Proposal Title
Given Words: Creative Writing, Collaboration, and Pedagogy
Proposal Type
Individual Presentation
Location
Olscamp 208: Collaboration in the Classroom
Start Date
21-10-2017 9:45 AM
End Date
21-10-2017 11:00 AM
Abstract
This project explores the pedagogical impact of incorporating creative writing, play, and collaboration into the writing classroom. Through a collaborative creative project, we began exploring and thinking about the writing process in different ways. This presentation focuses on the process of completing that project and the ways this type of collaborative writing could be used in the composition classroom to help students become more effective writers.
Given Words: Creative Writing, Collaboration, and Pedagogy
Olscamp 208: Collaboration in the Classroom
This project explores the pedagogical impact of incorporating creative writing, play, and collaboration into the writing classroom. Through a collaborative creative project, we began exploring and thinking about the writing process in different ways. This presentation focuses on the process of completing that project and the ways this type of collaborative writing could be used in the composition classroom to help students become more effective writers.
Proposal
This project explores the pedagogical impact of incorporating creative writing, play, and collaboration into the writing classroom. Our presentation will begin by engaging the audience in a brief writing activity where we will provide five words and ask that everyone spend a few minutes free-writing; the only requirement is that they use the five provided words in their free-write. We will ask a few participants to share their free-write and talk a bit about the experience. We will then lead into a discussion of a collaborative creative project we completed where we assigned each other 15 words and then had to construct an individual poem/short story using those words. In addition, we then used all 30 words to write a creative piece together. We will discuss the process of completing that project together and address the unique challenges and affordances of collaborating in our current space and time. Our discussion will then focus on how creative, collaborative projects can benefit writing students and help them to better visualize, explain, and map out their ideas, familiarize themselves with writing in contexts that vary from traditional academic writing, and “identify their own issues as readers [and writers] who must be prepared to recognize when they could more effectively strategize as readers [and writers] to take on unfamiliar reading situations” (Benson et al. 6). We will spend the last portion of our presentation time asking the audience to share their ideas for incorporating creative writing into the classroom and how those activities can work toward creating more effective, well-rounded writers.