Elbow, Peter. "The Pedagogy of the Bamboozled." Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching.

"The teacher must work as a collaborating ally of the student, not as a supervisor" (87). I'm beginning to see why Peter Elbow and the concept of expressivism is connected so closely to creative writing. I've met very few creative writing professors who believe in imposing their own ideas of "what works" on a student, wanting instead for a student to focus on creating their own voice and style. Voice and style can sometimes get lost in composition, where we can be more concerned with keeping a focus and organization.

"The object of study is the actual lives of the students and their perception of their lives -- always reflected back as problems to be solved and sources of contradiction" (88).

"When we order books and set up themes whic we decide (or publishers decide, or even past students decide) are relevant to the real lives of the students, we are often pretending to make our subject the lives and perception-of-lives of our students, but are actually falling short in a bamboozling way" (89). This is why I agree so much with the pedagogy where we allow our students to decide on a topic for themselves, based on a large theme like "relationships" or "issues in groups." If we force our students to write about topics like technology, or something else in which they might not be invested, the writing begins to become a chore again -- and composition writing feels more like work rather than a fun process.

"The process is primarily rational and cognitive (rather than affective): critical thinking, problem-posing, looking for contradictions, and achieving greater awareness of one's own awareness and thinking" (90). I feel this can work for both composition and creative writing. While creative writing allows us to flounder, we must ultimately decide what our theme is -- what is our work about? -- and focus on telling that story, leading our readers where we want them to go.

Elbow, Peter. "Exploring My Writing." Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching.

"Much teaching behavior really stems from an unwarranted fear of things falling apart. When I started to act on my new feelings and to refrain from unsolicited telling and asking, I discovered that the fear lay behind much of my previous teaching. I began to realize I'd always been 'running' or 'structuring' a class with the underlying feeling that if I ever stopped, some unspecifiable chaos or confusion would ensue" (71-72). I think this might be one of the differentations between composition and creative writing. In composition, we offer processes to stimulate critical thinking, ideas to organize and focus, stress the need for a thesis statement around which the work must center. In creative writing, there is much more room to flounder, and the instructors are comfortable with allowing their students to flounder and even fail. However, both compositionists and creative writers believe in revision, in that their first draft won't be the perfect one and that it's OK. For creative writers, perhaps there's even more revision, because we don't always have a clear "thesis" or "theme" in mind as we start to write.

"An actual audience is crucial for writing. English teachers know it helps for the student to imagine an audience. But this is nothing compared to the benefit of actually having one. The best thing about my course is the fact that each student writes something weekly he knows the rest of the class will read and, for the most part, comment on" (73).

"For learning, empirical feedback is a good thing and normative evaluation is a bad thing. Empirical feedback, in the case of writing, means learning what the words did to the reader. Normative evaluation means having the words judgmentally ranked according to some abstract standard" (75). This seems to support workshopping.

Elbow, Peter. "Nondisciplinary Courses and the Two Roots of Real Learning." Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching.

Not too much of this pertains to crossing over between creative writing and composition, but I like it, so I'm gonna include some of the key quotes here:

"It can often seem that noncurricular and nonacademic activity trend to produce more 'real learning' than textbooks, lectures, and classes: personal, social, and political situations, jobs, getting intro trouble, quitting or getting kicked out of school -- all these seem to teach better, if (perhaps) less, than our classes. When students really learen in class, it often seems because their class at that moment was an instance of a social and affective situation -- fighting or joining others about felt ideas" (8).

"To see why a disciplinary curriculum is not enough and should be supplemented with nondisciplinary courses, it is necessary to explore more fully what is meant by real learning.

Learning is getting categories. Even changing them would mean getting new ones. But of course the most trivial leaerning consists of getting categories: Pavlov taught a category to his dog. And all too similarly, when teachers teach stuents to write comprehensible essays feeding back undigested ideas from lectures and reading, this too constitutes imparting concepts. True enough, it requires important and sophisticated skills to take in concepts well enough to reformulate them on an essay or exam; and it's hard enough, God knows, for a teacher to make even that happen.

