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ABSTRACT
If we want to bring assessment into alignment with teaching and learning practices in creative writing, we will need to change our conceptions of teaching and learning themselves. I believe there is a precedent for a changed conception of teaching and learning and will sketch the outline of such a change. I will do so via a practical example of a course I teach in creative writing, as well as via theoretical interventions from current educational theorists. I take my lead from a call made from within the imperilled waters of creativity such as it exists in creative writing today, that we need to pay attention to ontological and ethical issues if our conception of creativity is to survive the slide into the hyper-cynical discourse of advertising. Without changing our understanding of the "what" of education we will never arrive at the how or the why.
KEYWORDS
Assessment, creativity, creative writing, ethics, Hughes Mearns, Gilles Deleuze
Creative writing is a recent American invention with an already fascinating history. In his survey of the field from the 1880s to 1996 David G. Myers situates the rise of creative writing squarely within a modern reformation of American education, and attributes its cause to Hughes Mearns.
Mearns was born in 1875, graduated from Harvard University at the age of 27, and taught English at the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy for 18 years. He was most famously director of the Shady Hill Day School, where his lifelong "experiment with the creative processes of children" (Myers 102) began. He was also inactively involved in the Lincoln School, a "progressive laboratory school" run under the auspices of Columbia University. He later went on to teach at New York University (102).
According to Myers, Mearns "was the publicist for a wholesale 'creativist' reformation of literary study". The new subject "was not called creative writing until Mearns called it creative writing. And then it was rarely called anything else" (103).
In his epochal Creative Power Mearns makes the following assertion: "Language itself [ . . . ] is comparatively unimportant; if vision is steady and the feeling true these will find their proper vehicle. The attention is never on the word but upon the force that creates the word" (9).
If...