Art Literacies
Arts of Response: The Good, the Bad, and the (Incredibly) Ugly in Writing Workshop and Art Crit Feedback Styles
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Derek Owens
The art of response has always been a central concern for composition scholars. As a writing professor for nearly 30 years and a current candidate in Transart Institute’s MFA program in “creative practice,” I’ve been researching the pedagogical histories of the workshop and the art crit. One thing I’ve discovered is students in both creative writing and art programs have no lack of horror stories to tell about arrogant, dismissive, misogynist, nasty responses from their faculty. An in depth review of the literature reveals how deeply workshops and crits have been associated with anxiety, fear, and hostility. This presentation seeks to highlight that history—but more importantly, call attention to alternative pedagogies that value empathic, healthy, student-centered environments. One result of my research has been to assemble a typology of response—identifying various “response types” found in workshop/crit settings where a range of problematic and successful personalities proliferate (“the librarian,” “the inquisitor,” “the cuckoo,” the “Terri Gross,” “the Hypothesizer,” etc.). As someone who teaches in multimodal, multigenre, and multimedia environments, my goal is to make this paper relevant to both writing and art faculty interested in the arts of response.
Creative Teaching and Teachers: A New Process to Engage and Empower Students
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sam Barta
This study builds on and contributes to work in literacy, drama pedagogy, creativity theory, Self-Determination Theory, and student engagement theory. It is centered within the social context of a specific classroom process, focused on literacy, informed by these key theories for both the activity and data analysis. This study provides insight into how the central idea of student autonomy within drama pedagogy and creativity theory can inform effective teaching practices, as well as research data analysis. The analytic focus on autonomy support and its importance for creative and effective teaching, as well as a key element in promoting intrinsic motivation, enables another contribution. The specific classroom activity, a collaborative, interactive and episodic written role-play, not only is an example of creative teaching, but of teaching for creativity. Although numerous studies have identified the relationship of the basic needs within Self-Determination Theory to promoting intrinsic motivation (relatedness, autonomy, perceived competence), little analytic attention has been paid to how these variables are central to drama pedagogy and creativity theory. I address this issue by showing how these theories, used in creating the written role-play process, also explains how and why it is so successful in empowering and engaging students in literacy.
Art and Finitude
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session John Pauley
Tragic realism, a form of narrative fiction, reveals human limitations in ways that are not possible in other discursive disciplines. One purpose of this essay is to argue why this is the case and precisely how those limitations are revealed. I use the word "finitude" because in tragic realism the human self, in constant relation to the social ecology, is importantly limited in resources for self-understanding. I argue that these limitations cannot be overcome: they are features of the human condition. In the last section of the paper, I argue that assimilating these features of art and finitude are crucial for a realistic comprehension of human progress. Insofar as STEM fails to assimilate these features, it prepares culture for a host of illusions and dangerous myths.
DIY Multicultural Story: Teaching Literature through Podcast Creation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Reshmi Hebbar
Falling within the Art in Society’s conference “Theme 3: New Media, Technology, and the Arts,” this paper discusses the value of exploring "digital media arts and education” within twenty-first-century college literature courses and presents case studies involving the development of a "'Do-It-Yourself' Multicultural Podcast" assignment. Along with other pedagogical questions, this project works to challenge the self-imposed boundaries that have become cemented in university programs between more creative and artistic writing and the academic study of literature; at its core, my contextualization of this interview-based podcast assignment probes into the nature of how constructive and hands-on artistic learning about digital narrative production might help to reap more effectively some educational benefits surrounding the teaching of literature, including critical and intercultural literacy. The project lays out the challenges of articulating to students and administrators the more creative learning objectives of digital narrative production, and it walks through the evolution of the DIY Multicultural Podcast Assignment through two different literature courses and one co-curricular university program involving civic engagement. It discusses both the value of outside-the-box digital literacy skills developed in such contexts as well as the real challenges of bridging the creative enterprises to the traditional research-paper-model college course. The project thus looks at this assignment as an expansion of literary-studies skills through the integration of an “arts” assignment. The paper concludes by reflecting on how studying artistic digital media is thus breathing new life into the traditional literary studies curriculum and asking students to reflect upon the professional implications of the connections between the academic, social/civic, and artistic realms.
