Critical-Creative Literacy and Creative Writing Pedagogy

This article builds on psychological research that claims critical thinking is a key component of the creative process to argue that critical-creative literacy is a cognitive goal of creative writing education. The article also explores the types of assignments and prompts that might contribute to this goal and simultaneously build bridges between creative writing education and other humanities disciplines.

Critical-Creative Literacy and Creative Writing Pedagogy

This article builds on psychological research that claims critical thinking is a key component of the creative process to argue that critical-creative literacy is a cognitive goal of creative writing education. The article also explores the types of assignments and prompts that might contribute to this goal and simultaneously build bridges between creative writing education and other Humanities disciplines.

Reading Literary Theory between the Lines of Creative Writing: The Dialectics of Theory and Practice in the Creative Writing Pedagogy

Literary theory and critical writing have been traditionally perceived as being in tension, either silently ignoring or polemically rejecting each other. In this paper we argue that literary theory and creative writing are interconnected on various levels. By acknowledging this fact, theory may be profitably deployed in the creative writing class, in order to enhance creative writers’ sense of literary mechanisms, conventions, and purposes in specific sociocultural contexts. In this way, theory informs students not only in relation to the poetics, but also to the pragmatics of the literary phenomenon. Theory askes creative writers to contemplate on how they themselves are socially, ideologically and culturally positioned as writers (and as readers) of literature, and how their activity is enmeshed in a broader process of personal and communal identity formation through language and literary representation.

GENRE APPROACH IN CREATIVE WRITING PEDAGOGY IN ENGLISH IN UPPER PRIMARY CLASSES IN KENYA

Writing can be used to measure learning of the other three language skills and written materials be used for reference in future. Creative writing (CW) is the production of texts which have an aesthetic rather than a purely informative, instrumental or pragmatic purpose. It is a personal writing where the purpose is to express thoughts, feeling and emotions in an imaginative, unique, and sometimes poetic way. Of all the four language skills, creative writing is a high order skill that calls for molding through appropriate pedagogical approaches. In Kenya, English is both an examinable subject and a language of instruction. CW accounts for 40% of the total score in English subject. However, over 62% of learners fail to achieve writing competence at the end of primary course. Primary schools in Vihiga County have persistently underperformed in CW with more than (70%) of Class 8 learners scoring below the average mean mark. Despite this underperformance, only a few studies on CW pedagogy are available. CW studies conducted in Kenya have established that 60 % of teachers find it difficult to teach CW while 75% of learners find it boring. These have implications for pedagogy and students’ writing enthusiasm. The objective of this study was to explore the use genre pedagogic approach and its effectiveness in the development of CW skills. Archer’s theory of reflexivity which views writing as internal and external conversations was used. The study used qualitative exploratory research design and the study was conducted in Vihiga County. The data collection tools were Lesson Observation Schedule and Interview Schedule whose validity and reliability were tested through triangulation. From Class 6-8, 30 lessons in 10 purposively selected schools were observed and 30 teachers whose lessons had been observed were interviewed. Data were analyzed thematically through transcription, coding and identification of themes. The key finding was: inappropriate use of genre approach due to teachers’ knowledge gaps on CW pedagogical approaches. The study recommended that teachers of English use genre approaches appropriately in CW pedagogy and the Ministry of Education to in-service teachers of English on CW approaches. The results are useful to teachers of English and Teacher Training Institutions. KEY WORDS: Approaches, Genre Approach Creative Writing and Upper Primary Learners.

Rethinking Creative Writing Pedagogy in a Multilingual Composition Classroom

This chapter aims to redefine creative writing pedagogy in terms of a literacy practice to identify the role of creative writing in establishing community literacy in ESL classrooms and to determine the ways in which creative writing might be implemented in the ESL composition class with a view to fostering community literacy. The chapter defines the scope of the following concepts and defines the corresponding working terms in the chapter: community literacy, creative writing pedagogy, composition classroom, etc. The first part of the chapter provides the overview of the theoretical works of the researchers whose views and concepts serve as the foundation for the current research. The second part of the chapter identifies specific creative writing techniques to be utilized in the ESL classroom for establishing community literacy.

Scriptorium: Creating an Open-Access Creative Writing Journal in Brazil

Since 2012, Creative Writing has been an official concentration within the Graduate Program in Letters at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. PUCRS is still the only institution offering Creative Writing courses across all levels (undergraduate, MA, PhD, workshops, non-credit courses) in the country. Within this context, we created Scriptorium, our first Creative Writing Studies journal. Linked to the Graduate Program in Letters and EDIPUCRS (the university press), Scriptorium publishes articles on the creative process, literary translation, Creative Writing pedagogy, as well as fiction and poetry. In our editorial team, we have faculty members, graduate, and undergraduate students. Every article is peer-reviewed, and the journal is open access and published online. The present paper aims to offer an account of the creation of our journal, drawing from my experience as editor. I will share our publishing process, the challenges in the dialogue between Creative Writing and Academia in Brazil, and our views for the future of this kind of publication, hoping that our experience can prove useful to other researchers and institutions wanting to publish similar open access journals.

Resisting Monosexism: Representations of Bisexuality in Literature

In a New York Times review of James Baldwin’s 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, Mario Puzo writes that “A propaganda novel may be socially valuable… but it is not art.” Puzo’s claim is a function of what creative writing pedagogy scholar Janelle Adsit calls “the particular privilege that comes with a denial of marginalization.” Assumptions of rigid binaries that categorise people as either hetero- or homosexual, a phenomenon that scholar Kenji Yoshino calls “the epistemic contract of bisexual erasure,” create and reinforce harmful ideas about bisexuality. Bisexual representation in literature can operate as a creative resistance to the status quo, undermining the alleged necessity for a rigid binary system of sexuality. From James Baldwin’s 1968 Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone to Jen Wilde’s 2017 Queens of Geek, this article traces representations of bisexuality in literature, with special attention to the ways in which bisexuality is demonstrated, described, and labelled in literature. However, while acknowledging the problematic representations of bisexuality in older fiction, such as Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 The Well of Loneliness, this paper resists a narrative of pure progress of bisexual representation, examining both problematic and nuanced representations in contemporary literature.