Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 20, No 2 (2023)
A MODEL FOR INFUSING A CREATIVE WRITING CLASSROOM WITH WRITING CENTER PEDAGOGY
By Kelle Alden
The University of Tennessee at Martin
kalden@utm.edu
Abstract
In response to criticisms about the methods and goals of traditional creative writing workshops, I used the foundational tenets of writing center pedagogy to develop an alternative workshop model and taught two upper-division creative writing classes using the new approach. I collected data inductively through class observation and field notes as well as students’ preliminary surveys and corpus of class assignments. The results suggested that using writing center practices in the workshop increased students’ civility toward one another and that prioritizing verbal conversations over written responses helped the students develop better feedback overall.
Despite being a mainstay in university pedagogy, certain creative writing workshops receive criticism for how professors and students are taught to respond to the work of writers. Scholars trace the roots of these unquestioned norms back to the first Iowa creative writing workshops, which were designed for professional writers rather than undergraduate students (Myers; Swander). However, there is no official name for the type of workshop that receives these criticisms; as Rosalie Kearns explains in her essay on theorizing creative writing pedagogy, the most problematic creative writing workshop practices are so ingrained in tradition that they were never named (792).
When criticizing certain workshops, therefore, scholars and writers often refer to the “traditional,” “normative” or “conventional” workshop, and they define these workshops based on the following pedagogical characteristics:
● The professor is positioned as an ultimate authority whose personal aesthetics are treated as unquestionable truths (Kearns 796; see also Leahy, Power and Identity).
● The overall goal of the workshop is to produce publishable work (Mayers 9). The drafts introduced in workshop are considered complete products that will be judged based on students’ and professors’ assumptions about what makes writing “good” (Kearns 797).
● Authors are encouraged or required to stay silent and listen for faults in their work (Kearns 793-795; Chavez).
Scholars have pinpointed several issues caused by the traditional pedagogical approach to the workshop. The fault-finding mode of workshopping fails to recognize writing as a process (Kearns 797), the silent workshop increases toxic behavior while othering diverse voices, and authorities in the workshop go unexamined and unchallenged, even when their analyses are subjective or flawed (Kearns 796). Challenging and revising the assumptions of the traditional workshop is a major focus of scholars in Creative Writing Studies, and I argue that Writing Center Studies can serve as a useful framework for reimagining the creative writing workshop.
Writing Centers and the Creative Writing Classroom
The threshold concepts and theories that inform writing center scholarship directly confront the problems that take root in traditional workshops. Writing centers are grounded in process-oriented and social-constructivist pedagogy, and they prioritize the development of both tutor and student. As North explained in his seminal article outlining the goals of modern writing centers, writing centers focus on producing better writers, not better writing (69). The product-oriented mode of traditional workshopping is therefore contrary to writing center philosophy, in which drafts are rarely spoken of as finished documents and students and tutors work at any stage of the writing process. Similarly, complaints about the smothering of diversity, the toxic behavior, and the lack of student agency in traditional workshops all stem from unhealthy power imbalances between writers, their classmates, and their professors, and these power imbalances are addressed in foundational writing center pedagogies such as student-centered, conversational, and nondirective instruction. North describes writers as involved collaborators in the tutoring process (70), and Lunsford elaborates on the complex challenges tutors undertake when creating a true collaborative environment, cautioning that unless tutors pay careful attention to how control is exercised in their centers, their environment can easily become a facsimile of collaboration rather than a true practice (97). Rejecting authority in favor of a true collaborative environment remains a central goal of writing centers to this day.
In particular, writing centers’ commitment to enabling conversation between tutor and writer is pedagogically oppositional to the silent workshop. Instead of relying on authority or editorializing, tutors strive to create a peer dialectic: a conversation between equals where ideas are built and refined through joint effort (Bruffee). The benefits of conversation are well documented; Mackiewicz and Thompson demonstrated in 2015 that it is possible to systematically analyze the conversations between experienced tutors and students to identify the variety of educational strategies the tutors use. Their case studies highlight the ways that nearly every moment of a tutoring conversation, from asking clarifying questions to telling jokes, connects to cognitive and motivational scaffolding strategies.
Conversation and student-centered pedagogies also reflect writing centers’ understanding of diversity issues in the university as well as how they recommend addressing those issues. Scholars working on issues of diversity in writing centers recognize that larger forms of systemic or societal oppression impact how writing is taught as well as how students perceive themselves and their writing. In particular, scholars point out the ways that minority students feel silenced, not just when a classroom explicitly demands it, but by their experience with the educational system in general (Suhr-Sytsma and Brown). Writing center tutors, therefore, use student centered tutoring and conversation as tools to help students regain agency and identity in their writing. For example, Suhr-Sytsma and Brown provide a list of actions that tutors can take to challenge oppressive systems during sessions:
1. Clarify meanings together
2. Express understanding of one another’s meanings
3. Discuss meaning and use of sources
4. Pose counterarguments
5. Maintain a non-combative tone
6. Address language without accusations of intentional oppression
7. Name the “elephant in the room”
8. Learn to better identify and address language that perpetuates oppression (514).
Each of these steps requires tutors and students to use conversation as a pedagogical tool. Without it, conveying tone and clarifying statements becomes significantly more difficult.
