Found poetry and communal memory-making in the L2 classroom

Taking examples from Hong Kong Anglophone poetry, this chapter offers pedagogical approaches to crafting experiential learning activities for L2 students which allow them to appreciate and respond to their local environment. The author observes that found poetry, as a form of performative ethnography (Prendergast et al. 2009), functions additionally as a potential archival and memory-making tool that can bridge the creative disciplines with the humanities and social sciences. This is illustrated through an experiential learning activity where local secondary school students are taken to an island to compose ekphrastic poems, as they traverse the rustic landscape with a related photo-poem pamphlet for inspiration. The students’ mimetic experience of this activity materializes through its learning outcomes, including rethinking their relationship with the immediate physical environment. Most significantly, the experience serves to memorialize a non-urbanized and unreclaimed part of Hong Kong. The essay also explores further avenues for pursuing community-based writing projects, such as finding ways to introduce Hong Kong students to the works of local poets whose own styles might employ aspects of pastiche, bricolage, or other text- and media-based art forms that are more readily accessible to L2 learners.