Blackout Poetry: Eclipsing With Words and Images to Illuminate Ideas

Abstract

Integrating literacy practices in science classrooms can help students read complex scientific text, write arguments as part of shared cross-disciplinary practices, and engage with content. In the Linking Science, Mathematics, and Literacy for All Learners program, middle school science, mathematics, ELA, and special education teachers have been implementing multimodal STEM text sets that include a range of texts and scaffolds that support instruction and students’ content learning. One of these strategies combines reading and writing in unique and creative ways: poetry writing! Blackout and found poems are accessible approaches to help students focus on key words and ideas in a complex text, pull out those words to work with them, and then reconstruct them into a poem. This approach can be used in a variety of ways, and in some of the examples provided, students include an altered page from a scientific article on which they find their words, black out the rest of the text, and then illustrate the entire document to help show their message

Keywords:

• Poetry
• Scaffolding
• Complex Text
• Writing

Additional information

Funding

We acknowledge financial support by NIH/SEPA award #8R25GM129228 and the University of Missouri.

Notes on contributors

Amy Lannin

Amy Lannin ([email protected]) is an associate professor and director of the Campus Writing Program at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Jeannie Sneller is a science teacher in the South Callaway R-II School District in Mokane, Missouri. Heba Abdelnaby is a doctoral candidate in special education at the University of Missouri in Columbia.