Appendix One: the questionnaire
SUPPLEMENTARY DISCOURSES IN CREATIVE WRITING TEACHING
I.
Basic information on Creative Writing teaching in your institution.
1.
At what levels is Creative Writing taught at your institution?
Level I
Level II
Level III
MA
Ph.D
□
□
□
□
□
2.
By what modes of delivery is Creative Writing taught in your institution?
Module
Pathway
Single Hons
Joint/Combined Hons
MA
Ph.D
□
□
□
□
□
□
3.
How long has Creative Writing (at any level) been taught in your institution?
□
years
II. Information about Supplementary Discourses
By supplementary discourses we mean pieces of written work submitted, either as
items of coursework in their own right, or directly accompanying creative work, for
assessment purposes. We would argue that a primary function of this discourse is to
encourage students to reflect on their creative work in a variety of ways. Some of the
most common terms for these discourses we have come across are: reflection, selfassessment, critique, commentary, journal, poetics.
4.
a) Do you ask your students to produce supplementary discourses (in whatever form)
to accompany their creative work?
Yes
□
No
□
b) If not, why not?
5.
a) Do you give your students opportunities reflect on their work in other ways, such as
by peer assessment or through workshop activities?
Yes
□
No
□
b) If so, please specify:
6.
At what levels do you ask your students to produce supplementary discourses?
Level I
Level II
□
□
Level III
MA
Ph.D
□
□
□
7.
What do you call these supplementary discourses?
Reflection
Self-assessment
Critique
Commentary
Journal
Poetics
□
□
□
□
□
□
Others (please specify):
8.
In supplementary discourses do you ask students to reflect on
Individual pieces of writing?
Yes
□
No
□
Their progress over a module, programme or year?
Yes
□
No
□
9.
a) Do you provide any tuition for the writing of supplementary discourses?
Yes
□
No
□
b) If so, please specify any materials or activities you use:
10.
a) Do you see any link between supplementary discourses and literary-critical and/or
theoretical discourses?
Yes
b)
□
No
□
If so, which literary-critical/theoretical discourses?
11.
a) Are there formally validated criteria/academic rationales for supplementary
discourses expressed in course documentation?
Yes
□
No
□
b) If so, where are these criteria held? (e.g. validation documents, module
handbooks?)
IF YOU WISH TO MAKE RELEVANT EXTRACTS AVAILABLE TO US
PLEASE PASTE INTO AN ELECTRONIC DOCUMENT AND SEND TO
XXXX@edgehill.ac.uk
12.
a) Are these supplementary discourses always assessed?
Yes
□
No
□
b) Are they always given a separate grade?
Yes
□
No
□
c) Are they assessed but not given a separate grade?
Yes
□
No
□
d) If they are not always assessed, what has influenced the department’s decisions
about which pieces of work to assess or not to assess (please include details about
level etc)?
13.
a) Is there a penalty for not submitting supplementary discourses?
Yes
b)
□
No
□
If there is a penalty, how is this expressed?
14.
If supplementary discourses are assessed, what is the proportion, in terms of
assessment weighting, of supplementary discourses to creative work as a percentage
of an overall course/module grade? (e.g. 20% supplementary discourse to 80%
creative work).
%
Supplementary
discourse
Level I
Level II
Level III
MA
Ph.D
15.
%
Creative
work
What is the wordage of supplementary discourses in relation to creative work (if
applicable)?
Please express answers in wordage and as percentages:
Supplementary
discourse
wordage
Creative work
Wordage
%
Supplementary
discourse
%
Creative work
Level I
Level II
Level III
MA
Ph.D
III: Issues about Supplementary Discourses
In this section we want to find out your views about the functions of supplementary
discourses in Creative Writing teaching, and issues around its relationship to
assessment and to creative practice.
