Freewriting: A Lesson with Peter Elbow
By D. Reaman
Objectives:
1: To familiarize students with the theory of freewriting as supported by Peter Elbow.
2: To participate in activities created by Elbow to give students hands-on experience with private and public freewriting.
3: To collectively discuss the benefits of freewriting.
Rationale:
Given freewriting assignments, students will learn the process of creative imagination through the experience of freewriting in both private and public approaches.
Procedure:
1: Open lesson with public writing task: "Introduce yourself in writing to the people here." Tell students they must write continuously without lifting their pen from their paper. Explain that grammatical and spelling errors are fine. Two constraints exist: the writing will be shown to the audience and the writing must stay on the topic. Therefore, the assignment, limited to 10 minutes, is both public and focused.
2: Continue lesson with private writing task: "Write down what you noticed about the environment or about other peopleís body language during the first freewriting." Inform students that the conditions remain the same. Explain that the difference is that this will be a private writing in which the writing does not have to be share. However, state that contributions will be gladly welcomed afterward. Again, time will be limited to 10 minutes.
3: Solicit three to five contributions from the first freewrite for discussion.
4: Allow for "cooking," constructive interactive critiques from other participants. For example, students could say what more they would want to hear as listeners.
5: Solicit contributions from private writing task.
6: Break class into three groups of four where students will express how they could organize a topic or starting point for a personal essay based on their first freewrite.
7: Ask groups to discuss how or if they felt or wrote differently during the second freewrite, compared to the first.
Materials:
"Writing Without Teachers," by Peter Elbow.
"Writing With Power," by Peter Elbow.
"Nothing Begins With N," edited by Pat Belanoff, Peter Elbow and Sheryl Fontaine.
Evaluation:
Each participant will experience two types of freewriting to warm-up their thinking process.
Each participant will offer constructive criticism on the freewriting work of others.
Each participant will use their work to understand how freewriting is used to explore opinions and think of topics to explore through writing.