Abstracts
The Muse Collaborates: Writing Communities for Learning Literature
and Composition
Modern Language
Association 1997
Hickey
| Reiss
| Bishop
Dona Hickey's Abstract: The Poem, the Princess, and the Pea: Teaching Literary Sensitivity in the Interpretive Community of the Classroom
Among novice readers of poetry, there are many received myths. The most daunting is that one must be born with a poetic sensibility. Without this inherited trait, there can be no feel for the art. In other words, you have to be a princess to feel the pea. And not just under one, but many layers of ticking. My presentation will focus on ways to develop a sensitivity to poetic language by drawing on what students already know from their experience in other art forms, and by what they can teach each other about reading and interpretation. Specifically, I will offer a variety of classroom exercises that help students hear, see, and understand a poem with increasing sensitivity and confidence.
Donna Reiss's Abstract: First-Year Writers Reflect on the First Amendment: Electronic Collaboration to Cool the Conversation on a Hot Topic
When online students address their own biases and ambivalence about freedom and censorship--in particular when they reflect on the implications of the First Amendment for collaborative communities in cyberspace--they are dealing not with abstractions but with their own immediate experiences. The misunderstandings and misrepresentations that can occur in an informal class discussion on controversial topics are tempered by electronic discussions. Like a face-to-face conversation, an asynchronous electronic conference can provide the give-and-take of dialogue. Unlike a face-to-face conversation, however, an electronic discussion allows for reflection, for editing of remarks before they are disseminated, for reviewing the record of others’ actual remarks, and for identifying the common ground--a way to foster community in the midst of conflict.
Wendy Bishop's Abstract: Entertaining the Conversation: Creative Writers in Working Communities
Creative writing can become a much more communal and conversational art than most of us imagine, swayed as we are by myths of solitary authorship and the often unexamined and internalized norms of academic creative writing programs. Reconsidering invention, co-authoring, and the value of independently convened creative writing groups and re-thinking ways for setting up writing as a pleasurable activity may change the ways we conceptualize our own writing and our teaching of creative genres. In addition, the advent of electronic media for communicating and publishing encourages us to consider what real and virtual locations we might explore for setting up salons and parlors and working creative writing communities. Working communities encourage entrance, support conversation, and nurture creativity by helping us value and visualize creative writing as part of a life-long aesthetic process.
modified 11/17/97 by D. Reiss