Collaborative agency and relationality in a high school/college poetry partnership

Abstract

This essay engages with ideas of agency and relationality to reimagine possibilities for young people’s modes of learning about and creating poetry. We describe a partnership between a high school and college class in which we minimized our authority as instructors to make space for young people’s collaborative agency in shaping a poetry exchange project. Our analysis of participants’ references to relationality in a post-project survey revealed relational dimensions of participants’ learning, influencing, and creating as supported by collaborative agency.