Teaching With Slam Poetry

What is slam poetry?

Sarah Kay gives a much better description than I ever could ‘poetry that doesn’t wanna live on paper.’ It’s also worthwhile showing something along these lines to students when you start as many won’t have seen slam poetry before.

How To Use It

I won’t break this down into a unit as it depends on where you are located and how you do things. (There are some great websites that do this and I’ve included some in the resources – so you can pick and choose accordingly). However, I’ll offer some more generic advice on my experience using slam poetry.
You can use slam poetry for a variety of purposes including (but not limited to):

• Dramatic performances.
• Acting.
• Studied poetry.
• Creative writing.

Resources
Teacher Off Duty ‘Speak Your Truth’
Slam Nation – Unit PDF
Mud and Ink Teaching ‘Slam Poetry 101 An Introduction’
TED ED – Become a slam poet in five steps

Pros

• Accessible – for the most part, using slam poetry makes poetry much more accessible to students who find it challenging. Often as a teacher, poetry proves a difficult topic to teach and adding movement and actions can help break down those barriers of metaphors for some students.
  
• Engaging – slam poetry is arguably designed to captivate and engage an audience about a certain topic in a very brief time frame, whether this is achieved in the style or tone of the performance, often it has this exact desired result for students.
  
• Interesting – rather than just reading about themes of nature or death (which is often the case in poetry) read about much more complex and topics that students can relate to. Often the performance style is considered to be similar to that of rap or hip-hop which students can admire.
  
• Differentiated Learning – for students who find it difficult to learn off a page, listening and viewing a slam poem can be a great way to teach to all different learning styles.

Cons

• Audience – keep in mind the content and the audience. Picking the right poem is really crucial to encourage student engagement.
  
• Language – sometimes there can be some really difficult language used which can be difficult for any student but particularly EAL students. It is worth keeping this in mind and again, trying to pick one that is accessible.
  
• Hard copies – this proves to be the biggest challenge. It is definitely worthwhile providing students with a hard copy to use to follow and this can be incorporated with your planning. However, it can be hard to find a hard copy of the poem. It is worth using a poet who is published.