Swander, Mary. Duck, Duck, Turkey: Using Encouragement to Structure Workshop Assignments. Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom.

This is yet another reading that adddresses how stringent the authority should be in the workshop: Is the teacher a dictator, in a master/pupil setting, a mentor, or a guide? Swander calls the master/pupil or dictator role the "abusive basketball-coach method to teach writing workshops. ...We all know how it goes. The teacher tells the students to go home, write, and come back with a finished piece. Then, in front of the whole class, the teacher rips the piece to shreds. In my very first undergraduate workshop, I knew I was experiencing a strange system" (167).

Swander said this workshop model is detrimental to good learning: "We were to learn through trial by fire, through negativity, through humiliation, through hearing what we and others had done wrong. In any other skills-building class, from foreign language to driver's education, students were asked to practice the basic steps of the craft, carefully mastering one chunk of knowledge before adding another. Why was the teaching of creative writing so different?" (167).

Swander says the "traditional" way of teaching creative writing was adopted from the model set up by Paul Engle, who set up the creative writing program at the Iowa Writers Workshop. The model, at that time, was meant for graduate-level writers, who might have already mastered much of the craft of creative writing; the model was created so "young, polished writers could come for a year or two and have their work critiqued. Engle assumed his graduate students alreaaady knew how to write. What they needed, he reasoned in this post-WWII era, was a kind of bootcamp where they would be toughened up to the brutalityof the enemy: the attacking critics" (168).

However, when these newly-minted MFA students graduated and took their degrees to other universities to start their own MFA programs, they still used the pedagogy used upon them -- but now, on less-polished writers, who might not have mastered their crafts yet. Swander likens this to "poisonous pedagogy" or breaking a writer's spirit (170) in order to teach them discipline. And, of course, creativity doesn't flourish when the spirit is broken, so a new pedagogy is called for when teaching undergraduates or less-developed writers.