Abstract When teaching in neighboring fields such as creative writing and writing studies, instructors can draw on the explicit recommendations of professional organizations and an existing scholarly consensus about threshold concepts. However, the struggle to define what exactly it is we teach when we are teaching literary studies continues. Rather than advocating for transferable skills in deference to the neoliberal marketplace, we should spend more time explaining to ourselves and to our students the particular practices, habits, and concerns that distinguish literary studies as a valuable scholarly discipline. Metacognition is essential for students to learn, and this can be facilitated more effectively by instructors able to articulate how the methods and goals of a course are informed by disciplinary norms, especially the ubiquitous and yet continually contested practice of close reading. This article reviews both recent scholarship and pedagogical resources on close reading to identify the intertwined challenges of defining and teaching this disciplinary method, making recommendations for more effective classroom practices.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has brought into question how much ownership college students feel for “their” writing when it is AI-generated. This study recruited 88 college writers at one midwestern state university in the United States. In a within-subjects design, participants composed poems about a meaningful, challenging life experience, then prompted GenAI to compose a poem about that same event. Results showed significantly greater ownership for human-made poems; additionally, human-made poems were rated as more accurately reflective of selected lived experiences. Aesthetic merit, however, was rated higher for AI-generated poems for imagery, language, and form—but not for originality. Half the students preferred GenAI poems, mainly because of their textual features, while less than half preferred human poems, mainly for personal connections to the events presented. Implications for GenAI as a tool to support creative writing and meaningful literacy are explored.

Using case study methodology, this article analyzes the collaborative writing of three adolescent girls, one Latina and two Black, composing a group poem in an after-school spoken word poetry team. Drawing from literature on distributed cognition and embodiment, we found that participants utilized a system of writing techniques “on the page,” as well as a variety of embodied and social practices “off the page” in their team meetings to collaboratively compose this poem. We argue that focusing on the intersection of distributed cognition and embodiment in collaborative writing allows writing researchers to more fully attend to the collaborative sociality of all writing and allows teachers to support youth writers in recognizing and gaining collaborative writing skills for professional and creative writing contexts.

The majority of first-year writing “is taught by teachers whose educational backgrounds are more likely to be in literature, cultural studies, or creative writing than in rhetoric and composition” (Abraham 78). This disciplinary knowledge gap poses a challenge for FYW faculty to adjust to new shifts in FYW pedagogy. We would expect inhouse faculty development opportunities to help fill these gaps; however, the results of our year-long qualitative study indicate that the lack of shared disciplinary knowledge and the constraints on adjunct faculty make it challenging for faculty without backgrounds in writing studies to adapt their pedagogies. We add to the body of scholarship on professionalization in two-year college writing studies (e.g., Andelora; Griffiths; Jensen et al.; Sullivan; Toth et al., “Distinct”) and argue that addressing this problem will require investing resources in adjunct support; changing hiring practices to prioritize expertise in writing studies; and designing faculty development that focuses on both theory and pedagogy.

Abstract This essay suggests that our understanding of writing workshop pedagogy has been limited by a divide between composition and creative writing, and by the ways we've narrated this pedagogy in our respective fields, leaving us with little knowledge of what actually happens in writing workshops. To open new possibilities within workshop pedagogy, the author argues, we need to tell our workshop stories differently: not as method or myth, but as a complex classroom scene.

Abstract This article applies critical pedagogy to creative writing courses in the context of the modern transforming university. The author incorporates discussions of varied forms of capital, histories of cultural and capital production in the academy, and transforming canons into workshops to facilitate student contextualization of their own creative work.

Currently, creative writing and writing studies occupy different disciplinary positions, but this relationship doesn’t need to be adversarial. This study illustrates “line-crossing” pedagogies of two creative writers who teach FYW to further the discussion of creative writing’s place in FYW and to help bridge disciplinary gaps.

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Abstract Is it possible to teach creative writing? Although creative talent may be innate, all individuals have the capacity to create, and creativity can be nurtured through specific approaches. The works of David Kolb in relation to experiential learning pedagogy are explored and adapted to creative writing courses, and examples of potential exercises are given.

AbstractThis article describes an autoethnography project used in an undergraduate creative writing course and discusses its pedagogical benefits. Drawing on results from a survey and interviews with former students and a supporting librarian, the article considers how the assignment might be adapted for diverse institutional contexts.

Abstract The authors present a lab-based research model that engages graduate students in undergraduate research mentorship positions that are mutually beneficial for graduate students, undergraduates, and faculty. They show how this model can be scaled up and adapted across the range of English disciplines. The authors share examples of the different types of research that they have engaged in for linguistics, literary archival studies, creative writing, and writing pedagogy. These examples illustrate how undergraduate research mentorship can prepare graduate students to teach and mentor students using effective methods in various institutional contexts.

