Hello all.
When I was doing my undergrad work in Hawaii, I took a course called Comp Studies that covered a lot of the issues we addressed as a class on Friday. I wrote this paper about Creative and Academic writing, the divide between the two, and ultimately how they cannot be separated because ALL writing is inherently “creative” writing.
After reading Freire and hearing what everyone else in the class had to say, I felt myself drifting back toward that same notion. At first I wanted to side with Freire – his ideas are compelling in the beginning. But as I read on, I just couldn’t get on board with the polarization of the two schools of thought. Freire wants to get rid of this “banking method” of teaching and embrace this “problem-posing” model. We figured out in class (I think) that he looks at students, the learners, as these receptacles for knowledge and completely dehumanizes the individual.
The idea is that each individual learns by having an understanding of BOTH his/her own background, upbringing, interactions with the world AND an understanding of the fundamental tools (historical methods) for writing, rhetoric, etc. Once these two understandings happen, the individual can then create.
And ultimately, that is what we are asking students/writers to do from the onset: create something new on paper. The parameters of which are defined by these historical methods. So my question would be, how can we tell students to create something, but not be creative when doing it?
In Hawaii, the schism between academic/creative writing is HUGE because nearly all teachers on the island are white and come from a Western cannon, while all the students are either Filipino, Native Hawaiian, hapa-haole, Micronesian, etc. There is this idea that “non-white” learners need the fundamental knowledge so badly that creativity is virtually non-existent. The result of this however, is a complete disinterest in the fundamental knowledge and therefore no learning or progress whatsoever when it comes to expressing argument/ideas on paper. As I said before, this is a prime example for how the two schools of thinking are imperative to successfully teaching.
In a practical sense, I think we can encourage creativity in lesson plans, writing prompts, reading responses, and just general class discussion. I say “encourage creativity” because I truly believe that, no matter what we do as teachers, the creative mind is active at some level in every thinking being. Figuring out how to utilize that idea is the job of the instructor/program.
I encourage everyone to watch Ken Robinson’s TED Talks on Creativity if you haven’t already.
Also, I hope this is what these posts are supposed to look like…