But real learning, in contrast, is the phenomenon of so abundantly "understanding" the concept in the book or lectre that it becomes paret of us and dcetermines the way we see, feel, and act -- the way we process the widest range of data. If all we can do is answer academic essay questions about it, that means it will only process data roughly similar to the data in which it came: a fairly narrow range of words and types of sentences. It won't process many of the words and types of sentences we come across outside of class, and even fewer of the nonverbal stimuli we bump into.

We can say now that there are two ingredients in real learning. The first is the ability to apply already-learned concepts to the widest range of data; or to recognize the widest range of potential instances of the concept" (13-14).

Elbow, Peter. Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Teaching and Writing. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

In Chapter One, Elbow says he believes the teaching he found most effective as a student was interdisciplinary: "Interdisciplinary study seemed to make learning 'real' for me and for my students i na way that learning had not often been before" (5).

"I'm arguing that, whereas plain, garden variety, in-school learning consists of the ability to apply academic concepts to academic contexts, 'real learning' consists of two further skills: the ability to apply known concepts moe widely -- to situations never found in schoo; and the ability to invent new concepts never presented in school. By fostering these two skills, non-disciplinary teaching can teach the ability to learn" (6-7).

I imagine he means interdisciplinary as outside of writing, but I also think it can pertain to teaching different genres of writing, or even creative writing and composition at the same time. I do this now in expository writing, and plan to a bit in my narration and description class. I think if students can better make the connections between what different kinds of genres entail, and what crosses over in writing across the disciplines.

Pennisi, Linda Tomol and Patrick Lawler. "Without a Net: Collaborative Writng." Colors of a Different Horse.

I thought this chapter had some amazing ideas for teaching and prompts, so that's what I want to emphasize here. All of this is (mostly) directly quoted from pages 227-228, and I just wanted to record them so I can use them later in classes:

Group poem: Each student writes the second line of a first line provided by the instructor. (First lines can be taken from published poems or created by the instructor.) Students sit in a circle, each providing a line and then passing it to the next student. The poem is finished when it reaches the first student who started the process. The instructor can concentrate on the function of first lines, the value of surprise in poetry, the issue of closure, and certainly on images created by the students.

Voice/Box: Students, with some direction, write down a list of interesting words or images. Word lists are cut up into strips of paper, placed into a box, and passed around the classroom. Students select five or six words or images and are asked to write a poem using them. (This can also work with titles.)

Response Poems: Students write poems in response to another student's poem.

The living newspaper (would work well for advanced classes, I imagine): Students select an issue (the environment, racism, the homeless, etc.). Using the newspaper as a source of inspiration, students begin to write about their issue collectively with the idea of having the pieces performed at the end of the semester. Students work with poetry, prose, and drama.

The Persona Poems: Students create a persona in small groups of 3 or 4, by answering 20-25 questions asked by the instructor. The small groups, after creating the character, begi nto write in the voice of that character.

Masiello, Lea. "Voices from the Writing Center: It's Okay to Be Creative -- A Role for the Imagination in Basic-Writing Courses." Colors of a D.H.

As I finish annotating this book, I'm beginning to see emerging patterns in what the authors say, both in this book and in Creative Writing in America: 1. That teachers need to use both composition and creative writing strategies in the classroom. 2. That the different types of writing don't necessarily need to be differentiated from in the classroom. 3. That creative writing is thought of as "fun" and composition is thought of as "work."

So I'm going to concentrate on just the new things I'm learning in the last chapters of this book, in the interest of my time. So, I like what is said here: "We often think of basic-writing courss as providing instruction in basic "skills," such as composing complete sentences, punctuating sentences accurately, and structuring the college essay. However we do students a terrible disserve when we emphasize skills in a basic-writing course; instead, we need to emphasize the development of identity and confidence. Imaginative invention activities can be used in basic-writing courses to build identity and confidence very successfully, and these activities will be especially effective when combined with support from peer tutors in a writing center" (208).

