[Cwgrad-announcements] crwt undergraduate program - a couple of ideas

[Stephanie Hammer]

Dear Colleagues – I gather that the undergraduate program is under discussion pursuant to Chuck’s participation in the Outcomes summit of a few weeks ago.  Since I won’t be able to attend the departmental meeting during exam week, I wanted to share a few thoughts, as an old UCR hand about the undergraduate program in creative writing as it currently stands.   I think that crwt students can be, and often, are brilliant and amazing.  But a substantial percentage of the ones who take my classes, at least, seem confused and lost about the program and about what they are supposed to get out an undergraduate degree in the first place.  

I think that — at least on the programmatic level – we can do a lot to clarify and in certain cases simplify the program.  In so doing we can assist our students in carving out for themselves a stronger and more vital educational experience.

A few ideas:

1.	Lower division -- historical survey.  At present, crwt students do not have much of a historical background as to how creative writing came into being in different cultures, who decided what constituted the literary, the beautiful, the canonical, and so on, and how some literatures entered the culture industry, while others remained outside – serving either an elite, as did certain kinds of Chinese poetry, or serving a marginalized group of readers, like comics did and in some ways still do.  I think this issue of historical continuities and disjunctions is a real problem for our students.  How can tomorrow’s writers appreciate globalization, multilingualism, the post colonial, and postmodernism (or, for that matter, modernism), without a set of historical frameworks (and an appreciation for the limitation of said frameworks) to ground their inquiries? 

On the practical front, to fix this issue, we have 3 choices, it seems to me. Either create our own historical survey in CRWT, or you rewrite some of the lower division courses currently offered in CRWT to address questions of historicity and or use the ones in English or Comp Lit.  Comp Lit 17a, b, and c did a lot for Alex Espinoza and Dave Hora, and I think that kind exposure to global literatures in a historical context might be handy.  What about making a set of 2 historical courses a requirement?  I honestly think it’s crucial to do something for these kids in the way of some kind of historical survey.  

This concern can then be articulated in whatever outcomes you want to state for crwt students, namely that they will acquire mastery, fluency or whatever with historical and material issues surrounding the developemnt of creative writing as a field of endeavor. 

2.	Simplify the course selection at the upper division.    
I see 3 areas that could be simplified.
a.	I would get rid of requirement, d, which insists on 1 course in a “third specialty."  Given the problems our students have with context and history – cited above –I don’t see how this 1 lonely course in addition to the 2 genres/forms you want them to have, is helpful to them as learners.
b.	The other area I would like to see simplified, is the f, g, and h cluster.   I would suggest meshing these in some way, so that students are actually building towards a sub-rubric writing interest in economics, psychology, art history, film, sociology, or even say –Physics.  Several creative writing majors in different colleges do this.  I want to say Bard does – although I may not be remembering correctly.

This would mean altering, meshing or in some way combining the demand that students take 1 art course (be it performing or visual), and then asking them attack a sub-discipline of 4 more courses.  It seems to me that if we want to encourage them to do a related art discipline –then we should say that up front.  Otherwise, I think it makes more sense to encourage student writers to be actually interested in the real world around them – it histories, languages, cultures, and the knowledges that have grown up as ways to understand that world.  If you want them to do other arts, then make them do other arts.  If you want them to do social science, then have them do that.  

c.	My last point bears on the infamous senior thesis problem.  I was at the departmental retreat a couple of years ago and took part in the discussions about how to handle the fact that some, if not most, of the crwt majors really weren’t prepared to write a thesis.  I agree completely that some students aren’t ready to write a senior thesis.  What I don’t see is the educational advantage of farming thee kids out to some other course and then just having them write a term paper.  I’m not sure I’ve understood this option correctly, but this seems to be what students think they need to do.   It seems to me that if students aren’t writing a thesis, then the work they do, needs to be folded into the secondary discipline option – so there is some coherence.  The sub-specialty then becomes the place where they do research writing.  Or better yet, prepare some kind of portfolio of creative work based on their experience with that other discipline.  That could be very worthwhile it seems to me.  I had good success with portfolios when I first started teaching Metafiction.  Students walk about with some pieces that they’ve reworked, the pieces revolve around a theme or strategy, and they’ve learned something.  These shouldn’t be too taxing to oversee or adjudicate.

Again this concentration of 2 genres rather than 3, and then a sub-speciality of another discipline can be articulated in the outcomes verbiage or mission statement as preparing students to be creative intellectuals who interact critically with the world (or something to that effect).

I hope these ideas are at least a little bit helpful.

Thanks --

Stephanie 

Stephanie Hammer
Comparative Literature and Creative Writing
"I want to hear and see ... Everything."

Jimi Hendrix, AXIS BOLD AS LOVE