Five Goals

Five goals I would introduce as teacher of an introductory, college-level creative writing class:

1. Through the use of teacher- and class-generated prompts, students will begin to explore using the mediums of poetry, fiction, and memoir to write about topics of interest.

2. Through workshopping of one's own writing as well as that of classmates, students will learn how to engage with and support the development of peers' work, and how to utilize peers' critiques to strengthen one's own. With aid of the teacher's facilitation, and frequent readings on best practices of writing workshops, students will develop skills in offering constructive feedback on peers' writing.

3. Through a series of assignments focused on revision, as well as individual teacher-student meetings, students will begin to engage with the process of editing and reworking early drafts of writing, and become both familiar and comfortable with the editing process.

4. Through attendance at and written responses to readings by visiting writers, students will be introduced to a variety of schools/movements in contemporary creative writing, develop a vocabulary for discussing what they find effective and/or ineffective in featured readers' work, and use said readers' writings as templates for drafting similarly structured poetry, fiction, or memoir.

5. Through the development of a theme-based semester project (be it a collection of poems, a series of short stories, or a memoir, any of which will be theme-specific), students will become familiar with the utility of a focused writing project over a designated period of time, and will create a portfolio of topically connected writing in the genre for which they hold most interest.

This last one might be a stretch for an introductory level course, but with so many contemporary collections of poetry or short fiction 'topical projects,' it seems worth introducing early on.

Obviously, each of these goals would need resources (textbooks, articles, poetry/fiction/memoir collections) to be adequately met. I've not included those here, as I assume those components will go into the course syllabus we'll be turning in later this semester...

Thoughts?