This World Poetry Day on 21 March 2026, the theme is poetry’s power to bring people together and open up dialogue across different cultures. This theme connects strongly with Anti‑Racist Education work happening in Scotland, where we help learners explore voice, identity and fairness in meaningful ways.
Teachers are already using poetry to open up big conversations in safe ways. To support this work, the new Anti‑Racist English and Literacy Resource on antiracisted.scot offers a clear, curriculum‑linked way to explore poems through an anti‑racist lens.
The Anti‑Racist Literacy Framework is designed to help teachers explore any text, in any genre, at any CfE level, through questions that build critical thinking, empathy and awareness of power. It’s flexible, adaptable and easy to use – you can apply it to a single poem, a class novel, a picture book or a spoken-word performance.
Teachers can explore and use these four example poetry units. These are not prescriptive – they just show what’s possible when the Framework is applied in a literacy lesson!
Four poems
Across the four levels, the resource explores:
- Agency and boundaries through Saying No by Joseph Coelho (1st Level)
- The power of words and responding to racialised name‑calling through Stomp by Nikki Grimes (2nd Level)
- Whose stories we learn — and whose we don’t through Checking Out Me History by John Agard (3rd Level)
- Home, safety and displacement through What Is Home? by Mosab Abu Toha (4th Level)
Each unit models how to use the Framework questions to look at identity, voice, positionality and representation – all while meeting Curriculum for Excellence literacy experiences and outcomes at the right level.
World Poetry Day
Poetry invites learners to slow down, to pay attention, and to hear voices they may not have heard before. It creates space for conversations about:
fairness and unfairness
who gets heard
who is represented
how language can harm or heal
how we understand our own stories and those of others
The Anti‑Racist Literacy Framework strengthens this by giving teachers a structured, safe and curriculum‑aligned way to explore these themes – with poetry as the gateway.
Getting started
This World Poetry Day, choose any poem you already love and try one or two questions from the Framework with your class:
Whose voice is centred? Whose might be missing?
What do I need to understand about the writer’s identity or context?
How does the poem make me feel – and why?
What kinds of power do we see or hear in the poem?
If you’d like something ready to go instead, explore the four poetry units on antiracisted.scot – all free, curriculum-linked and created with experts, teachers and young people across Scotland.
Find out more about World Poetry Day.
