What activities can I suggest during a workshop on designing awesome creative writing assignments for overworked ESL teachers to use in class? (In Indonesia?) (With learners across many levels?) (For little/no money?) (Without Powerpoint?)
Backstory: we work with a pretty prescriptive, grammar-focused, exam-based curriculum. "Writing" is worth just 10% of a student's mark, and I'd like to make that 10% something they look forward to doing well, not something they have to somehow scramble to achieve. Creative writing - really, anything fictional at all - is currently not on the agenda; the Powers That Be have decided that it's more important for students to write about the, um, more boring aspects of reality. We all want to change this.
The goal of this workshop, then, is to help teachers widen students' literary experience into the realms of what they actually enjoy reading about in the comic books or watching on the soap operas so popular here - drama, romance, fantasy, science fiction: writing from the point of view of a shark, or a sandwich, or a jealous lover, or an alien queen.
Our students range from absolute beginners to "upper-intermediate"/"advanced" levels, but few of our students are older than, say, 25, and many are also enrolled full-time in universities and high schools, and many are enrolled by their parents because their English scores at school aren't so great, so we don't have the most enthusiastic groups of students sometimes, especially among teens.
We don't have internet access for students in any meaningful way at school, but nearly all of our students have access to the internet at home or in internet cafes.
The workshop will last about an hour, so we won't have much time.
Any ideas about making this workshop effective? I'm looking for both effective workshop strategies, and ideas relevant to the topic: creative writing in an ESL context.
Thanks!
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A few essays on subjects that caught their attention: What would you change about your school if you could? I also used prompts from here.
A couple of 'constrained' short stories. For the first constrained short story, I made up lists of mandatory characters, props, and plot events that would be different for each student: If your birthday is in January or February one of your characters must be someone magical. If it's in March or April, you must have someone from far away. If it's in May or June, a genius; July or August, twins; etc. If your favorite color is red, you must include a knife. Purple, a special piece of clothing. Blue, a bicycle. Green, a statue; yellow, a trumpet; orange, a family of rats; etc. If you are an oldest child and a boy, you have to include a fire; oldest girl, a flood; middle boy, a revolution; middle girl, a person getting lost; etc. (In Taiwan, dividing birth-orders into oldest, any middle, and youngest actually produces a pretty good split.)
Semi-guided writing: In one class, we picked apart Langston Hughes's Harlem: A Dream Deferred on the board. We talked for a bit about similes and rhetorical questions, and about how the poem builds to a satisfying conclusion. I had them write a short free-verse poem of their own, using at least three similes and at least three rhetorical questions. While they were working, I did one of my own on the board, in real time, as a model. I typed up their submissions, with some copyediting and without names, and made a handout of them all. The next week we had a poetry slam: The class took time to read through the handout, voted on about ten to hear (we did this in two heats), and then if the author wanted to take credit for the work (not all of them did!) s/he could stand up and read. Finally, we took a vote for the class slam champion. I should have thought ahead and had a silly prize handy, but I didn't.
In our final class, we recapped that with a haiku contest. I didn't make it an assignment to submit one, but I could have. I took whatever they handed me, put it on the board if it was any good, and whenever the board was full we took a keep/erase vote on each one to narrow it down to five. Toward the end of class we had a more constrained vote-for-two-favorites election to select the winner. Don't be too strict about what is or isn't a proper haiku -- I taught them 5-7-5 and showed them examples with a nature reference, but I also showed examples, and accepted submissions with fewer syllables and no nature reference. For the sake of encouragement, I also showed them haiku I had done in a second language. And I told them to think of a haiku as a ten-second film, which really helped communicate how brief and yet how layered they can be. The class were pretty tight, so they had a lot of in-jokes and backstory that they used to tease each other in haiku form. It was a hoot.
posted by eritain at 9:24 PM on January 18, 2007