I haven’t posted on this blog for
a few months because I’ve been so busy with my novel, Miss Emily Book of Spells, but I just got back from New York City,
where I presented a paper to a small but enthusiastic audience at the
Transitions and Transactions II Conference, and I thought it’d be a good
occasion to break my silence (and I promise, dear readers, to post most often).
In spite of an ending to the trip marred by institutional indifference,
incompetence, negligence, and even dishonesty on the part of the MTA, which
caused my wife and I to miss our flight home, the trip was very successful and
very fun.
The focus of the The Transitions
and Transactions conference centers on literature and creative writing
pedagogies, and its audience is college professors at the community college
level, or university professors like me who specialize in undergraduate
instruction. My talk, which the chair of my panel, Irwin Leopando, Co-Director
of the Composition Program at LaGuardia Community College, described as “beautifully
written,” was entitled Later in the Early World: Positing a Changing
Role of Poetry and Creative Writing in the Undergraduate Curriculum. Though updated, it’s based on the chapter
that my colleague, Terry Hermsen, and I wrote for the International Handbook of Research in Arts Education, and which was published
by Springer in 2007. For those in the audience who asked me where they could
get a copy of this paper, and for those in the wider world who may be
interested, I am pasting in my talk below. I hope you
enjoy it.
All best,
Stuart
Later in the Early World:
Positing a Changing Role of Poetry and Creative Writing in the Undergraduate
Curriculum
Toward the end of his
introductory college-level textbook, Poetry
the basics, Jeffrey Wainwright notes the “growth of creative writing in all
parts of the English curriculum. Its best practice,” he writes, “is always… in
concert with reading, and its principal project is… to add an expressive field
to study, to enable students to discover the possibilities and the difficulties
of working in language, and to understand the process and nature of literary
texts by means other than the ‘reverse engineering’ of analysis and criticism”
(213).
This is a good and
succinct statement defending the use of creative writing, not as an end in
itself so much, but as a process that can actively enable students to enter
into, engage, and learn about literary texts in ways that go beyond the
traditional pedagogical means that have been the standby of the English
curriculum for so long.
But
almost fifty years before Professor Wainwright suggested an alternative to the
“‘reverse engineering’ of analysis and criticism,” a man named Elwyn
Richardson, an educator at a rural school in New Zealand, was already hard at
work, or should I say “hard at play,” putting into practice just this sort of
alternative pedagogy. In his classic text, In the Early World (1964), Richardson, documenting his
work with elementary school age students at Oruaiti School in northern New
Zealand in the early 1960’s, seems to have had an intuitive awareness of how
creative writing could function in this way in the classroom. He brought poetry
back into the hands of his students and linked it to the whole of their study,
demonstrating how creative writing can become a bridge for integrating and
uniting a whole arts-based curriculum. Not an advocate of
“anything-goes-just-express-yourself,” Richardson tried to develop in his
students a responsive yet critical eye - for the shape of an argument, a piece
of clay pottery, the line of a lithograph, or the turn of a poem that they were
studying. Writing became an art and art became a way of making meaning. As
such, by placing creative writing at the center of a web linking all of his
students’ learning, he anticipated many of the discoveries concerning the
impact of the arts on student learning that have emerged in subsequent years.
One of
Richardson’s methods was to make a habit of requesting what he called “ten
minutes thought writing to a set topic” (p. 108), the strategy of free-writing that
scholars like Scott DeWitt have documented as being so important to the
invention part of the writing process (DeWitt, 2001). “We found it useful to
write about unfamiliar things that were still close enough to our experience to
warrant some attention” (p.111), Richardson
writes. He describes how one student chose to write about “Feeling a Pine Cone
in my Hand” (p. 111), or how others described seagulls or the sounds of engines
(pp. 110-111), or the “Warmth of the Kitchen” (p. 108). The same year that
Richardson’s book appeared, J.R.R. Tolkien published his now famous essay, “On
Fairy-Stories,” in which he explains his notion of “Recovery” (1964, p. 46),
one of the “prime values,” he argues, that fairy-stories offer. We “need
recovery” (p. 57), he explains. “We should look at green again and be startled
anew [….] Recovery […] is a regaining – regaining of a clear view” (p. 57).
Recovery is exactly what seems to have been occurring among the students in
Richardson’s classroom at Oruaiti School.
