Advanced Creative Writing in Specialized Genres (Dark Literature)

Purpose: to help other instructors teaching the same course

Common Course ID:  ENG 5130
CSU Instructor Open Textbook Adoption Portrait

Abstract:  These low-cost measures are being utilized in an English course for undergraduate students by Dr. Kate Simonian at California State University, San Bernardino.  The main measures used were primary texts from Youtube and other sources around the internet, such as Manga repositories. Some motivations to adopt these accessible texts was reduced costs to students and the likelihood of students completing readings if they were digital and video-based. Most students accessed the materials via an internet browser on their phones.

English 5130 
Brief Description of course highlights:  This Course, Advanced Creative Writing in Specialized Genres is a prerequisite for creative-writing minors. There are no pre-requisites. https://bulletin.csusb.edu/coursesaz/eng
Learning or student outcomes: 

1. CLO1. Understand and use a “creative writing” vocabulary when discussing poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and cross-genre work. 
2. CLO2. Develop an appreciation of, and ability to discuss, various features of the horror genre. 
3. CLO3. Articulate some major considerations specific to the practical creation of horror writing.  
4. CLO4. Explain the ways in which horror writing has more recently moved towards diversity and more marginalized perspectives 
5. CLO5. Identify enquiry questions that arise from your own aesthetics. 
6. CLO6. Switch effectively between the two major modes of writing--the generative fountainhead and the critical reviser--to bring works to a publishable standard. 
7. CLO7. List strategies that work to get you writing or break through blocks, such as automatic writing, media, excursions, meditation, modeling, journaling, drawing, reading, etc. 
8. CLO8. Identify situations of moral and cultural ambiguity in texts. 
9. CLO9. Reflect on how social context affects meaning. 
10. CL010. Thoughtfully analyze the work of peers using a neutral observation method. 
11. CLO11. Find areas of your own experience that inspire, connect with, and uplift others 

Student Population:  Nearly all the students are English majors, and over half are creative-writing major. Typically, students have taken a few other creative-writing courses at a beginner and intermediate level. This foundational knowledge allows for this class to take a more specialized look at a chosen genre.

Key challenges faced and how resolved: My major challenge was deciding between the plethora of horror texts available for free online. When encompassing multiple media in order to draw out basic principles of horror there is just a lot to select from. Soliciting ideas from students was helpful, but also overwhelming, as many students were horror aficionados.  Nearly all the full-length horror movies of literary merit are copyrighted and will cost students to access.  

Textbook or OER/Low cost Title: Various links, but the main one was Youtube

Brief Description: The texts used were a range of primary texts, mainly games, manga, and videos, that could be found online. One advantage is the flexibility of texts. With such texts, it is possible to craft a syllabus reactively, and in response to student ideas and favorite texts. By using internet-based texts, students can contribute texts to our syllabus, which increases their investment.
Authors: Youtube videos such as Interface, by Umami; analog horror such as The Mandela Catalogue, by Alex Kister; All Tomorrows speculative horror video, by C.M.Koseman; online manga such as Uzumaki, by Junji Ito; short stories, such as “A Horror Story,” by Carmen Maria Machado; playthroughs such as Silent Hills P.T., by Kojima Productions.   
Student access:  The students could navigate to links through Canvas, or access the sites directly through Google.   

Supplemental resources: Other resources included some video lectures, supplemental documents and readings targeting individual craft lessons, and some films which had to be purchased by students, such as Us, by Jordan Peele.   

Cost Savings:  Students typically buy textbooks for about forty dollars. With twenty-five students paying only twelve dollars instead of forty, there was a net saving of $700.
License: Some material, particularly the films that had to be bought by students, were copyrighted. Most of the texts, however, were openly licensed.  

OER/Low Cost Adoption Process

Provide an explanation or what motivated you to use this textbook or OER/Low Cost option. The main motivation for the adoption was to save my students money. The adoption also forced me to use texts that students find more negaging because less traditionally “literary.” I foresaw that their ability to access the readings on their phones, as well as the perceived “fun” of the digital texts would increase the percentage of students who did the readings, and it did.

How did you find and select the open textbook for this course? I used my own knowledge to find horror resources online, but also crowdsourced texts from students at the start of the semester and tried to find online copies.

Sharing Best Practices:  The most exciting horror texts right now are those found on the internet. My students were endlessly engaged by the video and game texts I used, as they perceived them to be culturally relevant to their interests. They also reveled in showing off their knowledge of obscure horror niches and splinter genres that have developed in the online space. 

Share any curricular or pedagogical changes that you made as part of the Textbook/OER/Low Cost Adoption. In previous classes, I have relied on many more short stories and traditionally “literary texts.” Using low-cost materials found online opened me up to a range of texts that students found profoundly engaging. They were especially excited by the interactive component of texts based on gaming. I did have to prepare more material and lesson plans to suit all the new and contemporary texts we examined.

