In two articles the author extends insight into poetry pedagogy for secondary English classrooms underpinned with theories of Dewey, Friere, and Ranciere. Both articles examine the teaching practices and corresponding identities of the English teachers who teach poetry despite current pressures for testing and accountability that often narrow the high school curriculum. The first article is an analysis of interviews and a focus group exploring teacher-poets’ perceptions of how poetry affords identity and agency growth for themselves and for their students. This study views identity and agency from the guiding perspective of Moje & Lewis’s (2007) work which places these entities within sociocultural contexts. Analytical findings showed that the three teacher-poets reported growth in students’ identities and agency as writers, and that the teacher-poets’ own poetry writing afforded personal identity and agency to teach poetry writing. The second article also explores teacher-poet pedagogical agency, this time through an autoethnography that centers on the author’s development as a teacher of poetry writing in the secondary English classroom. Here, the author draws first on Foucault (1972) to frame her exploration of her early classroom practices that depended on teacher control of the students’ behavior and assignment output. Then she describes how her pedagogy proceeded to emancipatory practices evoking Freire (1970) and Ranciere (2010). Pedagogy in this article moved from traditional teacher-as-expert practice, to a classroom where students are empowered to own their learning as equals in a classroom of inquiry and sharing.
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