Moving the Margins: Fiction and Inclusion

MOOC course, July 2018

This MOOC worked with core elements of creative writing, including voice, character, setting, style, language. Participants explored “moving the margins” of the known and the expected to include aspects of gender and ethnicity, standard as well as post-colonial and post-apocalyptic settings, and disability as superpower. Participants also worked with balancing vivid imagination with craft, and with establishing an inclusiveness that allows for different kinds of thinking and different kinds of writing.

Write for Your Life: Turning Trauma into Stories

Russia and Armenia, Nov. 2018

Research suggests that narrative and expressive writing have powerful healing effects. As writer and University of Iowa professor Charles D’Ambrosio once said, “Instead of sobbing, you write sentences.” In this course, "Write for Your Life: Turning Trauma into Stories", we explored strategies to create vivid, compelling stories (fiction and/or nonfiction) from difficult experiences such as illness, trauma, or disability. We focused on the elements of craft while addressing the challenges of writing from personal suffering. As a community of writers, we examined and discussed published texts, and provided feedback on student work. By the end of the course, participants had produced a significant body of narrative prose.

 

“Fake News!”: Facts, Information, Disinformation, Misinformation

Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Kazakhstan, Nov. 2018

The “Fake News!”: Facts, Information, Disinformation, Misinformation course takes a creative fiction and nonfiction approach to understanding and recognizing information, disinformation, and misinformation. The course explores the elements of information, such as details, particulars, facts, figures, statistics, and data; the differences between primary and secondary sources including those found in traditional media, social media, and new media; the ways in which misinformation and disinformation are used; a history and overview of propaganda; and the roles of mythbusters, debunkers, fact-checkers, and individuals in countering disinformation. Course participants read fact and fiction, including creative nonfiction from writers such as John D’Agata and Angela Pelster-Wiebe, and fiction by George Saunders and Jennifer Egan, among others. Participants also write creative works during the course, including several new media projects involving both text and visualized information in order to understand how these elements work together in a multimedia world.

Stories of Place: Writing and the Natural World

MOOC course, Nov. 2018

This MOOC worked with core elements of creative writing, including voice, character, setting, style, language. Participants explored “moving the margins” of the known and the expected to include aspects of gender and ethnicity, standard as well as post-colonial and post-apocalyptic settings, and disability as superpower. Participants also worked with balancing vivid imagination with craft, and with establishing an inclusiveness that allows for different kinds of thinking and different kinds of writing.