Recently in Theory Category

The slides for my "Teaching and Learning" presentation today on Improv and Teaching are here on google docs:

For related topics (including a two-part review of Impro by Keith Johnstone, click the improv tag below.

Over on my other blog, The Popular Uncanny, I wrote this evening about a neat Prezi presentation on “Uncanny Digital Literacies” by Sian Bayne, from the ESRC seminar series on Literacies in the Digital University (University of Edinburgh, 16 Oct 2009). She mentions a book called A Will to Learn: Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty by Ronald Barrett that I want to get my hands on.

For now, I'll just embed Bayne's presentation here -- if you want to read some of my thoughts and light research on it, visit my blog entry entitled "Uncanny Digital Literacies: Defamiliarization in The Classroom" on The Popular Uncanny.

This morning I was pointed to an article on "The Five Mental Habits of Innovative People" that I found interesting, because it identifies the skillsets I would want to foster in my students, especially in a course related to creativity (like writing).

Drawing from research by Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen at BYU, called "How Do Innovators Think?" [available at Harvard Business Publishing's neat "Creativity at Work" page, which is worth a look-see], Jessica Stillman isolates (and explains) these five "mental habits":

* Associating * Questioning * Observing * Experimenting * Networking

The researches suggest 'questioning' is really the engine that drives all of the above, yet "questioning on its own doesn’t have a direct effect without the others."

In my classes, I have been a big advocate for question-generation -- it is the trigger behind all "inquiry" -- creative and scholarly -- and it protects the teacher from doing all the thinking for the student (without thinking, no learning!). I run students through an activity I call 'question-storming'; I often give them prompts for writing that encourage them to raise their own questions-at-issue; I'll play devil's advocate to challenge them to question their own assumptions; etc.

When a writer approaches the blank page "questioning" rather than feeling as though they need to be the "authority" they are open to making discoveries through writing...and they never have block.

What would I add to the list? LISTENING.

By which I mean "Active Listening".

Although 'listening' (like 'reading') is related to 'observing', I don't think people think of 'listening' as a skill that leads to innovation and creativity. They think of it as a passive act, which it is not. Part of this assumption of passivity comes from the education system: we sit in desks our whole lives, listening, listening, listening...more than doing, creating, innovating. The invisible work of learning happens in our heads, if we are self-disciplined enough to pay attention and listen actively. But that skill is rarely cultivated or directly taught.

LISTENING is crucial to mastering the art of concentration, but it also factors into creativity. As a creative writer, I could never write dialogue if I didn't listen closely to how people actually speak -- and not just listening to the words, but also to the musicality of it. If I did not listen intensely I could not know what it means to be a reader, who mentally 'listens' to the author's voice as they read. Listening enables emulation and imitative learning, as well: when we listen, we see how others raise questions and discover the pathways available to us in an attempt to answer them. When we listen to an audience, we can test our own answers to questions by getting responses. So listening is a feedback loop into questioning. Listening fuels creativity. Not all creativity springs out from within us; sometimes it pools and settles in, before feeding into the outward flow.

If your teaching is in a rut, or if you want to try to do something innovative in your classroom to solve problems or enable excitement in the room, try listening to your students. You might learn something.

My quest for finding good books on creative writing pedagogy continues. A week or two ago, I decided to drop a chunk of my paycheck on titles I found on the cheap at half.com, and I've begun reading them with great abandon, as I prepare to teach a new online class on the teaching of writing for graduate students in our MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction.

This weekend I've been reading the late Wendy Bishop's book, Released Into Language: Options for Teaching Creative Writing (NCTE, 1990) -- a book that is, astonishingly, available digitally via ERIC, the wonderful Education Resources Information Center. Though a bit dated by this point in time, Bishop's text remains a quite solid study of the different ways that creative writing can be taught well in the undergraduate curriculum, arguing for a transactional and reflective approach that addresses where students really are, and how students really think, striking a pitch-perfect balance between praxis and theory.

While the classroom activities and approaches in the book are not necessarily new to me, what I'm enjoying most about reading this book is the way it articulates how the assumptions of graduate programs in creative writing don't always translate well into the teaching of undergraduate programs in the same field. This is helping me rethink my own assumptions, as someone who often teaches similar material in both venues...and as I read it, I'm recalling just how often I have drawn upon my teaching of composition in the creative writing classroom, and vice-versa. I recommend all writing teachers take a look, if only for inspiration.

