A Taxonomy of Creative Writing Pedagogies

While the field of composition studies yields many useful taxonomies and axiologies on the teaching of writing, the field of creative writing studies is just beginning to emerge in this area of research. Composition's cognitive approaches, in particular, which sought correspondence between writing and learning and between how writers make decisions and choices in the writing process, might have served as a platform for parallel research in creative writing practice. It might have bridged a discussion from the writing and learning practices of creative writers to the ways in which we privilege certain teaching approaches and how these practices inform course planning, teaching strategies and classroom structure. Likewise, the field of literary studies has concerned itself with the research and study of literature from multiple (albeit conflicting) perspectives, presenting for creative writing, at a minimum, alternative methodologies for perceiving a text as verbal icon and for challenging master narratives.

What I discover when I survey the creative writing landscape for studies in teaching theories is limited. This is in spite of Bishop's (1994) plea for creative writing research methodology, ethnographic studies and teacher self-reports and Moxley's (1989) proposal for the interrogation of creative writing practices. Their work, often cited in today's scholarship, has moved the field forward only incrementally, perhaps because, as Moxley notes, creative writing teachers have a 'relative lack of interest in pedagogy' (1989: 27). Creative writing's isolationist posture is 'centuries old', and this stultifying stance leads Bizzaro to conclude that creative writers are skeptical 'of anything academic' (2004: 296). A mirroring of this 'view of science-as-devourer [is] put forth perhaps most emphatically and influentially in America by Edgar Allan Poe' in his 'In Sonnet – To Science': 'Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,/Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?' (qtd. in Bizzaro, 2004: 296).

In general, creative writers and writer-teachers seem to talk around the subject of research. The discipline often does not produce outcome data. It has little tangible evidence that affirms that our teaching methods improve student writing. In fact, because creative writing has often been defined by its writing workshop model, some in the field wonder if there is a substantial discipline from which to draw data on its teaching theories and practices, and if so, Shirley Geok-lin Lim (2003: 151) questions, 'How should we begin to talk about such a discipline?'

It may come as no surprise that creative writing lags in the study and theorizing of its teaching practices when we appreciate that the majority of graduate creative writing programs do not include coursework related to the pedagogy of creative writing, and only a handful of such programs provides training in teacher preparation. Ritter (2001: 213), who surveyed PhD creative writing programs in 2001, concludes, '[m]ost U.S. universities have no specific training in place that would prepare candidates to enter the creative writing classroom even remotely as well prepared as their rhetoric and composition Ph.D. counterparts'. The point to be made here is twofold: The first is that teacher training should assuredly include topics and/or courses in the history of creative writing, the theories behind pedagogical approaches, research methodologies in creative writing, contemporary issues in creative writing and, possibly, curricular design. The second reason to champion teacher training is partly rolled into the first point in that an awareness of historical approaches should lay the groundwork for important research studies that influence how we practice, how we teach our students and where meaning lies in our classrooms. It stands to reason that an immersion in the field's history and in teacher training will lead to more critical rethinking of our modes of instruction as well as notions on how this critical rethinking will translate to what and how we teach our students.

Mayers calls for an inquiry into the field's history beyond the contextualization of creative writing. There exist a few important historical inquires such as D.G. Myers's (1996) The Elephants Teach, Stephen Wilbers's (1980) The Iowa Writers Workshop, Patrick Bizzaro's (1993) Responding to Student Poems and Paul Dawson's (2005) Creative Writing and the New Humanities. Of the books mentioned, only Bizzaro and Dawson directly suggest ways to learn from creative writing's history and offer new avenues to approach its practice. What Mayers has in mind when he calls his fellow craft critics to action is for creative writing teachers to go beyond this historical research to discover different ways to consider our history, to explore new paths to contextualize its meaning and to construct variable lenses from which to view history in a different light. I suggest that there is still much we can learn from the history of creative writing from Emerson's naming of creative writing in his 1837 essay 'The American scholar' to contemporary creative writing praxes in university programs that might better inform our pedagogy. There exists significant data from which we can draw conclusions related to our teaching approaches and by which we might better integrate strategic program development in light of the new challenges we face in the 21st century.

In the early nineties, Bishop laments that creative writing teachers know little of the theory that informed their pedagogies and, as such, they could not voice the tenets behind their classroom practices because they lack reference. Almost a decade later, D.W. Fenza (2000) advances this same concern when he says, '[f]ew writers in the academy know the history of their own profession as teachers of writing'. In fact, Bizzaro (2004: 295) suggests practitioners 'view creative writing as something that has stumbled, by chance alone, into academe'. What is more, because writers do not know their history, they miss opportunities to address the theoretical rationale of the practices in their classroom. As such, Fenza tells us that 'they sometimes find it hard to defend their work against the scholars, the theorists and commentators who trivialize it'. If we are to bring the relevancy of history to current teaching practices, then we must include the view of English department chairs such as Stephen Tatum, the 1993 department chair at the University of Utah, whose essay in the ADE Bulletin forewarns 'The end of creative writing in the English department'. While Tatum's discussion does not necessarily include the teaching of creative writing, he does regret the curricula of graduate programs, which position the history of genres and of literature as an adversary to the creative writing candidate. His complaint has significance for the creative writing graduate who interviews for tenure-track positions today. This lack of history...