I want to start from the premise that a student can learn innumerable things from taking a creative writing course. Accepting this premise seems to me the only way to get anything done when we talk about pedagogy—otherwise we aren’t discussing pedagogy, but philosophy. I’m most interested in how we can decide what’s teachable out of the huge amount of learning material available in creative writing, and how we can hold ourselves accountable for having taught it afterward.

Taking the most common structure of the creative writing course as a guide, it seems that most teachers have decided on a few central skills that are “worth learning” about creative writing: reading, discussion of reading, writing, and discussion of writing. And the learning we intend our students to get out of practicing these skills is as clear-cut as in the study of any academic field: Reading is important for gaining information and expanding awareness about the field. Discussing reading is important for coming to a more critical and independent understanding of the field. Writing is important for communicating with others in the field. Discussing writing is important for learning to analyze and evaluate writing, with the goal of communicating more effectively in the field. There are of course many other potential purposes for teaching these things, and it’s hard to argue against the learning value of any of them—but I would argue that as teachers, we need to be much more attentive to these purposes, and much more vigilant about providing the rationales that tie them to the study of creative writing as a whole. There’s no inherent rationale, for instance, that reading has to be a part of learning writing—not until you decide what happens during reading that enhances the skill of writing, and how you can structure a class to provide the practice in and measure the acquisition of that skill.
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