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This research explores how imaginative writing practices help reinforce students’ close-reading abilities and benefit student literary analysis. The study examines the uses and benefits of implementing creative writing instruction to aid literary study, specifically in assessing close-reading skills, at the secondary 10th grade English level. The document defines terms such as creative writing, imaginative writing, informational writing, meta-cognitive writing, and reader-response theory. It also discusses the importance of evaluating college instructional strategies and related research to understand the benefits of creative writing practices in secondary classrooms.
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Running head: CREATIVE WRITING IN LITERATURE STUDY
Creative Writing in Literature Study:Reading Skills in Secondary English Instruction Using Imaginative Writing Practices to Refine Close- Kellie Palmblad Colorado College
gain deeper insights about an author’s message in a work. Accepted English instruction often helps students to arrive^ Rooted at the core of successful literary analysis is the ability to identify literary elements and use inference skills to at a more so insights about how imaginative writing practices help reinforce students’ closephisticated understanding of a literary work through refining analytical writing. This research uncovers-reading abilities and benefit student literary analysis. This work is a implementing creative writing instruction to aid descriptive, grade literary study, specifically in assessing close-level analysis that examines the uses and benefits of-reading skills, at the secondary sessions; these sessions 10th grade English level. Two prompted both imaginative writing sophomore classes prod responsesuced scored data from three consecutive writing and analytical writing responses to reveal how both imaginative writing practices and analytical writing practices assess the close-reading and inference skills used to enhance literary analysis. were used in a successfully analogous way to
Chapter One: Creative Writing as an Asset to Literature Study Overview I owe creative writing. I am indebted to it for the inspiration and motivation it has inspired in my own academic life and for the success it has created in my teaching experiences. I owe creative writing for any of the productivity I have had in my own artistic pursuits. I owe it for the inspiration it has embedded in me to further learn about multiple subjects from science to math, from history to education. It has its own momentum which gives freely to academia and pedagogy. I owe the exploration of its benefits my attention and energy for further investigation. In 2011, I was asked to design and lead a creative writing workshop in my community at a local homeless youth shelter. The hope for the workshop was that the teens residing there, often in the throes of very turbulent lives, might find an outlet for their experience and a way to stay connected to productive expression. The hope was that they survive the transition from teenagers to adulthood and stay engaged enough at the shelter to make it through high school and hopefully into jobs and to community college. The program often solicited volunteers who were active members of the art community and who preferably had some instructional experience. As a volunteer who fit this profile, I agreed. I worked on weekly plans, activities and exercises that centered on individual creative writing and group discussions that honored each participant’s experience and expression. What I discovered was an instructional process that would be continually beneficial to my endeavors as a future English teacher. When I chose to experiment with creative writing workshop techniques at the shelter, it was to supplement another artistic activity for the kids living there. Often, instructors brought in art workshops for painting, sculpting and crafts. We tried to create fun and expressive activities. However, what I quickly observed was how creative writing techniques carried academic assets.