16. SUPPLEMENTARY DISCOURSES AND STUDENTS
a) Please could you indicate the extent to which you agree/disagree with the following
statements:
Supplementary discourses allow students:
i) To describe and explain their creative products and processes
Strongly
agree
Agree
No view
Disagree
Strongly
disagree
ii) To evaluate and analyse critically their creative products and processes
Strongly
agree
Agree
No view
Disagree
Strongly
disagree
Disagree
Strongly
disagree
iii) To speculate on their future practice as writers
Strongly
agree
Agree
No view
iv) To learn about literature through writing
Strongly
agree
Agree
No view
Disagree
Strongly
disagree
b) Do you think that i-iv vary according to levels? (e.g. strongly agree with ‘i’ at
Level I but not at Ph.D)
Yes
□
□
No
c) If they vary, how do they vary?
d) Are there any other functions of supplementary discourses for students not included
here?
17. SUPPLEMENTARY DISCOURSES AND TUTORS
a) Please could you indicate the extent to which you agree with the following
statements:
Supplementary discourses allow tutors:
i) To assess students’ creative products and processes
Strongly
agree
Agree
No view
Disagree
Strongly
disagree
ii) To facilitate discussion with students about their creative products and processes
Strongly
agree
Agree
No view
Disagree
Strongly
disagree
iii) To monitor the originality of students’ work and combat plagiarism
Strongly
agree
Agree
No view
b) Do you think that i-iii vary according to levels?
Disagree
Strongly
disagree
Yes
□
□
No
c) If they vary, how do they vary?
d) Are there any other functions of supplementary discourses for students not included
here?
18.
a) Does your assessment of supplementary discourses influence your assessment of
creative work it accompanies?
Yes
□
No
□
b) How? For example: can a supplementary discourse validate work positively (e.g.
explain techniques not immediately clear to a reader) or negatively (e.g. puff up
mediocre work by references to published writers, schools, theories)?
19.
Do some students produce high quality supplementary discourses and bad quality
creative work? Or vice versa? What implications does this have for assessment?
20.
a) Are you concerned that some students do not see any point in producing
supplementary discourses and don’t take ownership and responsibility for the
discourses they produce?
Yes
□
No
□
b) If so, can you suggest ways to change this?
21.
How would you characterise the relationship between supplementary discourses and
creative work?
22.
Do you think supplementary discourses are always inherently secondary; or can they,
in some cases, be a primary element of student progression?
23.
What role do supplementary discourses have in internal moderation and in presenting
your teaching and learning to external scrutiny (externals, QAA etc)?
24.
a) Are you planning to make any changes to the way in which you use supplementary
discourses in teaching and assessment?
Yes
□
No
□
b) If so, could you tell us about the changes you are planning?
Appendix Two
Notes for the interviews
Prelude
1 The three stages of the project outlined
2 anonymity
3 The interview will move from structured to open
4 I hope you will respond to not only to what you do, but to what you see around you,
and what you’ve seen in part one of the questionnaire. I am interested in qualitative
notions; your attitudes, feeling, intuitions, hopes, fears, hunches and plans. I want to
move out from my conclusions.
1. On the standardising of assessment nationally. Do you think this a good
idea? I wrote in the conclusion of the interim report:
Supplementary discourses are not always separately assessed (or assessed at
all), or supported by formal criteria, which suggests an unsystematic approach to its
production, function and assessment. It could, of course, demonstrate the
encouragement of developmental, non-assessed journal or notebook work. The
wordage demanded varies. Some centres allow the absence of supplementary
discourse to go unpenalised. Other centres regard it as equally weighted with creative
work (or in some cases theoretically more). There is a sense that the quality – but not
the function - of the discourse will vary according to level, the complexity of
reflection increasing by level, but formal level descriptors are not referred to so it is
impossible to assess this. Or is this formalisation only there to validate the subject?
2. What do you think the function of the supplementary discourses are in terms
of assessment, for tutors. Are there hidden functions (such as those to do with
plagiarism?) I have concluded:
The importance of the supplementary discourse for assessment – even if not
separately graded – is clear. There is evidence that the supplementary discourse are
regarded as a statement of the writers’ intentions for a tutor’s judgement as to
appropriateness as to market, publication, genre – as well to match performance in
terms of success and failure against stated aesthetic intentions. This, at its most
positive, allows students to establish and state their own benchmarks for the piece.
This is highly enabling for the student, but it may be philosophically dubious from
any respondent’s point of view. Is fulfilling intentionality the sole guarantee of a
writer’s worth? Such a view is long invalidated in literary theory and this issue is
worth visiting in the evaluative part two of the research. The profession may be
teaching creative writing, but is it practising creative reading?
