Imaginative Teaching through Creative Writing

A Guide for Secondary Classrooms

Amy Ash, Michael Dean Clark, Chris Drew, Amy Ash, Michael Dean Clark, Chris Drew

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350152700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Scrittura creativa

Growing out of recent pedagogical developments in creative writing studies and perceived barriers to teaching the subject in secondary education schools, this book creates conversations between secondary and post-secondary teachers aimed at introducing and improving creative writing instruction in teaching curricula for young people. Challenging assumptions and lore regarding the teaching of creative writing, this book examines new and engaging techniques for infusing creative writing into all types of language arts instruction, offering inclusive and pedagogically sound alternatives that consider the needs of a diverse range of students. With careful attention given to creative writing within current standards-based educational systems, Imaginative Teaching through Creative Writing confronts and offers solutions to the perceived difficulty of teaching the subject in such environments. Divided into two sections, section one sees post-secondary instructors address pedagogical techniques and concerns such as workshop, revision, and assessment before section two explores hands-on activities and practical approaches to instruction. Focusing on an invaluable and underrepresented area of creative writing studies, this book begins a much-needed conversation about the future of creative writing instruction at all levels and the benefits of collaboration across the secondary/post-secondary divide.

Part One

1

Finding Our Angels in Ourselves: Overcoming Lore and Myth to Teach Creative Writing

Stephanie Vanderslice

University of Central Arkansas

Creative learning and creative writing are important in virtually any education curriculum from kindergarten through university because they are essential to the working lives people will lead in the twenty-first century. As Patrick Blessinger articulates in “Transforming Higher Education’s Creative Capacity,” creative learning is important because “jobs that do not require some form of creativity are more likely to be outsourced or automated. Creative industries contribute significantly to gross economic output and that contribution is likely to increase in the future.”¹ In other words, we must prepare our students for a future in which they are able to respond to a constantly changing economy that will demand their creative response.

Incorporating creative writing into the classroom and addressing standards at the same time is not difficult; it just requires a little, ahem, creativity. In the next chapter of this book, Chris Drew makes an abundant, detailed case for the ways in which the Common Core standards correspond to teaching creative writing in the K–12 classroom, calling for secondary ELA teachers to “further refine and communicate how creative writing pedagogy and practice serve as powerful tools in reimagining and expanding the ways secondary English educators can help their students succeed.”

But even if those of us who teach English agree that creative writing belongs in the ELA classroom, there are still obstacles to teaching it. One of these is the persistence of myths about writers and creative writing. At the postsecondary level, the discipline of Creative Writing Studies has been trying to debunk these myths for years. But because, through no fault of their own, as Drew notes, “many teachers have neither been taught creative writing pedagogy nor participated in a creative writing workshop, since such activities are not usually part of their required training,” they are at risk for reinscribing these myths in their own classroom instead of providing their students with a more authentic creative writing experience. Before describing what the authentic creative writing experience is, let’s take a look at what some of these creative writing myths are and how they came to be.

Myth Magic

There are many myths—ideas about creative writing that are not grounded in research or fact—that surround the practice of creative writing in Western culture, from the idea that creative writers require illegal substances to stimulate their creativity to the idea that writers can only write in a garret when inspired. For the purposes of this chapter, however, I am going to focus on the myths that are most inhibiting to secondary ELA teachers and that may not only prevent them from incorporating creative writing in their classroom but, importantly, from seeing themselves as writers and empowering their students as writers. These myths are:

1. Creative writers are “born,” not made, and we must be rigorous in our gatekeeping because our society can only support a very few of these “born” creative writers.

2. Good creative writing just naturally springs from the pen of these “born” writers with little attention to process and revision.

Indeed, from where I stand, after twenty-five years of teaching and working with teachers, it is the first myth that is the most damaging. In that time, I have encountered dozens of people—some of them my own students, some already teaching ELA whom I encountered through the National Writing Project—who felt they were “not” writers, and many who were actually (and undeservedly) ashamed of their writing. They were victims of a cultural conception that a writer either “has it or they don’t,” and either they didn’t believe they had “it,” or they had actually been told by another gatekeeper along the way, often early in their education, that they didn’t. Some of them had even become gatekeepers themselves, eager to pronounce who among their students seem to have “it” and who did not, as if it was their cultural responsibility.

The truth is, and the research shows, people are not actually “born” writers. Writers progress at different rates over the course of their development. One writer who appears to have “it” in your classroom may simply be someone who has read extensively and written for pleasure for many years, and so they have more experience than the student at the desk next to them who did not have those advantages and has never considered writing much before but is interested in it now. Our culture loves to “anoint” writers and artists, to proclaim one person among a group or class as the “one,” but the fact is, most beginning creative writing classes are simply collections of people at different stages of practice and experience. Some writers who may end up being successful are only getting started and are making the same mistakes that the more practiced reader and writer got to make in the privacy of their own home when they read past bedtime and wrote page after page in their journals.