Of course, using creative writing as an inherent part of the curriculum
did not begin exclusively with Richardson; however he did, at that time,
produce one of its most sustainable models. But there were progenitors. Several
decades before Richardson, for
example, Louise Rosenblatt, who taught English Education at NYU for many years,
and before that at Brooklyn College, as way back as 1938 suggested a way of
responding to literature that involved a “personal sense” (p. 60), “an
unself-conscious, spontaneous and honest reaction” (p. 67). In a similar vein
and around the same time, anticipating the metaphor revolution in the late 20th
century, in which theorist after theorist, (such as Giles Fauconnier & Mark
Turner, 2002; Roman Jakobson, 1971; George Lakoff & Turner, 1989) demonstrated
that societies are structured around signs, symbols and embedded meanings, Robert
Frost, in his more plain-spoken way, claimed in his essay, “The Figure a
Poem Makes”:
Unless you
are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education
in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with
figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its
weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may
break down with you. You are not safe in science; you are not safe in history
[…]. (p. 39)
Taken together,
Rosenblatt and Frost suggest that poetry in particular and creative writing in
general can be the vehicle, the medium of expression by which a personal,
unself-conscious, honest reader response can be integrated into a “proper
poetical education” (Frost, .p. 39),” one which enables us to delight in
bodily rhythms that in their roots go back to the heartbeats we first heard in
the womb; a process of knowing, and of understanding ourselves and of
empathizing with others beyond ourselves; and a metaphorical, attentive way of
living more completely in this world and in our experiences past and present. At some level Elwyn
Richardson seems to have understood this.
One of the most valuable aspects of Richardson's work in In the Early World is his demonstration of how the use of creative writing can lead to an appreciation and understanding of other disciplines and vice-versa. after one nature study class, for example, where students wrote short creative pieces about wasps, he concludes:
Unless the interest had been deep, unless the subject
had been followed in fullness, and unless there had been a certain amount of
the thrill of achievement through making advances on the basis of certain
criteria, the impression, and hence the creative expression, is unlikely to be
good. Nor will the process be of interest to them. (1964, p. 168)
Richardson suggests it's a two-way process: Using creative writing helps to enable the "deep interest" into a subjet, which allows it to be "followed in fullness," to the successful outcomes we all wish for in our lessons. Likewise, such engagement leads to greater creative expression in the writing.
Others
have followed Richardson in the decades after In the Early World’s publication in 1964, writers and teachers who
have utilized creative writing in a number of ways to ignite that “deep interest”
on the part of students as they engage a particular subject. Christian McEwen
and Mark Statman, for example, in their book, the alphabet of the trees:
guide to nature writing (2000), provide a comprehensive follow-up to
Richardson’s work in nature study. Based on the idea that writing enables the
two-way process described above, McEwen and Statman claim that creative writing
in the teaching of natural science is a vital activity, since “most students
[….] see nature as ‘Other’” (xv). An introductory essay by Gary Snyder suggests
a context for the book, an intimate interdependence between the “wild tune”
(Frost, 2003, p.984) that Robert Frost claimed poetry to be, and nature:
“Wildness […]”, Snyder writes, “the essential nature of nature [can best be
articulated in] language [… that] does not impose order on a chaotic universe,
but reflects is own wildness back” (p.1).
Besides
being a vehicle to help in the teaching of the natural sciences, another
natural ally for creative writing is the teaching of the humanities, of
course. One very productive use has been
in the teaching of history. For example, Kane and Rule (2005), writing in the Journal
of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, report that “there is a convincing
literature base showing that teachers in a variety of content areas [are using]
poetry to enrich their curricula” (p.658) and cite as an example one teacher
who wrote, “I have found that poetry is a particularly useful and engaging
vehicle for revealing the complexities of a historical moment” (p.659). In a
similar vein, Cynthia Stokes Brown (1988), in her book, Like It Was: A
Complete Guide to Writing Oral History, shows how students might write oral
histories and how teachers might assess such projects. Likewise Bill Roorbach
(1998), in his book, Writing Life
Stories, explains how students can create detailed memory maps of their
earliest neighborhoods (pp. pp. 18-34) as they work to uncover and collect
material toward the writing of memoirs, and Mary Fortunato Galt (1992), in her
book, The story in history (Writing your way into the American experience),
uses creative writing to help students enter the lives and times of historical
people and events. “When we study history at arm’s length,” she writes, “with
more emphasis on facts than on individual human responses [… t]he past remains
distant, not quite real, safe. But when
we invite imagination to enter our study of history, we open the door to
character, emotion, irony, and the magic of metaphorical language” (p. 165).
The
visual arts are another natural ally of creative writing, and Richardson (1964,
pp. 49-70) nicely documented his work in the visual arts over three years at
Oruaiti school. At the end of that time he concluded, “I believe that the final
success of most of this work came from the forging of a close association of
the child’s thinking with some actual experience or observation” (p. 49). What
his students were discovering was what Tonya Foster and Kristin Prevallet call,
in their anthology of essays of the same title (2002), the “third mind”:
“Listening to works of art,” they write in the introduction, “and participating
in a conversation with them can produce […] [t]he ‘third mind,’ […] a state in
which something new, or ‘other,’ emerges from the combination that would not
have come about with a solo act” (p. xv).
