Creative Writing: Can It Be Taught?
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- Rudy Wiebe
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For 21 years I have been working in creative writing classrooms in schools, colleges and universities, both in the United States and Canada; if I don’t think that creative writing can be taught, I’m either a charlatan or an idiot. Now it is quite likely that persons (perhaps even academics) exist who believe me to be either, or both, but I would here like to explain that the teacher — who showed me it could be taught was Dr F. M. Salter, for some time the head of the English Department at this university.
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Wiebe, R. (1986). Creative Writing: Can It Be Taught?. In: Demers, P. (eds) The Creating Word. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07954-4_8
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ebook ∣ Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy
By stephanie vanderslice.
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Stephanie Vanderslice
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Creative Writing Cannot be Taught but it Can be Learned – Creative Writing in Higher Education
2022, Creative Writing Cannot be Taught but it Can be Learned – Creative Writing in Higher Education
The University of Iowa’s graduate Writers’ Workshop is ‘often considered the best MFA program in the country’ (Heimbach, 2021). However, despite Iowa providing the ‘founding model’ (Wandor, 2012, p. 51) for creative writing study, Menand (2009) discusses the premise’s scepticism, ‘that creative writing is something that can be taught’, and quotes the school themselves: ‘the fact that the Workshop can claim as alumni nationally and internationally prominent poets, novelists, and short story writers is, we believe, more the result of what they brought here than of what they gained from us’ (The University of Iowa, 2022). It is also interesting to consider how, as Laurillard (2012) discusses, for many years the university teaching pedagogy had been that of ‘imparting knowledge’, which ‘has usually been only a partially successful teaching activity’ (p. 11). If research is the ‘careful study of a subject, especially in order to discover new facts or information about it’ (Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, 2022), then creative writing students in higher education might learn as much, if not more, from their own research, as from lecturers/tutors.
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Creative writing as an academic discipline has been contested since the very beginning of its existence at the American universities, and "backlash against it is always in full blood" (Burroway, 61). To critics, it seems to be softer, and less rigorous discipline, in comparison to other English studies (Elliott 100). Other critics describe it as the most under-theorized and in that respect the most anachronistic [field] in the entire constellation of English study (Haake, 83). Even some faculty members at English departments expressed mockery and sarcasm when the universities began recruiting creative writers to teach creative writing. For instance, a professor of English at Cornell University, who when told of the proposal to hire the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, said to do so would be like the Department of Zoology hiring an elephant (Dibble & Van Loon. April 2000). In examining critics' negative stand, one may assume that it basically stems from two different misconceptions: first, critics seem unable or possibly unwilling to digest the idea that creative writing is a process-led, process-based discipline and its nature decrees different set of conventions and teaching techniques; second, it is more possibly that critics' adverse stand is based chiefly upon the performances of some incompetent instructors whose ineffective performances are taken as ground for criticism. Against all odds, creative writing has continued growing and expanding incessantly and has always received strength from its popularity and ability to recruit, and all attempts to marginalize it would be doomed to failure. Unfair and rather groundless attitudes persist regardless of the acknowledged popularity. The current study is designed to show the highlights of teaching creative writing at the American universities, and then to fairly discuss this peculiar experience and gauge its validation. After surveying the current state of this ever-blooming discipline and the negative stand held by some critics, the study examines the commonalties, the shared conventions, and the ground rules of fiction writing workshops. A considerable number of essentials would be tackled
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For undergraduates following any course of study, it is essential to develop the ability to write effectively. Yet the processes by which students become more capable and ready to meet the challenges of writing for employers, the wider public, and their own purposes remain largely invisible. Developing Writers in Higher Education shows how learning to write for various purposes in multiple disciplines leads college students to new levels of competence. This volume draws on an in-depth study of the writing and experiences of 169 University of Michigan undergraduates, using statistical analysis of 322 surveys, qualitative analysis of 131 interviews, use of corpus linguistics on 94 electronic portfolios and 2,406 pieces of student writing, and case studies of individual students to trace the multiple paths taken by student writers. Topics include student writers’ interaction with feedback; perceptions of genre; the role of disciplinary writing; generality and certainty in student writi...
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In this article, the author argues for the inclusion of creative writing assignments in secondary school disciplines other than English in order to (1) improve the authenticity of students’ written voices, (2) provide new formative evaluation tools for teachers, and (3) create opportunities for meaningful collaboration between secondary English teachers and teachers in other disciplines. The author provides a variety of example assignment ideas, including “time traveler” journals, poetry exercises, scriptwriting, and fictional journalism to further support the argument for creative writing in the disciplines.
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This special issue of TEXT responds to the current challenge faced by writers in the academy to identify with greater precision what it is about their work which is genuinely an original contribution to knowledge across the field of creative writing (or, more rarely, in another field). It follows from the acclaim with which the first three Creative Writing as Research special issues, published in TEXT in 2010, 2012 and 2014, have been met. In those landmark collections, creative writing pieces from writers based in universities around Australia and New Zealand were published under refereed circumstances with statements regarding their status as research attached. Not only – as reader feedback told us – did TEXT’s readership enjoy consuming a range of creative work from creative writing academic researchers, they also found the research statements useful as models for their own practice and others in their universities.
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The teaching of writing The problem arises in the definition of what is meant by "teaching" and "creative writing." If it means "turning out new Hemingways and Faulkners," of course workshop teachers can't do that and don't pretend to. If it means provid ing an opportunity for writing students to understand the na
ature can benefit creative writing students, it offers inroads for how creative ... was the long-standing skepticism about whether creative writing could be taught. What Mayers calls the "institutional-conventional wisdom" of creative 52 glenn clifton university of toronto quarterly, volume 91, number 1, winter 2022 ...