As Vicki Spandel notes in The 9 Rights of Every Writer, none of us are born walking, yet when we watch a toddler practice cruising, stumbling, and falling, we don’t say, “He’s no walker.” We all learn to walk at different rates, but we eventually learn to walk.² Likewise, when my younger son walked a month earlier than my older son did (partly because he was extremely motivated to catch up with his brother), I didn’t say, “Look at that kid. He’s a natural. He’s going to be a great walker someday.” That’s because walking is something we assume that most of us—at least those who don’t have a disability that affects them in this way—will be able to achieve with practice. But because creative writing is considered one of the arts, Westerners view it differently. We think we should limit the number of people who can see themselves as artists. We gatekeep. And that gatekeeping starts as early as elementary school. Each year when I teach creative writing pedagogy, a course I have been teaching for seventeen years, I usually get a variation on the following question from one of my students—often a preservice teacher: “What if I have a student who just doesn’t have ‘it’ as a writer? When should I tell them? What’s the best way to break it to them?”

The scary thing about this question and the fact that it keeps occurring is that many of the students who ask it will be teaching either elementary or secondary language arts. Basically, they are assuming that they should single one writer out of a group of, say, ten-year-olds or fifteen-year-olds, who they believe has “it” and encourage them, and that it is their responsibility as teachers to gently discourage the rest. They are also assuming that they are the ones who should be making this distinction and that they will simply “know” creative writing talent when they see it—a dubious assessment method if I ever saw one. Today, even most university writing teachers will tell you they never discourage people from writing, because “making it” as a writer has just as much to do with perseverance and determination as it does talent or anything else.

These kinds of assumptions are not the fault of these preservice teachers or even those currently teaching elementary and secondary ELA who might also hold them. Creative writing myths have been reinscribed generation after generation in a way that leaves no one unaffected. Current ELA teachers may have been celebrated for their writing, for being the most talented writer in the classroom, at the expense of others, or disdained and told, “Hate to break it to you kid, but you’re no Shakespeare.” Nobel prize-winning author Toni Morrison once famously wrote, “The function of freedom is to free someone else.”³ Not surprisingly, many teachers fear writing, teaching creative writing, or even calling themselves writers because they too are caged by these myths. They don’t feel free to be writers, so they cannot free their students to aspire to be writers either.

Where did this myth come from? It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact origin of the myth, but the Romantics of the nineteenth century have a lot to answer for. As Joshua Wolf Shenk explains, in the eighteenth century, “as the feudal and agrarian gave way to the capitalist and industrial, artists needed to be more than entertaining; they needed to be original, [in order] to profit from the sale of their work.”⁴ It became more important for artists to set themselves apart, to be seen as “geniuses,” “lit up by an inner light,” and during the Romantic era, “the true cult of the natural genius emerged.”⁵ Shakespeare was a “signal example; so little biographical material existed that his story could be made up.”⁶ While the story of Shakespeare according to the Romantics dominates—that one individual genius gave birth to dozens of brilliant plays with a talent that sets him light years apart from anyone else—the actual history is somewhat different. Playwriting in the Renaissance was a collaborative effort in which dramatists, according to Shenk, made “compelling work from familiar materials. Shakespeare, for example, did not typically dream up new ideas for plays whole cloth but rewrote, adapted, and borrowed from the plots, characters, and language of previous works.” In fact, Romeo and Juliet is an “episode-by-episode dramatization of a poem by Arthur Brooke.”⁷

Fast forward to today and the Romantic genius myth continues to suffuse our culture, as Shenk points out, where posters paying homage to the individual genius—think Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Feynman, Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, Walt Disney, and so forth—decorate classrooms around the country, failing to mention that most of these individuals collaborated with others or, at the very least, like Shakespeare, drew from the context of their time and the work that preceded it.⁸

So, while the genius myth originated with the Industrial Revolution and the Romantic era, artists in the two hundred years since have done much to perpetuate it, often because it serves them as well. If there are actual steps to developing as a writer—reading, studying, practicing—the individual artist might become less important than the process. Less unique. Less saleable.

Concurrent with the myth of the genius, then, is the myth that the best creative writing arrives close to fully formed, borne on the wings of angels to the lucky few. As Wendy Bishop notes in Released into Language: Some Options for Teaching Creative Writing, however, writers are notoriously unreliable narrators of their own writing processes—often misremembering their process in ways that make them appear (surprise!) special, unique, or chosen.⁹ Romantic writer William Blake, for example, likened his writing process to “taking dictation from angels.”¹⁰ Certainly, there are times when writers experience a kind of “flow”—the state that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi named and described “as a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation”¹¹ where their writing feels divinely inspired. But what writers often leave out are all the times they struggle to put words on the page as well as all the different prewriting strategies they develop, through time and experience, in order to achieve any writing at all. As a result, when beginning writers sit down to write and discover, “Wow, this is really hard, where are my angels?,” their next step is often to assume: “If there are no angels, I must not be a real writer.” Likewise, if their teacher also believes that “real” writers get it right more or less the first time, with only a little editing, they will fail to teach the writing process or teach it in such a way that they imply that “process” is really only for those who struggle with writing, not those who, you guessed it, have been given the elusive “it”—the golden “Congratulations, you are a real writer” ticket from the literary gods.

So How Did We Get Here?

Although aspects of the history of creative writing pedagogy have been described in other chapters in this book, it’s worth connecting the rise of creative writing as a teachable subject to the ways in which, even as a teachable subject, it has resisted theory and research to ultimately explain why a lot of these myths continue to persist in creative writing classrooms at all levels. Traces of the inclusion of creative writing in higher education begin as far back as the...