An assignment that
I’ve developed with Terry Hermsen, a colleague of mine at Otterbein College,
called ”X Marks the Spot,” works, I think, in just this way. It’s a writing
assignment that asks students to spread out in a gallery space, picking out one
of the pieces of art that “hits your eye.” It then asks each student to look at
their choice, or a portion of the piece of art for a set length of time, and then
to follow a series of writing prompts, such as writing “three lines, 8 words
long, each one beginning with the word, It’s’” (encouraging them to feel free
to cut out the “it’s later on in revision). The next prompt asks students to write
another two lines that begin with the
phrase “What I see (or hear, or taste, or smell)…”and
then, when they’ve written those lines, to feel free to cut out the “What I see
is” or similar type phrase; and then to respond to the piece in terms of
opposition, to write the opposite of what they experience as they observe that
work of art. Then, on a signal, students are asked to move two pieces of art to
the left, say, or to “Look around and
find the ‘piece’ that is most nearly ‘opposite’ the “piece” you just wrote
about,” and then another set of writing prompts apply as they respond to this
new work of art, and so on.
“X Marks the
Spot,” is an assignment in active and engaged observing that not only works
when students are collected in a gallery space, however. “Riffing,” that is to
say, creatively improvising or changing up an assignment to meet altered pedagogical
and rhetorical needs among students in a class, in this case riffing the
writing prompts of “X Marks the Spot,” I
have successfully used this assignment not only with my college-level students,
but with middle and elementary school students, as well, not only in a gallery,
but walking around downtown or in a prairie, or merely sitting in class and
rooting about in one of the Norton anthologies. Other colleagues have riffed on
this assignment at the college level to teach subjects as diverse as biology
and semiotics. It all depends on how you riff the writing prompts.
Likewise,
David Morice (2002), in his book, Poetry comics:
An animated anthology, also uses the visual arts to teach poetry, by
taking well-known poems and resetting them within the field of play of
illustrated comic strip panels. One of my colleagues at Ohio State, Nathan
Wallace, has used student-created comic strip panels with great success to
teach British Literature. The distillation that occurs when students have to
choose which particular text and what particular picture should go with that
text in a comic book panel, one of a series of such panels that they are
creating, encourages, he finds, a level of close reading and engagement with
primary texts (Beowulf, say, or a
poem by Tennyson, or a scene in a play by Shakespeare) that he’s not easily
able to duplicate through other more traditional means of teaching.
In
other books (1995, 2001), Morice encourages students to physically play
with the materials of language through the use of cut outs and other
strategies. Similarly, Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge (1996) encourages the use of cut-out words, what she
calls “creating a wordpool” (p. 10), not only as a way of collecting or
“banking” words to come back to and use, but as an aid in the revision process,
since the words and phrases, collected on what she calls “word tickets” (p.14),
are easy to rearrange.
Wooldridge’s
book, Poemcrazy (freeing your life with words), details her experience
as a teacher in the California Poets-in the-Schools Program. She finds that
“writing poems can help kids shift the way they see themselves” (pp. 97-98),
helping them articulate positive self identities. Mark Statman, in his book, Listener
in the snow (The practice and teaching of poetry) (2000), has also
demonstrated that the use of creative writing in the classroom can help
students engage issues such as identity, as well as an understanding and
engagement with other cultures, something that Julio Marzán, in Luna, Luna:
Creative Writing Ideas from Spanish & Latino Literature (1996)
and Lorenzo Thomas, in Sing the Sun Up (Creative Writing Ideas from African
American Literature) (1998), have also nicely demonstrated. All of these
writers and educators utilize creative writing assignments to help students
along paths that lead them to that sense of Tolkienesque recovery, as they “shift
the way they see themselves.”
In
his “Forward” to In The Early World, John Melser writes:
In much
discussion of teaching there is an assumption that a radical difference of kind
exists between work which is variously called ‘creative’, imaginative’, or
‘expressive’ – work which is about children’s feelings and sensations – and, on
the other hand, work which is distinguished as ‘factual’ and which concerns the
‘real’ or ‘outside’ world [….] It seems evident from the work at Oruaiti that
the distinction has little relevance to the work of children [….] Because the
children were not required to make a divorce between the parts of their experience,
a divorce hostile to their intuitive grasp or situations, they could bend to
their work with an enthusiasm and a degree of concentration which ordinary
schooling never touches. (Melser, 1964, pp. v-vi)
Writing
fifty years ago, Melser hit the nail on the head. Poetry helps heal this
“divorce” between the “imaginative” and the “factual.” And when we use Creative
writing exercises and assignments as part of a pedagogy of play to not only to
teach students those process-level skills of reading and writing, but also to
reinforce knowledge-based skills more broadly throughout the curriculum, to
assist us in our goals of helping students to develop, synthesize, and organize
thoughts, feelings and understandings about a subject, we are fostering the
spirit of Elwyn Richardson, so that this marriage between the “imaginative” and
the “factual” can prosper. At the same time, as we move ever later into the
early world, we are engaging in that process of recovery, of, to paraphrase Professor
Tolkien, regaining
of a clearer view, that perspective of openness and receptivity so
necessary for productive inquiry at all levels of teaching and learning.
Thank
you.
Works
Cited
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