Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Week 2, Pedagody Forum
The nature of "work" in this class differs greatly from any other type of class that I have ever taken. I've noticed that when I let creative work for this class consume me, the work becomes fun. If you let a traditional class consume every thought, insanity ensues. I feel that understanding this is so important because it changes the goals for learning. Looking at the class though a creative process verses a final product, frees me, a self-proclaimed overachiever, to calm those thoughts and really do some interesting, meaningful work. I have found it very liberating to "play" with language instead of focusing on just interpretation and analysis. Through a little experiment of mine, I began thinking of this class differently this week (a different type of work), and so far, I can't wait to get home from work to examine my journals and practice writing.
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This is precisely the type of binary that you want to break down, and one that promises enormous benefits for you in the critical classroom. When students think of "creative writing," they most likely think, "exciting, playful, imaginary, etc." When they think of critical writing, they think, "research, difficulty, anxiety, form, etc." Of course, we know that this is a false binary at work. Creative writing, as you have seen, is a great deal of work, while critical writing--the location of interesting phenomena in texts, the engineering of viable signs for further analysis--is extremely creative. The challenge is to get your students to see how that opposition is a myth. Keep working on it.
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