Poetic Justice Values in UK's Digital Spoken Word Education: Artographic to Autoethnographic Portraits of Collective Becoming

This fellowship will draw attention to the importance of spoken word poetry education for the design of morally pragmatic interventions as well as its central place within UK policy and on the national curriculum. Policy requires English schools to teach spiritual, moral, social, and cultural development (SMSC) with British values, which is rife with historical prejudice. In 2021 US presidential inauguration, youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman's spoken word poem captured millions online with hopeful values. Minoritized young people saw themselves reflected in her, while UK schools faced Covid-19 poetry cuts. Across the pond, UK poet Kadish Morris warned "poetry saved me, don't deny it to next generations". Teaching online-poetry is difficult, but a rare diverse representation and emotional resource. It the case of spoken word poetry as a popular art form performed out loud for an audience, it is inherently digitised and shared online. Young poets like Gorman and Morris remind not only that politics needs poetry, but that both schools and policy need poetry too, especially during adverse times. For example, before fame, Gorman taught spoken word to empower youth, while Kadish said that without poetry she may still be in school detention. The ESRC fellowship will enable me to firmly extend the place and impact of spoken word poets' values in young people's lives in the UK building on my PhD's delivery of a spoken word poetry programme in prison. Particularly, as part of my PhD's work with imprisoned young men abroad, I designed a new spoken word poetry programme based on US and UK spoken word poetry and hip-hop. I also conducted small research with international and UK spoken word poet educators. I concluded that spoken word poetry education can inform young people's personal, moral, relational, and social development.

The fellowship aims to consolidate my PhD findings primarily in the field of education and build its reach beyond the arts and prison context. The SMSC approach is relevant to ideas of good lives in youth justice that can help alleviate the school to prison pipeline. The fellowship will also show the practical role of philosophy of education to help design education interventions led by spoken word educators. To do this, there are four aims aligned with my PhD findings that creative practice, pedagogy, collective performance (i.e. artographic sites) can contribute to moral development and rewriting adversity in a positive manner. First, I will consolidate the values that underpin artographic spoken word to complete an arts-based book manuscript that will serve as college textbook as well as research methods book for HE courses. Second, I will develop my research skills and networks to expand academic-spoken word poet partnerships to reimagine pedagogies with youth. Third, the fellowship will boost spoken word poetry values impact in SMSC. To do this it will generate new limited research findings on how UK spoken word poets' work extends a collective space where more just practice of values can take place and be taught with young people. The UK is a particularly interesting case because of its unique and impactful scheme of spoken word poets in schools initiated through the only postgraduate degree in the country that trains spoken word poet educators. Moreover, the fellowship will highlight UK spoken word poets' role in critiquing Ofsted and British Values policy context and its damaging role in perpetuating social stigma. It will stress poets' role in countering supremacist cultural and religious values. Fourth, I will expand the impact and dissemination of the SMSC findings in a unique research conference in this field, to bring together multiple beneficiaries of this fellowship. The conference as well as prior stages will lead to a special issue on SMSC and showcase the voices of poet educators and young people through a spoken word poetry album of redefining British Values on the terms of the participants.