Course Outline Summer 2008
Mario Rinvolucri, UK
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Creative Writing Course July 6th to July 19th 2008
Sample activity
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This course ran in first in 2006 and again in 2007 and this is one of those fortnight experiences that is really as much about you as about your students. If you come on a Creative Methodology course it is natural for the tutor to focus your mind back onto your last year's students and forward onto the people you will meet in September ( if you are Northern Hemisphere).
On the Creative Writing course you will find yourself thinking about yourself as a writer just as much as yourself as a teacher of L2 writing. A large minority of the people who came on the first two courses were fluent and self-confident writers in both MT and English and they were real fun to work with. However, maybe 50% of the participants in 2006 and 2007 were what I would describe as "wounded writers" or people who had been discouraged from enjoying this activity by leaden-brained teachers at secondary level but more especially at University level. I think that for some of these participants the course set in motion a slow healing process, a realisation that they had worth, weight and value as writers.
Naturally the course also arms you with a hundred and one techniques for getting your students writing. Here is an example of a very simple, generic exercise:
- Ask the students to form pairs with people not sitting near them.
- Ask them to decide who is A and who is B.
- Tell the A people that they are to role-play the volcano. In role they are to write a
one page letter to B, their lava. They start their letter:
Dear Lava,
- Tell the B people that they are to role-play lava. They write a one page letter that opens: " Dear Volcano,"
- Once the letters have been written they are delivered.
- In role both A and B answer the letters they have received.
- In the final stage the A's and the B's come together and discuss the role-play experience.
For another example of a creative writing exercise click across to the "Creative Writing: Flowers" activity in this issue of HLT – lesson outlines.
To really find out about this course apply for a grant and come and join us on the Creative Writing Course, 2008!
Please check the Creative Writing course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
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