29 Bonnie Sunstein – Teaching Nonfiction Writing – Fall 2022

Teaching Nonfiction

Wednesdays, 9:30-11:45

Instructor: Bonnie Sunstein

Fall 2022

Writing is a craft before it is an art; writing may appear magic, but it is our responsibility to take our students backstage to watch the pigeons being tucked up the magician’s sleeve…

Donald Murray

Course Objectives

By the end of this entire academic year, I hope you’ll have considered some of the big questions teachers of college writers—and nonfiction in particular—raise, and try to answer in their own teaching and writing: 

1. Many writers claim that writing can’t be taught. Can it?  If so, how?  Why do people say that?
2. What are the differences between teaching nonfiction and teaching other kinds of writing to college students?
3. How do writing teachers create a “community of writers” in minutes and foster response that leads to revision?
4. How do we consider the terms and cliché’d dichotomies and allow for them in a course? “Product/Process?”  “Competition/Collaboration?”  “Reading like a writer/Reading like a student of literature?”  “Student-centered/Teacher-centered?”  “Metacognitive Reflection?” “
5. What kinds of reading habits can I expect/mandate/encourage? How do I get them to document how their reading is influencing their writing? What kinds of choices can/should I build in?
6. What’s the difference between “assessment” and “evaluation?” What outcomes can a teacher expect?  Can a student writer expect? How does a writing teacher “grade” in a writing class?
7. What are the parameters of a writing conference? Who sets the rules, rituals, boundaries? How does a writing teacher manage—and define “writing conferences,” “workshop,” “publication,” and other such terms?
8. What’s published out there about college student writing? What are the available, interesting, academic, popular resources in the field?  What theories underlie the teaching of nonfiction college writing?
9. How does an MFA teacher of writing position her/himself in “the college writing” job market?
10. What are the more perplexing situations writing teachers encounter? Where is the tension in those situations?

And:  Yikes––How in the world do we teach writing online? What’s different for us? For our students????

In creative work, a single product is just a temporary resting place in the continuous and demanding process….The contradictory pulls of joy and discouragement, of sudden bursts of insight and tiring efforts of execution, of process and product, are the necessary tensions that fuel creative thought….creative work is rooted in the material conditions of existence, such as space, money, and experience.

Vera John-Steiner, Notebooks of the Mind.  New York:  Harper and Row. 1985.  79.

Requirements

(You determine due dates, depending on your teaching appointment and your personal schedule. Note that you’ll be taking this course for one semester, but perhaps teaching for two)

• Complete by the end of this semester:
  • A “one-pager” of which you will write ONLY ONE (at a time you choose), linked to the week’s reading, to share with your colleagues in class and posted on our course website.
  • Development and participation in our seminar and on the course CANVAS site, as well as “Writers Gone Public” (in one way or another) by the end of the semester.
  • A book review (one-page downloaded and oral presentation, singular or collaborative) of one of the recommended texts, or a different text about teaching writing you might want to propose.
  • A proposal for your own essay about teaching nonfiction (see third bullet below), which you will finish during the year

• Complete by the end of the academic year:
  • One course observation and written report/letter/response of a partner’s nonfiction class: three copies–one for you, one for me, and one for your colleague’s teaching folder.
  • A teaching portfolio: include CV, dossier, sample syllabi, exercises, student evaluations, two classroom observations, sample student paper, your analysis of what’s in it, and a more formal “teaching philosophy” which will eventually become your generic cover letter to personalize for the jobs to which you apply.
  • A finished essay related to teaching: Could be a “case study” of a single writer, of your own writing class, of an assignment, an encounter, a meditation on teaching, something you want to think through or research further–written for your writing/teaching colleagues to read, in manuscript form, COMPLETE WITH citations and bibliography, ready to send out to an appropriate journal: 8-12 manuscript pages.

“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different worlds on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”

Annie Proulx

Required Books

• Newkirk, Thomas. (Embarrassment) and the Emotional Underlife of Learning. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2017.
• Smith, Frank.  The Book of Learning and Forgetting.  1998.  New York: NY.  Teachers College Press. 1998.  ISBN 978-08077-5623-2
• and, of course, our Giant Canvas Stash (treasure trove?) of Essays: posted on our CANVAS site, ready for your contribution

Choose a book to review––from recent resources on writing and the teaching of writing. Think of it as both art and craft. Write a review for all of us. A few of my faves as of now:

• Blum, Susan.  Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and  What to do Instead). West Virginia U Press. 2020.
• Blum, Susan.  I Love Learning, I Hate School: An Anthropology of College.  Cornell U Press. 2017
• Blum, Susan.  My Word: Plagiarism and College Culture. Cornell U Press. 2010
• Chiseri-Strater, Elizabeth and Bonnie S. Sunstein.  What Works:  A Practical Guide to Teacher Research.  Portsmouth:  Heinemann.  2007.
• Chavez, Felicia Rose.  The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom. Chicago: Haymarket. 2021.
• Fletcher, Ralph.  What a Writer Needs, Second Edition.  Heinemann. 2013.
• Foster, Patricia and Jeff Porter, Eds.  Understanding the Essay.  Toronto, CAN: Broadview Press. 2012.
• Gooblar, David.  The Missing Text: Everything They Never Taught You about College Teaching.  Harvard U Press. 2019.
• Glaude, Eddie S. Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for our OWN.  Crown (Random House. 2020. ISBN:978-0525575344. 
• Harris, Joseph. Rewriting:  How to Do Things with Texts. Utah State U.P. 2006
• King, Stephen. On Writing.  Simon and Schuster. 2002.
• Klaus, Carl H and Ned Stuckey-French, eds.  Essayists on the Essay:  Montaigne to Our Time.  U of I Press.  2012.
• Newkirk, Thomas. Newkirk, Thomas. Minds Made for Stories. 2014. Portsmouth: Heinemann. 978-0325046952
• Perl, Sondra and Charles Schuster.  Stepping on My Brother’s Head and Other Secrets Your English Professor Never Told You: A College Reader. Boynton/Cook. 2010.
• Price, John.  All is Leaf: Essays and Transformations.  U of Iowa Press. 2022.
• Stuckey-French,  Ned.  One By One, The Stars: Essays..  U of Georgia Press. 2021.
• Talbot, Jill, Ed.  Metawritings:  Toward a Theory of Nonfiction.  U of Iowa Press.  2012.
• Tobin, Lad. Reading Student Writing:  Confessions, Meditations, and Rants. Heinemann. 2004.
• Zinsser, William.  The Writer Who Stayed.   Paul Dry Books. 2012.
• Zinsser, William.  Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir.  Houghton Mifflin. 1998.

You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself. – Galileo

I’ll wager that the major challenge of twenty-first century writing instruction will be similar to the challenge of twentieth-century writing instruction or first century writing instruction—that is, to resist the forces that pull us away from genuinely helping students to engage in writing.

Thomas Newkirk, “Looking Back to Look Forward” 2007