Weaving Multiple Dialects in the Classroom Discourse: Poetry and Spoken Word As a Critical Teaching Tool‪.‬

Introduction Shiv: All I can remember as I sat in Professor Miguel Algarin's undergraduate class "Ethnic Poetry in the United States" was, "I should have been exposed to this sooner. Why wasn't this part of my schooling experience?" In his class, we read and scrutinized spoken word poetry as well as listened to spoken word artists perform their poetry for our class. For the first time in my schooling experience, we were reading texts written by people of color and discussing topics that I could relate to such as racism, oppression, poverty, immigrant identity, and a number of other important issues that a kid from urban Jersey City understood only to well. The spoken word texts articulated a style that demonstrated how intellectual, aesthetically beautiful and socially conscious inner-city youth were. Spoken word poetry, performance poetry, spoke to me and touched my soul like no other type of literacy before. It was like looking in a mirror and seeing my faults, my resiliency, my scars, and my hopes.