Creativity Development and the Writing Workshop

Abstract

For a long time now, higher education learners have been flocking to join the English Literature and Creative writing programs in various parts of the world, intending to become writers. Trying to match up with their enthusiastic pace, a vast majority of institutes today have come to the forefront to offer Creative Writing Courses, most of them offering the workshop as a part of that course. The academic teaching of creative writing is therefore no longer given an alienated status. With the pedagogical mechanism of developing creativity in students contextualized with immense response, numerous academics have grasped the importance of an underlying standard which informs their teaching of creative writing skills to learners. At the same time, as Donovan (2008) and Haven (1999) inform us, we are also surrounded today by a varied body of practitioners whose views on creative writing pedagogy are informed by their input on ‘creativity’ as an art form, particular to their own writing practice or teaching experiences, thereby providing the arena with its unique set of contradictory approaches to developing and enhancing students’ creative writing skills. With the aforementioned information as background, the present article will seek to address the underlying principle behind an endorsed establishment of creative writing as an academic discipline, especially in the context of the higher education sector, as postulated by various practitioners in the field. The same will then be followed by reasons that foster the workshop process as an ideal method to foster creativity among students, a few issues that may nevertheless arise during the process, and how by utilizing a cautionary mechanism the discontents could be successfully avoided and transformed into a successful workshop.