Poetry and Art: A Case Study of Saudi Students

Abstract

This study is anchored in pedagogy through Art: the artistic expression that helps Saudi students analyse and interpret English poetry from another perspective. Saudi students are given the chance to use the strategy of visualisation to create paintings from poetry and enhance their experience in the reading and analysis of English poetry. This strategy is especially important since some Saudi students are not as proficient in written English as others. Thus, I question what it might look like to strategically implement a pedagogy which allows for particular illustrative works of Art through visualisation in the poetry classroom. Students are asked to draw what they visualise after reading a poem; it opens their eyes to realising we all have different mental images since each student has his/her own particular schemata.  This also cements the notion of no right or wrong answers in the reading and analysis of poetry. Hence, I study a possible link between multimodal pedagogy focusing on image-language entwinement for Saudi students within an English poetry classroom.