The article reports on a nationwide survey- and interview-based study of creative writing instructors designed to identify the extent to which the field of rhetorics and composition and key aspects of rhetorical theory have influenced the teaching of creative writing.

Twice, and sometimes even three times a week, Kathie Klarreich enters the front entry gate of Dade Correctional Institution to teach creative writing. Armed with a see-through plastic carrying case filled with pencils, paper, and the day’s assignments and handouts, she’s ready to bash the monotonous lives of the prisoners with stimulating reads and intriguing&hellip; Continue reading The Effects of Educational Programs in Prison Towards Overall Rehabilitation: The Observations and Perspective of a Prisoner by Christopher Malec

As the founder of Indiana Prison Writers Workshop, I go into Indiana correctional facilities each week to facilitate a creative writing workshop. The workshop, I would argue, allows my students to experience a therapeutic avenue for expression. Writing can encourage us to explore our emotional states and can cultivate more critical self-awareness and critical thinking.&hellip; Continue reading Review: Feeding the Roots of Self-Expression and Freedom by Jimmy Santiago Baca by Debra Des Vignes

&nbsp;“I’m just gonna let you know how it is’: Situating Writing and Literacy Education in Prison” | Tobi Jacobi “Where Lifelines Converge: Voices from the Forest Correctional Creative Writing Group” | Laura Rogers “Disturbing Where We Are Comfortable: Notes from Behind the Walls” | Lori Pompa “Prison 101” | Shane R. Hillman “Telephone Conversation with&hellip; Continue reading Volume 4, Number 1, Winter 2004

This article is a teacher narrative examining the experiences of a teacher in a correctional facility writing workshop and how those experiences led her to understand that in order to effectively teach the workshop, she had to achieve a deeper understanding of the world of the prison as well as see that the success of&hellip; Continue reading Where Lifelines Converge: Voices from the Forest Correctional Creative Writing Group by Laura Rogers

“I’m not gonna sit and preach to anyone because I myself have been in and out of these doors 12 times. I’m just gonna let you know how it is” “To the Girls at the Audy” by Irene Sanchez (17) In ten-week creative writing workshops held at Chicago’s Cook County Jail, Irene Sanchez and other&hellip; Continue reading I’m just gonna let you know how it is’: Situating Writing and Literacy Education in Prison by Tobi Jacobi

How can we nurture children’s creative ability as writers outside the academic context, celebrating their unique voices, teaching them to trust their ears and value the creative process? It can be set up simply: A group of young students in an after school center. Some adults acting as mentors to help them do creative writing.&hellip; Continue reading Merging Voices: University Students Writing with Children in a Public Housing Project by Michael John Martin

Warrior Writers: A Collection of Writing &amp; Artwork By Veterans offers a voice for soldiers speaking their truths and a rare glimpse inside their hearts and minds for the civilians who remain homeside, creating an open channel to the lesser known, (and rarely discussed), personal details of warfare through poetry, creative nonfiction, and photography. Editors&hellip; Continue reading Review: Warrior Writers: A Collection of Writing &#038; Artwork Veterans by Aleashia Walton Valentin

The Writers in Communities (WIC) Program at Gemini Ink in San Antonio sends professional writers into diverse community settings—from shelters, schools and neighborhood centers to detention facilities and halfway houses—to work alongside students of all ages, needs, interests and abilities. These workshops—always free to participants—focus on oral traditions, reading, and creative writing. The majority of&hellip; Continue reading Mother Tongue/Idioma Materno by Anisa Onofre, Mary Morales, Jessica Gonzalez, Sonia Marzo &#038; Robb Jackson

This article describes a one-session classroom activity that employs an unusual creative nonfiction genre (the hermit crab essay) to initiate first-year writers into the practice of successfully integrating academic research in their work. I share step-by-step instructions for implementation, along with classroom resources and materials necessary to conduct the assignment.

This article is about combining career exploration with composition and creative writing to engage students with relevance and motivation as they explore their future careers.

This article reconsiders theoretical claims of identity fluidity, stability, and agency through a longitudinal case study investigating one adolescent’s writing over time and across spaces. Qualitative data spanning her four years of high school were collected and analyzed using a grounded theory approach with literacy-and-identity theory providing sensitizing concepts. Findings uncovered how she laminated identity positions of perfectionism, expertise, risk taking, and learning as she enacted her passionate writer identity in personal creative writing, English classrooms, an online fanfiction community, and theater contexts. Using “identity cube” as a theoretical construct, the authors examine enduring elements of a writer’s identity and the contextual positioning that occurs when youth write for different audiences and purposes. Findings suggest that adolescents approach writing with a durable core identity while flexibly laminating multiple sides of their identity cube, a reframing of identity that has implications for literacy-and-identity research.

