected Poems; Hard Times;

Hamlet ; The Plague; and The Stories of Tobias Wolff .

In both 2006 and 2007, Plath’s poetry appears in this ‘highest mean score’ cate-

gory for both parts of Section 1. As yet it is not clear what can be made of this data,

but it suggests a link, however tenuous, between the study of poetry and the ability towrite well, at least in an exam. We are curious to unpack such statistics. A simplistic

approach would suggest that only the strongest students write on the more challenging

texts, leading to higher average results for those texts across the State. We believe thata broader range of factors must be in play, starting with the selection of texts that a

given teacher or school makes for a given class or cohort. The Examiners’ Reports

hold open another fascinating possibility: namely that the study of poetry may be

connected to enhanced reading and writing skills more broadly. It is this latter

question that we are most eager to explore.‘Poetry and Poetics’ is a compulsory unit of study for all undergraduate students

of Literary Studies at Victoria University. Students normally undertake this unit in thesecond semester of their first year. About two thirds of the students who study ‘Poetry

and Poetics’ are enrolled in the Bachelor of Education course, and these are the peoplewe targeted in our research.

Because a compulsory first-year unit (or semester subject) wholly dedicated to

poetry is unique to our institution within Australia, we were keen to examine the reac-

tions of our students, both before and after the event. We were also interested to learn

about any of their previous experiences of studying poetry in terms of how this mightmake an impact on their current attitude. We wondered whether these experiences

would lead them to think favourably on the further study – and eventually the teaching

– of poetry. As is usual with this sort of research, our delving revealed more than we

had initially anticipated.We began by calling for volunteers to participate in semi-structured interviews

during the week prior to the first poetry tutorial for Semester 2 (July to November),

Table 1. ‘Unpopular’ poetry texts in VCE examinations.

Poetry text identified amongst least popular in Exam Assessment Report

Other poetry text available for study

2001 Emily Dickinson, A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s

Verse

Bruce Dawe, Sometimes Gladness

2002 Emily Dickinson, A Choice of Emily Dickinson’sVerse


2003 Emily Dickinson, A Choice of Emily Dickinson’sVerse


2004 John Silkin, The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry

Philip Hodgins, Dispossessed

2005 John Silkin, The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (only in Part 2)

Philip Hodgins, Dispossessed

2006 Sylvia Plath, Selected Poems (1985) Paul Kelly, Don’t Start MeTalking: Lyrics 1984–2004

2007 Sylvia Plath, Selected Poems (1985) Paul Kelly, Don’t Start MeTalking: Lyrics 1984–2004

Source: Exam Assessment Reports (VCAA 2001–7).



Changing English 81

2009. Mary conducted the interviews on campus but on a confidential/anonymous

basis, one-to-one and face-to-face. We kept sound recordings of the interviews, whichwere subsequently transcribed. Six kind souls consented, on the understanding that

they would also be available for a follow-up interview after the conclusion of the

semester, in 12 weeks’ time. Of the original six, five were indeed able to return for the

follow-up interview; the sixth had transport difficulties and declined. We had obtained

ethics approval for this research through Victoria University. Importantly, while thisis a unit both of us have taught, neither of us were teaching it (or any of its students

through other units of enrolment) during the semester of this research. That meant we

had not met any of the interviewees prior to recruiting them for this research.

For the first round of interviews we had five open-ended prompts or questions:

(1) Please tell us about your current expectations and attitudes towards the studyof poetry.

(2) What do you think might have contributed to these expectations?

(3) What experience of studying poetry have you had in the past?

(4) How do you think this experience has influenced your present expectationsand attitudes?

(5) How would you describe the sort of person who might gravitate towards or

enjoy studying poetry?

The first and last questions were intended to give us a sense of the sort of image that

these students had of the study of poetry. The other prompts were aimed at drawingout stories or narratives of the influence that the study of poetry had had on their

perceptions of literature in general.

In analysing the data, two features have surprised us. One is the lack of poetrystudy that students reported from their secondary school experience. Some stated cate-gorically that they had not studied it at all; others recalled a few isolated poems. Most

referred to experiences with poetry in the primary setting but an absence of poetry in

the secondary school.

The one exception to this is an immigrant student, Gaynah, who had completed all

her primary and secondary schooling in her country of origin before moving to Austra-lia. There, she said, poetry was an integral part of all language sessions – the equivalent

to our English study. Debates were held regularly on the literary merits of various

poems. Her experience with this activity led her to make the following statement:

[Poetry] gives you the best way to put your feelings into words as well.

During her first interview, we asked Gaynah: ‘So what do you expect you might get

from the study of poetry here?’ In reply, she acknowledged that she had found the

study of poetry in the past not only to be ‘fun’ but also formative in the developmentof vocabulary and writing skills:

Definitely vocabulary and writing skills, because I need that a lot. And I actually find itfun, reading other people’s words and translating to your own [ideas], what you’re tryingto get from there.

Gaynah’s responses contrasted sharply with our first interview with Nathan, who

completed all his schooling in Australia and claimed:




With English we read heaps of books but never really experienced poetry.

Little wonder that when asked to elucidate his current expectations on the study of

poetry he said:

To be honest with you I’m expecting to be bored and confused.

