ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a case study about supplementing distance-learning biotechnology modules with digital video poetry to engage and facilitate student learning while also suggesting that digital video poems are a form of hybrid poetry that can offer valuable affordances for teaching. Enriching STEM subjects with digital video poems, appended with images and video clips, makes learning more engaging. This enables a transformative teaching interaction allowing the subject to become more meaningful, empowering, and exciting, thereby fostering a student growth mindset. In the first phase of the project, video poems were created by environmental poets and shared with students. In the second phase, students created their own digital poems. The authors illustrate how video poetry allows scientific language to mingle with lyrical language, crossing modes by interlacing video, image, and sound with words. The results can be seen rhizomatic (Deleuze & Guattari 1987). Hybrid creations can de- and re-territorialize; they can shift from the realms of science to poetry and back again, allowing science students to develop an appreciation of poetry while learning more about their own subjects.
