Creative Assignments: What They Teach Students and What They Teach Us

Thinking about creative responses to literary texts, Tricia wrote:

I'm not sure this kind of open-ended assignment would be possible to assign very often in a literature course, since I assume it would be difficult to consistently grade such vastly different assignments, and I imagine some teachers and heads of departments might not think creative options like these allow for enough literary analysis.

While I think she’s right that some people might see so-called “creative” responses to literary texts as lacking rigor, I’ve found that they can serve as highly effective means for students to enter into a literary text in deep and meaningful ways that in fact can lead to greater depth of analytical understanding than might be unlocked by more traditional teaching methods.

For inspiration I think those of us teaching at the college level and beyond should look to our colleagues in middle and high school.  Faced with groups of students whose exposure to and interest in the texts at hand—not to mention their reading skills—may be widely varied, great middle and high school teachers routinely incorporate creative activities and assignments into their classes, even in the face of strict requirements for teaching to standardized tests that tend to crush creativity rather than inspire it.

A useful entry for those of us who feel wedded to teaching standard literary analysis and argument, especially in our writing assignments, might be through activities and writing tasks that focus on rewriting the text at hand in various ways. These could include rewriting a piece of the text in a different genre or mode, for instance changing a play to a short story or rewriting a sentimental scene from a novel as a scene of Gothic horror; asking students to recast a passage through another point of view; having students write alternative endings; or inviting them to reimagine the setting of a text as something entirely new. This kind of rewriting is an activity many of our students engage in on their own, as the plethora of online fan fiction sites demonstrates.  But just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it’s new; engaging with writing by attending to mode was a cornerstone of the composition curriculum in the past. Applying this technique to literary texts is not just fun; it’s illuminating for students and directly transferable to more traditional analytic work.

All of these activities are based in close reading, and once we have students’ creative minds engaged with the text it’s a short step to framing the analytical work required for successful creative projects in more traditional terms. What is key here, I think, is the teacher’s ability to help students identify and understand the analytical work they are already doing and explain how this work can get re-presented  (or perhaps re-re-presented) in the genre of academic writing. Isolating the formal qualities of academic writing is key to this process. Students who have been thinking in terms of genre already through their creative work are likely to have more to say about the formal essay—and find it more interesting as a form—than they might if the essay were just one more standard writing assignment for English class.