Dr. Kate Osana Simonian. https://www.csusb.edu/profile/kate.simonian
California State University, San Bernardino 

Please describe the courses you teach.
ENG 2500--Introduction to Creative Writing
ENG 3030--Analysis of Fiction and Nonfiction Prose
ENG 3500--Literary Movements: Aesthetics and Craft
ENG 4180--Intermediate Fiction Workshop
ENG 5130--Advanced Creative Writing in Specialized Genres
ENG 6210--Teaching Imaginative Writing 

Describe your teaching philosophy and any research interests related to your discipline or teaching.  How we see the world is often how we teach. My younger brother has an intellectual disability. In 2005, my mom, desperate to prop up his grades, asked me to tutor him. At first, the scenario played out badly. Close-reading, however “fun” the texts were, repelled him. Imaginative prompts yielded blank pages. So, what did I, a budding fiction writer, do? I turned to story.  Good stories move before they instruct, so I won him over emotionally. We wrote about his passion: cars. He was a visual learner, so we used diagrams to learn essay structures. We spoke of the mental “story” that an essay told and used anecdotes as mnemonic tools. He learned to not only re-frame his attitude into a growth-based model, but to stop seeing himself as defined by a perceived deficiency. Today, my pedagogy clusters around these same principles of storytelling, with the goal of re-writing how students see themselves.  

Win Hearts, then Minds. Learning happens best in a safe space. In my Introduction to Creative Writing, I create this environment on the first day. Through a humorous confession of my own errors, I dispel some ideas that first-time writers might harbor; model the “critical kindness” with which I want students to approach their own work; and establish a norm whereby incorrectness is a corollary of brave writing. I then distribute a survey asking about past experiences and preferred learning styles, which springboards us into a discussion of how we’d like the class to be conducted. By giving students buy-in, I establish that the relationship between us will be two-way, not top-down. One of my objectives in any class is to show students that their interests are valuable. To get my creative writing students in this frame of mind, we have “Glimmer Days” throughout the semester, in which students share a moment, image, idea or situation from the preceding week that has stood out to them. This increases trust between group members; is a low-stakes way of getting reticent students talking; and establishes the habit of active noticing. When the primary focus of a class is on academic writing, my approach is different. In my ENG 110 composition class, for example, we discuss critical arguments for the “worth” of art—aesthetic, political, intellectual, canonical. The capstone essay is a defense of a student’s most beloved artist. Given the range of lenses we’ve discussed, why might we consider their work “art?” Being able to close-read friendship bracelets, The Wu-Tang Klan, or Deadpool shows students that art exists in their daily lives. Their wealth of knowledge on the chosen subject leads to a more nuanced discussion of socio-historical contexts. In sum, writing their passions lets students learn better, and leaves them empowered.  

Show, Don’t Tell. I use active learning in the classroom, including field-work, transcribing overheard conversations, pair performance, games, collaborative stories, storyboarding, and cognitive mapping. One of my favorite exercises to use is debate. During my The Great Books Course, students studied The Odyssey. I assigned roles to each student (prosecution, defense, judge, witnesses) for a criminal case trying Telemachus for his murder of the maids. Quite apart from this being one of the most passionate teaching moments of my life, with students wanting to stay long after the period had ended, the exercise showed students how cultural values of a text may be received differently over time.  

Everything Is a Story. In class, I make content memorable through narrative. I often start class with an open-ended question; like a good introduction, this hooks the class and primes them to look out for certain information. As a group, we may move through a provisional answer to the posed question, and then problematize it through Socratic questioning. We might split into four groups and re-define the question, then have each group report back. We may do a collective brainstorm on as-yet-unconsidered assumptions within the question and concretize our understanding with a “minute paper” that elaborates upon what we’ve discussed. Finally, we’ll return to the question that opened the class. Such structuring does more than let students know they need to think critically; it shows them how to. It shows them that the conclusions to which we come, not unlike a final story draft, are often only arrived at through a process of interrogation. Even then, the answers we reach are only provisional.  

Revision Makes the Story. Revision is one of the hardest things to teach. I open the subject of revision with George Saunders’s video, “On Story,” in which he explains revision as a process of “active love” whereby we urge a work to higher, more complex, ground. To supplement this, workshops and critiques are a standard part of my classes. After a first assignment has been handed in, I hold an ongoing in-class “reading series” in which I have students read excerpts of their changed versions aloud. This normalizes the process of revision and, because I always choose students who have made substantial structural changes, lets students know that they should be making large-scale changes to their drafts.      

Revision is also built into my teaching. Reflecting after each lesson; watching footage of myself teaching; harvesting ideas from literature, conferences, and peers; re-working assignments; and revising syllabi lends me the wisdom of multiple iterations of myself. Direct feedback is also invaluable. For example, this semester, in my Introduction to Creative Writing Class, students were asked to do a mid-semester course evaluation. When students said that they sometimes didn’t know what a given lesson was going to be about or what skills they were meant to have learned, I more directly identified objectives before and after classes, instituted “muddiest” point index cards for gauging confusion, and made more comprehensive rubrics. Through metacognitively discussing my teaching practice with students, I increased transparency, and showed them that learning is a never-ending process for me, too.  My teaching has changed since I tutored my brother, but my focus on narrative remains. A good lesson, like a good story, wins the student over emotionally, shows before telling, offers provisional closure, and stresses the importance of revision. In my classes, teacher and student are co-authors. We strike out in a direction, but end in no predetermined place. For me, that is the joy. That is what keeps me reading.