What do you think?
3. There are clearly questions about the relationship of the supplementary
discourses we ask students to submit and other discourses (theoretical, eg.) and skills
and other educational courses and contexts. I wrote:
There were some assumptions made about the nature of the supplementary
discourse, that its production consists of the exercise of the same critical skills
employed by literary critics, the same skills taught by teachers of literature. There
may not be a concept of reading as a writer, whose skills would not be identical to that
of a critic. Student writers are sometimes expected to read their own work as though
they were reading the work from the outside. It’s not clear how much Writing
students are asked to write on other works, and how we might expect that to be
different from an English Literature students’ work, particularly on courses taught
within English degrees. This kind of writing might not be thought to be
‘supplementary’ at all.
Is this a unique discourse with rules of its own, a hybrid one? Are we
supporting other analytical skills directly?
4. Are we examining Process and/or Product through supplementary
discourses? Is the resultant discourse primary or secondary? Does this change at PhD
level?
There was little sense that the supplementary discourse might be produced
before the creative work is produced. The insistence that the journal might be a
discourse to be produced alongside creative work is worth examining in part two of
the research.
It was a surprise to find some people stating that supplementary discourses
might be (or become) primary. Common sense dictates that they are secondary. But it
could be said to be primary in one important sense only: that the writing to which it
refers is not yet in existence, that its purpose is to help to bring the work to fruition.
There is another sense of primary, of course: that the commentary on process and
product might be more important than the creative work; as an essay on creativity it
might be a valuable exercise, particularly if Writing is taught within an English
degree.
5. There seem to be 4 modes in which the discourse appears (there are mixed
modes between them of course):
1. Text accompanying writing or reflecting on courses
which refers directly to the works produced;
2. Journals and notebooks
which are usually undirected, unassessed and student-centred;
3. Reading as a Writer
which involves learning from other writers (which could include other
students’ work, of course);
4. Poetics
which is a term to describe a speculative discourse on writing in general that
can be found occasionally in the other three.
Do these categories suggest anything to you? Do you want to comment upon them?
6. Do you have a sense of innovation in the discourse? How might it develop to
become more efficient or solid. Less of a bolt on? What pedagogic materials or
strategies need developing?
Centres are saying things like: ‘I want to analyse what we aim to assess by
supplementary discourses, and then change the supplementary discourses to be a good
instrument for such measurement. This would also involve integrating supplementary
discourses much more into coursework.’
‘I want to put much more emphasis on the use of critique for the student
looking to their future practice as writers. This element has been crucial in
MA work & hitherto not so essential to BA work – I now think it is essential
to all learning.’
‘We’re looking at increasing the importance of commentaries of
undergraduates’
‘I have refined my list of reflective essay titles from an open “reflective
commentary” to a mixed “critical/reflective” emphasis.
‘We are foregrounding the notebook in our first year classes in order to
inculcate independent writing skills’
7. Are there other burning issues? Things that have remained unsaid. Things that have
occurred to you whilst marking after responding to our questionnaire or reading the
interim report?
Appendix Three
Discriminating Levels of Discourse Accompanying Creative Writing
Assignments (creative critique, reflection, self-evaluation, commentary, poetics,
etc...)
The following are some suggestions for discriminating between levels and attempts at
defining modal attainment. The principle of level description is that higher levels of
attainment must be more autonomous and will move from mere description, through
stages of analysis to a work of poetics or other discourse upon the art practised. They
cannot simply be longer versions of the same thing.
I have made use of two important guidelines to generic level descriptors, those of the
South East England Consortium for Credit Accumulation and Transfer (1996) and
those of the Northern Ireland Credit and Accumulation and Transfer System (1998).
So relevant are they that I have taken the “Self-appraisal, Reflection on Practice” from
the SEEC document intact, and reproduced them below, and the “Autonomy”
descriptors from the NICATS descriptors for Accountability.
While levels 1-3 (I shall convert NICATS’ 7 levels) are definitely apprentice levels of
creative writing (whatever the quality of the writing), at M level and higher, the work
is of a higher, even professional, level. At these levels one might expect a greater
level of generality and autonomy. While apprentice writers might benefit from
attempts to analyse their own work, a professional writer should never be in this
position. There is, in any case, a certain impossibility about this, since the writer can
never be a reader, for reasons I have explained elsewhere.