So basically it reaffirms what I've said before, although it is stretched to the writing center this time, which I think is great. A few years back someone at the USF Writing Center said they wanted me to work there because they needed someone who understood creative writing there to help THOSE students ... like they were compositionists, and creative writing was separate from that.

Bishop, Wendy. Crossing the Lines: On Creative Composition and Composing Creative Writing. Colors of a Different Horse.

Bishop states something that I on occasion also feel: "We need to be crossing the line between composition and creative writing far more often than we do. In fact, we may want to eliminate the line entirely" (181). I find it interesting that composition, creative writing, marketing, and journalism have been entirely separated from each other in the traditional academic world: A writer needs to be able to cross these lines in order to survive as both a creative person and a professional.

"Often students believe essay writing is a chore. They also believe in what I'll call the myth of 'free creativity' in creative writing classes, as expressed here by Bill (one of Bishop's students): 'In creative writing, I feel that there is no set guidelines. It leaves room for experimentation and you can go into any angle or direction. In expository prose you have set guidelines of what you must write and how you should write it.' This 'free creativity' belief is as devastating for the creative writing class as it is for composition classes. When students arrive in creative writing classes with dichotomous attitudes -- composition is no fun, creative writing therefore must be fun -- creative writing classes can appear surprisingly restrictive since novice writers are often expected to learn conventions like the intricacies of formal verse or plotting and point of view rather than simply given free rein to 'find some exotic, fun, brilliant way to say things,' as Ashley had hoped" (187).

And this is true enough. I have plenty of students come into my expository writing class initially dreading it because it's titled as an advanced-level composition class -- it couldn't be fun. And I have many creative writing students who initially think that their writing doesn't have to make sense to other people; as long as they're expressing themselves, they should have their writing accepted. I've had to dispel the myths in both cases, and more and more depend on strategies I've learned in both types of writing to help students understand the overall concept of successful writing.

Leggo, Carl. Voice(s) in Writing: Symphony and/or Cacophony. Colors of a Different Horse.

Some quotes that lead off this chapter:

Because the whole notion of "voice" is so mystical and abstract, the term 'voice' may have become nothing more than a vague phrase conjured up by English teachers to impress and motivate the masses to write more, confess more, and be happy. (Hashimoto 75-76). 1

Your authentic voice is that authorial voice which sets you apart from every living human being despite the number of common or shared experiences you have with many others: it is not a copy of someone else's way of speaking or of perceiving the world. It is your way. (Stewart 2-3). 2

Voice is something that seems to be touched upon more in creative writing. We're told that the more we write, the more our own voice will emerge. For me it's a combination of style and how I talk, which seems to be reflected in some of my work. Of course my voice can get lost when I'm creating characters' voices, and don't want mine to intrude.

Voice can come across in all types of compositions. Leggo says that "the experience of voice, the politics of voice, the intertextuality of voice, the authenticity of voice, the origin of voice, the ubiquity of voice, the energy of voice cannot be conceptualized, schematized, and classified anymore than beach stones can be categorized and labeled" (167).

He points out something that I believe is true about academic writing: "As a young academic writer eager to be published, I am tempted to write the kind of essays that belie the meaning of essay as "trying." I am tempted to write essays that I don't really want to write, that don't seem especially significant, that are full of complaint and criticism, that croak in somebody's notion of a scholarly, academic voice, that huff and puff with braggadocio, whimper and whine with sibilant sycophancy, and pontificate with proclamations for progress -- a sort of bash 'em, trash 'em, hash 'em, flash' em writing. But in this essay at least I am trying to avoid those rhetorical stances in favor of an interrogative stance ..." (168-169).

