Learn4Life students in Fresno carry hardship and experience trauma, many of them without ever having the opportunity to process what they have been through, let alone heal. The Get Lit program focuses on taking those personal traumas and turning them into poetry, giving students a voice and the confidence to use it. The trauma that Learn4Life students have analyzed in the class include issues with disabilities, mental and physical illnesses, physical and mental abuse, drug and alcohol exposure, in addition to everyday challenges of simply attending high school. Get Lit focuses on helping students find their personal identity while examining various aspects of the self to create a whole soul.
In every class, there is a prompt or poem to discuss and respond to, sometimes with a pre-planned lesson. On other days, the prompt is selected based on the student emotions that day to make what they are doing in class more relevant to what they are dealing with outside of class. Essentially, students learn classic poetry, claim a poem that resonates with them, and then pen their own spoken word response pieces, which they perform in tandem.
The class offers guest speakers, often local poets and professionals who share their stories. The course also involves a year-end field trip to the California State University, Fresno Young Writer’s Conference. Students receive a journal as part of their class materials to fill with notes from their adventures.
Get Lit was founded in 2006 after Diane Luby Lane created a one-woman show about the power of words and toured colleges with iconic Chicano poet Jimmy Santiago Baca. After the show closed, she could not bear the thought of cutting off the work completely. She started teaching classic and spoken word poetry in two high schools but when the semester ended, the students would not leave. They insisted on meeting after school. Today, the curriculum has expanded to almost 100 schools, and the Get Lit Players are the most watched poets on the internet. Curriculum requests flow in from Mexico to New Zealand.
The Get Lit Curriculum is aligned to Common Core Standards in both English and Visual and Performing Arts. Fusing the worlds of canonical text and youth-led thought, the Curriculum builds literacy, love of learning, vocabulary, and confidence.
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