Stefanie Savva

Who is the Academic?

Surrounded by books, crouched over a microscope, presenting thoughts in front of a lecture hall. Who is the Academic and what is their place in today’s society? I am haunted by these thoughts as I am doing the last proofreading an an academic article, soon to be published in a journal. I wonder how many people will read it apart from the reviewers and a handful of people around the world interested in that specific topic that I am discussing. These are questions that I have been confronted with since my PhD graduation a couple of years ago. On that day, dressed in the doctoral gown I was told ‘You will wear this at every university graduation you will attend from now and on.’

The assumption obviously was that I would strive for a position at a university, despite the knowledge that this will be almost impossible. It really is a noble idea that despite academia rejecting you, you will continue to strive for a position within the institution, you will go hungry for your research and you will go homeless for academic excellence.

It might seem a bit dramatic but this is the reality for many PhDs who graduate and are caught in this narrative that expects them to make great sacrifices in order to maybe one day have a permanent position at a university. Yes, there are some that will. But not most. Most will go from maternity leave cover to zero hour contracts for years, they will run reading groups and seminars for free, they will make sacrifices on heating in order to attend a conference and they will write article after article with the hope that their CV will look good enough one day.

A year was all that I could give that life. The misery of the rejections led to my most unproductive months in years. I wasn’t writing or reading – instead I was obsessing over application and job interviews. I was depressed, anxious and I was quickly losing hope. I had passed my viva without corrections, I was continuously told that I was good at what I was doing, yet I could not find a job.

When finances became a massive issue, I decided to pursue teaching. I found a job as a Teaching Assistant in order to gain the relevant experience and I then applied to do my Initial Teacher Training. While I was settling in with my decision and I started feeling positive about things, the response from the academic world was negative. I felt that people were feeling sorry for me, that they thought I wasn’t strong enough to continue fighting for a university position. I started hiding my title and I decided that I would dedicate myself towards becoming a teacher and that I was no longer an academic.

Since then, I came to realise how wrong I was. An Academic in today’s society is not just the one in university halls. Being an Academic is a way of thinking and a way of approaching things. When you do a PhD, you change the way you see the world, you achieve a high level of critical thinking that remains with you in everything you do. While a university affiliation can be extremely helpful, research can be done without it, people can publish without it and  write books without it. I have since embraced this idea of the contemporary academic. I am content with my teaching because I am where I am needed. And I am content with my research because I write and I research when I want to, at my own pace and without my job being on the line.

I guess the whole point is that there is not one type of Academic and not one way of doing research. So to you my friends surrounded by books, crouched over a microscope, presenting in lecture halls and to you my friends in primary and secondary schools, attending conferences during half term breaks and to you my friends juggling administrative positions and writing academic articles. And to you my friends who are still striving for a position at a university.

You are going to enter a creative writing competition.

For a creative writer,  Paper 1 Question 5 is probably the hardest to teach among the two English Language papers because it is not a creative writing question. Question 5 is an exercise on how well a student can write under the pressure of time, in an exam hall and with the weight of 40 marks on their shoulders. Realizing this is of vital importance in the way that you approach this question.

As with most disciplines, the study of creative writing on an undergraduate and postgraduate level has nothing to do with the approach of the subject in secondary education. While a lot of the skills needed to study said degree can be acquired in high school, creative writing is a much more inter-disciplinary degree than what Question 5 makes it to be. Let’s demonstrate this through a narrative:

A group of 25 Y10’s are in an English lesson looking at question 5. The teacher projects the following picture on the board.

The students are asked to first create some lists. What can you see? What can you hear? What can you taste? What can you touch? What can you smell? The teacher then proceeds to circle some details on the picture and asks the students to write some sentences using a simile, a metaphor, onomatopoeia or alliteration and finally the students are given a rough plan on how to write their description. In paragraph one they need to be approaching the scene, in paragraph two they need to be in the scene, in paragraph three they will need to describe a part of the scene in detail and in paragraph four they need to be leaving the scene. While not all teachers and not all schools will be following that exact pattern, something similar is usually used to provide students with some form of structure.

The students’ writing is then marked by the teacher who will specifically look for those elements that correlate to the marking criteria of the examination board. Often responses that have less ‘creative merit’ will score higher because the student has used paragraphs, a variety of punctuation and ambitious vocabulary. The 25 responses will be limited in terms of creative interpretation due to the fact that the majority of them will be informed by the contributions made in the prep time of the lesson.

Now let’s look at a group of 5 first year undergraduates in a creative writing workshop.

Two of the five would have submitted an sample of something (a chapter, a story or a poem) to be read in that week’s workshop. On of the two students have submitted a story about a storm. The student reads the story to the group while the rest keep notes. When the reading has finished, the discussion begins. The group shares thoughts and ideas on what the story is and what it could be, they pull references from different writers and try to unpick the text. Some of the will have some scientific knowledge about storms, some will make links to a natural destruction from which the writer could pull inspiration from. The teacher might make a suggestion about how the student should look into myths concerning storms and maybe embed such ideas in the narrative.

The student will then go away, look though the notes and the recommendations of the class and re-write the story. This will happen 2-3 times in the term before the student has to officially submit the story for marking, alongside an academic commentary, explaining and exploring the writing process, showing the intentions and the hard work that went into writing that piece, and in a way justifying why it could not have been done in 45 minutes.

Creative writing is a craft. Writing a story or a description is an artistic endeavor. And there is no formula that you can use to ‘solve’ composing a narrative. So why do we continue teaching it in such a way? The only answer I can come up with is because it is easier. Some of those formulas will result in high marks and as long as we are getting the expected results then why bother?

And it is this exact approach that makes Paper 1 Question 5 unbearable for a creative writer. As a teacher I am  constantly in battle with my personal approach to writing and with the way I am forced to teach writing to my students. What can I take from Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style that I could use in the classroom? Which aspects of the creative writing workshop can I employ when teaching writing? And is there any value to that? It is clear that I don’t have the answers to any of these questions, but there is one thing I am clear about: there must be a better way to teach creative writing.