Verse and Voice: Reimagining Poetry Pedagogy in ELT Classrooms

Verse and Voice: Reimagining Poetry Pedagogy in ELT Classrooms offers a critical and creative rethinking of how poetry is taught in English Language Teaching (ELT), particularly in Indonesian and Global South contexts. Moving beyond formalist and instrumental approaches that reduce poetry to grammar, rhyme, or metaphor, this textbook positions poetry as a vital pedagogical space for voice, justice, and imagination. Grounded in critical pedagogy, decolonial theory, feminist and ecofeminist criticism, and Indigenous knowledge systems, Verse and Voice invites readers to engage poetry as a living, political, and ecological practice. The book foregrounds marginalized, feminist, Indigenous, and local poetic traditions alongside global voices, challenging Eurocentric literary canons and affirming multilingual, embodied, and place-based ways of knowing. Bridging theory with classroom praxis, the textbook offers participatory and multimodal pedagogies such as poetry performance, zine-making, translanguaging writing, visual and digital poetry, and community-based poetic inquiry. Designed for undergraduate students, pre-service and in-service teachers, and language educators, Verse and Voice is an invitation to teach poetry not as an abstract literary object, but as a practice of care, resistance, and world-making—and to reimagine ELT classrooms as spaces where language, culture, and ethical imagination meet.