ENGLISH 890: STUDIES IN COMPOSITION AND RHETORIC "TEACHING CREATIVE WRITING: THEORIES AND PRACTICES"

Composition Studies, Fall 2003 by Dawes, Kwame, Friend, Christy

* Interdisciplinary reading: Mindful of Bishop's recommendation that creative writers and compositionists learn more about each other's work, we sought out readings that offered an interdisciplinary range of material on teaching creative writing, including articles on composition research and theory, essays by creative writers, articles by K-12 educators and social service professionals, empirical research on creativity, and teaching materials from interesting creative writing programs around the country. We hoped that this diversity would broaden students' understanding beyond the training and experiences they had received in their major fields.

* Varied Writing Assignments: We required that every student, regardless of his or her major, craft and submit both creative and scholarly projects: every student completed a small portfolio ofpoeins, designed lesson plans, and researched and wrote an academic seminar paper. While this format created a relatively heavy workload, we felt it was vital for an interdisciplinary course to push students to work both within and outside of their comfort zones. We also wanted to ensure that the course would acknowledge a full range of genres and modes of inquiry.

* Teaching component: Finally, we wanted everyone in the class to develop and actually teach creative writing lessons at sites of their choice. This practical component, we hoped, would build students' confidence in their teaching abilities and would illustrate that different combinations of skills and approaches are useful in different teaching settings.

Most of all, we wanted the course to embody a rich mix of theories, research, and practice that would help students draw on the resources of both composition and creative writing to approach their writing and their teaching in more thoughtful ways.

STATEMENT OF LOCALE________________________

In addition to these broad pedagogical influences, TCR responded to several ongoing needs on our campus. The course provided professional development for several groups of students:

* Graduate Students in Composition and Rhetoric: Recent MLAsponsored reports have called for graduate programs to broaden students' pedagogical training beyond preparation to teach first-year composition (ctd. in Ritter 208.) This need is especially pressing for departments like ours, whose Ph.D. graduates typically take jobs at small, regional colleges where they will teach a wide range of courses-including courses in creative writing. Our department already offered pedagogy courses in composition, literature, and business and technical writing. TCR seemed like a logical next step in this direction. The course broadened students' teaching credentials to include creative writing as well as experience with community outreach. It also introduced them to a new research area in composition -one that, as Wendy Bishop has noted, is ripe for scholarly investigation ("Places" 29).

* MFA Creative Writing Students: Creative writing graduates face one of the toughest job markets in the academy (Ritter 233). Yet until TCR, our MFA students had little opportunity to develop teaching credentials or to study the theoretical and pedagogical literature in their field. Because most teaching assistantships in the department are used to staff first-year composition, MFA students rarely get a chance to teach creative writing courses on campus; TCR, we hoped, could give them some substantive academic and practical preparation for teaching in their specialty - preparation that we hoped would enhance their qualifications on the job market.