While there is a long and widely held belief that poetry matters and is a necessary component of the school curriculum, such convictions are at odds with the way poetry is taught and the general antipathy that students, especially in secondary school, hold towards it. Such disregard is well established among most school teachers who have been similarly schooled and consequently distrust their own competence as readers of poetry and unwittingly perpetuate such insecurity. Teachers need to act with some urgency to determine why poetry is such a valuable cultural and social good, and consider the easily accessible means by which poetry can be enthusiastically embraced by their pupils.
I have come to believe that most students who have read and studied poetry in school and college do not go on to read and enjoy poetry in their adult lives because they do not expect to understand a poem of any complexity on their own. Unfortunately, years of conditioning into such dependence have also victimized teachers into functioning as guardians of the poem's meaning. In an attempt to find out what students could realize from a poem without teacher direction, I discovered in studies at various levels of schooling that students working in small groups without any expectation that the teacher held and would provide "the one right meaning," generated rich and powerful readings of challenging poems far beyond any understanding that the teacher could have mediated with questions.
Stories, often dismissed as irrelevant in traditional research interviews, can provide valuable insights into the culture or cultures that pervade the setting within which the research is conducted. Studies of conversational storytelling have demonstrated that narrators not only relate events and conditions but also indicate the significance of their stories by means of story evaluations; that is, they highlight the points of their stories in various ways, such as suspending the story, making overt comments about the importance of an event, and repeating certain key words or phrases. This article demonstrates how story evaluations can reveal a story's significance within an organizational setting by examining two narratives from research interviews that form part of the data in a study of readers' responses to writing in a marketing organization.
The last issue of the Journal was devoted to Studies. Not inappropriately, no reports of research such as our issues normally contain appeared, for the climate of freedom of action recognised by all our contributors to be essential for the development of good language hardly lends itself to the constraints a researcher must customarily impose - least of all in the study of literature. The study below is interesting not only because it advocates for high school students a process in poetry much freer of constraints than what (in spite of the views of the academic leadership) is still the rule in English classrooms; it also offers a means of obtaining a quantitative estimate of the consequences. Patrick Dias' model here has the merit of being scaled both to the values and to the resources of the enterprising high-school English teacher; in its own modest terms, which admittedly are not those of the research purist, it will nevertheless convince the sceptical teacher that there is nothing to lose, and everything to gain, in genuine teacher free discussion.