Research published on the relationship between writing centers and the creative writing workshop does suggest that writing center pedagogy can benefit creative writers and that programmatically, writing centers and creative writing classrooms can benefit each other (Kearns, Kostelnik, Adsit). However, one-on-one tutoring conversations and peer response groups developed in different contexts, and usually, writing center tutors avoid conflating the two (Harris). Combining writing center pedagogy with a creative writing workshop requires reconfiguring the structure and policies of the workshop.
Scholars who have theorized models for a writing center-inspired creative writing workshop present a diverse range of potential setups. While authors agree that writers deserve a greater voice in the workshop, the mode, degree, and timing of the student’s voice varies depending on each scholar’s vision. Kearns imagines a peer discussion led and facilitated entirely by the writer (804), while Kostelnik suggests training undergraduates in writing center pedagogy and then replacing the workshop with one-on-one conversations (134). Adsit’s workshop description is the most similar to the one I developed, as she proposes three changes to the workshop format:
1. A metadiscursive cover sheet should accompany the draft submitted to workshop to help contextualize the story or poem;
2. Peer workshoppers should not make suggestions for revision, but should instead dramatize their reading in a written response sheet; and
3. the cardinal rule of the traditional workshop should be done away with—the writer in the hot seat should be a central participant in a workshop conversation that analyzes, rather than evaluates, her text. (177)
I agree with Kostelnik and Adsit that training students in tutor pedagogy and providing context for drafts are both theoretically sound ways to adapt writing center ideas to the workshop. I also hoped, like Kearns, to keep the students gathered together and conversing as a class so they could experience as many benefits of verbal dialogue as possible. Would it even be possible to recreate writing center conversations in a group setting, and if so, what would that workshop look like? How would students react?
To explore these questions, I used the foundational tenets of writing center pedagogy to develop my own alternative approach to the traditional creative writing workshop, then taught two upper-division creative writing classes using the model. I present here my reflections on how students responded to the workshop model as well as suggestions for how others can incorporate writing center pedagogy in creative writing settings.
The Model
The Structure of the Writing Center Workshop
When designing the core structure of this class, I utilized writing center pedagogy in several specific ways. To emphasize student-centeredness in the classroom, I prioritized the goals and wishes of the writer being workshopped by giving them more opportunities to speak up and provide context for their drafts. In keeping with process-oriented pedagogy, I pushed students to refer to their drafts as works in progress that could go in many reasonable directions. I also encouraged more peer-oriented dynamics by reorganizing the workshop to minimize my own authority. Finally, to encourage dialectic in the classroom, I deemphasized the role of written feedback in the workshop and instead required students to discuss the drafts verbally.
Students in each class were divided into workshop groups, and every week, 2-4 students submitted a workshop draft to Canvas. Each writer submitted a letter with their draft explaining their craft choices and asking their classmates questions (see Appendix). Everyone read the drafts and letters and submitted written feedback to Canvas by midnight before the workshop. Students received homework credit for their written feedback, which verified that they read one another’s work before class, but the homework assignments remained private, and responders were free to give verbal feedback during the workshop that differed from what they wrote.
On workshop day, all members of class, including me, the writers, and the responders, sat in a circle. I began each individual workshop by summarizing what the writer said in their letter to the class before asking two standard writing center tutor questions: “What would you like us to focus on during this workshop?” and “Do you have any particular questions you hope we will address?” Sometimes writers ceded their right to ask additional questions; at other times, they expressed anxiety about some of their craft choices or explained the direction they hoped to go with their work. Responders were reminded to treat each draft as a work in progress that could go in many reasonable directions depending on each writer’s goals.
After I completed the introductions, each respondent gave verbal feedback to the writer one-by one, starting from either my left or my right. I encouraged responders to speak directly to the writer and ask questions. They were also encouraged to disagree with each other and discuss options. I always gave my feedback last and avoided interrupting what students had to say unless they needed redirection. This method ensured that every responder in the class would have to deliver verbal feedback before anyone would learn my opinion of the work. Removing my authoritative voice from the workshop, even temporarily, allowed students to speak to each other as equal peers. Responders and writers discussed drafts while I listened.
