The chapter investigates the work of a group of ninth grade students during the Covid lockdown as they authored digital blackout poetry in response to reading the novel The Hate U Give in an ESL class in a Norwegian school. The study tells about a learning process dealing with the growth students exhibited working through a blackout poetry approach to make connections between themselves and the lives of black people in the United States. The students read parts of the novel and, as an idea to explore new literacies, were tasked with creating blackout poems. The data of the study consists of students' blackout poems and interviews showing students' choices when manipulating the language of the novel, expressing their own emotions and interpretations. The work creates a link between “the other” and the students, providing them with a forum for self-expression and agency.
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This chapter investigates the work of a group of 9th grade students who authored digital blackout poetry in response to reading the novel The Hate U Give (THUG; Thomas, 2017). The study took place in an English as a foreign language (EFL) class in an urban Norwegian school. The spring of 2020 saw major changes in teaching due to the Covid-19 lockdown. In Norway, schools were closed for six weeks for younger students and eight weeks for older students, and universities closed from March 12th to the end of term. Schools and universities moved their teaching online to virtual classrooms. This alteration prompted teachers to try new ideas and invent new literacy pedagogies. Different schools faced different challenges depending on their access to digital platforms and equipment. The lockdown of all schools in Norway forced teachers to be creative and to rethink learning.
The blackout poem project described and analyzed in this chapter resulted from the change from a physical classroom to a virtual one. The students had read sections of the novel THUG as part of their English studies, and the task of creating blackout poems from the novel was an idea to explore new literacies. Since the novel concerns the agency of the main character, Starr, it exemplifies how agency can emerge and empower people. Hence, the novel fosters possibilities for independent reflection, cultural understanding, and reader agency through the coming-of-age story of a young African American girl.
The novel was inspired by the police shooting of Oscar Grant (Tucker, 2009) and the Black Lives Matter movement. In the fictional story, Khalil, a childhood friend of the narrator and protagonist, Starr, is shot by the police when putting his hand in his pocket to get his comb. The police believed he was reaching for a weapon. Riots erupted as the policeman who shot Khalil was found not guilty. In the aftermath, Starr and her friends stand up to injustice against the Black community. The reading of this novel in the 9th grade Norwegian classroom coincided with the police killing of George Floyd (Spocchia, 2020). Excerpts from the novel are often used in ESL textbooks, as the novel also deals with democracy and citizenship, which is a cross-curricular topic in Norway .
One approach to creating authenticity is to voice one’s own reactions to real and fictional realities. In this sense, blackout poems, also called “found poetry” (Butler-Kisber, 2010), can provide readers with a means to express their responses to a text. Blackout poems blacken certain words, sentences, or complete sections in a chosen text, such as a newspaper article, a short story, or a novel. The remaining words become the poem. Moreover, the work of eliminating and erasing to craft a new poem is understood as authoring a poem (Kleon, 2010). In a blackout poem, both the placement on the page and the selection of non blacked-out words comprise the design. Keith and Endsley (2020) pointed out that the process of making a blackout poem creates unique agency in the reader.
When creating blackout poetry, the student “takes a marker (usually a black marker) to an already established text like a newspaper article and redacts words until a poem is formed” (Keith & Endsley, 2020, p. 61). When the words in the poem are established, elements of color, lines, frames, and drawings can be added but are not required. This process is similar to what Petchauer (2015) refers to as layering: “to shroud their identification to untrained eyes and to add style” (p. 84). In the set of blackout poems from which the examples in this chapter are drawn, all the texts include added elements of lines, frames, and color.. Reworking a page of text this way can be understood as an aesthetic transformation (Østern, 2008), because students use their aesthetic affordances when designing the blackout poems. Moreover, this type of work presupposes an aesthetic reading experience, where the interaction between the text and the reader creates a felt emotional response in the reader (Iser, 1978; Langer, 2011; Rosenblatt, 1995).