Using student poems and reflections collected over several years, the author examines the impact of a role-playing game experience on introductory creative writing students’ openness toward taking risks, revising (and improvising) playfully, and working with limitations or rules. The role-play uses Lars von Trier’s film The Five Obstructions as a model—particularly the diabolical game that unfolds between directors von Trier and Jørgen Leth—and requires students to “remake” a poem of theirs three times according to sets of rules designed specifically for them by the instructor in face-to-face meetings.

Since the publication of Wendy Bishop’s Released into Language (1990), the disciplinary boundaries of composition and creative writing have been in question. More recently, as Douglas Hesse’s “The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies” (2010) suggests, creative writing has been assumed to exist as a subdiscipline of composition despite efforts during the past decade to develop a new discipline, Creative Writing Studies. The research reported on and analyzed here argues for creative writing’s disciplinary status by using Toulmin’s (1972) definition of disciplinarity as a basis for claiming writers’ aesthetic documents as data and reporting those data in an aesthetic form. In our study, 57 students in first-year composition were asked to write a creative piece concerning how they came to the present place in their lives. Students produced 57 artifacts, including 55 poems, one script, and one visual narrative. These data were subsequently represented in fiction—that is, we used a novel to present our findings in an effort to assert the differences between the ways findings might be rendered in composition as opposed to creative writing. This paper examines what each subject area views as evidence and how that evidence might be most profitably analyzed and discussed in an aesthetic document. We suggest that the process of writing the novel is a method, a mode of analysis, with the novel itself as the articulation of the researchers’ analysis of the original data. Using this method, we studied creative writing aesthetically as creative writing and offer a justification for doing so.

The creative writing program through its theory, pedagogy, and praxis in workshops has resisted the inclusion of lived experiences of politically active radical minorities. To mitigate some of these exclusions, I restructured a traditional workshop to integrate critical race studies by including nonwhite writer-activists and writer-centered social movements countering dominant white discourses.

The publication of the three works reviewed here relating to creative writing theory and pedagogy mark a point of critical mass for the field of creative writing studies that has been building for decades. This review looks at those books and discusses how they help point the way forward for the discipline.

Both creative writing and composition seek to teach writing, yet their pedagogical approaches are poles apart, especially concerning instructors. Creative writing instructors serve as “mentor-models,” whose authority comes from their writing practice rather than (only) departmental sanction. Despite potential pitfalls, a mentor-model approach could reaffirm composition instructors' identities as writers.

Reviewed are: Writing across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and the Sites of Writing, by Kathleen Blake Yancey, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taczak, Reviewed by Polina Chemishanova Understanding Language Use in the Classroom: A Linguistic Guide for College Educators, by Susan J. Behrens, Reviewed by Patty Wilde Creative Writing and Education, edited by Graeme Harper, Reviewed by Mitch James

This article examines how creative writing pedagogy and composition pedagogy can be put into productive conversation by using expressivism and social constructionism as a shared frequency, allowing for a deepening of the pedagogical options available to teachers. The end result of this analysis is a proposal for a dual course pairing of composition and creative writing. Within this proposed arrangement, creative writing, on the one hand, would emphasize expressivist pedagogies that grant students centrality in the classroom while still exploring the ideological implications of the writing act. Composition, on the other hand, would focus on scholarship, research, and theory, while still employing creative writing activities that keep student writers from feeling utterly marginalized.

This article illuminates how reading serves as the foundation for writing workshops in both composition and creative writing courses. It discusses cooperative learning and improved student writing as two main goals for workshop and explains how both are completely reliant on student reading. The article introduces a particularly effective way to teach students to read in preparation for workshop and concludes by revealing how asking students to read published and student-produced texts in different ways can inadvertently devalue student writing and limit workshop's effectiveness.

This essay examines high school poetry instruction in the 1920s and 1930s in light of the influence of Hughes Mearns, a teacher who wrote about and lectured on his experiences in teaching what he coined “creative writing” and who played a major role in reconceiving how teachers taught students to read and write poetry. Rather than focusing on memorization and recitation, Hughes enacted an experiential and “emotional” method of teaching students poetry. This student-centered approach reflected major thoughts in pedagogical progressivism of the period at the same time that it conflicted with the education tracking and standardization that also took shape under the name of progressivism. The innovative work of Mearns and teachers who embraced his philosophies is especially important to revisit given the analogies to our own period,where spoken-word programs, for example, exist alongside school standardization measures that often devalue poetry. Understanding the arguments Mearns and other teachers made for the unique value of poetry, as well as some of the shortcomings in their thought, can help educators to better articulate the need for K–12 poetry instruction now.