Can Creative Writing Be Taught? Stephen Carver. 2015, Mash Stories. A meditation on a very old pedagogical chestnut, arguing in favour of craft over art and the value of practise-based learning, originally published online in Blot the Skrip and Jar It, January 19, 2015. See Full PDF.
ovative Practices in Creative Writing TeachingxiPersonal opinion thus expressed, whatever someone is teaching it is not a matter of simply being good at a thing and then passin. on that expertise, osmotically, to someone else. Teaching involves modes of connecting, employing techniques for conveying information, explaining or d.
English teaching could be updated and refined for teachers of creative writing. In the third section, I empirically test my ideas and illustrate how my reinterpretation of the Cox Report played out when I taught my Masters' creative writing students. Finally, in my conclusion, I sum up the different reasons why we might teach creative writing.
Creative Writing: Can It Be Taught? 137 process of comment and discussion and invariable argument and sometimes drastic disagreement and occasional consensus of either censure or praise, both writer and discussants and instruc tor (so-called) are really being taught all they will ever be taught: exactly as much as they want to learn.
Synopsis: A page-long summary of the plot of a novel, screenplay, or other literary text written in engaging prose. Syntax: The principles that govern the rules of grammar, linguistics, and the construction of sentences and phrases. Tercet: Also known as a triplet, a tercet is a stanza of three lines in poetry.
Revised and updated throughout, this 10th-anniversary edition of Can Creative Writing Really Be Taught? is a significantly expanded guide to key issues and practices in creative writing teaching today.Challenging the myths of creative writing teaching, experienced and up-and-coming teachers explore what works in the classroom and workshop and what does not.
Revised and updated throughout, this 10th-anniversary edition of Can Creative Writing Really Be Taught? is a significantly expanded guide to key issues and practices in creative writing teaching today.Challenging the myths of creative writing teac...
activity requiring manual dexterity or artistic skill," and by which I mean, "a thing you can, with effort and attention, learn to get better at," and by "get better at," I really mean, "enjoy doing more." People like to talk about how writing can't be taught, and this is partly true: creative writing does involve vision and
According to Tok and Kandemir (2014) creative writing can be defined as any type of writing outside of the scheme that imposes on everyday communicative uses. For Harper (2010), creative writing consists of two things: the activities that occur during creative writing and the results of the work that emerges from creative writing activities.
(Moon, 2001). Indeed, creative writing education is embedded within the language subject in the curriculum and is not seen as arts education worldwide. During teaching and learning, creative writing is also mainly taught in functional ways rather than creative ways (Winston, 2011).
And refreshingly late in the collection, after much wrestling with the question of whether writing can be taught, Michelle Cross's "Writing In Public: Popular Pedagogies of Creative Writing" describes literary pedagogy, commercial pedagogy, holistic pedagogy, and iconic pedagogy as they likely appear, "whether or not as types per se ...
Part 1: Can It Really Be Taught? Influential Essays Revisited by Their Authors Introduction. Lore Past, Present, and Future: The Tenth Anniversary of Can Creative Writing Really Be Taught?(Stephanie Vanderslice, University of Central Arkansas, USA) 1. (Re)Figuring the Future: Lore, Creative Writing Studies, and Institutional Histories (Tim Mayers, Millersville University, USA) 2.
e PDF : 978-1-4742-8507- ePub: 978-1-4742-8506-3 ... Title: Can creative writing really be taught? : resisting lore in creative writing pedagogy / edited by Stephanie Vanderslice and Rebecca Manery. Description: 2nd edition, 10th Anniversary Edition. | London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, [2017] | "New chapters on identity and activism Can
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ts.Data analysis of question no 1: Feel comfortable and confident about the ability to write.Table 1, re. eals that a total of 33.5% of girls and b. ys students feel a little comfortable while writing. Among them 35% of girls and 35% are boys. In comparison, 22% feel much comfortable while writing and 30% rather.
creative writing can be taught as a form of therapy (2000); Smith and Wrigley reveal that teaching writing works well when teachers find communities of professional practice, nurturing spaces with
The progression through these stages is ultimately guided by an increasingly sophisticated internalization of the awareness of the reader, resulting in increasing objectivity toward their own work (268-72). (And as Vanderslice points out, Light's work is perhaps the best evidence that creative writing can, in fact, be taught [30-31]).
This book is suitable for informal educational settings and structured teaching environments. It may support writers of all skill levels who thrive from learning solo, in groups or a mixture thereof. It may also guide Creative Writing Professors who teach applied education courses at all levels - from certificate to Graduate-level coursework.
r. ourself to becom. a good writer are:1. Write, write, write2. ead, read, readThe more you write, the more you will improve. Don't wait for inspiration to strike, don't aspire to writing, do. 't be embarrassed if you're not as good as you want to be. Just sit down, and, as Orson Scott Card says, "writ.
Louisiana public schools are now required to display the Ten Commandments in all classrooms, after Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed the requirement into law Wednesday.
51) for creative writing study, Menand (2009) discusses the premise's scepticism, 'that creative writing is something that can be taught', and quotes the school themselves: 'the fact that the Workshop can claim as alumni nationally and internationally prominent poets, novelists, and short story writers is, we believe, more the result of ...