Imaginative Teaching through Creative Writing: A Guide for Secondary Classrooms

Growing out of recent pedagogical developments in creative writing studies and perceived barriers to teaching the subject in secondary education schools, this book creates conversations between secondary and post-secondary teachers aimed at introducing and improving creative writing instruction in teaching curricula for young people. Challenging assumptions and lore regarding the teaching of creative writing, this book examines new and engaging techniques for infusing creative writing into all types of language arts instruction, offering inclusive and pedagogically sound alternatives that consider the needs of a diverse range of students. With careful attention given to creative writing within current standards-based educational systems, Imaginative Teaching through Creative Writing confronts and offers solutions to the perceived difficulty of teaching the subject in such environments. Divided into two sections, section one sees post-secondary instructors address pedagogical techniques and concerns such as workshop, revision, and assessment before section two explores hands-on activities and practical approaches to instruction. Focusing on an invaluable and underrepresented area of creative writing studies, this book begins a much-needed conversation about the future of creative writing instruction at all levels and the benefits of collaboration across the secondary/post-secondary divide.

Amy Ash is an Assistant Professor of English at Indiana State University and Director of the Indiana State University Creative Writing Program. She specializes in poetry and creative writing. The author of The Open Mouth of the Vase, winner of the 2013 Cider Press Review Book Award and the 2016 Etchings Press Whirling Prize post-publication award for poetry, her work has been published in various journals and anthologies.

Michael Dean Clark is Associate Professor of Writing at Azusa Pacific University, USA. Formerly an award-winning journalist, his fiction and non-fiction work has appeared in Pleiades, Fast Forward, Relief, and a number of other periodicals.

Chris Drew is an Associate Professor of English at Indiana State University, USA, where he supervises the English Teaching program and teaches creative writing and teaching methods courses. He previously taught ELA and theatre at Heritage Hills Middle School and Mater Dei High School, both in Indiana. His work has appeared in publications that include English Leadership Quarterly, The Journal of Creative Writing Studies, Minnesota English Journal, Wisconsin English Journal, Mad River Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and Quarterly West. He is a co-editor of Dispatches from the Classroom: Graduate Students on Creative Writing Pedagogy (Bloomsbury).