The Workshop Participants
I introduced the writing center-inspired workshop format in two upper-division English classes. Eleven students enrolled in the first class, a memoir workshop called Personal Creative Nonfiction. In that group, almost everyone was an English major, and three were also student tutors in the writing center I direct. The second workshop, called The Art of the Essay, consisted of nine students. The essay workshop, which is designed to broaden students’ understanding of the essay as a form of creative expression, is a required part of the Education curriculum, so most of the students in this class were Education majors. One was a writing center tutor.
I did my best to anticipate the issues students could have with the writing center workshop format. On the first day of both the memoir workshop and essay workshop, I surveyed students about their prior level of experience with workshops as well as their hopes and fears for the class. Most of the memoir workshop students had already taken one or more creative writing classes at UT Martin. When discussing their hopes, seven students wrote that they wanted to advance their writing skills further, while three more shared that they hoped to grow personally from the workshop experience.
When discussing their worries, the memoir students’ responses suggested that they were aware of some of the potential problems associated with workshop settings. Although their confidence in their ability to handle criticism varied, several of them also expressed concern about the negative impact their critiques could have on others. One student worried that in-class debates would become arguments in which he would not want to participate.
The Art of the Essay students had significantly less experience in workshop settings than the Memoir students. Many of them were Secondary Education majors, but out of nine, only five had ever participated in any kind of workshop, and three claimed to have never participated in any kind of peer review at all. Almost every student in The Art of the Essay hoped their writing skills would improve, and several hoped that discussing drafts would improve their social skills. When asked what concerns or worries they had about the workshop, the majority of the Art of the Essay students expressed worry about what their experience might be like. Several shared fears that their work wouldn’t measure up to the expectations set by their peers.
While individual students in each class differed, the overall experience gap between the Memoir students and the Essay students did affect how they responded to the writing center workshop format. The memoir students were more confident, experienced, and nuanced responders. They were also cognizant of the differences between this workshop model and others they had completed. The Essay students accepted the workshop format without question, but they also needed more assistance building their skills as readers/responders.
Initial Concerns, and How I Addressed Them
The majority of my students in both classes had no experience with writing center theories, and some of them had no experience with peer review of any kind. I also suspected that some of my students would struggle to master writing center pedagogy because it asks tutors to demonstrate a high degree of “soft skills,” such as patience, listening skills, and empathy (see Ryan and Zimmerelli). The problem was exacerbated by the histories the students built with each other prior coming to my classroom, some of which were negative. I worried that these students, when given room to speak, would start arguments or fail to deliver the kind of nuanced and caring feedback I would expect from a tutor.
Hoping to immerse students in the foundational concepts behind the workshop format and mitigate problems before they began, I dedicated the first two weeks of class to introducing the model, piloting the workshop, and establishing norms for the class. I described how writing center tutors respond to works even when they feel underprepared or uncomfortable and provided a list of strategies that tutors rely on when providing feedback.
In each class, I selected two short essays from Brevity for students to practice workshopping. I searched the archives for stories that were grammatically experimental as well as works that dealt with traumatic incidents, such as addiction and death, because these were the types of stories my students reported feeling the most uncertain about workshopping. After giving the essays to the students, I announced that we would practice workshopping the essays. To make sure the practice session resembled interaction between writer and responder, I played the role of the writer. The Art of the Essay students’ lack of experience showed during the initial roleplaying sessions: their feedback was less substantive overall. However, both groups successfully modeled the format.
The Workshop Model in Practice
During and after every class, I recorded observational notes on how the writing center workshop format was progressing. I received IRB approval for studying each class discussed in these notes, and every student whose work is mentioned signed a consent form agreeing to have their work anonymously discussed. All names have been changed for privacy.
I used the following questions to guide my observations:
1. Does encouraging in-class conversation impact students’ behavior toward each other?
2. How will changing the workshop format and policies affect students’ views on writing?
3. How does prioritizing verbal over written feedback change the quality of the feedback given?
How Conversation Impacted Behavior
The writing center workshop format directly influenced the ways students spoke to each other in workshop. In particular, it affected how responders engaged with each writer. Because their comments were delivered in the context of a conversation, individual responders behaved as if they were speaking to the writer one-on-one as the rest of the class listened in. One-on-one conversations between responders and writers emphasized consent and mutual connection.
Responders in both workshops actively requested permission from writers before talking about certain aspects of each writer’s draft. Sometimes the responders asked writers if they were comfortable expanding on certain scenes or background details, especially when the writers wrote about sensitive topics like bullying, abuse, or death. However, the responders also showed awareness of consent when discussing potentially embarrassing issues, like sentence-level problems, as the following conversation from the first Art of the Essay workshop shows:
Mina (to Winona): “Is it okay if I talk about confusing sentences?”
Winona: “Yes, that’s fine because I need help with that.”
