ABSTRACT
Festering poetry Recently I watched a student teacher teaching ‘Death of a Naturalist’ (Heaney 1998: 5) by Seamus Heaney. It was a predictable lesson. I want to describe this lesson to illustrate how the literacy strategy can push inexperienced teachers into mechanistic methods of teaching focused on linguistic features at word and sentence level. In rethinking this lesson I want to foreground the experience of nature as the primary source of inspiration for planning to teach a nature poem. In making this shift I want to show how an ecocritical approach can open up the text to children’s experiences of nature, encouraging creative and critical responses.
