To rhyme or not to rhyme, that is the question - or is it? : ITE student reflections on using poetry in the classroom

It was quite by coincidence that the week I was discussing integrating poetry into our classrooms, I was asked to write a response to Creely's (2022) article. I am a lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane and my primary focus is teaching Primary and Early Years English Curriculum to Initial Teacher Education (ITE) and postgraduate candidates. Within our units we discuss content relating to teaching English literacies in Australian classrooms, including reading, writing, speaking, listening, and creating. We cover numerous topics that an effective literacy teacher needs to know; how to teach reading and writing, how to integrate phonics and phonemic awareness into teaching and learning sequences, the importance of vocabulary, comprehension, oral language, and fluency, amongst many other things. We underpin this learning with theories and pedagogies suitable for the tasks at hand. I have some wonderfully passionate students who have chosen to become teachers because they feel they can make a difference in our world. In his article, Creely focuses on four pedagogical concepts: poetry built from prior experiences and interests, poetry as performance, poetry as embodied practice, and poetry as diverse community expression. Creely's concepts are useful, however, in my response I will consider the first of these, poetry built from prior experiences and interests, from the perspective of my ITE candidates. I will relate the tension that exists between my students' historical experiences and the integration of poetry in their current and future classroom contexts and how the disruption of past experiences impacts present contexts. Furthermore, I will offer some considerations for Initial Teacher Educators and ITE students going forward. [Author introduction]