Working together with young people and poet educators from the live and digital spoken word scene to reimagine UK’s spiritual education
Overview
Poetic Justice Values is a research project centring young people’s experiences, values and views within contemporary debates of spoken word poetry - an art form performed live to an audience and circulated online - and the future of just education in the UK. While small in scale, the project addresses a pressing, yet overlooked education policy that requires English schools to teach for young people's spiritual, moral, social, and cultural development (SMSC), with British Values, rife with prejudice. SMSC in education, mandated in the 1944 Education Act and every Act since, is part of Ofsted schools’ inspection handbook.
Research on SMSC largely ceased in the late 1990s. During adverse times, spiritual well-being in education and working together with poets is becoming more vital than ever for young people’s flourishing and collective recovery. The project will reinvigorate a variety of youth voices in educational and contemporary poetry debates to reimagine the place of spoken word poets in education towards a youth-led SMSC.
This website contains information about the research, upcoming events, and a conference.
PJV artwork by © Naomi Gennery
Funding
The project is part of a one-year Postdoctoral Research Fellowship titled Poetic Justice Values in UK's Digital Spoken Word Education: Artographic to Autoethnographic Portraits of Collective Becoming, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
Project Reference: ES/W007010/1. The project gained ethical approval from the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge.
Contact
If you want to get project updates via email, please sign up to the mailing list by contacting PoeticJusticeValues@educ.cam.ac.uk
Twitter: @PJV_project
Partners
Special thanks to our partners and funders Cambridge Digital Humanities, Economic and Social Research Council ESRC and Young Identity. Learn more about the work of the Cambridge ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership for Social Sciences.