Rationale Creative writing, when used as an application assignment in a literary lesson, seems to attract students’ investment to the academic process. It creates a venue through which students can apply their growing knowledge of literary elements into their own writing. In return, they can apply knowledge they discover in their writing to broader works or movements of literature. This experience helps students to more clearly identify literary devices and techniques when analyzing literature. While creative writing practices are useful in understanding literary conventions and devices, it may also be a beneficial way to create a personal investment in learning. The creation of original work in a classroom setting is relevant to students and their lives. It offers an intimate and open environment that encourages original thinking and expression. Organization Research concerning the benefits of creative writing is mostly targeted at postsecondary education. Interestingly, despite university attention to creative writing practices, creative writing is hardly a focus of secondary curriculum research. While high school instruction most often targets analytical prose, rhetorical construction and essay development, research is aimed primarily at the effects of writing across disciplinary studies (Bangert-Drowns, R., Hurley, M., & Wilkinson, B., 2004). It may simply be observed that creative writing has been greatly marginalized due to secondary classroom focus on informational writing and text analysis (Knoeller, 2003). In lack of empirical evidence concerning the specific effects of creative writing on high school classrooms, most accurately literature study in secondary classrooms, it is important to draw upon other relevant sources to learn more how the use of creative writing might or might
not benefit literature study. We can draw upon postsecondary curriculum’s use of creative writing and any research that relates to this while keeping in mind it is common to look toward the framework of college practices in expectation of secondary targets and goals (Common Core State Standard Initiative, 2012). Whether it is for the purposes of college readiness, the promotion of original higher thinking, or both, looking at college instructional strategies and related research might be valuable to understanding the benefits of creative writing practices in secondary classrooms. It is useful to evaluate some principle insights about how teens engage with and pay attention to tasks. A simple understanding of teenage attention to tasks might shed some light on creative writing’s usefulness in the classroom. In addition to this, reports about how the inclusion of creative writing might affect classroom culture helps us to understand when and how to work with creative writing in instruction. Following the literature review, I will employ creative writing techniques in the classroom to more clearly understand and assess how creative writing can be useful to literature study at the secondary level. Definition of Terms The object of this research is to understand the significance of using imaginative writing for exploring literary content alongside informational writing. Exploring literary content, specifically employing close-reading and passage inference skills, can be done through engaging in both imaginative writing practices and informational writing practices when those practices are designed to meet close-reading criteria. It will be important to clearly define these terms which I hope to explore throughout the literature synthesis and instructional process. One major term that will need further clarification
specific criteria of that type of informational writing. Informational writing, as a practice unto itself, may not always correlate with criteria met in imaginative writing assignments. An important practice and idea to define, in relation to writing and learning, is meta- cognitive writing. This is writing that serves to explore reflection on the thinking process. Personal writing or reflective journal writing that aims to help a student better understand his or her own thinking is meta-cognitive writing. Studies show that meta-cognitive writing practices that relate a student’s personal learning process to educational content further enhances comprehension (Bangert-Drowns & Hurley & Wilkinson, 2004). Various types of writing and content study can be greatly aided through meta-cognitive writing. However, it is important to define how meta-cognitive writing is different from imaginative writing. “What do you think…” questions that ask a student to reflect upon a hypothetical situation and projection are ways of reasoning, but they are ways of reasoning in an imaginative form. These are questions that may be specifically tailored toward the imaginative writing process and should be directly distinguished from meta-cognitive practice that asks a student to reflect on how he or she has best learned. Meta-cognitive writing will and should be used to gather information about the student’s learning, but it will not be interchangeable with imaginative writing. Branching between informational writing and the self-awareness in writing is the reader- response theory of writing practice. This is a form of writing that serves to analyze a text through the framework of a reader’s personal response to a work (Dobie, 2002). Reader- Response has devolved into a common practice for literature analysis. It is important to note that this differs greatly from meta-cognitive writing. Reader-response is an approach to literature analysis while meta-cognitive writing is a practice to help a student’s learning.
Classroom culture refers to the classroom environment and how the students collectively interact with the classroom as a community of individuals. Because classroom culture is directly affected by the individuals within it and the thoughts, ideas and experiences they bring to the class, a classroom’s culture is created from the interaction of the students with each other, the instructor(s) and the content within the class. In light of these terms, I will attempt to understand more about the usefulness of imaginative writing practices in a secondary classroom through the framework of students’ close-reading and inference skills, and how these skills can be successfully supported through employing both imaginative and analysis writing practices.
