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

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

We also underestimated the degree to which some students expected the course to focus strictly on practical issues -on prescribing teaching materials, classroom strategies, and expert advice that they could take directly into their teaching. Despite our course description that clearly articulated the course's interdisciplinary aims, these students felt that how-to instruction was the proper aim of a "teaching" course and sometimes saw theoretical and pedagogical reflections as intrusions. As one anonymous midterm evaluation put it, "I am frustrated by the conversations that go in circles about things like who can teach creative writing, what constitutes good writing, and how to evaluate writing. We will never come to an agreement on these questions, so we should focus our attention on the practical aspects of the classroom." In another student's words, "I see the value of raising assumptions that underlie our teaching, but it seems important to come, if not to a perfect consensus, at least to some general sense of a range of good choices to apply in our teaching."

Because we never intended to design a "methods" course and had made this clear in the syllabus, 1 took some of the students' frustration in stride. Nonetheless, I had to come to terms with the fact that I had overestimated some students' interest in and preparation for grappling with extended theoretical explorations. Because I teach mostly Ph.D.-level courses for composition graduate students who intend to do scholarly and theoretical work, I had lost touch with the fact that the courses I was accustomed to were not necessarily the kinds of courses that master's level students in education and creative writing -for whom methods courses or writing workshops were the norm-found familiar or self-evidently worthwhile. Because Kwame and I agree that we want the course to include students from these master's programs, and because in the future we hope to attract local K-12 teachers as well, we will need to deal with these expectations. Possible solutions might include spending an early class session talking explicitly about the relationship between theory and practice; beginning the practically-oriented assignments earlier in the semester; and setting aside more time to draw conclusions (even if that conclusion is only that several competing viewpoints have emerged), so that students don't feel that the course lacks direction.

These glitches in the syllabus are easily fixed; more difficult were the tensions that emerged among the students - especially between MFA and non-MFA students. This division took me by surprise. I had taught nearly all the students before in composition courses, knew many of them well, and had seen several of them collaborate happily on other projects. Forgetting that these previous courses had stayed within traditional disciplinary boundaries, I didn't anticipate that in this class the stakes would change. The trouble started in the third week of the term, when our scheduled discussion topics included whether creativity can be taught and who should teach creative writing. Several MFA students spoke in favor of the "master poet / apprentice" model traditionally favored in creative writing programs, positing that in most cases, only a published creative writer can understand enough about the dynamics of the creative process to effectively teach it. Another MFA student suggested that perhaps a "sliding-scale" model would be appropriate: non-specialists might appropriately teach creative writing to children and beginners, but older and more talented students should be taught by published writers.