Mina’s brief question (and Winona’s response) immediately established a positive tone between the two of them. Mina could comfortably give sentence-level feedback without feeling that she was judging Winona in front of an audience. Winona, meanwhile, could be secure in the knowledge that Mina had considered her boundaries. Additionally, their interaction established a positive norm for the rest of the class: it was okay to say something about unclear sentences to people who wanted to hear it. Other students began following Mina’s example for how to talk about awkward sentences; as one classmate told her, “I like that you asked first.” Silent workshop pedagogy might insist that Winona submit to the feedback whether she wanted to hear it or not, but that kind of force was not necessary here and might only have served to make one or both students uncomfortable for no reason.
Students also began using relatability as a way to form connections, even during critiques. For example, Winona began her comments about the wordiness of Sam’s essay by asking what sort of tone he wanted for his work. When Sam responded that he felt he’d gone too formal in places, Winona said she felt the same way about her own essays.
Providing the writer with an active voice gave students the confidence to take risks with their content and reveal their personal struggles to the class. Students opened up about injustices they faced due to their race or sexual orientation as well as physical challenges, mental illness, and learning disabilities, secure in the knowledge that they had an equal voice when sharing these issues with the class and that they had the power to refuse to share certain details at any time. As the connections between individual respondents and writers developed, they began inspiring each other to push the boundaries of what they initially felt comfortable sharing in workshop. In the memoir workshop in particular, one writer shared an experience with sexual assault, which led two other students to broach the topic in later drafts. During the later workshops, those students used their ability to hold direct conversations in class to uplift and support each other, as the following example shows:
Carol: I felt anxious about my last essay until I read yours.
Dorothy: I turned in this draft because I read yours.
Unsilencing the writers and encouraging direct conversation allowed these two students to comfort and reassure each other publicly and immediately rather than waiting until after class to speak to each other in private (or not speak to each other at all).
Occasionally, students realized that they disagreed on certain topics, but encouraging dialogue between the writers and responders meant that students were able to engage with their differences as equals rather than sitting in forced silence while their essays (and by extension, their worldviews) were critiqued. In Art of the Essay, in particular, the debates often made subsequent drafts of their research essays more effective: Will’s essay about his negative experiences with standardized testing was strengthened by his in-class conversations with Mina, a homeschooled student who relied on standardized tests to prove that she was as qualified as others. Ross, a committed patriot, and Sylvia, who had become disillusioned with the American Dream, expressed mutual respect for each other’s essays despite their opposing worldviews about the country.
I had worried prior to workshop that students could silence a classmate with a differing opinion. Creative writing scholars often discuss the experience of being “othered” in a workshop (see Chavez; Haake; Hegamin), and I soon learned that many of my students had felt the effects of being “othered” in prior educational settings on account of race, sexuality, learning disability, family issues, etc. However, I found that, rather than attacking others for their differences, many of the students in my classes were afraid to criticize the work of classmates whose experiences were different from their own because they didn’t want to seem judgmental of situations they hadn’t lived through. Therefore, while class opinion did sometimes divide in a lopsided manner, the only time I felt I had to step in as a professor was when I thought that students’ worries about the dynamics of a situation were preventing them from speaking, at which point I relaxed my rule about staying silent long enough to spark a craft discussion.
For example, when Sam (who was the only student of his race in our class) shared an essay about racial injustice, he included an abundance of page-length quotes from authors. The first three or four students to deliver feedback briefly mentioned the quotes but avoided suggesting he take any action about them. I therefore asked Sam and the class which quotes they thought were the most important and which could be shortened or paraphrased, which sparked a good discussion about which quotes they reacted the most strongly to as readers.
At its best, emphasizing student-centeredness in the workshop format offers some protection against othering because it empowers writers to share information that, in turn, provides respondents with a better understanding of how to best work together. For example, Louise, a conscientious and hardworking student, has several learning disabilities that impact her writing as well as her conversation skills. She unintentionally interrupts others and veers off-topic. I could not tell the students about Louise’s diagnoses and had to settle for asking annoyed students to be patient with her. However, Louise soon felt comfortable enough with her classmates to tell them about her disabilities, and from then on, the respondents, as if by unspoken agreement, worked together to refocus Louise during class.
For example, when the time came for Louise to have her interview essay workshopped, the following exchange occurred:
Richard: I think you could add more of your family’s responses to your interview questions.
Louise: My family is short and to the point. [From here, Louise started to tell stories about her father and then her extended family.]
Richard: Maybe you should describe your family in your essays more, like how you describe them to us. [Mina and Sylvia jumped in to offer additional support for this idea. Louise agreed with everyone and took down notes.]
