Please join us for a dissertation defense by Elizabeth Berlinger Daniels titled Creative Writing Pedagogies in Basic Writing Classrooms: Faculty Attitudes and Perceptions at the City University of New York.

Dissertation Committee: Shannon Walters (chair), Eli Goldblatt, Laura McGrath, and Mark McBeth (external reader)

The purposes and effects of using creative writing pedagogies in composition classrooms are compelling subjects that have been explored over the last several decades by composition scholars, but less often discussed is the use of creative writing pedagogies in basic writing classrooms. Focusing on the site of the basic writing classroom at the City University of New York, Creative Writing Pedagogies in Basic Writing Classrooms: Faculty Attitudes and Perceptions at the City University of New York interrogates the intersections between basic writing and creative writing pedagogies through interviews with fifteen CUNY instructors from the late 1960s until today. In this dissertation, both founding and current instructors of basic writing at CUNY discuss how they define creative writing pedagogies and what they have observed in their students’ basic writing experiences when they engage with creative writing in an analytical writing framework. An analysis of themes that arise from the instructor interviews is contextualized by a literature review of scholarship on the intersections between expository and creative writing. After assessing CUNY’s singular place in basic writing history through the lens of creative writing, I give an account of my use of creative writing pedagogies in my basic writing courses at CUNY and I describe how examining the pedagogies offered by instructors interviewed in this dissertation compelled me to revise and strengthen my approaches to teaching basic writing.

Please contact James O'Brien ([click-for-email]) for the meeting link.