At my first
Summer Institute, we were told to come in the first day having written a first
draft of a “position paper” – some thoughts on some position we had related to
writing and/or the teaching of writing. At the time I didn’t know if I had a
“position” on anything, but I could come up with a few things I wanted to learn
to do better. One of them – and the one I chose to write about in my first
position paper – focused on peer response groups. I used them in my classes,
and I believed (in a theoretical way) in their value, but I’d never quite felt
I was doing them very successfully, and so I decided I would devote at least
some time during the Summer Institute to learning more about peer response
groups and how I might make them work better in my own classes.
I’m not
sure why I came up with this particular idea; we were never told more than that
single instruction to write “thoughts on some position.” And when I got
together with my writing group that first Monday afternoon and we shared our
position papers, the thing that stood out most to me was how differently each
of us had interpreted the assignment. I had chosen a fairly specific aspect to
focus on, while other teachers had taken a broader approach, presenting their
values in regard to teaching writing, or talking about their own experiences
and aspirations as writers themselves; one, a Physical Education teacher,
phrased her position as a basic question: How can I use writing with my students?
The title
“position paper” has since been replaced by the title “statement of inquiry,”
but one of the things that remains is the freedom each teacher has to shape
this statement around whatever interests and matters most to that individual
teacher. Perhaps it is some specific aspect or technique involved in teaching
writing that you’d like to do more, or better. (In a later summer, my statement
of inquiry focused on portfolios, which at the time I didn’t know enough about
to feel comfortable introducing into my classes, but by the time the summer
ended, I was so hooked I’ve never taught a writing class since that didn’t use
some version of the portfolio system.) Perhaps it has to do with your sense of
yourself as a writer or something you’d like to do that will help you as a
writer. Or perhaps it’s a broader issue you want to consider and explore, maybe
from a political point of view. At one point, thinking about the summer, I
pondered making my “statement of inquiry” simply be: technology (though I realize
this is neither a statement nor, I guess, an inquiry.) I feel that I am too far
behind the times both in my ability to use technology for myself (I’d like to
have a web page, for instance, and although I am on Facebook, I don’t know how
to do anything on Facebook, not even how to find all my “new notifications”),
and also in using technology in my classes. So even though “technology” isn’t
particularly enlightening as the title of a statement of inquiry, I knew what I
meant, and if I’d chosen to go in that direction, I would have been comfortable
with the choice.
What I have
ended up choosing to explore for my statement of inquiry stirs some excitement
in me, and for me at least, that’s important. Simply put, I feel as if I have
caught the “political bug.” I am a creative writing teacher; I believe in the
value of creative writing. (I probably believe in its value more than I believe
in the value of Algebra or Chemistry, but then I do admit to being biased.) I
believe students innately sense its value, and the vast majority of teachers
understand it has great value too. And yet creative writing, like so many other
arts, is constantly being reduced (or eliminated) by those who make the
decisions about what teachers will teach and what students will learn.
In one of
our informal staff discussions over the last few weeks, Peter Anderson
mentioned that in some ways, teaching creative writing can be seen as a
subversive act. This thought shocked me at first, in part because I teach in a
creative writing program – I would be considered subversive is I did not focus my classes around creative
writing. But the more I thought about it, the truer it began to seem. Even in
my program, one of the deans recently said that she believed supervising a
creative writing thesis is much easier and less work than supervising a
Government thesis, for instance, because a creative writing thesis has no
content. I can’t begin to explain all the ways that statement is wrong.
This
summer, I’m going to search out all the errors in that notion. I’ve spent most
of my life learning the “hows” of teaching writing; now I want to look into the
“whys.” I know, at a level deeper than any conscious argument can tap, that
creative writing is important. But I’ve never really thought about how I can
make that case to others. This summer, I’m going to try.
Mark