Again, while silent workshop pedagogy would deny Louise the right to speak during workshop as a way of minimizing problematic behavior, it’s an unnecessary, and in this case, ableist response to a student who may have difficulty staying silent in a workshop. In contrast, student-centered pedagogy gave students the tools they needed to help Louise without excluding or silencing her.
In addition to my fear that students could bully each other in workshop, I worried that some students did not have the personality of a tutor and would be unable to articulate feedback with grace. While no one actively refused to be kind in their verbal feedback, a few students did respond in ways that would not be acceptable in a tutoring environment. Lydia occasionally made statements like “You could have at least used Grammarly,” though she reserved most of those comments for one classmate with whom she was already friends. In a more potentially incendiary instance, David started his response by blurting out to Lydia that he hated everything in first four pages of her memoir. (Fortunately, Lydia laughed and said it was okay, accepting his flustered apologies.) Students who gave overly blunt commentary in class were subjected to jokes from their peers, and David’s unfortunate statement became a running gag. However, in the reflective portfolios and end-of-year evaluations, no student reported feeling bullied or uncomfortable as a result of what their classmates said. On the contrary, in their portfolios at the end of the semester, students reported feeling not only that they had improved as writers and responders, but that their classmates had been supportive.
How Students Viewed the Workshopping Process
Creative writing classrooms provide a necessary challenge to students’ unquestioned assumptions about how writing works. As Leahy says about beginning writers, “They want to fix, implying flaws, instead of re envision, which implies potential and looking forward rather than inward” (60). In addition to observing student interactions, therefore, I made notes on students’ opinions about the act of workshopping in order to learn more about how the changes to the workshop format affected students’ views on writing. As part of my workshop redesign, I wanted students to reconsider the myths they had been taught about revision and reading/responding. In particular, I wanted students to take a healthier approach to the writing process and stop characterizing their drafts as either “perfect” or “flawed.” In the end, however, resetting students’ longstanding conceptions of writing took more than a workshop redesign: I had to actively use my authority in the classroom to advocate for my strategies, model behavior I wanted to see, and redirect or reassure students.
From day one, students in both workshops expressed concerns that they weren’t giving feedback correctly, and their worries matched some of the philosophies that authors criticize about traditional workshop pedagogy: namely, that certain opinions are unquestionable and that the purpose of a workshop is to find issues with drafts. Students sometimes felt that they were doing something wrong if they didn’t adhere to fault-finding models of writing, which was complicated for them because they also hated finding fault with the work of their classmates. For example, in one of the first Art of the Essay workshops, Will confessed, “I couldn’t find anything wrong and felt bad about it. But I also feel shitty saying it when things are wrong.” When I gave Will a gentle reminder that we don’t have to categorize writing as bad versus good and asked him to instead consider ideas for where the draft could go from here, he immediately asked a series of clarifying questions about the work. Will exemplified the ways that the fault-finding mode of looking at writing silences both the writer and the reviewer of that writing. Reframing the discussion led to an immediate improvement in his perception of the task ahead of him and freed him to explain the thoughts that were in his head all along. Students also expressed anxiety that asking questions or contradicting what other students had to say would make their feedback less effective. During the first Memoir workshop, Peter confessed what he felt was a flaw in his methods by saying, “Sometimes I ask questions when I am afraid to say anything declarative about the work.” I directly reassured Peter that asking questions is a fundamental part of a writing center tutor’s toolkit and a good way for responders to achieve the goal of helping writers take their work in the direction the writers want it to go. However, Peter’s initial feelings about his role as a respondent were interesting because he seemed to equate declarations with knowledge and confidence, while clarifying questions betrayed a possible flaw in his abilities. The writing center workshop model actively challenged some of my students’ perceptions about what experts look like in practice.
As one method of combatting the authoritarian, fault-finding mode of workshopping, I encouraged responders to frame their ideas as possibilities. Sometimes responders politely debated each other about possibilities, often reaching consensus or mutual understanding through dialogue. For example, when discussing the work of their classmate, Winona, three students had the following discussion:
Mina: Some of the information in this paragraph was confusing. I think you should consider revising or removing that paragraph.
Sylvia: But I loved that paragraph! That scene was so good!
Richard: I see what you both mean. [To Winona] I think you should have more context for that paragraph.
Conversations like these explained why respondents reached such different conclusions about the same section of writing, demonstrating the value of having respondents speak to both the writer and each other. Their conversations led to feedback that was more nuanced and helpful than a set of contradictory written critiques would have been. Emphasizing the agency of the writer as the ultimate decision-maker also helped students feel better about giving contradictory advice because it reduced the pressure my students felt to give the “correct” feedback. Sometimes writers specifically requested ideas for how to handle certain frustrations they had about their drafts. For example, prior to being workshopped, Lydia requested that her classmates give feedback on her introduction because she didn’t like it. As a result of class-wide brainstorming, Lydia received six different suggestions for how she might revise her introduction, which thrilled her. Respondents were able to give ideas freely despite their contradictory advice because they did not have to worry about finding the best answer: as they pointed out in class, that decision was up to Lydia.
