4 Teaching Creative Writing eds. Moira Monteith and Robert Miles (Open University Press, 1992), p. 30.
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Workshop pedagogy
The seminar, or small-group pedagogy in higher education, became particularly important during the 1970s, drawing on ideas derived from principles of political democratisation, community-based creativity and radical work in psychotherapy. A university-based organisation called DUET (Developing University English Teaching) was founded in 1979 by Professor John Broadbent: ‘In the later 1960s at Cambridge I was tiring of one-to-one tutorials, so I began holding seminars. Then I moved to the University of East Anglia where the basic teaching unit was the seminar . . . people came late to classes or not at all, hadn’t read the books, did not participate or talked demotically. . . . In an effort to get out of this, I regressed to techniques used in primary schools – thematic topics, dramatic improvisation . . .’5 Broadbent and his colleagues set up conferences and workshops, to explore group dynamics and to increase the degree of student participation, as well as to involve teachers themselves more closely in the classroom process.
Authority
Authority, leadership, democratic participation and a degree of autodidacticism were the socio-political issues at the heart of these various small group activities, infused with many of the ideals in the widespread political and cultural radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s.
Feminism, in particular, but not exclusively, placed great importance on the idea of leaderlessness, on equal participation by every member of the group, on the democracy of experience and voice. The equation of leaderlessness with democracy, based on the desire to overthrow what were seen as oppressive traditions of power, was shared by many theatre groups.
5 ‘ “Forms of life”: how the DUET project began’ by John Broadbent, in Developing University English Teaching, ed. Colin Evans (The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), p. 18.
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It was exhilarating, empowering and produced original work, but there were also often competing differences, which were frequently ignored or covered over. Each individual inevitably brought his/her own history and agenda (class, culture, ethnicity, expectations, needs) into the process. While this was precisely the source of much new discovery and creativity, it also became the source of a different kind of organisational difficulty. Power relations, and the important matters of different skills and aims, could not be easily put aside.
The problems inherent in the supposed ‘structurelessness’ of such groups was analysed in an American feminist magazine, the second wave, in 1972:
Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion . . . to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an ‘objective’ news story,
‘value-free’ social science or a ‘free’ economy . . . the idea of
‘structurelessness’ does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones . . . As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules . . . The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalised.’6
The continuing influence of a crude egalitarian ideology has a significant place in the various pedagogic models which have informed the development of CW pedagogy, and it is these which currently influence the way drama is incorporated into higher education.
6 By Joreen, vol. 2, no. 1, 1972, pp. 20–1.
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Workshop practice and power relations
As was briefly mentioned in the Introduction, the first full postgraduate CW course in the UK was the MA set up at the University of East Anglia, for novel writing. Various teachers and writers in other universities were already including aspects of CW in their literature teaching, but it took far longer for CW to spread more widely. It was not until the end of the 1980s, when the two-tier higher education system was homogenised, that disciplinary and ideological spaces were available for a new, practical subject such as CW. Before the end of this decade, higher education was divided between universities, polytechnics and colleges of further education (the latter also took in younger students). Polytechnics became known as universities and because their remit was more flexible (often practical and vocational) than universities, the idea of CW as a subject found a more easily assimilated place in the curriculum.
Pivotal to CW workshop protocol, and seen as constituting its distinctive professional practice, is a special form of ‘criticism’, or critiquing. This applies to both under- and postgraduate workshops.
As Danny Broderick has described, in the ‘seminar/workshop . . .
students’ own work in progress is reviewed and revised through critical discussion . . . This cooperative critiquing of work by peers
. . . places emphasis on the analysis of the text as literary artefact . . .
Students are asked to make value judgements on their own and each others’ texts as part of the process of arriving at the artefact.’7
In the process of ‘workshopping’, therefore, the CW seminar is driven by procedures of rewriting, rather than writing. In addition, the process of critiquing, and the stress on rewriting, draws on literary-critical criteria, which were developed over decades to interpret and evaluate complete and published pieces of work in poetry and the novel. This lends the flattering illusion that the workshop somehow duplicates the professional publishing (or 7 Danny Broderick, NAWE website, 1999.
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theatre-producing) process, or that it is a latter-day version of the master ( sic)–apprentice relationship. The conditions of teaching and learning, whatever they may or may not lead to, are quite different from any professional artistic situation, and – among other things –
serve to conceal the fact that the real pedagogic object of such a class/workshop is the process of learning to produce a certain kind of imaginative writing, rather than directly training professional writers.