Voice is often lost in academic work, which troubles me, because aren't we trying to teach people to write persuasively, which includes not just logos, but ethos and pathos as well? I can believe what you're saying is true, but if you don't move me emotionally, instead just throwing out facts, I'm bored with you. Yet much academic writing just does that -- which is why it's difficult to read, and why I feel many academics shouldn't teach writing -- they haven't thought about all of the aspects of good writing, and are preparing students to write for just one narrow, academic audience, instead of all of the audiences they will encounter throughout their lives.

1. Hashimoto, I. "Voice as Juice: Some Reservations About Evangelic Composition." College Composition and Communication 38 (1987): 70-80.

2. Stewart, Donald C. The Authentic Voice: A Pre-Writing Approach to Student Writing. Dubuque, IA: Wm. C. Brown, 1972.

Brand, Alice G. "On Seeing the Green Parrot and the Green Salad." Colors of a Different Horse.

Just one nugget here I'd like to emphasize: "Despite the persuasive power of Peter Elbow's and Donald Murray's writing pedagogies, expressive writing -- wholly legitimate in creative writing -- is considered merely instrumental in academic discourse, intended to be left behind as quickly as possible" (146). Funnily enough, these two teachers are those to whom I cling the most in my studies, most likely because I'm a creative writer. I don't know if they are dismissed as easily as Brand says here, but it could make sense that it is why academic writing is pushed so hard in first-year composition classes, rather than writing that might make a personal difference to a student.

Sarbo, Linda and Joseph Moxley. "Creativity Research and Classroom Practice. Colors of a Different Horse.

This chapter tries to look at creativity itself theoretically, which was interesting to me -- I hadn't thought about that before.

The chapter states that this kind of research has a "fundamental obstacle: creativity's imprecise and ambiguous definition" ... music critics, art historians, scholars, and scientists ... often disagree on the creative value of a work" (133). Perhaps this is why creative writing has such a difficult time being taken seriously as an academic practice; everyone has a different definition of it, so it's hard to determine when a student is "successful" or not. "There is agreement that a creative act must be original or novel, that it must be seen as valuable or interesting, and that it cannot be accidental" (134).

Creativity is defined here through several types of processes:

1. An unconscious process: "Influenced by then-dominant Freudian psychoanalytic theory, early twentieth-century philosophers such as Henri Poincare and Karl Popper viewed creativity as an unconscious process ... a creative act occurs when an artist becomes intensely engaged in an encounter with his or her world. In this state of total absorption, the artist experiences a heightened awareness in which the conscious, subconscious, and the unconscious converge in a suprarational process to produce a creative insight. This sudden illumination occurs at the moment of transition between prolonged conscious effort and relaxationand is characteristically concise, elegantly simple, contrary to prior rational thought, and accompanied by a sense of immediate certainty" (134). This would go against what is often taught in composition classes, where conscious choices are made in writing.

2. A Cognitive Process: "Cognitive Psychologists theorized that creativity, like general intelligence, is a cognitive process, a special way of thinking and solving problems ...(cognitive theorist J.P.) Guilford hypothesized that at least eight primary mental abilities, which he collectively labeled divergent thinking underlie creativity: sensitivity to problems, fluency, flexibility, originality, synthesis, analysis, elaboration, and evaluation" (136-137). This is so much like the process I lead my composition students through as they construct a work that I am taken aback at seeing it stated so simply here.

A couple other comments worth recording: "...while divergent thinking is associated with creativity, it is not equivalent to it" and "Student writers are often limited, not because they have no solution, but because they can see only one solution to a narrative problem" (136). Creativity in a composition classroom allows students the flexibility to stay away from one thesis statement, trying to tailor research and points to fit that focus, rather than reaching around a bit to come to an ultimate solution to a writing work.

3. A Personality Trait: This section looks at creativity as a personality factor. However, the features of a "creativity personality" were so broad that I found I could dismiss them easily.