In the
book Why Art Cannot Be Taught, author James Elkins attempts to
explain “the curious endeavor to teach the unteachable.” He organizes the
book by several arguments ("Art can be taught, but nobody knows quite
how," "Art can be taught, but it seems as if it can't be since so few
students become outstanding artists," and "Art cannot be taught, but
it can be fostered or helped along," among them) but the ultimate
impression is that the pedagogy of art is a mystery. The book
specifically applies to college level instruction of visual arts, but many of
these concerns translate quite readily to the teaching of composition and
creative writing. A writing class is necessarily very different from a
differential calculus class, for example, or from a language class. It is
a brief exposure to the process. For some students, a writing class will
be an introduction to the undertaking of a much longer study. For others,
it will represent a stage in their already started journey toward becoming a
writer. For still others, and especially in the case of creative writing,
it will represent a mode of expression that may one day be discarded.
My
values and goals as a teacher very much reflect the idea that learning an art
is a process, and that I am in the midst of the same discovery process as are
my students. I value:
1. Writing
and reading as a primary means of communication within academic, personal, and
professional spheres.
2. Writing
and reading as a way to connect, both to the internal (self) and to the
external (the outside world).
3. Clear
expectations for individual writing courses, with instruction specialized
according to audience, purpose, and student needs.
Always,
I focus on writing as both process and product, and know that separating one
from another is impossible. Additionally,
as a creative writer and a teacher of first year composition, it is important
for me to acknowledge the value of both modes of writing and the differences
therein.
Writing and reading as a primary means of communication within
academic, personal, and professional spheres.
Writing
and reading remain primary methods of dissemination for the bulk of academic
work, including journal articles, theses and dissertations, and press
releases. Students often believe that
writing and reading are skills mainly used in the humanities, but though much
of STEM research may be done in a lab or other setting, it is the publication
of this work that makes it available to a larger community of scientists, and
thus continues the conversation of knowledge.
In the personal sphere, though letter writing has fallen out of favor,
we still write as a means of communication (emails, texts, social media posts,
and yes, letters), and we read as a way to receive this communication. In the professional world, being able to
write continues to remain crucial for workers, and the opportunities for
writing have only expanded (consider here the fields of business writing,
technical writing, professional writing).
Writing and reading as a way to connect, both to the internal
(self) and to the external (the outside world).
As a creative writer and a teacher of
creative writing, I value writing and reading both as a means of expression and
as an aesthetic entity. Writing and
reading allow access to our most private selves, and much of the curriculum of
creative nonfiction operates on the belief that we don’t truly know what we
believe until we try to write these beliefs.
I believe in the value of expressionist writing as a source of
self-discovery, as a means to facilitate healing in the case of trauma, and as
a way to connect more fully to our human experience. When this writing is shared, and when we share
in the writing of others through the act of reading, we often connect in
profoundly human ways, and often, we connect to people we have never or will
never meet in person.
Clear expectations for individual writing courses, with
instruction specialized according to audience, purpose, and student
needs. I also believe in clear
expectations for coursework, as the reason for writing figures greatly into the
process of producing a piece of writing.
Readers have different expectations for different types of writing, and
learning to recognize these different expectations is crucial to becoming a
successful writer. For example, a
research paper is different from a business email, and so would have a different
process and a different format. In the
same way, a creative essay is different from a poem, which is different from a
rhetorical analysis. I believe that
clear expectations are crucial to student success at the assignment level, at the
course level, and at the level of the overall degree plan. If, as teachers, we understand exactly the
kind of writing we want students to be able to produce after finishing the course,
we can better construct this course in order to scaffold these skills. Here, too, we are able to accommodate many
different forms of and purposes for writing:
if our goal for freshman composition is preparing students to participate in the academic conversation,
we prepare them for these sorts of writing (literature reviews, researched papers,
even lab reports). If our goal for a
fiction workshop is to understand the facets and nuance of story, we
deconstruct story and study these elements, parts in the service of a
whole.
I do
feel that the focus on writing often neglects the act and skill of reading, and
I hope to encourage within my students a love for the written word, a curiosity
about their lives and their surroundings, and a respect for the process
itself. Research has shown that students
who identify as readers are more empathetic, and have a larger referential
knowledge base. Reading is certainly a
way to experience many lives that do not belong to us, and is thus enriching
beyond measure. I believe very strongly that readers become
writers, in much the same way that people who like to eat learn how to
cook. And part of the process of learning to write lies in the process of
learning to read, and in both a construction and a deconstruction of the
craft. But always craft is primary, and growth the goal.
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