Teaching Creative Writing - March
Writing in the community
Lewis Buxton
Tuesday 9 March
11am-12.30pm | Microsoft Teams
Photo credit: Thom Law
Teaching writing in the community is vital to that community’s creative ecosystem – both as activism and creative collaboration, and as an important career path for many writers. This session will focus on different pedagogical approaches to community settings; particular strategies and writing activities; and why writing in the community is fun, valuable and viable. It will ask how we can engage hard-to-reach communities and what the role of the writer and facilitator is in those communities.
Lewis Buxton is a poet, performer, educator and arts producer. In 2018-19 he was selected as one of the Poetry School & Nine Arches Press Primers Volume 4 poets. Lewis was the recipient of the 2018 UEA Literacy Festival Bursary for Creative Writing. His work has been published in The Rialto, Magma, Ambit & Oxford Poetry. He is Director of TOAST, a live poetry event and workshops project designed to support poets in the UK. He has performed in theatres and at literary festivals across the country. He teaches creative writing in schools, libraries and community settings for organisations like The Matthew Project, The Poetry Society, The Poetry School and The National Centre for Writing. He is an artist-in-residence for First Story, The Norwich Arts Centre and BBC Norfolk. He currently lives in Norwich.
Series Overview
Creative writers teach in schools, universities and the community, on retreats, in theatres and in workshops. Teaching is often a key part of a writer’s career, and there are rich possibilities creative arts education across a huge range of contexts. But how do you teach creative writing? Can you? This series offers anyone considering teaching creative writing as part of their career development the opportunity to look in detail at the theory and practice of creative writing pedagogy in a variety of institutional and community settings.
The series will address the historical principles and contemporary critiques of creative writing pedagogy, and how these are responding to wider institutional and societal developments. It will consider in detail the theory and practice of employing these pedagogical skills both within and outside higher education. Attendees will be invited to reflect on future possibilities and challenges for the development of creative writing teaching, enabling a deeper awareness and knowledge of creative writing as a subject of study, a future career, and a creative practice.
Students are not expected to attend all the sessions, but the series has been designed to allow for an arc of learning from theoretical principles to practical engagement.
The sessions will take place online via Microsoft Teams, once a month for the 2020/21 academic year.