Teaching Haiku
in American Higher Education, Part 2
Another area included in the bibliography is pedagogical research on teaching haiku. The big news here is that you have to go beyond the quick assignment, the instant experience, and into more long-term approaches for quality engagement with reading and writing haiku. As soon as teachers go beyond the one-hour or two-day assignment, the articles begin to discuss how writing haiku engages students in ongoing creativity, and how sharing haiku builds community. Often these newer pedagogical studies focus on how haiku helped students in community colleges, in English as second language programs, in schools with students who are disadvantaged, or with students who are basically failing school.
How are other academic areas using haiku as part of teaching? There are a lot of disciplines using haiku, and while some members of the haiku community might argue that these faculty are “abusing haiku,” I argue that faculty from these disciplines are using haiku because they value certain aspects of it as related to their own academic area. Faculty in the fine arts do a beautiful job of integrating the arts, including the integration of the visual and the verbal evident in their use of haiku. Sometimes these creative arts faculty are adapting the aesthetics of haiku, but more often they are genuinely interested in multiple arts and creatively bringing them together. There are wonderful dissertations and MFA projects and theses that are musical compositions, exhibitions of visual arts including haiku, and that employ haiku in aspects of theatre.
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