Establishing Creative Writing Studies as an Academic Discipline (New Writing Viewpoints): 7 - Softcover

Dianne Donnelly

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847695892 ISBN 13: 9781847695895

Publisher: Multilingual Matters, 2011

Synopsis

This book advances creative writing studies as a developing field of inquiry, scholarship, and research. It discusses the practice of creative writing studies, the establishment of a body of professional knowledge, and the goals and future direction of the discipline within the academy. This book also traces the development of creative writing studies; noting that as the new discipline matures—as it refers to evidence of its own research methodology and collective data, and locates its authority in its own scholarship—creative writing studies will bring even more meaning to the academy, its profession, and its student body.

About this title

About the Author

Dianne Donnelly is the editor of Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? (2010) and co-editor of Key Issues in Creative Writing (forthcoming). Her fiction and scholarship appear in numerous venues, and she is a frequent conference presenter on the subject of creative writing. She teaches at the University of South Florida where she is also the Associate Director of Composition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Establishing Creative Writing Studies as an Academic Discipline

By Dianne Donnelly

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2012 Dianne Donnelly
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84769-589-5

Contents

List of Figures, 
Acknowledgements, 
Introduction: The Emergence of Creative Writing Studies, 
Section 1 A Taxonomy of Creative Writing Pedagogies, 
Section 2 The Writing Workshop Model, 
Section 3 The Academic Home of Creative Writing Studies, 
Conclusion: The Legitimacy of Creative Writing Studies, 
References, 

CHAPTER 1

A Taxonomy of Creative Writing Pedagogies

While the field of composition studies yields many useful taxonomies and axiologies on the teaching of writing, the field of creative writing studies is just beginning to emerge in this area of research. Composition's cognitive approaches, in particular, which sought correspondence between writing and learning and between how writers make decisions and choices in the writing process, might have served as a platform for parallel research in creative writing practice. It might have bridged a discussion from the writing and learning practices of creative writers to the ways in which we privilege certain teaching approaches and how these practices inform course planning, teaching strategies and classroom structure. Likewise, the field of literary studies has concerned itself with the research and study of literature from multiple (albeit conflicting) perspectives, presenting for creative writing, at a minimum, alternative methodologies for perceiving a text as verbal icon and for challenging master narratives.

What I discover when I survey the creative writing landscape for studies in teaching theories is limited. This is in spite of Bishop's (1994) plea for creative writing research methodology, ethnographic studies and teacher self-reports and Moxley's (1989) proposal for the interrogation of creative writing practices. Their work, often cited in today's scholarship, has moved the field forward only incrementally, perhaps because, as Moxley notes, creative writing teachers have a 'relative lack of interest in pedagogy' (1989: 27). Creative writing's isolationist posture is 'centuries old', and this stultifying stance leads Bizzaro to conclude that creative writers are skeptical 'of anything academic' (2004: 296). A mirroring of this 'view of science-as-devourer [is] put forth perhaps most emphatically and influentially in America by Edgar Allan Poe' in his 'In Sonnet – To Science': 'Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,/Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?' (qtd. in Bizzaro, 2004: 296).

In general, creative writers and writer-teachers seem to talk around the subject of research. The discipline often does not produce outcome data. It has little tangible evidence that affirms that our teaching methods improve student writing. In fact, because creative writing has often been defined by its writing workshop model, some in the field wonder if there is a substantial discipline from which to draw data on its teaching theories and practices, and if so, Shirley Geok-lin Lim (2003: 151) questions, 'How should we begin to talk about such a discipline?'

It may come as no surprise that creative writing lags in the study and theorizing of its teaching practices when we appreciate that the majority of graduate creative writing programs do not include coursework related to the pedagogy of creative writing, and only a handful of such programs provides training in teacher preparation. Ritter (2001: 213), who surveyed PhD creative writing programs in 2001, concludes, '[m]ost U.S. universities have no specific training in place that would prepare candidates to enter the creative writing classroom even remotely as well prepared as their rhetoric and composition Ph.D. counterparts'. The point to be made here is twofold: The first is that teacher training should assuredly include topics and/or courses in the history of creative writing, the theories behind pedagogical approaches, research methodologies in creative writing, contemporary issues in creative writing and, possibly, curricular design. The second reason to champion teacher training is partly rolled into the first point in that an awareness of historical approaches should lay the groundwork for important research studies that influence how we practice, how we teach our students and where meaning lies in our classrooms. It stands to reason that an immersion in the field's history and in teacher training will lead to more critical rethinking of our modes of instruction as well as notions on how this critical rethinking will translate to what and how we teach our students.

