Notably, the poem being recited by the schools seems much connected to the gun violence and especially the Florida shooting. These students are concerned about the current state of insecurity. And although it is a little unnerving, it is also clear that they are afraid of being the target. As an audience, I could observe the “pain’ in these students as they pass the message how the school shootings have been normalized nowadays. Further, in my understanding, they are trying to create public awareness on the topic of gun control and a school shooting. Similarly, the poems seem like a reminder and keep the discussion of gun attack going as it becomes a hot topic and all over sudden everyone forgets about it. The cheers from the audience provide a clear response that what the poem is talking about is the fact of the current security conditions.
Throughout the poem, these students have widely used literacy to activate prior knowledge of the audience. In conceptual terms, the poets want the audience to connect to the series of terror attacks that have occurred recently. Similarly, literacy has been used to establish the theme of the poem. Theme acts as the guiding topic of the discussion or the reflection of the happenings. Lastly, literacy helped the poets to focus on the facts on the gun shooting and school attacks. One of the major literacy that has been used in the poem is the rhetoric questions. This device has been used to persuade the audience on the potential danger of gun shooting and school attacks. The students were asking these rhetoric questions for effect of the theme but rather not to get answers from the audiences. Similar, the purpose this literacy device was to emphasize on points that keep the audience thinking.
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Reference
Machado, E., Vaughan, A., Coppola, R., & Woodard, R. (2017). “Lived Life through a Colored Lens”: Culturally Sustaining Poetry in an Urban Literacy Classroom. Language Arts , 94 (6), 367.
