Considering Where We're Coming From

Learning to teach better is tough, exhilarating, and possible.

Wendy Bishop (1994a: 291)

One thing, for example, I have come to understand is that when I write, language accumulates along a metonymic register and gathers a particular force or momentum that almost always culminates in something that feels, stunningly, true. I pause for an instant, savoring the moment, then, driven by a kind of perpetual curiosity about whatever in the world might be coming next, breathe deep and begin again, knowing that what seemed in the instant before both fixed and inevitable is left over now, more or less, as a remainder, as delicate as a whisper or wish. This is something I know about writing and I also know that, for me, the same is true of teaching.

Katherine Haake (2000: 143)

We come into teaching from somewhere, with our own becoming as writers perhaps only partly examined, employing teaching practices picked up from models whose influence we only dimly grasp, going on shared assumptions that are mostly tacit. To become authentic as teachers, we need to do what writers do: name and know our sources, consider how they have shaped us, and integrate their influence, our own experience and our best thinking into a coherent text we can claim as our own.

Influences on Our Teaching

A section of my survey asked teachers to estimate the influence of each of eight factors on the way they teach creative writing: their experience as a student, their experience as a writer and reader, conversations with colleagues, observations of colleagues' classes, composition theory, creative writing pedagogy, informal analysis of student response and teacher research. Their responses show how much more we rely on experience (as students, as writers and as observers of our own classrooms) than on the means of seeing, questioning and reflecting upon experience that are summed up in the word pedagogy.

Learning to teach from experience as writers and readers

Creative writing teachers say that their teaching is most heavily influenced by their experience as writers and readers. Of those responding to my survey, 73% rated 'my experience as a writer and reader' as having 'much influence' on their teaching, and most of the rest gave it the next highest rating. This is consistent with the belief that a teacher of creative writing should first of all be a writer (some even assume that's the only requirement) and that our teaching is viewed in large part as an apprenticeship.

Hugh Cook (2004) sent me a list of ways his experience as a writer supports his teaching. Some have to do with being a model: 'experiencing how competitive getting something published is'; gaining 'respect in students' eyes simply for having published three books. They know I've "'been there'". Other items from his list relate to an insider's grasp of process: 'understanding how difficult it is to write well'; 'understanding the process of writing'; 'understanding that what works for one writer may not work for another'; and 'encouraging student writers not to be satisfied with a first draft'. Jim Heynen (2004) told me that he even bases writing exercises 'on problems I have just run into in my own work. It's one of the strongest arguments, if my experience is representative, for the writing teacher to be a writer'.

Convinced that it takes a writer to teach writers, we may fail to consider limitations of basing our teaching upon that experience. One is that writing may always have been easier for us than for most of our students – or if we had difficulties learning to write, we may have forgotten them. Stephen Brookfield (1995: 50) cautions, 'One of the hardest things for teachers to do is to imagine the fear that students feel as they try to learn what we teach. If we have been teaching in a particular discipline, content, or skill area for a long period of time, we have most likely forgotten what it feels like to come to this learning as an uncertain novice.'

Another limitation is that what works for the teacher may not work for the student. Thus, W. T. Pfefferle (2004) said he's willing to 'talk about my own processes as examples' but focuses on helping writers 'discover their own idiosyncrasies', and then he attempts 'to get inside what these writers already do, and try to maximize those things'.

An implication is that we are unlikely to teach effectively 'from experience' without informed reflection upon that experience. Patrick Bizzaro (1993: 27) observes that even expert writers can have plenty of difficulty with knowing where to begin 'in helping students read and evaluate poetry' until their own ways of reading are visible to them. He concludes that teachers need 'a systematic analysis that will enable them to recognize their own reading habits' as well as 'determine when such habits can be useful pedagogical tools'. In this way they empower themselves 'to let such readings go (and to perhaps offer more appropriate readings) when the readings threaten to be ill-advised or ineffective'. When he did such a systematic analysis of his own revision process, Bizzaro concluded that he needs a prewriting stage, and that it begins long before what beginning writers might see as 'the actual writing'. Some time later, reading a poem may trigger a memory, and it is this new event that occasions the poem that begins to take shape on the page. At that point, his poems talk to him, and their further shaping emerges from a dialogue between the writer and the work. A particular kind of form that often emerges consists of two strong sections connected by language bridges. Thus, what originally triggered the poem often falls away as the activity of writing generates the real discovery.

One application Bizarro made from this reflection was that the usual notion of prewriting and revising is too static in that it lacks the recursiveness as well as the distinct stages that he finds in his own process. Another outcome of his reflection was the ability to articulate why a particular way of teaching works or fails to work. He doesn't use photos in his teaching, for example, because 'writing should not be a response to a prewriting activity. Rather, the activity should help students see their own experiences as subject matter suited to writing, poetic or otherwise' (p. 25).

Learning to teach from our experience as students

In any practice we tend to follow our models, raising our children as we were raised and adopting a persona and a practice of teaching from our most influential teachers – unless we deliberately question their example or its aptness for us, and then construct our own alternative. As Andrew Scott (2004) observed, especially when starting out, our mentors' decisions 'can deeply influence'...