Brooks Protg Reaches Students Through Poetry

Thelma Sardin |

While teaching to the test and standardized exams can measure academic success, using creativity serves as another way to help measure performance where the goal is to reach one, teach one in todays classrooms.

One Chicago State University scholar is using creativity to construct educational strategies that are helping to prepare a whole new generation of learners.

Quraysh Ali Lansana, director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center (GBC) at Chicago State University recently co-authored a book entitled, Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy, & Social Justice in Classroom & Community. The book is intended to support both teachers and teaching artists with the aim of helping them to recognize the value of poetry as a vehicle to access acceptance of others, self-identity, meaning/inference and cross-curricular applications. With a foreword by Dr. Carol D. Lee (Safisha Madhubuti), the book includes a series of essays that share poignant tales of specific classroom/workshop experiences, effective instructional processes in both reading and creating poetry, and comprehensive lesson plans to support the pedagogy presented throughout the book. It has been 30 years since a book suitable for K-12 classrooms has explored poetry as a vehicle for social justice.

Lansana is also an associate professor of English/Creative Writing at CSU. He has been a literary teaching artist and curriculum developer for over a decade and has led workshops in prisons, public schools, and universities in over 30 states. In a recent interview with the Citizen, he discussed how his book helps shape todays learners.

The books pedagogy is composed of 20 years of experience. Lansana has worked in various classrooms, whether they [were] urban public schools or rural schools in North Carolina. Hes even worked with young people who are incarcerated and his experience helped him author the text.

He and the books co-author, Georgia Popoff, used various methodologies to construct the educational strategies. One method Lansana cites is verse journalism, a technique he gained from the famous writer Gwendolyn Brooks, who was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985. A protg of Brooks, Lansana has studied her work for nearly 20 years.

[Verse journalism] gives us an opportunity as poets to take a news item and make it human and personalize it, as opposed to a news story that gives you cold facts. The method is a way to engage young people in current events, he says. I feel like a lot of our young people know more about whats happening with Kanye [West] or Lil Wayne or Lady Gaga than they know about whats happening in Afghanistan or even the fact that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives is moving to attempt to repeal President Obamas healthcare law, he said. Ultimately, verse journalism is a means to present the news to young people in a way they can digest it.

As director of the GBC at CSU, he discussed why the Center is a mainstay on Chicagos south side. Chicago was her home, referring to Brooks. [It] captivated her imagination probably 80% of her work has something to do with Chicago or something that happened in the city of Chicago, Lansana said.

A pioneer who reported the Black experience through poetry, Brooks helped pave the way for African-American intellectuality. A Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968 and the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize, she carried the baton for many Black writers and influenced a later generation of writers including Nikki Giovanni and Alice Walker. I was fortunate to be among her last students and certainly her last protg for the last 13 years of her life, Lansana said. And now through his work, Lansana serves as an inspiration for other students, some of them who may become future writers.

Brooks legacy is important to the city, he continued. I believe the city should honor her and actually in more ways than it currently does, he said.

GBC was established at CSU in 1990. It serves as an institutional home for Brooks work and the study of other significant writers of the African diaspora. Brooks taught at CSU for nearly a decade. She loved working here, she loved working with the young people here, Lansana stated.

On April 9th, the GBC will host the 2011 Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry and Writing Festival which is renamed from the annual Black writers conference that CSU holds annually. The festival will feature Black writers from across the nation to celebrate and discuss whats important to African Americans and Black literature. The event is still in its planning stages. For more information, please call 773-995-4440 or log on www.csu.edu/gwendolynbrooks. Also, a book release party to celebrate the publication of Lansanas and Popoffs new book will be held on Friday, February 10, with the program beginning at 6:00pm 8:30pm at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum located at the University of Illinois at Chicago on 800 S. Halsted. For more information, call 312-413-5353.

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