Imaginative Teaching Through Creative Writing - by Amy Ash & Michael Dean Clark & Chris Drew (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Growing out of recent pedagogical developments in creative writing studies and perceived barriers to teaching the subject in secondary education schools, this book creates conversations between secondary and post-secondary teachers aimed at introducing and improving creative writing instruction in teaching curricula for young people. Challenging assumptions and lore regarding the teaching of creative writing, this book examines new and engaging techniques for infusing creative writing into all types of language arts instruction, offering inclusive and pedagogically sound alternatives that consider the needs of a diverse range of students.

With careful attention given to creative writing within current standards-based educational systems, Imaginative Teaching through Creative Writing confronts and offers solutions to the perceived difficulty of teaching the subject in such environments. Divided into two sections, section one sees post-secondary instructors address pedagogical techniques and concerns such as workshop, revision, and assessment before section two explores hands-on activities and practical approaches to instruction.

Focusing on an invaluable and underrepresented area of creative writing studies, this book begins a much-needed conversation about the future of creative writing instruction at all levels and the benefits of collaboration across the secondary/post-secondary divide.

Review Quotes

"Contributors to this volume prove beyond any doubt that creative writing belongs in the secondary classroom, offering research-based conceptual groundwork and mapping standards for inspiring activities and practices, presented by the teachers who developed them ... Secondary teachers will find both inspiration for developing assignments and a solid theoretical framework for scaffolding, assessing, and reporting about them to administrators." --CHOICE

"Imaginative Teaching is a teacher's book. It is for and about teaching and learning led by voices both dynamic and inspired. I dare you to read it. Because you can't just read it; you will write and think beside it for days. Your classroom will be upended by the smart thinking here. And that's important, because sometimes changing students' learning outcomes requires a major shift in teacher culture-our culture. But that is the gift of this book: an invitation to experience the joy and expansive thinking that these classroom teachers have realized in courses labeled AP to remedial. As poet and teacher Tim Staley says in a chapter I wish I had written, "Poetry should be a break from the typical horrors of high school." Reading, writing, and teaching can be. Imaginative Teaching shows us the moves that will create a home for creative writing in our plans, our notebooks, and forever, in our students." --Penny Kittle, Plymouth State University, USA

About the Author

Amy Ash is an Assistant Professor of English at Indiana State University, USA and Director of the Indiana State University Creative Writing Program. She specializes in poetry and creative writing. The author of The Open Mouth of the Vase, winner of the 2013 Cider Press Review Book Award and the 2016 Etchings Press Whirling Prize post-publication award for poetry, her work has been published in various journals and anthologies.

Michael Dean Clark is an Associate Professor of Writing at Azusa Pacific University, USA. An author of fiction and nonfiction primarily, his work has appeared in Pleiades, Jabberwock Review, The Other Journal, Angel City Review, and a number of other publications. Formerly an award-winning journalist, he is also the co-editor of Creative Writing in the Digital Age and Creative Writing Innovations (Bloomsbury, 2015).

Chris Drew is an Associate Professor of English at Indiana State University, USA, where he specializes in creative writing and secondary English teaching methods. He is an editor of Dispatches from the Classroom: Graduate Students on Creative Writing Pedagogy (Bloomsbury, 2011). His creative work has been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Quarterly West, and Mad River Review. His scholarly articles have appeared in English Leadership Quarterly, Wisconsin English Journal, Minnesota English Journal, and The Journal of Creative Writing Studies.