Criticism and value judgement
If the main pedagogic activity in the workshop is ‘criticism’, there must be some kind of informing criteria and value judgements at stake. In the workshop, such value judgements are inevitably concealed, because rarely, if at all, explicitly taught or shared. At the very least, there is simply not the time. Where CW is taught as part of the content of English undergraduate degrees there are likely to be some shared contexts, but this is by no means always the case, even on postgraduate degrees.
Students are often admitted to such courses on the basis of a sample of their writing. This is a half-open-door policy, to enable anyone who is interested in imaginative writing to study and is a good principle for widespread access. However, it can all too easily result in pedagogic problems within the course, because no shared background knowledge or experience can be assumed. In such a context it is far easier for the ‘teaching’ to be pragmatic and ad hoc, based largely on whatever happens to be brought into the class by the students. Teachers use their expertise to busk. While this seems to construct a student-centred pedagogy, it also creates a contradictory state of affairs because, at the same time, the tutor is always in charge and always makes the final assessment. The earlier comments about the disingenuousness about the idea of a ‘structureless’
class are clearly illustrated.
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Given that the bulk of workshop time is given over to discussing student writing, it is virtually imposs
ible, in any thorough-going way, to establish generally understood and shared criteria. The CW
literature largely consists of how-to advice, based on generating writing, rather than, on the whole, theorising its critical values. The workshop methodology is built round ‘feedback’ or ‘critiquing’, claiming to focus on ‘process’ rather than ‘product’.
There is a particular vocabulary, which has evolved in relation to CW pedagogy. ‘Feedback’ can mean favourable or adverse opinion (this is ‘good’ or ‘bad’). ‘Criticism’ or ‘critiquing’ can be (often is) used in the colloquial sense of put-down, disapproval. The solution of offering ‘constructive’ or ‘positive’ criticism means saying nice things first, pointing out what you ‘like’, what you think is ‘good’.
This is contrasted with its opposite, ‘negative’ criticism, which involves pointing out what is ‘wrong’ or what doesn’t ‘work’. The mooted ideal is to find some form of ‘constructive criticism’, which is meant to ‘help’ the student rewrite his/her work, if he/she wants to. It is a kind of on-the-spot reader response which, while it may well elicit the odd useful comment, cannot possibly be elevated into a serious methodology (let alone any poetics of writing) for understanding and teaching what is involved in imaginative writing.
Training professional writers versus self-
expression
An ideological confusion underpins workshop practice. Part of the legacy of CW pedagogy derives from its US origins in the postgraduate workshop. Initially, as an advanced academic course, CW had ambitions to train students to become professional writers.
This aim was echoed in the first MA in the UK, where writer/
academics Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson consciously wished to provide an opportunity for would-be professional writers to have a space in which to develop their art and craft as novelists.
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While this might be a perfectly laudable aim in a very specialised context, the problem is that it has continued to be the informing principle, the shop window, as it were, of most CW courses in an expanding field. The claim (though not the promise) that CW can train professional writers has remained the headline attraction for students, as well as the genuine (if misplaced) ambition of many teachers. This principle retains the idea expressed in many CW
books (including how-to drama-writing texts) that such training only produces results if the student has ‘talent’.
By comparison with other, longer-established, academic
‘Humanities’ subjects, this is clearly a risky idea. Such academic courses, while always subject- or discipline-specific, do not, on the whole, directly train for successful (vocational) employment. They focus on the parameters of the subject and on a consensus agreed over time (notwithstanding the fact that this also changes) about what a curriculum consists of and how it is assessed. The long-standing educational debate about ‘vocational’ versus ‘academic’
courses is not merely an argument about manual versus intellectual training, but also a discussion about how directly ‘applied’ such training is and can be, in terms of the job market.
The other side of the CW coin, also much bruited in how-to books, is that all imaginative writing is a form of self-expression.
The idea that imaginative writing literally ‘expresses’ the ‘self’ is behind some of the comments quoted in the next chapter – about the dramatist’s subject matter coming from his/her own experience and the idea that the blank page is a terrifying obstacle to be overcome. This attitude, including the overwhelming stress on personal experience, good or traumatic, memory, dreams and the real people in the student’s life, as the source of imaginative raw material, serves to transform the workshop into an arena where personal, emotional and sometimes traumatic material may be ‘revealed’ and discussed.
Inevitably, such an emotionally risky enterprise suggests that the workshop has much in common with a therapy group where writing is one of the methods behind a kind of ‘healing’.