While students were largely successful at reframing their ideas about authority or contradiction, some students struggled all semester with rejecting the fault finding model of writing. As a result, a couple of Art of the Essay students purposely ignored the questions writers had about their drafts and insisted on delivering nothing but praise. One student in particular, Ross, filled his written and verbal remarks with superfluous admiration, insisting that he couldn’t find a single fault with any of his classmates’ papers.
Throughout the semester, I observed that Ross’s behavior was not the result of pressure from his classmates. On the contrary, the students reported that they did not want to solely hear praise for their own work. When discussing their survey responses in class, students in both classes expressed the frustration they felt when they didn’t receive substantive feedback on papers. One student even listed the issue as one of her fears about the workshop: she worried that classmates would say something blandly positive about her work but offer no criticism. I asked both classes if they trusted feedback that was entirely positive, and they unanimously said they did not. I also asked if they believed their teachers read their work if they didn’t leave feedback, and everyone said no.
Despite their distrust of vague praise on papers, writers did appreciate receiving Ross’s adulations on their first essays, when they felt the most insecure. However, the feeling did not last. As the semester wore on, Ross’s classmates occasionally joked about the shallow nature of his feedback. In private, one writer told me with regret, “All that praise felt good at the time, but now I have no idea what I’m supposed to revise.” At first, I suspected that Ross was not actually reading his classmates’ drafts, but I noticed that Ross did sometimes offer substantive ideas and feedback—after comments made by another classmate inspired him to add to their assessments. He replied to other responders with “Yes, and” statements, accidentally revealing that he had seen potential ideas for how his classmates could improve their drafts and chosen not to say anything. However, despite multiple reminders and interventions, Ross rarely gave a direct suggestion to a classmate about their work. Both writing center and creative writing scholars have discussed the difficulty of determining the correct level of authority to assume when working with students. Peter Carino, Linda K. Shamoon, and Deborah H. Burns all caution against taking too militant of a stance in favor of non-directive tutoring approaches, especially when the tutor knows much more about a particular writing task than the student does (Carino; Shamoon and Burns). In creative writing scholarship, Mary Swander advises instructors that our ingrained idea of traditional creative writing instruction (which she refers to as “the abusive basketball-coach model”) is guaranteed to impact our pedagogy and our students’ expectations: “Every creative writing instructor… must struggle with the inheritance of the basketball-coach method—that shrewd-criticism, buck up, for-your-own-good approach—and how s/he establishes authority. And students must be made aware of what they’re working with or against” (169).
Helping students see the wider context behind their actions as reader-responders requires active instruction, which means finding a balance or alternative between what Mary Ann Cain calls the “Charming Tyrant” and “Faceless Facilitator” roles that an instructor might play in a workshop. When describing her own attempts to define her role over time, Cain writes, “I did not want to be the object of my students’ unquestioned reverence and slavish devotion. And yet if I were not to remain “dead” to the social order that my students lived by… I needed their respect and recognition—a Face” (35). In the end, while the writing center workshop did not require me to give conclusive, binding opinions on any students’ drafts, I did have to be direct and exert my authority regarding the workshop philosophy. Classroom policies helped reinforce the messaging, but I had to consistently challenge unwanted behavior and directly explain to students how I wanted them to approach workshopping and why.
The Impact of Verbal Over Written Feedback
Perhaps the most significant and unusual difference between my writing center workshop and other workshops is its complete adherence to verbal, synchronous, conversational feedback. Although I was nervous about implementing these changes, I observed that prioritizing verbal over written feedback brought a number of significant advantages to the creative writing workshop. Verbal feedback freed students to revise their comments based on new information, and it also enabled them to clarify their remarks in person. Verbal remarks also helped to soften the impact of commentary from the more abrasive students, and students who tended to fixate on sentence-level correction were forced to instead prioritize global concerns. However, convincing students to accept a verbal model was sometimes challenging, and it was difficult to keep the conversations under a reasonable time limit.
Because the verbal workshop design encouraged students to converse and change their minds whenever they wanted, respondents often deviated from their original written feedback mid-workshop as a result of hearing new information from the writer. Sometimes writers gave important contextual information in their answers, which led to good discussions about what extra information or scenes they could include in their essays. Additionally, writers applied active listening when receiving feedback, and respondents were often able to clarify their comments upon request, as the following exchange shows:
Sylvia: The ending image in your essay was cool, but I think you could dial it back.
Will: Do you mean like simpler language, or less detail?
Sylvia: Hmm. I think I mean more like shortening that section. Less detail, yeah.
