Creating collective poems to teach interpersonal and family communication concepts

Abstract

Leveraging arts-based pedagogy, this interpersonal and/or family communication activity allows students to engage creatively with a concept of the instructor’s choosing through the creation of a collective poem. Each student contributes statements that the instructor forms into a poem, resulting in a collaborative artifact that engages students’ affective and cognitive understanding of the subject. By the end of the activity, students should be able to analyze the diverse ways people experience and interpret the concept, and they should explain how ideas in the poem confirm or challenge previous course content. This adaptable exercise helps break down barriers to participation, and the final poem illuminates the complexity of the chosen concept, yielding dynamic discussion.

Courses: Instructors can implement this activity in a variety of classes, including Family Communication, Relational Communication, Introduction to Interpersonal Communication, and Advanced Interpersonal Communication.

Objectives: Through the creation of a collective poem, students reflect on and discuss their experiences with an interpersonal and/or family communication concept of the instructor’s choosing. By the end of the activity, students should be able to write two statements about the concept from their own experience, interpret a collective poem that the instructor creates from these statements, and analyze and compare diverse meanings of the concept in the poem. Finally, students should be able to explain how ideas in the collective poem confirm or challenge previous ideas from the course. This activity results in a collaboratively constructed artifact. Instructors may modify the exercise for traditional, online, and hybrid courses to enhance discussions about a myriad of concepts.