Creative Writing as Knowledge: What’s Assessment Got to Do with It?

Abstract

Without tangible evidence that affirms that our teaching methods improve student writing, and without empirical outcome data that informs us as to what learning takes place in creative writing, our classrooms will remain unexamined, untheorised, and will operate from a base of assumptions that is more focused on teaching practice than on research practice. Knowledge, theory, practice, and assessment are all instrumental parts of our practice-led research discipline, systematically working together as a cohesive unit, moving us forward as a field of intellectual inquiry, a practice-led academic discipline committed to the advancement and expansion of knowledge in its field.

Keywords:

• knowledge
• practice-led
• research
• assessment
• process
• outcome-based

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr. Dianne Donnelly is the associate director of the CCCC-Award winning National Program Excellence Composition Program at the University of South Florida. She addresses the theory and pedagogy of Creative Writing in her works Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? (2010), The Emergence of Creative Writing as an Academic Discipline (2011), and Key Issues in Creative Writing (with Graeme Harper) as well as in several collections and journals. She is a frequent presenter on creative writing pedagogy forums at CCCC conferences and AWP; reviewer for Pedagogy, TEXT, and multiple book presses; senior creative writing editor for Writing Commons; and editorial board member and associate editor for New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing.

Notes

1. This essay supports previous work in my publications on creative writing as knowledge and the assessment practices in the discipline.

2. My thanks to Trent Hergenrader, Assistant Professor of English specializing in Creative Writing at the Rochester Institute of Technology, for his short story rubric, submitted via email on March 16, 2015.

3. Joe Moxley’s thoughts based on a face-to-face conversation held on 03/12/15.