The title comes from a passage by Adrienne Rich (from her classic, On Lies, Secrets and Silence), which I like so much I wanted to post it here so I can return to it again later:

At the bedrock level of my thinking about this is the sense that language is power, and that, as Simone Weil says, those who suffer from injustice most are the least able to articulate their suffering; and that the silent majority, if released into language, would not be content with a perpetuation of the conditions which have betrayed them. But this notion hangs on a special conception of what it means to be released into language: not simply learning the jargon of an elite, fitting unexceptionably into the status quo, but learning that language can be used as a means of changing reality. What interests me in teaching is less the emergence of the occasional genius than the overall finding of language by those who did not have it.... -- Adrienne Rich (emphasis added)

Empowerment. Social justice. Transformation. Discovery. It's all encapsulated here, in this brief passage about teaching and writing.

On the topic of the cross-overs between composition and creative writing pedagogy, I'm eager to study another book that I've ordered: (Re)Writing Craft by Timothy Mayers. I think it will prove quite useful to us at SHU, since we are presently considering "(re)writing" our undergraduate curriculum a little bit in the year ahead.

"The classroom is like my garden. There is nothing that is ever ugly in it. If it is capable of blooming, it stays." -- Louis Schmier, "My Most Important Teaching Tool", Peer Review

The quote above comes from Schmier's reflective essay in the Spring 2009 issue of the AACU's journal, Peer Review. (I blush to brag that I just learned my analysis of Rate My Professor from this blog was also cited by the editor elsewhere in this issue). In his opening anecdote, Schmier describes how he was once asked the question by her mentor, "What is your most important pedagogical tool?" and it later struck him that it was ultimately herself and "the power of [his] intentions."

This may seem quite obvious. But the key word here is "intention." It takes reflexive practice to really know what your own intentions are as a teacher. Our job title is a verb that sometimes becomes a tautology ("As a teacher I intend to teach") that focuses on the content of the teaching, rather than the actual process of how we teach and what it means to teach.

This is why, perhaps, crafting and annually revising a "philosophy of teaching" statement could be a valuable "tool" for your teaching toolbox.

Schmier's essay essentially concludes with such a philosophy. I really liked his iteration of seven elements that compose his "vision statement." These are overtly optimistic and necessarily general, leading with the metaphor above: that "the classroom is like my garden." It's a good metaphor, though it ostensibly includes nurturing rather than weeding. The teacher feeds and cultivates, but lets learning take its own natural course.

In doing so, there must be room for aberrant growth and unpredictable weather. In another element of his vision statement, he writes: "The classroom is a shop of 'serious novelties'...we must never get into a predictable, old-hat, stagnating, repetitive, and mind-numbing routine. New ways of looking at, thinking about, and using both the material and ourselves must be the rule of each day." I share this vision. Constructing moments of 'serious novelty' is the only way to prime the pump of intellectual curiosity -- which is a pro forma requirement for autonomous learning.

-- postscript: thanks for the corrections Charles B.!

This week I'll be teaching in our weeklong, intensive graduate creative writing workshops for the MA in Writing Popular Fiction program at Seton Hill U. It's always a great experience, and I particularly enjoy getting to teach and work with students and colleagues in my favorite literary genre: horror. Indeed, I'm rather fortunate to be able to do this, since the majority of creative writing programs in this country not only eschew genre labels, but also would likely eschew horror even if they didn't. Genre, most assume, is too formulaic, too emotional, too popular (and therefore too oriented to the lowest common denominator).

Obviously, such hierarchical distinctions are usually an expression of "highbrow" class politics, or a culture which reifies the individual over the collective in the creative arts -- but I won't repeat the lessons of cultural studies here right now. Instead, I've been thinking a lot lately about how genre fiction -- and particularly horror fiction, as I recently argued in a pedagogical essay on "Horror and Responsibilities of the Liberal Educator" -- may actually be more "educational" than many literary academics realize.

Often "literary" fiction and canonical literature is considered of higher educational value because it has historical lessons to teach us about culture, or because it addresses universal issues pertinent to mankind. But this is no less true of genre fiction (and many genre stories are in the canon, actually). Genre fiction is castigated because it focuses more often on emotional payoffs than intellectual ones, but this is not all that genre fiction seeks. Horror stories, for instance, are often "cautionary" in nature, and therefore teach lessons. Readers of romances and children's fiction often turn to these books for models of behavior in human relationships. Science fiction rewards knowledge of the sciences and often teaches readers about emergent research; mystery, likewise, teaches readers about criminalistics and is predicated on the notion that reader and detective alike will be engage fully in critical thinking as crimes are solved.

