Teaching Creative Writing and English Literature:
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I teach creative writing courses which are small workshops for about fifteen people and I teach literature courses that typically have 20-35 people. I have two distinct personalities almost every semester. I have students that take me both semesters and they indicate I am different in each. So how I teach and the things I like to do over the years have changed but it is definitely a different experience. My experience as a creative writing instructor has definitely affected how I handled the larger lecture conversations of my English Literature classes.
In the creative writing workshops, I am really interested in having my students speak as much as possible. We talk about poetry in these classes so it is possible for me to ask my students to read, when its their alphabetical turn, to read their own literary product of the week aloud. Everyone has a copy of it in front of them. After the student has read his/her poem, I ask the student to ask any questions of the class or make any comments about the poem that he or she wishes to. Then I ask the student to be quiet and not say anything until the class has concluded its discussion. I then give the students a quicker meeting experience where I say, to the students, there is no pressure for you to say anything and to go ahead and collect your thoughts, and think about what you’re going to say.
I always ask the students to be mindful of their initial impressions, to try to be as true in their comments to their own initial impression. Ideally they would have read and studied the text beforehand so they come to class, prepared in that way. Then we have a free flowing conversation, and when they are ready to start talking about the poem, we start talking about it; almost all the students speak, about 10 of the 15 people in the class. Some of the comments are quite wonderful; searching, probing and pushing. I’m there to add information, to ask additional questions, to push the group to think about things they have not yet thought of. So we try to engage in work in progress, everything is a draft, possible for a future revision. We are very much involved in the process of student engagement, with their own creative process and artistic endeavor. That is the model of the workshop method, as I use it.
We do sometimes talk about great published or interesting work. Generally, I conduct those kinds of conversation as if it were offline. Online, using blackboard, having students read stories and poems and comment on their reactions to those things. It is usually a pretty cozy and comfortable situation. Sometimes it is a little more electric and sometimes it’s tense and stiff. It depends on the caliber of the student work which varies from class to class and semester to semester.
In my literature classes, in recent years I have been teaching a year-long survey of American Poetry for undergraduate student population. I start off in 1650 with M. Bradstreet’s poetry and move up to the current moment in two semesters. So it is a rapidly moving course that requires us to look at a lot of different poetry. I try to emphasize three or four poets each semester more than others, so there is some magnetic foci that the course develops. I am also really interested in the students experiencing and acquiring the historical development progress of the discipline.
I do this through, not lecturing very much, but rather am more inclined to be interested in the nature of their engagement with the work. While someone could lecture about the biography of the author, or the historical situation in which it was written, or the philosophical issues it is engaging, it misses the point of its being an artwork and the experience of the artwork. That is what engages me the most.
I read poems aloud in class, or parts of poems. I have students read poems aloud in class. I ask students to memorize poems and come to my office to recite them. I want to stress to them the engagement with the text. I have taught graduate students in seminars and American Poetry and what I have discovered is that graduate students in English do not generally know how to read and speak poetry. In fact, it is very hard for students to know how to engage with words used in the language of poetry. It is almost like learning a separate foreign language. It has so many long traditions and ways of doing business that are different from ordinary speech. It feels daunting for people because it is, in fact, extraordinary and it also should feel very familiar to people. I think it is hard for students to read poetry if they are only reading it as they would with factual text or novels. Poetry is something you read many times and that you can memorize and take on a different life every time you read it. So trying to engage students with the experience of the poetry is a large part of what I try to do.
It does seem that we do speak in a typical class about perhaps three or four poems. We understand, we work towards a close reading of these poems and a vibrant understanding of each of these poems. The goal the student should achieve when walking out of class is that he/she understands the poem in a way they didn’t understand it before. The next time they go to read similar poems, they may or may not feel they can get closer on their own. They may say “How come I can’t understand it right now and felt like I could really understand it in class?” I think that if you keep taking poetry classes, eventually you have that experience that you can make them blossom on your own, but it is not an easy thing to achieve. There are so many writers and so many different ways of approaching this subject and each particular mood has its own difficulty and requirements.
I try to get students to sometimes write a brief statement about what they have understood from some particular passage or poem in class and then talk about in small groups with each other. I have developed an assignment that I give people early in the course in which I ask them to go off and have coffee with each other in small groups of two or three people just to talk about a particular poem. I have them meet twice and when they are done with their two meetings on a particular poem, then they each have to write a separate paper. They more or less have done what I want them to do in class which is to think about how the poem works and then write a paper that develops their own understanding.
They learn pretty quickly and everyone in the class has something to contribute to the conversation about what is going on. They learn that they have valuable ideas on their own and learn to articulate their thoughts and experiences with the poems. That is a privy way to begin. Of course, they know two or three people from the class from the beginning of the semester and I think it helps as an icebreaker experience. They write long papers and short papers and because I have been teaching these courses, recently, as WID courses, they actually do a lot of writing and I think that really helps them understand and develop themselves as writers.
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