What do Readers Want? Teaching Students to Think Like Editors
What does it mean to think and act like an editor? This is the question I recently posed to the students in my Introduction to Poetry course as they began work on their final project of the semester: a multimodal critical edition of Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard.
By producing a scrolling essay (a multimodal webpage) for their assigned poem, each student carefully curates multimedia content to supplement their contextual introduction to and footnotes for the poem. These submissions are then compiled to form the complete multimodal edition of Native Guard, which students experience through a virtual gallery walk. I love integrating digital tools, specifically Adobe Express, into my poetry curriculum through carefully scaffolded multimodal projects. These projects combine traditional literary analysis with a contemporary digital skillset, empowering students to engage with poetry in innovative ways as twenty-first-century readers and creators. In other words, by composing multimodal responses to Native Guard, students learn not only to read and interpret poetry that reckons simultaneously with both personal histories and national History but also to interact with the collection in a way that reflects the complexities and affordances of the twenty-first-century literary experience.
But what makes this project unique is that students have to think like an editor, not just like an undergraduate writer or a student of poetry. In this blog post, I share the assignment prompt, along with one of the scaffolded lesson plans that help students begin to adopt this new mindset.
Project Overview
Instead of providing a link to the nested Adobe Express webpages that contain the spring 2025 edition, I’ve recorded a quick video that samples some of the student work. Once students graduate and lose access to their work, links start to break. So, if you are planning on doing this type of project with your students and want to capture their work for posterity, (1) get permission from your students to share their work, (2) take screenshots and videos, and (3) make your own copy of their webpages.
Thinking Like an Editor: An Introductory Activity
The following slides provide a window into our class the day after I first introduced the project prompt. Students prepared for today’s session by reading two poems that help to contextualize the work Trethewey is doing in Native Guard: Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” and Joy Harjo’s “New Orleans.”
Phase 6 Google Doc Guide
For this collaborative meaning-making activity, in the Google Doc, you will work together in your group’s tab to create an appendix for our critical edition of Native Guard that teaches or demonstrates how to read the Harjo and/or Tate poem through the lens of your umbrella question.
In a critical edition, an appendix is a set of supplemental materials created to help readers engage more deeply with a literary work.
Your group has the creative freedom to design and structure your appendix as you see fit, as long as your choices are in the best interest of a reader who is being introduced to these poems for the first time and is eager to participate in conversations about them.
Need ideas? You might complete or combine any of the following
Write an editorial introduction that orients readers to the poem & its author and previews its relevance to Native Guard.
Draft footnotes clarifying historical references, diction, or imagery.
Choose a key passage to quote and show your reader how to annotate line-by-line, explaining not just tone, form, or thematic significance but the how and why of your annotating process.
Design a “How to Read This Poem” guide that frames the reader’s approach.
Write a mock interview or Q/A, modeling what a conversation about the poem and your umbrella question (and sub-questions) might be like.
Get graphic! Build a visual concept map or graphic organizer. Or, create a timeline or annotated map that situates key locations in the poems. You are welcome to use Adobe Express to produce any visual materials.
Excerpt and close read criticism of the poems. How do critics and the poets themselves talk about the poems? Show your reader how to engage meaningfully with these supplements.
Notes from Our Observer
I was grateful to be observed on the day I taught this activity. I wanted to share this letter because it’s one thing for me to tell you this activity works. It’s another thing entirely to hear it from a poet and educator who is meeting my students for the first time!