Imaginative thought processes and questions are used frequently in education across disciplines. Educators ask questions and hold discussions concerning a variety of points of view. They ask, “What do you suppose would happen if….” Perhaps, the imaginative writing is largely missing in instruction research and methodology because it is nebulous in definition. Imaginative writing, largely referred to as creative writing, hovers around specific genre study. Even within these definitions, it does seem that imaginative writing is often overlooked as a useful student practice to literature study as it relates to the reasoning processes inherent to analysis. It has been classified as an extracurricular practice. While imaginative writing is entertaining and engaging, it is also practically useful. When used as writing practice that explores literary content, imaginative writing creates the opportunity to produce higher level thinking. There are a plethora of skills alive and at work in writing and thinking in terms of fiction, poetry, story-telling, plays and prose writing. These are all organic extensions of genre study. Imaginative writing used to expand upon or imitate literature capitalizes on hypothetical reasoning, close-reading, compare and contrast, classification and organizational skills. It provides opportunities to predict and synthesize. In literature and language arts studies, it can be and should be used to explore literary devices and traditional criticism techniques. Imaginative writing techniques are simply an extension of the reasoning thought processes used to comprehend a subject and explore material in a hypothetical way. Imaginative writing can be the medium through which we comprehend the arguments, point of view and critiques of subject matters held by the writers we study. Literature as Conversation Point of view is a literary device that portrays how a story or narration is being told. Understanding point of view is essential to analyzing most literature and successfully understanding a narrator or character. Often, it is the key to unraveling important information
about the story, its characters and the author’s choices. However, point of view can extend beyond its use by the author of a fictional work. Point of view may be found in essentially any type of writing. A writer chooses point of view because, in storytelling and many other writings, it is a natural extension of creating a conversation. In a conversation, be it an argument or persuasion, there is usually a point of view that coincides with the author’s opinion; understanding it helps us to understand the thinking behind it. Criticism is no stranger to point of view. There is a strong call to action from postsecondary curricula for students to think “in character” as a literary critic while studying literature. This call asks students to consider both the power of a reader’s perspective and active involvement in literature study (Dobie, 2002). Different schools of literature inherently contain a point of view, which, like a lens, serves to focus a written analysis on specific aspects of a literature body with a specific angle in mind. The major schools of literary study include criticisms ranging from Culturalism and New Historicism, Feminist Criticism, Deconstructionism, Psychological Criticism and Reader-Response to Post-modernism and Marxism schools of thought (Dobie, 2002). There are many more schools of criticism; all are important to analyzing a body of work through a particular focus or point of view. As a writer is asked to develop an analysis of works through these criticisms, she is being asked to explore a point of view. These are the ways in which we ask students to elaborate on their knowledge of a work and more deeply discuss literature (Dobie, 2002). It may be reasonable then to understand literary criticism as a conversation between a school of thought and a person attempting to understand that school of thought. The development of that conversation requires understanding point of view, the argument itself and, most important, the experience out of which a point of view develops.
was successful; within twenty-five minutes, elementary students were grasping binary math concepts. However, the real magic happened during the Socratic session when the teacher asked the kids to answer thinking hypothetically. They were to relate the math concepts to counting with only two fingers through the illustration or storyline of alien math. In this story moment, the aliens would have learned to count differently because their preschool had to teach them to count with only two fingers. This storyline continued throughout the instruction at pivotal moments of understanding. Interestingly, it was the use of imaginative storytelling (with a sci-fi touch) that greatly aided the method and students to successfully grasp the material. Asking students to think in the first person point of view of an imaginative character presented a viewpoint that helped them understand the material. Very often connecting point of view to experience comes in the form of