Thus, I'm mulling over the notion that the writers who create these stories have to be "teacherly" in their approach to the reader, to some degree. I've often heard the notion that the bestsellers of any given period not only catch the interest of the masses, but often teach readers something new -- this draw to discover and learn is a large part of popular genre fiction. It assuages curiosity about "what everyone is talking about." Yet at the same time, writers who seek to educate (usually) cannot be didactic or preachy or dogmatic about some ideological belief. As with "literary" fiction, good authors of popular fiction should raise issues of import (and often they pull these issues from the headlines, which ties them to time at the cost of being 'timeless') while keeping their own biases out of the story and lead readers to think critically about these issues on their own. The characters in a story often are models for such ways of thinking.

For the writers, however, their models are often each other. They read each others' books, or find each other at conventions, or -- for the dedicated -- encounter each other in workshops like the program we host at SHU, or the less-academic-but-more-deeply-focused-on-genre groups like Odyssey, Clarion, Borderlands Boot Camp, Alpha, and the various workshops held in meeting rooms at genre conventions. I've taught at these, and they are not nearly as "amateur" or "commercial" as one might assume. Fan and genre communities are perhaps more critical and knowledgeable about their own genre than anyone else, as the work of Henry Jenkins and others have taught us.

I have the good fortune to appear in a new instructional book for writers in the horror genre, The Writer's Workshop of Horror (ed. Michael Knost, Woodland Press, Aug 2009). Like the Horror Writer's Association guidebook, On Writing Horror, this is an example of how the creative community of genre authors "teaches" within that community. What I like about these books is that they are not just written by a single author, but a gathering together of multiple views and voices in anthology form.

For those reading this who might have the opportunity to teach horror writing, and are looking for resources, you can order The Writer's Workshop of Horror early from Woodland Press; it will be out in August, just in time for school.

I'll end with a small excerpt from my contribution, called "Stripping Away the Mask: Scene and Structure in Horror Fiction," which deals with issues regarding the pleasures of the taboo in horror, and how these are embedded into the structure (not necessarily the content) of horror narratives:

...horror is a striptease of suspense. It is an inherently exhibitionist genre, as much as it is the genre of fear. And this may very well be why horror gets a bum rap from the literati: horror can make a reader feel dirty, because it refuses to obey the inner censor that tells us that such-and-such is morally wrong, that such-and-such is ugly or grotesque, that such-and-such is perverse or unhealthy, that such-and-such is unreasonable or irrational, that such-and-such is dangerous or inhumane. Horror writers seek truth in the darkness. They remove the mask, to peer unabashedly at what it hides, horrendous warts and all....

If you wish to write horror stories, it is imperative that you understand this aesthetic. There are no "rules," really, because readers only expect the unexpected when they pick up a work of horror. In place of rules, we just have a worldview that says: "Readers peek between their fingers. I refuse to look away." We remove the mask.

I got the idea for this essay from the late author Robert Bloch, who defined horror in passing during an interview once as "the removal of masks."

Is this not also the mission of liberal education?

The latest issue of DISSECTIONS: The Journal of Contemporary Horror just went live online. The theme this time around is "Teaching Horror" which emerged as part of a series of panels at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts in March 2008. It includes a few spectacular articles from a panel I was on with Doug Ford and Frances Auld. My article from that panel ("The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory") went on to be published at a journal called Transformative Works & Cultures), but I wrote a new essay for Dissections in its place: "Horror and the Responsibilities of the Liberal Educator" . Here's a sample:

....Luckily, the teacher fully knows what the students want to ignore: that horror is inherently an educational genre. The very notion of a ‘cautionary’ tale is predicated on the notion of teaching someone a lesson. And while not all horror stories and films are cautionary in nature, they are always stimuli that aim at generating a dark emotional reaction which - when all the screaming stops - one inevitably attempts to manage with enlightened intellectual reasoning: whether it's in the mode of investigation (‘what's really lurking in the shadows?’) or metaphysical inquiry (‘do alternatives to God exist?’) or logic judgement (‘why did her baby have to die?’). Our rational minds are still at work when we contend with the most irrational of fictions. Indeed, even when a horror narrative - such as the work of Lovecraft - attempts to obliterate logical reasoning and symbolic systems altogether, it needs to construct them first.

What all this means is that, despite the naysayers, horror provides an excellent context for learning. It raises the serious questions that allow critical inquiry to transpire.

Go visit Dissections to read on, or to see other essays on issues related to integrating the horror genre into the classroom by Ford, Auld, Brock-Servais, Schnopp-Wyatt, Wisker, and more!

For a few years now, I've had this nagging worry that students are coming to college more and more distracted, less and less prepared to concentrate long enough to read -- and my intuition, like that of most, is to correlate this with the proliferation of cell phone texting, twittering, IMing, gaming, etc., etc.