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This has rather different, problematic and, I suggest, irre-concilable problems, when combined with the Romantic/training professional/great writers claim. If CW is training professional writers (those who already have ‘talent’), then the great-writers approach privileges the text over the writer; if students are taught that CW expresses the self (writing as therapy), then the person is privileged over the writing. The first overvalues the art, the second overvalues the person, and together they confuse the object of the work and its objectives. They cannot be simultaneously and effectively contained within the same pedagogic model. Both, of course, evade the fundamental issues of what is involved in the actual process of imaginative (dramatic) writing.
The workshop as a House of Correction
The methodology of the workshop is widely accepted. However, even in accounts of it by those who work according to its principles there are very clear problems. For example, Tom Grimes, in Seven Decades of the Iowa Workshop, described the internal dynamics of the workshop experience as follows: ‘Nearly every participant has sensed and reacted with some apprehension to a spirit of competition in the Workshop setting. But many writers view the ordeal of measuring their talent against the talent of others as a necessary crisis in their artistic development. Paul Engle believes that the intensity of this experience contributes to the writer’s growth.’8
The idea that the best way to learn an art form is via an ordeal involving a ‘necessary crisis’ is, to say the least, punitive. The patronising of individual vulnerability alongside a method which cannot fail but be discouraging and educationally disempowering is not a context in which genuine teaching and learning can take place.
Such workshops are sado-masochistic Houses of Correction on a 8 Grimes, op. cit., p. 131.
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Victorian scale. The workshop principles alternate hard-cop/soft-cop methodologies. Training great writers entails toughening them up to ‘take criticism’, to survive baptisms of fire. In writing-as-therapy (deriving from the idea that writing is self-expression) the emphasis is on avoiding hurting people’s feelings (after all, if the writing is thought to be expressing the ‘self’, then the ‘self’ will be vulnerable).
Over the past two decades there has been some questioning of the workshop methodology – mostly from America and from teachers who have experience in teaching both Composition (discursive writing) as well as CW. In this country a research project into community writing groups, undertaken in 1992, yielded some interesting insights. Rebecca O’Rourke, author of the study, concluded that ‘People are working with cobbled together models of constructive criticism drawn from school – criticism as negative, unpleasant and fault finding – and from the market – criticism as a selective judgement. I found few models drawn from the writing process – criticism as a means to extend, clarify and challenge the writer . . .’9
She reported concerns about ‘feedback’ and ‘criticism’: ‘A contradiction began to emerge. People went to writing groups in order to get feedback on their work and yet were almost always unhappy with the feedback they received. The issue was partly a question of whose responsibility criticism was seen to be: did it belong to the writer, the group or its leader/tutor . . . Some . . . felt encouragement was incompatible with criticising work.’10 These comments were not voiced within the workshops, but away from it, to her, as someone safely outside the group: ‘The language which people used to describe feedback was distinctive and it was at odds with the actual process I observed. The language was violent and aggressive. Phrases such as “rip it to pieces”, “pull it part”, “pull no punches”, “give it the once over” and “brutally honest” . . . It 9 ‘Writing in Education’ (NAWE, Autumn 1994).
/> 10 Ibid.
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conjured up a process in which the writing and the writer’s feelings were literally taken apart.’11
Students wanted more guidelines from the tutors: ‘Tension surrounding feedback and criticism was a constant theme in the life of the creative writing groups and courses. It was cited as the most important aspect of the activity, and the one people wanted most to change.’12 Students were aware that peer comments came (inevitably) from inadequately informed responses – ‘many students do not trust the judgement of their peers. . . .’13 Students, quite rightly, wanted tutors to teach, to take responsibility – ‘to deal in absolutes – what was right and what was wrong, good or bad – and to offer definite opinions’.14
O’Rourke’s conclusion was that ‘Central to the problem are issues of power and authority within courses/groups . . .’ This is very clear indeed, both from the conflictual pedagogic models into which CW
is constrained to fit and from the frankly brutal process to which students can be subjected. It suggests a dynamic which has more than a little in common with a sado-masochistic teacher–student relationship. The student wants approval from the teacher/expert, and at the same time believes that the only valid teacherly comment is disapproval: ‘Be brutally honest with me; I can take it.’ Because, of course, being able to ‘take it’ is seen as entering the privileged world of the professional writer. Brutal honesty thus becomes desirable as the most important part of a pedagogic process, which is meant to produce results.
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