Creativity in the English Department

This has been a week of great creativity in our English department at Spartanburg Methodist College.  I've rounded the corner and come across students putting together presentations with a variety of art supplies collected by the teacher and left out in the public space of the office suite.  I've seen a different colleague sorting the costumes in the collective box that we keep in a cabinet.  I've led my own students through a poetry writing exercise so that they could attempt to write both factually and poetically about the tree they have been observing.

In the morning, I made this Facebook post:  "In my English 101 class this morning, we were using techniques that I have used in Poetry Writing classes to create language to describe a tree more evocatively. My students had never heard the song 'Poor Wayfaring Stranger,' so I sang the first verse for them, avoiding the refrain which goes higher than my vocal range. I was able to sing decently and remember all but one word. My students clapped, and we went on to create an evocative scene of a tree on campus, missing all the students who had graduated, a tree who can't go home the way that we all can."

In the morning, I thought, if you had told 25 year old me that I would sing in front of a room of students, I would have said you were crazy.  I'm not sure how I've gotten this brave, although perhaps it's a trajectory that makes sense.  In my younger years, I'd teach by way of zaniness and stand up comedy and saying outrageous things to provoke class discussion--singing Appalachian folk music isn't that far from what I did as a younger teacher.

In the afternoon, as I walked by my colleague sorting costumes, I thought about my younger self who was in a community college English department with colleagues that were horrified at my ideas about how to teach Literature.  Have students learn about poetry by writing poetry?  The horror!  Have an assignment like MacBeth's wife writing a letter to the editor?  Where is the serious literary analysis?  I was part of a group of younger colleagues who wanted to do things differently, and we had pleasant arguments about what those different methods should be.  

I am older now, and I see a variety of ways to teach writing, and some will work for some students, and some will not.  We go through the semester not knowing for sure, and we won't know, most of us, if our successful attempts to teach writing will stick with the students.  

I am grateful to be in a department that explores new ways of teaching, including using AI, so that students know what that tool can and cannot do.  I am grateful to be one of many using creative techniques to teach writing and literature.