Then I myself learn more about this trend via Twitter itself (thanks Matt Cardin). There's a good article in the May 17 2008 issue of New York magazine by Sam Anderson, called "In Defense of Distraction: The Benefits of Distraction and Overstimulation" which I think teachers who share my growing concern about student multitasking, ADD, and lack of focus ought to read.

Are we experiencing a "cognitive plague" -- or are we simply wasting our cognitive surplus? Is "multi-tasking" a myth? Is paying attention "a kind of sexy, visceral activity"? (Sure it is!) Is meditation the solution? These are the kinds of questions raised by the article.

My question is: how can we teach focus and concentration...or at least, teach it better than our curriculum already presumes we do. I think the answer lies somewhere in how well we teach reading -- whether book-length prose or complex arguments or even, perhaps, well-crafted poetry -- and listening. There's a degree to which we already expect students to be able to concentrate well; perhaps this is not an assumption we can rely on any longer in the same old ways.

It is paradoxically difficult to teach concentration and focus because it may take concentration and focus to learn it.

But there may be ways of fomenting the sort of positive distractions that Anderson writes about, which lead to greater awareness. This is why, I think Improv activities and Drama Games in the classroom work so well.

"More than any other profession...teaching is a confluence of opposites. Teaching draws on instinct, and it draws on acquired skills. Teaching involves routine, and it involves improvisation. Teaching is prose surprised by moments of poetry. Teaching is applied pedagogy, tested by trial and error. There is no better way to learn something than to teach it, and teaching itself is a continual learning process -- a methodology that changes every time new students walk in the door and sit down at their desks." -- Tim Lemire, I'm an English Major -- Now What?

This semester, my "Introduction to Literary Studies" course read Lemire's book as a way for students to start thinking realistically about their future careers. There was a great interest in teaching as a potential profession, which is common among English majors. In fact, it's sort of a "default" for many of them. Even if they don't know what they're getting into, it is still our job to provide them with models they might draw on in the future, when they scramble to understand what it really means to be responsible to both the field and their students' future.

I do always try to model good teaching practice, even when I'm only playing the goofball in the front of the room. But now that the term is almost over, I'm wondering: do I employ my own teaching in a way that not only models what it is that teachers actually do in a classroom, but also how they navigate this "confluence of opposites" that Lemire describes? Do they learn to intellectually and performatively cope with and manage the oppositions? Do they know how to synthesize the oppositions or how to separate them when required? Are they learning instincts as much as acquired skills. Improv as well routine? Poetry as much prose? Application and experiment? Flexibility to learn continually?

This quote above really spoke to me as a poetic truism about the impulses of the profession -- which often moves in opposite directions simultaneously. Even here in this blog, the two primary categories -- theory and praxis -- are at once separate in their purpose and yet brought together in any act of writing. But is such a "bringing together" going on in my classroom when I host a discussion or mark up a paper? How 'dialectical' is my teaching, really? I'll keep musing over it, but for now, I just liked that quotation so much that I wanted to share it... and encourage other English professionals to consider using Lemire's book in their classroom or in their advising. It is quite a practical and thoughtful guide to the various options our major affords.

Education Week is reporting on a study that the makers of the ACT have recently put out that points to the gap between what high schools and college teachers want their students to be ready for when they come to college.

The new survey found that college professors generally want incoming students to have a deeper understanding of a selected number of topics and skills, while high school teachers in all content areas tend to rate a far broader array of content and skills as “important” or “very important.”

In other words, the "array" of content coverage is a sign that HS emphasizes breadth, while college tends to emphasize depth of work in a single content area. I'm not sure if this happens because of the assumptions of high school teachers about what college actually expects, or if it is merely a symptom of a larger neurosis regarding testing (prompted, perhaps, by NCLBA). "Breadth" is easy to test and grade, and errs toward assessing memorized knowledge over analytical and critical thinking, which usually takes essay reading and concentrated analysis in itself to generate a response.

Thus, the report itself shows the outcome:

the survey found a general lack of reading courses in high school and a decline in the teaching of targeted reading strategies after the 9th grade. In contrast, college instructors of remedial courses rated such strategies as very important and reported devoting a large percentage of time to teaching them.

I am not damning all High School in some generic, demonizing way. One of the things colleges have to offer is a shift in this paradigm of thinking. I think breadth is perhaps JUST AS important as depth for that level of learner, and I would simply suggest that some sort of balance should be sought. Whether or not an institution can support that kind of balance, in a frenzy to establish assessable outcomes, is debatable. But until teachers begin supporting reading in every way they can -- which means being active readers of their own student's writing, in addition to simply assigning texts -- the culture will not change.