Real Writing Interactive: A Brief Guide to Writing Paragraphs and Essays, by Susan Anker, Reviewed by Mark Blaauw-HaraAfter the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur, by Frank Farmer, Reviewed by Jill Darley-VanisRhetoric of Respect: Recognizing Change at a Community Writing Center, by Tiffany Rousculp, Reviewed by Glenn Hutchinson Jr. and Paula GillespieTeaching Creative Writing, edited by Heather Beck, Reviewed by John Reilly

There is increasing usage of creative writing in the ESL/EFL classroom based on the argument that this pedagogy develops writer’s voice, emotional engagement, and ownership. Within the context of teaching poetry writing to second language learners, the current article develops a scientific approach to ways in which voice can be measured and then empirically explores the claim that voice is present within poetry written by second language learners. The study explored this question: Do second language poetry writers have a discernable voice in their written poetry? This issue was investigated in two different ways: (a) utilizing human reader ratings of the likelihood that two poems were written by the same poet and (b) using computational linguistic methodology to explore systematic differences in specific linguistic features in poetry written by second language poets. The data presented here show that poetry written by the same L2 writer is more readily recognized as such and that relevant linguistic items have patterns of frequency of usage that are different for different poets. Together the two studies provide a compelling case that voice is measureable and present in the poetry written by second language learners.

This article addresses the current nationwide emphasis on job-readiness programs by (1) pointing to the “utility” of studying creative writing and (2) outlining a plan for including engagement strategies in the construction of a two-year creative writing degree.

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Brandt an Bigalk respond to each other's articles.

By growing creative writing courses and programs, community colleges can improve retention while also fostering supportive communities of student and faculty writers.

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Brandt an Bigalk respond to each other's articles.

Creative writing is divided between instructors upholding New Critical emphasis on texts and those challenging the goals of the discipline. While innovators propose reform, reconceptions put instructors at odds with one another and with students. In compromise, I propose praxes that incorporate lore-based methodology with innovations from critical and rhetorical theory.

Why would an English professor enroll in an upper-level biology class? This article describes an experiment in interdisciplinarity: an English professor takes a class titled Scientific Imaging in order to enhance her teaching of nature writing. The author outlines thirteen specific lessons imparted by her experience as a student in a class devoted to photographing elements of the natural world and creating images suitable for scientific presentation, and then she explains how she adapted the principles from Scientific Imaging for use in a creative nonfiction class focusing on nature writing. The article concludes with a discussion of the results of this interdisciplinary experiment and suggestions for promoting interdisciplinary learning as a mode of faculty development.

This article identifies and examines a digital arm of creative writing studies and organizes that proposal into four categories through which to theorize the “craft” of creative production, each borrowed from Tim Mayers’s (Re)Writing Craft: Composition, Creative Writing, and the Future of English Studies: process, genre, author, and institutionality. Using research from composition studies and literary studies, the article examines the concerns each of these categories is beginning to confront as more and more creative texts recruit digital technologies. As such, the argument outlines four tiers that each work as a line of inquiry regarding the valuable—indeed necessary—ways to imagine concerns regarding craft in twenty-first- century creative writing studies.

Alexis Brown , University of Wisconsin-Madison Enculturation : http://enculturation.net/the-algo-numeric-daughter ( Published: September 27, 2012 ) Click this image to read Alexis Brown's "Algo-Numeric Daughter" This comic attempts to allegorize the relationship between myself and my algo-numeric double. I examined the effects of orality, literacy, and numeracy in the context of familial relations, with each character drawn directly from the results of my signature, or the results that a Google search of my name generated. I wanted to examine whether my parents could legitimately connect with me through my algo-numeric double. For instance, what is the relation between me and my algo-numeric double, and how much control over it do I have? Does it represent some facet of me, or has it been so abstracted by numeracy that the information connected to my name now bears almost no connection to me at all? And in an age where information now exists in a realm of its own, could my algo-numeric double in some sense replace me? Could it be manipulated by others through algorithms to create some better version of myself? This project appealed to me in part because it was very different than my usual work in the English department. Instead of implementing theoretical concepts to analyze literature, I used them to provide framework for what might almost be termed creative writing. At the same time, this project also made the theories of Scott McCloud, Eric Havelock, and others more personal—I found myself examining the connections between these theories and my life.

This article interrogates the commonly used creative writing workshop model, calling for a higher degree of process-oriented work in the classroom and bringing to light process-oriented models already in place in universities across the country. This discussion can serve as a springboard for classroom development of alternative teaching models.