Mayers calls for an inquiry into the field's history beyond the contextualization of creative writing. There exist a few important historical inquires such as D.G. Myers's (1996) The Elephants Teach, Stephen Wilbers's (1980) The Iowa Writers Workshop, Patrick Bizzaro's (1993) Responding to Student Poems and Paul Dawson's (2005) Creative Writing and the New Humanities. Of the books mentioned, only Bizzaro and Dawson directly suggest ways to learn from creative writing's history and offer new avenues to approach its practice. What Mayers has in mind when he calls his fellow craft critics to action is for creative writing teachers to go beyond this historical research to discover different ways to consider our history, to explore new paths to contextualize its meaning and to construct variable lenses from which to view history in a different light. I suggest that there is still much we can learn from the history of creative writing from Emerson's naming of creative writing in his 1837 essay 'The American scholar' to contemporary creative writing praxes in university programs that might better inform our pedagogy. There exists significant data from which we can draw conclusions related to our teaching approaches and by which we might better integrate strategic program development in light of the new challenges we face in the 21st century.

In the early nineties, Bishop laments that creative writing teachers know little of the theory that informed their pedagogies and, as such, they could not voice the tenets behind their classroom practices because they lack reference. Almost a decade later, D.W. Fenza (2000) advances this same concern when he says, '[f]ew writers in the academy know the history of their own profession as teachers of writing'. In fact, Bizzaro (2004: 295) suggests practitioners 'view creative writing as something that has stumbled, by chance alone, into academe'. What is more, because writers do not know their history, they miss opportunities to address the theoretical rationale of the practices in their classroom. As such, Fenza tells us that 'they sometimes find it hard to defend their work against the scholars, the theorists and commentators who trivialize it'. If we are to bring the relevancy of history to current teaching practices, then we must include the view of English department chairs such as Stephen Tatum, the 1993 department chair at the University of Utah, whose essay in the ADE Bulletin forewarns 'The end of creative writing in the English department'. While Tatum's discussion does not necessarily include the teaching of creative writing, he does regret the curricula of graduate programs, which position the history of genres and of literature as an adversary to the creative writing candidate. His complaint has significance for the creative writing graduate who interviews for tenure-track positions today. This lack of history and it pertinence to a candidate's field and subsequently to her teaching opportunities is a reality we cannot ignore or resist in our reform. Given creative writing's changing goals, those which move us from a generation of publishing writers to a generation of teachers performing in the creative industries of education and business, it is time, as Bizzaro (2004: 300) urges, 'to reconsider the way we think of creative writing as a teachable subject'.

It becomes difficult, I suggest, to ground theoretical underpinnings to our teaching pedagogy without such historical reference. Moreover, the lack of empirical data and investigative studies into creative writing's teaching praxes leaves much of what goes on in the creative writing classroom unexamined, untheorized. Consequently, creative writing continues to operate from a base of assumptions that is situated more on practice than on research. However, if creative writing practitioners can agree on the principle that what they teach in their creative writing classes filters down to how they teach their creative writing students, then it is possible to break this hypothesis down further to conclude that methods of pedagogy are driven by a teacher's perception of where meaning lies in the context of the writing process. What a teacher privileges as it relates to text, writer, reader and reality (as an implicit or explicit world-view) is tied directly to her pedagogies, to the structure of her classroom, to her course planning, selection of readings, choice of exercises and assignments, reading practices, classroom management, workshop practice, social relations – and evaluation, justification and the grading of course requirements.

As my research interest relies on history, pedagogical implications and curricular design, what I propose is a four-part taxonomy of teaching approaches that converge, in part, on the principles underlying James Berlin's (1982: 765) analysis of teaching differences as those 'located in the diverging definitions of the composing process itself'. Berlin insists that all pedagogy is ideological; any single approach supports an underlying set of values while questioning others. These rhetorical elements are often represented as a triangle and, as such, the element placed within the triangle assumes the greatest teacher emphasis. Pedagogy, as John Trimbur reminds us, is exacted by ideology.

Similarly, the operational pedagogy of creative writing teachers can be analyzed according to a set of interactions among the elements of the composing process. Equivalently, teaching differences of creative writing teachers are located as disparate privileging (rather than definitions) of the composing process.

While Berlin (1982: 766) identifies four principal pedagogical theories and concerns each with the way it interprets and associates writer, reality, audience and language 'to form a distinct world construct with distinct rules for discovering and communicating knowledge', his classifications and purposes do not necessarily align optimally for the case of creative writing pedagogy. The dominant composition teaching theories engage with, among other elements, principles of truth and its relationship with the world and to language, reality as it exists to the writer and inductive versus deductive processes.

This is an oversimplification, of course, of the field's teaching constructs; however, there is more relevance in an analysis of creative writing's salient pedagogies and their strategies for communicating where meaning lies in the composing processes in M.H. Abrams's (1953) four overriding theories of artistic transaction as outlined in The Mirror and the Lamp. I approach my taxonomy of creative writing pedagogies by using Abrams's classifications to explain his: (1) objective theory – which describes New Criticism, a creative writing pedagogy that privileges meaning with the text, (2) expressivist theory – to detail expressivist functions of self-expression as well as the influences of Romanticism, both which place meaning for the creative writing teacher with the writer, (3) mimetic theory – to discuss the imitable functions of the writer's world that emphasize that meaning lies with the 'universe', and (4) pragmatic theory – to characterize reader-response pedagogy that situates meaning with the reader.