storytelling as explored through dialogue (King, 2007). Teachers and students communicate through exchanging ideas, experience and information through dialogue. This transference of ideas and experience through storytelling and dialogue is a natural part of classroom discussion and idea sharing; it is essentially that these dialogues keep classroom discussions and education afloat with relevance for the learner. Imaginative writing practices that build on dialogue writing can explore a work’s theme, the point of view of a character or of a prediction of the author’s point of view (King, 2007). Point of view explorations in imaginative writing that seek to combine experience with literary devices like imagery, flashback, and diction are valuable to literature analysis. Students explore conversation conventions because storytelling and dialoguing are natural occurrences in their lives socially and academically (King, 2007). Exploring points of view through imaginative writing practices that include conversations can stimulate higher level
thinking about a work. Simultaneously, storytelling and dialogue helps us to relate ideas to our own lives and make sense of the information about which we are reading. Storytelling, in its provision of background and formation, also provides context. The process of hearing and telling about background information scaffolds a connection between the point of view and its meaning and also between teller and the listener (King, 2007). It also provides a context for the language being used. A conscious and competent participant in a conversation can use the language of his or her audience to best communicate a point of view (Dobie, 2002). In language and situational context, storytelling and dialogue serve to create reciprocity between one point of view and another, both in writing and discussion. Imaginative writing can provide a context for that conversation to take place often encouraging a deeper understanding of the ideas involved. Like-Genre Writing For Close Readings One of the most valuable assets of imaginative writing is that it provides students with the opportunity to interact with the text. Essay and analytical prose are most often used as a way for students to write about literature, but teachers have found that when students write like-genre while studying a work this experience adds a deeper level of engagement with the text (Knoeller, 2003). The supplemental practices of writing in the style and voice of an author or imaginatively creating an extension of the text such as a epilogues, prologues, additional chapters, alternate endings or interjecting internal character monologues, creates the opportunity for students to imaginatively interact with the text. As logical an asset to literature study as it seems, like-genre writing is often used in only in creative writing courses, and is used less in traditional literature study courses. Excluding like-genre writing can exempt opportunities for close-reading, reasoning, and in-depth exploration of point of view (Knoeller, 2003). The practice of mimicking
on critical thinking in texts including non-fiction and commentary writing in high school English goals, this mindset is increasingly more important. Imaginative writing can provide a space in the reasoning, between the text and the thesis of an argument, where students can act upon the ideas they are exploring to further understand ideas and meaning (Cooper, McDonald, 2000). Journal Prompts Personalizing Literary Devices Other instructional methods encourage students to find pleasure in writing about fiction through identifying the pleasure in reading it (Meyers, 2000). The goal is to approach writing as an intellectual and emotional opportunity rather than merely making sentences (Meyers, 2000). This approach encourages students to “experience or feel” their way into a work, much aligned with reader-response criticism. Often this occurs in imaginative journal writing. To expand on this reaction, students are encouraged to engage in imaginative writing responses to further explore and understand the text (Meyers, 2000). Students can be encouraged to respond to a moment of imagery in a story or a physical picture that aligns with that imagery and write a description or character narrative to elaborate on the mood or atmosphere of a story. This helps students to interact with the psychology or mood of a story to better understand an author’s description or setting choices (Meyers, 2000) Character Sketches: Exploring A Poem’s Speaker One of the key skills in poetic analysis is identification. It is the skill of identifying the speaker, the situation or state of mind, persons or personas addressed in the poem and identifying meaning and patterns in the form. To a less experienced reader, the confusion of identifying these elements can be particularly tricky, especially in light of the many devices, movements and poetic forms poetry has to offer. It is particularly difficult to respond, discuss or intelligibly elaborate upon the meaning of poetry without identifying and classifying these elements.
