Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

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.