My work as a fiction writer and my experiences and training in creative writing workshops fundamentally shape my approach to teaching writing. Fiction writing is, as a former professor of mine described, an act of “cutting from whole cloth”–building something that does not exist because the writer believes that it should. Though college composition papers are not short stories or novels, my philosophy is that good writing is both creative and liberating to the author. Where possible, my goal is to empower my students to articulate what matters to them within a structure and process that makes sense to them, dismantling oppressive barriers of “what I [the instructor] want” or “how it should be.” My philosophy is that composition coursework must equip students to be and become independent and to introduce them to the nuances, complexities, and caveats that comprise any compelling argument or idea.
I teach two introductory courses in Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky to primarily first-year students. We are learning to critically assess the academic and non-academic sources we encounter in our daily lives, and the class culminates in a Wikipedia editing project, where students identify and fill gaps in public information and learn to write for a public audience. As a first time instructor, I am learning day by day how I can help my students learn, and speaking in terms of their experiences and understandings is a way in which I work to bridge and fill gaps.
For example, in our first assignment, the “Assessing Public Information Essay,” many of my students struggled to make sense of the multi-part writing prompt and its lack of structural requirements. I offered an additional worksheet and lecture that spoke in the terms some of the students used to describe what they understood about the assignment: namely, the “compare and contrast essay” and/or particular paragraph and sentence structure requirements. We considered how our assignment was a compare and contrast essay in the sense that we were looking at two different articles about a similar topic, but we wanted to take our work one step further by studying why those differences exist and why those differences matter. We needed, in other words, more sophisticated analysis. Likewise, we talked about how our essay could adopt a traditional five paragraph structure and what that could look like, but also why that might not work for us. As I spoke in their terms—or, more specifically, the terms handed to them from their past writing experiences—I invited them to see the opportunities in which they could take agency in the writing process and try something new.
In creative writing workshops, we talk about revision in terms of reaching the next best version of the written product. This encapsulates my mentality about student progress in composition: I want them to move one step closer to taking chances in their writing, whatever that looks like for them. To that end, I am inspired by the ways in which the writing workshop facilitates that progress: namely, by the feedback offered in class-wide peer review sessions. Students can learn to parse through the possibilities and potentials others see in their work, identify what best speaks to their ambitions, and proceed accordingly. Nevertheless, a class-wide roundtable in an introductory composition course is an intimidating endeavor. Thus, as I prepare for my second semester of teaching, I am looking to small group roundtable structures, so students receive feedback from a few peers, but in a more private, low-stakes way. Meanwhile, students will introduce their draft with a paragraph about how it was composed. Ideally, this will open up discussions about the infinite good possibilities for writing and revising drafts–and that they, the writer, must use their best judgement to make final decisions. It is this independent, informed thinking that will best guide them to write what matters to them, identify and articulate their own values and ideals, and make meaning within and beyond the composition classroom.
