Poetry, Gender and Teaching: Building Students’ Character through Multicultural Literature

This paper is aimed to explore the concern of gender in teaching poetry as an effort to build student’s character through multicultural literature. The students’ success in life is based on 80% of their soft skill. This is in line with the objective of teaching literature that focuses on developing the affective side of the students. Gender problem is one of the crucial and complicated issues in contemporary multicultural society. Gender issues cover various disciplines; literature and education are among them. These multicultural circumstances, including gender, are portrayed in poetry of multicultural poet’s background. This can be used as rich and inspiring resources for teaching poetry and is valuable for developing students’ character that gets weak from time to time. This weakening condition is caused by the teaching method focusing on developing more and more the cognitive side of the students. Poetry and literature in general, bears human soul that touches four elements of human being: intellectual, sense, imagination and emotion. Thus, teaching poetry can develop gender awareness of the students to prepare themselves be persons with strong character to live in contemporary life which are full of gender problems