Research & Projects

In this project, I blend two of my M.A. studies, "Ekphrastic Poetics" and "Teaching First-Year Comp," into a transfer study. Using student examples in my ekphrasis course, Dr. Maya Jewell Zeller's introductory lessons, and my own ekphrastic writing prompts, I teach a mock audience of undergrad non-writing majors about ekphrasis while challenging writing preconceptions. After the mock lesson, I wrote a report on how my student's perspective of writing changed. 

Objectives

This assignment was submitted for the "FINAL research project w/metacognitive statement" assignment for English 555: Studies in Ekphrasis, and built upon a previous Wordpress submission where I shared the mock slides for participation credit in the course. After receiving feedback from my classmates about the mock lesson I created, I wanted to actually challenge myself to teach the lesson and see how the content could break common writing myths and misconceptions. 

At the time, I was also enrolled in a course with Dr. Dan Martin, where we studied threshold concepts and first-year composition (FYC) pedagogy. I wanted to teach ekphrasis to an audience that did not already consider themselves writers. 

In my project introduction, I write:

"How can we integrate creative writing into the English 101 classroom to teach rhetorical situations, break writing myths, and introduce multimodal genres? For this project, I plan and implement an ekphrasis lesson for a non-English majoring audience as a doorway for teaching research methods and using art response as a kind of curiosity-opener. This lesson plan aims to teach non-English majors about ekphrasis and allows them to practice creative and expressive writing in addition to standard academic writing" (1). 

Results

This mock lesson and research project revealed the power of creative writing and, specifically, the potential for ekphrastic poetry as an easy entry into breaking writing myths and misconceptions in "non-writers." Although the test students were not FYC students, they represented a similar writing experience level and demographics to FYC students.

After the lesson, I followed up with the test students and interviewed them about their thoughts about writing and poetry, before and after the exercise. I wanted to know how and if the exercise had transferred any writing truths into their actual fields and lives.  

From the student interview, I found evidence to support the following: 

"Through this loosely guided practice in creating an ekphrastic poem, both students went from claiming that they weren't creative and knew nothing about poetry to recognizing how their preconceptions about poetry were limited and how creative writing would have been a useful tool for learning how to use language in their early English classes" (6). 

Connecting these testimonies to the field of writing studies transfer concepts, I found that ekphrasis was a great way to introduce students to multimodality, genius fallacies, playful pedagogies, and the deconstruction of distinct binaries between creative and academic writing (8-9).  

Currently, this project is being re-genre(d) to fit the call for submissions for the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). From this assignment, I initiated a study that would contribute to the composition and creative writing discourse communities and investigate my identity and pedagogy as a writing teacher. This was one of the first projects that helped me recognize my passion for bringing in creative and multimodal opportunities for learning in the FYC classroom.