Very Pinteresting

So — to accomplish this particular assignment, I wanted to utilize Pinterest as a way to remediate poetry for struggling students. For the purposes of this post and the product created, I focused on Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXXIII, below.

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all triumphant splendor on my brow;
But out, alack! he was but one hour mine;
The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.

I chose to focus on this poem because I thought it represented a really interesting shift in attitude and perspective for the speaker, and that it functions on a literal and metaphorical level that students could appreciate and relate to if it was remediated poetry. It’s rife with beautiful imagery and an underlying sense of betrayal and bitter disappointment. I thought it’d be awesome to break down via Pinterest. I’ve used Pinterest in the pass as a way to interact with texts that I thought were particularly beautiful or to inspire my own writing by posting images and quotes that reminded me of the work in some way.

Pinterest allows users to create boards that can include ideas, pictures, videos, or any kind of information and combine them into alike groups. It’s usually a personal tool for bringing together different media that share a common theme, or at least, that’s how I tend to use it.

Below is a sample of a Pinterest board I created as a remediation for Sonnet XXXIII. I don’t feel comfortable linking to the board itself because I prefer to keep my Pinterest private.

The organization style of Pinterest was part of what made it an effective tool for this poetry remediation. I was able to create a board specifically for the poem I wanted to focus on, and the search feature made it easy to look through images for ones that fit the theme of the poem I was trying to represent. I also think Pinterest’s capacity for a variety of different kinds of images, like the pictures mixed with quotes above, made it a great resource for capturing both the literal imagery of the poem and the themes it tried to convey about the betrayal of a loved one and the love for them that lingers despite the betrayal.

Pictures paired with poetry has been especially helpful for me in the classroom, and Pinterest lends itself well to visual elements. Pinterest also afforded me the opportunity to create moments of intertextuality. I connected Sonnet XXXIII to Edgar Allan Poe’s “Alone” by pinning an excerpt from the latter in my representative board.

In the classroom, I think Pinterest could prove a really interesting tool to incorporate with a poetry unit, or with poetry looked at over the course of a semester. Because Pinterest is a social media site, it includes a way to collaborate on boards with multiple people. If you wanted, you could create opportunities for pairs or small groups of students to collaborate on a Pinterest board for a specific poem and justify their choice of ‘pins’ in the captions, or incorporate a line from the poem in the captions so the relationship between the pin and the poem itself is clear.

I haven’t personally used Pinterest in classroom, but I think by using it as a means for students to connect visual media and other texts to poetry being studied in class, it could serve as a medium to illuminate a genre that often seems so inaccessible to students.

Parting Thoughts

• Is it inappropriate to ask students to interact via social media? Is it okay, as long as the account the teacher uses is not their personal one? How would a teacher go about implementing a Pinterest project in a way that was safe for students and transparent with administration and parents? I’m always worried about how an assignment might be perceived by someone outside the classroom?
• Suggestion — you don’t have to rely on images and representations just in Pinterest’s internal search engine, media can be pulled and pinned from elsewhere in the internet. Just be careful where they’re pulled from because Pinterest will link back to the source (a good practice), but definitely make sure the source is student-appropriate!