Level One
SEEC: The writer ‘is largely dependent on criteria set by others but begins to
recognise own strengths and weaknesses.
NICATS: The writer will operate ‘under general guidance’.
At level 1 the student will be able to describe processes of composition and the
various skills employed to achieve this, to evaluate success and failure in relation to
task descriptions and assessment criteria or other external criteria.
The accompanying discourse should contain descriptions of writerly process, and may
relate to received notions of appropriateness and literary value, which will have arisen
out of the learning process.
In relation to creative work this discourse will be largely descriptive and therefore
secondary.
Level Two
SEEC: The writer ‘is able to evaluate own strengths and weaknesses: can challenge
received opinion and begins to develop own criteria and judgement’.
NICATS: ‘The ability to ... take personal responsibility for planning and delivery is
required’.
At level 2 the student will be able to evaluate own strengths and weaknesses in
relation to both tasks and assessments and will begin to use tutor feedback to develop
their own criteria for judgement of aesthetic value and artistic success.
The accompanying discourse should contain descriptions of process, and evaluations
of strengths and weaknesses in both process and product. It will begin to formulate
judgments of a general literary nature.
In relation to creative work this discourse will be evaluative of processes used and
work produced to achieve or attempt success.
Level Three
SEEC: The writer ‘is confident in application of own criteria of judgement and in
challenge of received opinion in action and can reflect on action’.
NICATS: The writer will accept ‘full responsibility and accountability for all aspects
of work and learning’.
At level 3 the student will be able to develop and apply own criteria and a poetics of
writing (or philosophy of composition) that reflects on the value and success of the
processes undertaken and the work produced. The criteria will also evaluate and
challenge received notions of literary value.
The accompanying discourse should contain criteria and poetics are both specific to
tasks undertaken and general to genre, or literary value judgements generally. It will
not necessarily itemise process. Form may begin to reflect the emergent poetics.
In relation to creative work this discourse will be analytical at a specific level, and
speculative at a general level, but will not particularly deal with processes, unless
relevant to larger issues. The writer may profess ownership of the document and its
ideas and ideals.
M Level
SEEC: The writer ‘engages with a critical community; reflecting habitually on own
and others’ practice in order to improve own/others’ actions.
NICATS: ‘Accountability is usually to peers rather than to superiors. The learner is
responsible for initiating supervisory and peer support contacts.’
At M level the student will be able to reflect on own work and that of others, with a
speculative discourse upon writing, that is related as much to future work and to
criteria that have emerged from the writerly community (both local and outside the
course of study).
The accompanying discourse should contain poetics that is analytical and speculative,
that situates the writing achieved (and writing projected) in terms of the field of
literary production, both locally and outside the course). Form of such writing may
reflect the developed poetics. The writer will own the document and its ideas and
ideals.
In relation to creative work this discourse will be able to move from the specific to the
general, situating the writing in the literary field. It will offer intellectual arguments,
but will be permissive of further experimentation.
PhD: not a level, but pure research
At PhD level the student will be able to produce a discrete document out of the
experience of the process of writing the creative work. While it might refer to the
creative work, it won’t operate as a commentary or reflection upon it, even less
constitute a critical reading of it, but a freestanding essay in genre, or a document of
poetics, for example. It will refer to the practise of others.
The accompanying discourse should contain an intellectual argument that is germane
to the issues of the creative work, and amount to a developed poetics of writing, for
work and genre, placing it in national (and international) literary, social, intellectual
contexts. It will potentially challenge the field of literary production, or even construct
a fresh literary context for the work. At this level it is difficult, indeed wrong, to
prescribe content. Its form is permitted to reflect the poetics it embodies.
In relation to creative work this discourse will be an autonomous piece of work,
dealing with issues raised by the creative work, or providing its intellectual and other
contexts. It will not be secondary to the creative work, but is speculative, permissive
of further experimentation, and in no way be regulatory or prescriptive of the creative
work. It will be of publishable standard. Its audience will be therefore peers.
Robert Sheppard