From Page to Digital Stage: Creating Digital Performances of Poetry

The authors share the story of a performance-based poetry project undertaken by a class of grade 6 and 7 students. The use of new digital media for reading, writing, and representing poetry encouraged an exploration of the relationship between text and image and how images and sound might be used to mediate meaning making. New media have an immersive and performative potential that encouraged students to get inside a poem and play with it. This project tapped into students' interests in new media and allowed them to experience poetry in new ways through a multimodal learning environment. (Contains 3 figures.)