Our first workshop session of the course has finally come, and I think that it has sparked a lot of questions for me. Throughout the class I kept thinking back to my own time as an undergraduate creative writing student. Particularly, I found myself thinking back to what I thought the purpose of workshop really was.
The answer that I've come up with is that maybe I didn't really know - that is, I had numerous understandings of what workshop was doing for me, some of them contradictory and others very cohesive. Of course I understood that it was for the purpose of critique, delivering constructive criticism to the writer. But it was other things too. A deadline was definitely a way of defining it. I needed some date that my piece had to be finished, or else I would fail to write anything at all. Last of all, somewhere in there, was this aspect of workshop as a kind of competition, aiming for successes in writing. I think unconsciously everyone is weighing the week's submissions - and there's a certain pride for writers in knowing that what they produced is good.
I bring this up because while viewing the workshop from a new perspective, I'm starting to see this amalgam of emotional and intellectual approaches to workshop in a more apparent way than I have in the past. I think that as educators, our understanding of what both students and teachers expect the function of workshop to be can directly relate to our pedagogy. I think that to truly develop a holistic pedagogical approach to running a workshop some of these tensions between student and teacher expectations, assessment, pride, emotional attachment to creative work, and craft must be addressed.
So I want to pose this question to you all: What do you see as the function of workshop? To frame this question, I want to bring up what David mentioned after class in reference to Heidi's piece. He stated (and feel free to correct me, because this is coming right from my often-flawed memory) that the best way to help someone with a highly emotional work is to give them very real feedback. He mentioned that eventually this work must be assessed, and that in the end we are trying to teach art here.
So what is the right balance? I think this is a huge question that has a lot of sub-categories: How do we critique writing in workshop? What role do craft, creativity, and emotional output play in critique? Are students thinking of their critiques in workshop as a way of learning about their own writing? How do they translate workshop comments into craft? How is creative writing assessed? What kind of reading and critique behavior are we modeling? Does that behavior translate into our assessment methods? How do we qualify 'growth' in a writer's pieces?
Last of all, I promised some Thunderdome footage in light of Dane's piece, so here it is:
Thoughtful post, Ryan. You're asking some very big questions, and I think I'd enjoy you applying those questions to a very, very small aspect of the workshop. For instance, in a future post you might want to talk about, say, the tradition of the writing remaining quiet during the workshop session. How do the questions you raise above apply to that particular stance? What are its positives and negatives?
ReplyDeleteAlso, my memory of Thunderdome seems to be very different from the reality. I remember it as being grittier, but really it just looks like the musical CATS.
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