Imaginative writing can greatly aid the identification and classification skills that help poetic analysis. One valuable method is to personify the speaker of a poem and create a character sketch of the speaker (Meyers, 2000). This helps to identify the persona of the speaker and that speaker’s point of view and make it accessible or relatable to the student. This method might be particularly helpful to younger students or students new to poetic analysis. Imaginatively interacting with the speaker of a poem through an interview, biography or conversation with other characters can help students make use of key lines in the poem, understand word choice or difficult language and organize the elements of the poem that create its meaning (Meyers, 2000). Imaginative Writing: Guided Learning, Specificity, and Meta-cognition Incorporating imaginative writing techniques in traditional literature study may be seen as problematic for instructors for a variety of reasons. Imaginative writing, often viewed as inferior to informational writing (Knoeller, 2003), is seen as sometimes inaccessible or derailing from learning targets. A discrepancy may lie in the fear that imaginative writing can too easily stray off topic or be simply inaccessible to “non-creative” students. Unfortunately, educators, seeing themselves as not creative, worry about developing an imaginative project and being incapable of guiding or containing imaginative processes (King, 2007). Part of overcoming the resistance met when incorporating imaginative writing by teachers and students who see themselves as not-creative is recognizing that imaginative writing is simply an extension of reasoning; like other instructional processes, imaginative writing can and should be broken down to skills that aid the learning targets of the class (Marzano, 2010). Imaginative writing best serves a curriculum when it is used within the design of a cohesive framework for a unit, semester or year (Marzano, 2010). In light of these controversies, it would benefit an instructor
paramount part of studying it; these skills access a pathway toward analytically writing about literature and intelligibly discussing it (Ackerman, 1993). Imaginative Writing: Meta-Cognitive Reflection Research reiterates that meta-cognitive writing helps to organize and reinforce understanding of both content knowledge and produces higher level thinking. Assignments that incorporate meta-cognitive refection on the learning processes help to scaffold aspects of self- regulation. (Bangert-Drowns, Hurley, Wilkinson, 2010). Meta-cognitive writing after imaginative writing can be a particularly useful method for students to connect how this exploration of literary ideas has enhanced their understanding of literary content. Students profit by reflecting on what they have learned in the process, exploring their insights (Knoeller, 2003). Writing, by nature, offers repetition in thought process; the reinforcing and cyclical nature of the cognitive process in writing is a powerful mode for learning (Emig, 1977). To write about a text from different points of view or through imaginatively expanding upon its subject matter allows a student further repeat and practice analysis of the text’s ideas. Imaginative writing practices, followed by consistent class journaling or reflective prompt responses, can help students make the connections between their imaginative writing and learning goals. Meta-cognitive writing, in this sense, can help to guide imaginative writing toward useful and productive learning targets. Post unit meta-cognitive writing has revealed that students both learn from imaginative writing practices while greatly enjoying it (Knoeller, 2003). This process can be as elaborate as a reflective essay or as simple as a three sentence reflection on an assignment. Task Attention and Motivation in Teen Adolescents One influential factor that can most affect adolescent attention is emotional investment (Wolfe, 2012). Learning is led by attention and attention is led by emotion (Wolfe, 2012). The
cognitive processes that allow the mind to differentiate between frivolous and essential information relies heavily on emotions, meaning flight or fight responses, and can greatly determine the way the mind distributes attention (Wolfe, 2012). Adolescents in the 12-19 year old developmental stages are particularly affected by this. It takes more stimuli to activate the reward center of a teenage mind than it does in younger children or adults (Bronson, Merryman, 2009). Because motivation is a complex structure affected by multiple factors like self- regulation, self-efficacy and attention (Bandura, 2007), it is important to anticipate what challenges a teenage mind might encounter during cognitive tasks such as close-reading and passage inference. Emotionally engaging tasks, in moderation, help to retain attention (Wolfe, 2012). Imaginative writing is largely interactive with students’ emotional responses because it offers the opportunity to draw upon their own lives and experiences (King, 2007). The experiential assets of imaginative writing can engage and motivate students to stay on task during the study of a long or difficult works (Knoeller, 2003). The Motivation of Expressing Original Thought There is much to be said for the motivation and engagement, traditionally speaking, accompanied by original thinking. When students are asked to think originally and not reproduce ideas, their motivation and attention towards a writing task increases (DeSena, 2007). Imaginative writing can provide opportunities for free writing, the “fertile ground of original thinking” (pg. 71). In free writing, students may be free from form, and often this space allows students to take risks and experiment with inference (DeSena, 2007). The space and freedom found in free writing and other imaginative writing can help create motivation for original thinking. It helps to prevent students from repressing original reasoning, and it enhances the