Anyone who has puzzled over an instructor’s inscrutable commentary knows that idiomatic or vague language in writing is easily misunderstood. In contrast, Will’s request for clarification helped Sylvia improve the specificity of her verbal feedback.
Although I had worried that verbal feedback would embolden abrasive students to cause a scene in workshop, the opposite happened: verbal delivery led opinionated students to work through their statements, often with the help of the writers they were critiquing. For example, in his pre-workshop letter, Peter told the class that he felt he had written a theme about his middle school experience, but not a full memoir. He wasn’t sure why he felt that way, but he requested advice on how to resolve the issue. Lydia shared his sense of dissatisfaction but said she’d struggled to write down the reason behind her impression of the draft. Normally, Lydia delivered her opinions with full confidence, but with Peter’s essay, she made several halting attempts to verbally explain her feelings. Eventually, Lydia said that she felt the piece was “one-dimensional emotionally,” and she wished it was in the setting of middle school. She asked Peter if anything she had said was making sense to him.
Peter then spoke up, telling Lydia, “I think I see what you’re saying. I’m in the emotional place of middle school, not looking back at middle school. It’s because I’m just angry and venting.”
Relieved, Lydia said that he was right. “I didn’t know how to put it into words.”
The exchange struck me as especially positive, not only because writer and reader worked together to do a complex analysis, but because both students showed emotional growth. The normally brash Lydia was considerate and careful, and Peter, an anxious student, showed confidence and initiative. To fully understand the impact of verbal feedback on the workshop, however, I looked up the written feedback Lydia had submitted the night prior. It read as follows:
“Were you trying to make this about your mom and y’alls argument? If yes, redo this because it, I think, is set all in your middle school self. I am highly confused by the time line in this story because it is so intermingled with your current inner monologue. On pages 2-4 I started to lose sense of your memoir. Are you still speaking in your middle school past? Or are you angsting irl? Make a distinction. There are also some parts where you say “I’m fine” and some of them look more introspective others look like they should be turned into dialogue instead because otherwise it looks awkward and out of place. I also see a lot of repetition in your sentence style where it is independent sentence comma independent sentence. Try and add a little more variety there.”
While I can see Lydia beginning to articulate ideas about authorial distance in her written feedback, she was correct that her commentary was confusing and could easily be interpreted as harsh. Had the official feedback in this class been written instead of verbal, perhaps Lydia would have given up on fully explaining her feedback, or her feedback would have come off as overly cruel, causing Peter to disengage. Even if given the opportunity to converse about the feedback later, Lydia and Peter would not have started off well. Therefore, I argue that verbal conversation was the most productive way for Lydia and Peter to work on his draft.
Accepting the Idea of Verbal Feedback
An early challenge of the memoir workshop was that the students were initially uncomfortable with the idea of not providing written feedback. After the first workshop, several students asked why their written comments weren’t being sent directly to their peers. The students worried that they wouldn’t be able to share sentence-level feedback, which for some, was the vast majority of what they’d written. One student asked whether she could make a Google Doc for students who wanted “editorial” comments.
While I encouraged students to focus beyond the sentence level in their feedback, as a compromise, I agreed to create a Canvas discussion board where students could submit written feedback to each other after the discussions were done. However, I insisted that students not share written feedback until after the class had time to discuss the paper in person because some of them were changing their feedback based on new information learned during workshop. Three students waited until after class to confess that they had changed their feedback. They wanted to make sure I wasn’t upset. One student asked me if students needed to go back and change the written feedback to reflect what they said in class.
While I reassured the students that changing their minds based on new information was a good and fine thing to do, I noted the exchange because it revealed some concerning ideas my students had about the feedback process. Just as Peter had worried that asking questions was a weakness, these students believed that changing their minds mid-critique was a negative behavior, and that their official responses needed to be both consistent and written to receive a good grade.
Despite the initial pushback, after the first few weeks, students accepted the verbal feedback model. No one posted their written feedback on the Canvas discussion board I created. Some students said that they had begun talking to each other and sharing feedback outside of class, where I unfortunately could not observe it. However, much of that feedback appeared to be conversational: students who were friends outside of class often started their in-class discussions by saying, “I know we already talked about most of this, so…” The need for formal written feedback did not seem to apply to conversations between friends.
Unlike the Memoir students, the inexperienced Art of the Essay students accepted the idea of verbal feedback without question. However, upon further observation, I realized that part of the reason for this was that the Art of the Essay students were more likely to bring their written comments to class and read them verbatim instead of engaging in discussion or even making eye contact with the writer. I responded to this problem by stepping in more often and asking the class discussion questions about the draft, forcing the Art of the Essay students to provide commentary that they hadn’t prepared in advance.
