Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2010
Throughout most of the 20th century, there was often a brutal atmosphere in educational and professional writing circles. The motto governing the general environment in which writers struggled to write was: Real writers can take it! This was a culture in which abuse (ridicule, shaming, expressions of disgust) was often masked as “critique” and hierarchical grading (A to F, or any system that assigns success or failure to creative work) was perceived as corrective. Starting in the 1970s a popular reaction against this brutal culture emerged called “the writing process movement.” It began at a grassroots level as individual teachers invented new ways to teach creative writing even before Peter Elbow's groundbreaking book, Writing without Teachers (1973), brought to academic attention the possibility of a nonhierarchical approach. Such an approach would create a community of peers in which mutual encouragement would replace competitive classroom response and evaluation. Since then, the movement has grown up, earned its own deserved and undeserved backlash, learned from its mistakes, and become mainstream, both in popular books and in academic theory.
Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA) has made a contribution to that history by developing a systematic methodology for the creative writing teacher or workshop leader to use in classrooms and workshops. It has been used at all levels of education – with children in preschool through graduate school, with post-PhD adults, and with a wide range of underserved populations: the homeless, the incarcerated, youth at risk, and many others.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.