Brittany's I-Search handout

Productive Cross-Pollination:

Pedagogical Connections between Creative Writing and Composition

Wendy Bishop: “We need to get serious about creating new, fused pedagogies, ones that include rhetoric, composition, creative writing, and literature as partners in instruction” (“Suddenly Sexy” 273). Sounds good. But WHY? and HOW?

Why #1: Cultivating critical thinking

• Reading and analyzing texts
• Applying techniques of craft to own work
• "High road transfer”—recognizing how creative writing process/techniques can apply to other rhetorical situations

Why #2: Encouraging collaboration

• Produce a pair-written text
• Students begin to see their “composition class community” as “a place where writing is welcomed, fluid, and able to be scrutinized in creative as well as critical ways” (Hochman 3)

Why #3: Subverting institutional hierarchy, thus empowering student

• Wendy Bishop: “The lessons here are obviously political ones; fundamentals precede art and art writing is for the elite (endlessly, the white, literate, at least middle-class kind), and composition writing is for those who need nothing more than basic literary” (Colors 187).

• Makes artistry less elite; validates students’ voices

• Opens class up for interrogation of power structures & boundaries

How [Outside Resources]:

• Will Hochman’s paired fiction writing
• M. Thomas Gammarino’s “portraits”
• Charles Fox’s “processive prompts”
• Email me to borrow Fox’s book!

How [My prompts]:

• Life Place Reading Journal
• Missoula Collage Poem
• Op-Ed commercial
• Email me for any of these prompts!

My tips:

• Make prompt organic

-Tie directly to rhetorical goals of unit

-Use as necessary drafting stage

• Be specific

• Make them reflect on the process

Works Cited [and suggested sources]:

1. Bishop, Wendy and Hans Ostrom. Colors of a Different Horse: Rethinking Creative Writing Theory and Pedagogy. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1994.
2. Bishop, Wendy. “Suddenly Sexy: Creative Writing Rear-Ends Composition.” College English 65.3. Jan. 2003: 257-75.
3. Fox, Charles. Creative Control: Creative Writing Prompts for the Composition Class. Dubuque: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2009.
4. Gammarino, M. Thomas. “Class Barriers: Creative Writing in Freshman Composition.” Currents in Teaching and Learning 1.2 (Spring 2009): 19-27. Web. 27 Oct. 2010. .
5. Hochman, Will. “Using Paired Fiction Writing: Transactional Creativity and Community Building in the Composition Class.” Daedelus. 1997-98. 27 October 2002.