Is It Acceptable for a Teacher to Only Provide Verbal Feedback?
Students also realized after week one that I did not intend to give them written feedback on their workshop drafts: like everyone else, I committed to delivering all my draft feedback verbally in the workshop. If students wanted to know what I thought beyond what I said in workshop, they had to come talk to me about their draft. Several students did so on a regular basis. Although I never received any complaints about my methods in my student evaluations (and students never demanded written feedback), I still struggled with the feeling that I was being a bad teacher, which in turn made me consider how much I, like my students, have absorbed the idea that written feedback is intrinsically more valid than verbal feedback.
Research doesn’t appear to support this idea. A 2020 meta-analysis of 70 studies published in the last twenty years revealed that as of now, there is not enough data to determine whether written or oral modes of feedback are more effective. However, the analysis did show that good feedback needs to have certain characteristics, including timeliness, positivity, and specificity. It should also encourage active student engagement (Haughney et al.). By these measures, the verbal conversations I had with the workshop students might be more effective than any written feedback I’ve ever produced. In general, verbal feedback carries a number of advantages and may be undervalued by both students and professors.
Time Concerns
The largest threat to my model was time management. At our first memoir workshop, which twelve people attended, asking each writer questions, giving our opinions one at a time, and holding conversations about the work took 25 minutes per writer. We only completed three workshops, and a fourth student was bumped to the following week. After class, Dorothy approached me, and we had the following discussion:
Dorothy: “I have a solution to the time issue. In the poetry workshop, the writers have to stay silent until every student gives feedback, and then they can talk. It goes a lot faster.”
Me: “It is faster. But if we do that, we can’t have a conversation with the writers anymore.”
Dorothy: “Hmm. I do like the conversations.”
Like several other students at that point, Dorothy had tailored or revised her feedback based on what she learned about the writer in conversation. Dorothy did not express a wish to silence the writers because she found their feedback annoying or because she thought silence had a pedagogical advantage. She was worried about time.
Writing centers (and all service-oriented sectors of the university) receive constant pressure to go faster or be more efficient. The work of conversing and thinking about drafts is time consuming. While factory-grade efficiency decreases the efficacy of our work, writing center tutors do employ time-management methods such as structured conversation to manage the length of sessions. Therefore, I decided to tell all respondents to ask any questions they had about the work at the beginning of workshop before we began sharing thoughts in a circle. Starting with questions brought the average length of each workshop down to a barely manageable 15-20 minutes.
In Art of the Essay, I anticipated the time concerns and arranged for no more than three students to have their drafts workshopped per class. However, the problem of how to facilitate meaningful verbal feedback in a larger workshop remains. Some students were better at producing unguided conversations than others, so I am hesitant to rely on small group discussion. However, there may be ways to bring in additional facilitators for larger creative writing classrooms, either by inviting the assistance of TAs, writing center tutors, or student leaders with structured guidelines to follow.
Conclusions and Suggestions for the Future
My goal in creating a workshop inspired by writing center pedagogy was to positively impact students’ behavior toward one another as well as their views on writing and the quality of their feedback. Based on my observations and the corpus of coursework produced by students, I argue that the writing center workshop model directly and positively addressed many of the communication issues and unhealthy power dynamics that can affect writing workshops. As a result of this model’s emphasis on verbal conversation, students experienced positive personal interactions, and the quality of their feedback improved in real time.
However, to successfully run this classroom format, instructors must be ready to consistently model the behaviors and philosophies they want students to embrace. The students in my classes were unfamiliar with thinking about writing as a process, and they had internalized a number of myths about what it means to give feedback on writing. In the future, I plan to reinforce the concepts students needed to understand by providing more readings and activities related to the writing and drafting process. Instructors must also be prepared to deal with time limitations. For classes with more than twelve students, instructors may need to reconfigure the format suggested by this model or find alternative ways to manage the limited time available in class.
As for the larger picture, writing center pedagogy absolutely benefits the creative writing classroom, which suggests that writing programs would be well served by stronger partnerships between writing centers and creative writing departments. Creative writing instructors can train writing center tutors on useful terminology for discussing poetry. Writing center tutors can give classroom presentations on how to thoughtfully respond to writers. The programs can host joint events, expressing a shared goal of encouraging the growth of writers and readers. As long as members of both programs agree on the central tenets of feedback and the writing process, any number of joint ventures are possible.
Works Cited
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Appendix
Workshop Draft Submission Questions
Dear Writer,
As part of your Canvas essay submission, please write a letter to the class answering the following questions about your latest piece:
1) What inspired you to write this piece?
2) What are your goals for this essay? What do you hope it will achieve?
3) While writing this piece, did you make any particular craft choices that you want to discuss? What do you hope to achieve with these choices?
4) Overall, do you have any questions for your readers?