By the time we conducted our second interview with Nathan at the end of the semes-

ter, his viewpoint had shifted. He remembered his previous attitude, and was quiteclear about how the study of poetry fitted in with, and also expanded upon, what he

already knew of literature:

Yeah, because I was saying I hadn’t studied poetry before [and] I had no idea what toexpect, I’d never been exposed to it … I guess I just realised that it’s more important thanI initially thought, to study poetry, because I never really thought of it as such an influ-ential type of writing. But yes, reading all these different kinds of poems and seeing the

‘behind the scenes’ sort of thing about how it’s all written and the different rules and stuff like that, you appreciate how it fits into the whole literature aspect.

A finding worth noting (and worthy of further research in its own right) is that students

tend to undervalue or misrecognize the experiences of poetry in their lives before

studying it in the focused manner of Poetry and Poetics. One of our respondents,

Albert, has extensive experience of playing music in a band, for which he is the mainsongwriter. During his first interview, it was only after we suggested a link between

‘poetry’ and the always metrical, often rhymed verses and choruses he composes that

he seemed confident to discuss that link – which he then did quite passionately.

Doing poetry is exciting, I guess, because I’m excited about doing it and seeing how it’sstructured and pretty much having to learn from the basics.

The misrecognition also includes previous study of poetry in a formal school setting.During her first interview, Gaynah (whom we have quoted above discussing the value

of poetic expression) did not initially recognize that the poetry she had studied at

school in her country of origin was any form of preparation for the approaches to read-

ing and analysis that she would learn in Poetry and Poetics at Victoria University.Again, once we suggested the link to her, she discussed it confidently because she

recognized it clearly – but not beforehand, as this quote from the early stages of her

first interview reveals:

Gaynah: This is my first time studying poetry.Interviewer: First time ever?Gaynah: Yes.

The two main findings here are clearly related. On the one hand, students come into

Poetry and Poetics without much previous experience of poetry in their secondary

English studies. On the other, students do not tend to recognize the relevance of the

experiences they have had with poetic texts. This pair of factors must be a significantinfluence on student demand for poetry – and yet the putative lack of student demand

has been the lead excuse for an on-going running down of the study of poetry that we

see in Victoria and other education systems. If the study of poetry is valuable, this

political and economic cycle needs breaking.



Changing English 83

And what did the students think they got from Poetry and Poetics? Their answers

were divergent of course, but all our second interviews shared an appreciation thatreading different kinds of texts gave rise to different ways of reading texts, and that

reading often-difficult texts cultivated stronger and more independent reading prac-

tices. Asked how the unit had compared with her expectations, Jacinta’s response was

typical of the second round interviews:

Jacinta: It’s sort of what I expected it to be but I didn’t expect to enjoy it as muchas I did. I expected it to be really boring but it was really interesting.

Interviewer: You don’t have to say that.Jacinta: But I’m being serious. I’m not lying. I’d tell you if I hated it. I didn’t hate

it; I liked coming to the classes and it was interesting. I liked some weeks better than others because some things interested me more than others, butstill I found that in the ones that I wasn’t as keen on, they were still interesting.

Jacinta’s happy surprise aligns her experience with findings from the OfSTED Report,

which noted that, ‘Generally, pupils in the schools visited enjoyed poetry, especiallywhere teachers used active approaches’ (Office of Standards in Education 2007, 3).

Although the reference there is to primary schools, we suspect that the same is very

likely to be true of those few secondary schools in Victoria where poetry is taught toVCE English students. Nathan’s second interview also exemplifies this attitude of

enjoyment. He described the study of poetry as a way of learning that led to what he

called ‘a better understanding of how to appreciate other forms of writing’:

That’s what I’m saying, yes, and that’s how you can sort of appreciate the importance of the written word because it’s the ultimate form of quality over quantity. So that’s why Ifound it really fascinating.

Nathan’s insight, surely, is at the heart of a pedagogical rationale for studying poetry:a sense of communicative ‘quality’ (at the expense of ‘quantity,’ if need be), of read-

ing closely, of learning both how to handle and how to appreciate the heightened

ambiguity of the poetic mode of expression.

People who study poetry have the opportunity to learn deeper truths about, and

develop more hard-won skills in, the difficult business of communication than thosewho do not. As the Victoria University experience of Poetry and Poetics shows, unless

education systems expose students to the study of poetry in depth, it is a value that

eludes or escapes most, unnoticed and unmissed. When those same students go on to

become the English teachers, the school leaders, the curriculum developers and therole models for future English teachers, in their turn, this pedagogical bypassing

becomes profoundly entrenched. One of the guiding aspirations we have for our

research is to find clearer and more verifiable ways of establishing this point. The

voices of these Poetry and Poetics students have demonstrably advanced that search.

Notes on contributors

Dr Mary Weaven is a Lecturer in the School of Education at Victoria University (Melbourne),researching and teaching in the field of English education.

Dr Tom Clark is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication and the Arts, also atVictoria University, researching and teaching in the fields of rhetoric and poetics. This articlearises from an ongoing project of research into the place and purpose of poetry in the EnglishStudies curriculum.




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