Innovation in Language Learning

How can Creative Writing – and Creative Reading as a related procedure – enhance the teaching of literature, annihilating, or at least reducing, the students’ resistance to it? Despite voices that question the utility and necessity of Creative Writing, it is proved – through Creative Writing applications and research in typical junior High School classrooms as well as in Creative Writing Workshops – that this medium reduces the students’ fear towards mistakes, empowers creativity in learning, enhances creative attitude towards life and promotes Creative Literacy, as students “try their hands on” Literature. Creative Writing permits a combination of reception/reading, analysis and practice, which are basic ingredients of creative literary education. Creative Writing, in other words, transforms Literature Teaching into a constructive art, based not only on literary records but mostly on literary action. Teaching literature through Creative Writing and Reading, teachers can exploit and combine different pedagogical instruments: the Objective Theory (focus on critical reading and writing), the Mimetic Theory (focus on mimesis writing), the Expressivist Theory (focus on free expression through free jotting, automatic writing etc.) and the Pragmatic Theory (focus on reader-response and on polyphonic reading and writing). Creative Writing, in connection to Creative Reading, not only leads to reading and critical efficiency but also to imaginative exploration and accomplishment. At the same time, it cultivates students first-order thinking (which refers to creating a text) and second-order thinking (which refers to assessing and reviewing a text). Reviewing a text can rise difficulties leading to reviser’s block; it is important, through Creative Writing, to teach students to consider revising as a natural procedure, connected to writing. How can one assess the students’ texts in a Creative Writing classroom or workshop? For the assessment of Creative Writing and its related dilemma (assessment dilemma), it is up to the teacher to sustain an equilibrium: on the one hand, assessment is important, as it leads to improvement, on the other hand it must be moderated so as not to become a kind of force/power imposed to students’ creativity. Creative Writing and Creative Reading, applied in a typical classroom as a tool of teaching literature as well as in a Creative Writing Workshop as a tool of self-expression, can transform radically and positively the way students confront Literature: indifferent or resistant students who don’t enjoy literature or question its utility seem to discover, via Creative Reading and Writing, the textual power that derives from the literary text as well as from their own imagination.

[1] Brophy, K. (1994). Strange Practices: Anxiety, Power and Assessment in Teaching Creative Writing. Overland, 137, 55-57.
[2] Cowger, A. (2012). Eradicating Reviser’s Block: Bringing Revision to the Foreground. In C. Drew, J. Rein & D. Yost (Eds.), Dispatches from the Classroom: Graduate Students on Creative Writing Pedagogy (pp. 15-22). New York: Continuum.