Moreover, a second major strand in an axiological study of teaching practices involves the complicated social relations within the structure of our creative writing classrooms that are created, in part, by the constructs of our methods and philosophies. As practitioners, we tend to oversimplify the interactive and dialectical nature of the teacher-student relationship. However, when teachers can view their classroom dynamics through a Lacanian lens, they can better understand the actualities of students' behavior both in class and in their writing and how teacher-student interaction influences such behavior. More specifically, psychoanalytic theory offers valuable and concrete assistance in explaining – through Lacanian theories of the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic orders and the dynamics of transference and counter-transference – what goes on beneath the surface of our writing instruction and how we might decode it more constructively for ourselves and for our students.

Where Meaning Lies – A Multi-Faceted Approach

In Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Gerald Graff (1987: 10) contends that 'no text is an island'. Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack (2002: 1) add that 'no form of theory or act of criticism is an island either'. Graeme Harper (2006: 1) cautions us not to moor our students' learning to one specific island when he suggests in his introduction to Teaching Creative Writing that the 'learning of creative writing' by our students 'gains nothing at all from being considered the remit of only one type of learner or one type of teacher'. Richard Fulkerson (1990: 424) offers that '[e]ven if you know where you want to go, a shrewd Cheshire Cat can point out more than one path to get you there, as well as some attractive ones that won't'. Moreover – and this is an axiom borrowed from James Berlin's (1982: 766) taxonomy of composition pedagogical approaches – creative writing teachers must also be cognizant that through their determinable intent, they 'are tacitly teaching a version of reality and the student's place and mode of operation in it'.

My posture leans more toward not privileging any one element of the communication transaction whether it is finding meaning with the text, the writer or the reader. Instead of a singular pedagogical focus, I believe we must continue to challenge and question the underlying set of values Berlin associates with each pedagogy so as to acknowledge the assorted and changing ideological forces at work. Teachers can avoid giving conflicting messages to their students when they are aware of their own pedagogies, stay current with research and scholarship, and make adjustments along the way to their approaches. Assessing our own pedagogy is critical to what and how we pass on writerly and readerly skills to our students. While there is expected overlap as Abrams suggests – 'Although any reasonably adequate theory takes some account of all four elements, almost all theories ... exhibit a discernible orientation toward one only' (p. 6) – teachers should be conscious of their pedagogical theories as much as this is possible.

Perhaps, it is even time for creative writing teachers to ask what alternative methods they might conceive in their classrooms. For example, creative writing teachers might begin with practices based in composition theory or literary studies theory and find new ways to apply such principles to the specifics of creative writing as they keep in mind the unique ways that creative writers think, read and write. Katherine Haake (1994: 81) concurs that there is value in engaging in a 'spirit of interdisciplinary curiosity' as it 'will help us reconstruct our own projects [pedagogies] in such a way as to respond not only to the needs of all our students but also to our own'. Stagnated as we may be on any one given practice – or worse – not knowing the implications of our practices, limits the direction of our teaching strategies, our course design and our students' ability to broaden their knowledge and reading/writing skills. We must, as Haake notes, 'reject as our purpose the unexamined, single-minded pursuit of the literary artifact', and once we can move beyond the kind of funneled teaching that contains us, we 'must then ask how we might begin to re-envision and transform not just our expectations of our students and their work, but those also of ourselves and our own work, at least within the context of our discipline' (1994: 81). Such re-envisioning and transforming might include varying classroom methodology, experimenting with different approaches and opening the creative writing course to the emergence of new theories that might come about as a result of the conscious blurring of lines between approaches. Studies and practices such as these propel creative writing studies forward as a separate and distinct discipline with research and scholarship of its own making.

As methods of pedagogy are driven by how we locate meaning in a text, one concern relates to model confusion, a case where teachers apply meaning in one composing structure but evaluate according to another. Our reading and writing processes are informed over years of practice and, as such, when we teach these processes to our students, we must be careful of conflicting theories. Bishop (1990: 15) cautions teachers that 'it is possible to hold unexamined or conflicting theories and to be resistant to theoretical and practical changes'. Too often teachers confuse their students when they apply differing motivating philosophies in the classroom. One approach may signify meaning in some element of practice (e.g. the reading of professional texts, the choice of writing prompts) and another as it relates to the evaluation emphasis (e.g. revision suggestions for student drafts, judgments of what constitutes 'good writing'). When our 'guidance [is] grounded in assumptions that simply do not square with each other' (Berlin, 1982: 766), we confound our students' learning.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Establishing Creative Writing Studies as an Academic Discipline by Dianne Donnelly. Copyright © 2012 Dianne Donnelly. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1847695892
• ISBN 13: 9781847695895
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 168