January 06, 2018

Teaching in Two Places at the Same Time

Photo by Cory Morton

I worked through the holiday season planning the creative nonfiction graduate course I will be teaching this spring term in Washington, D.C. And I am pretty excited about it.

You’d think after all of these years teaching creative nonfiction that the prospect of teaching a course—one that I have, in one way or another, taught dozens of times – that I would approach the first day of class basically calm and confident. And I guess that’s true in some ways. But I’ve got my jitters. For me, although a seasoned professional, having taught thousands of students who are eager to learn true story writing techniques, I know that the first day is the key day, the setting of the tone and the beginning of a relationship with a group and with each individual who is part of the group.

Even though my messages and methods are clear to me, this course is more than a little different. For one thing, it is the first course Arizona State University (ASU) has offered through the School for the Future of Innovation in Society (SFIS) originating in D.C. – and at its new building, no less, on 18^th and I Streets, not far from the White House. I feel a bit of pressure to make it work for ASU because I know my school wants to grow its programs in D.C.— and this in some ways will be a test case.  It will open the door for the other courses I want to offer in D.C. and for other programs to be launched and developed by my colleagues.

My students, by the way, are not in many ways traditional students. There are some grad students in my class working on master’s degrees or PhD dissertations, but mostly I will be teaching professionals with various degrees from foundations, government agencies, policy think tanks and industry. They’ve gone to a lot of trouble—paperwork and schedule manipulations—to register for this class. It goes without saying that I owe them my best efforts, as do all teachers who walk into a classroom from an elementary level and all the way up the ladder.

And to add to the challenge, while most of my students will be sitting in one of our classrooms in our new building, a smaller group will be in Tempe on the main campus, communicating and interacting live through Vidyo. This is a conferencing tool used widely in business and healthcare, and for bringing guest speakers into the classroom. But doing this on a regular basis, class after class, will be more challenging, especially in a writing workshop setting, where a certain amount of intimacy and trust has to be established to make it all work.

Whether it’s poetry, fiction or nonfiction, the workshop experience, if it is going to be successful, means that students will put themselves “out there.” They will need to make themselves vulnerable by opening up their lives, fears and ambitions and family and friends, to one another, if writing memoir. And showing what they do, what they know, while learning to transform their research and their work into true stories, if they are planning to write something more informational for a specific audience. And probably the students are strangers; they may discover they have mutual connections, but, basically, they are walking into a classroom from a day of work or study feeling excited, hopeful, but also more than a bit apprehensive.

My job, first and foremost, is to make them feel comfortable and confident, to build that atmosphere of trust and intimacy that will eventually allow them to drop their guard, to push themselves, to try new approaches to their ideas and the stories they want to tell, to not be afraid to go off in undefined directions, to explore and push the boundaries of their work and, of course, to accept the fact that they might not, especially at first, achieve their objectives, if indeed they know what their objectives are in writing their true stories. Which is often perplexing.

In a way, the first day you meet a class is very much like the first few paragraphs of the essay you might be writing: You want to draw your readers in, introduce your characters, establish your voice, make them comfortable and committed because you will be taking them on a journey, kind of like a road trip, that will bring them insight, new ideas, and satisfaction and a hunger to learn and write more when it ends.

Whether it’s poetry, fiction or nonfiction, the workshop experience, if it is going to be successful, means that students will put themselves “out there.” They will need to make themselves vulnerable by opening up their lives, fears and ambitions.

Most of the time I have discovered, personally, as a writer, that I don’t exactly know where I am going when I am writing. Even if I think I do when I begin an essay or a book, but so very often, as the process takes root, we move in mysterious directions. I have a slide series that I will show my students the first or second day of class that begins.

Don’t think: “What’s the point I want to make?” 

Think instead: “What’s the story that will lead to that point?” 

This, my students will learn, is the first and primary challenge of writing compelling and informative creative nonfiction: to find the story and allow the story to direct you. And what often happens, more often than not, in fact, is that the story they find that they want to write will surprise them and lead to other points, ideas, conclusions that they might not have initially considered. And this is exactly what we want to do as writers of creative nonfiction: capture a reader with a story or stories, compel them, inform them and in the end surprise and perhaps delight them.

Most often I can help my students achieve these objectives—feel good about their work and the people in their workshop who are advising them—but the process begins the first class and continues as the class goes forward and the atmosphere for learning and experimenting and trying and sometimes failing and then trying again takes hold.

How will I do that with a group of students who will inevitably, hopefully, bond in D.C. and another group connecting with one another in Tempe, who will also bond, take coffee breaks together, etc.? Like I said, that’s my challenge, and I am honestly anxious to confront it, to figure it out. I understand that now, in 2018, the world is changing, how we teach and how we learn may begin or be grounded in the traditional classroom, but it has been enhanced by and sometimes limited or challenged, as well, by cutting edge technology.

I do appreciate and, in fact, I am invigorated and inspired by the challenge. No matter how often a teacher teaches, even when dealing with familiar subject matter, we face each class as if it is a new experience, synchronizing what we know with what we will learn from the students we will be teaching and guiding.

Lee Gutkind is the author and editor of more than 30 books and founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, the first and largest literary magazine to publish narrative nonfiction exclusively. He is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence in the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes at Arizona State University and a professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society.