Expressive Pedagogy

Tip for new teachers: Encourage students to inject their voices and experiences into their writing; pay attention to how students develop as writers, communicators, and thinkers.

What is Expressive Pedagogy?

Expressive Pedagogy is a pedagogical approach focused on developing the student as a writer and, more importantly, as an individual. This approach utilizes students’ experiences and emphasizes the writer developing a voice and identity in all forms of writing. It promotes “writing as a process of discovering meaning” (Christopher Burnham 24).

Why is this approach beneficial?

• Personalizes all forms of writing ranging from low-stakes writing to more formal writing assignments.

• Helps to develop the student as a writer with a unique identity and voice.

• Can increase creativity. For example, in regular journaling, students typically write about the extraordinary first but soon write about more mundane topics and begin to improve their creativity as they explore and think about these common observations.

• Can help students become more comfortable in not just writing in general, but also in writing about oneself, one’s growth, and one’s style.

• Can encourage risk-taking. The developmental model encourages lack of control, as having an outline or a plan may make a student feel stuck. This means that students shouldn’t worry about knowing what they mean or what they intend to write ahead of time; they should try to let things get out of hand. This is the definition of going with the flow. “Most people will improve their ability to think carefully and discriminatingly if they allow themselves to be sloppy and relinquish control at other times” (Elbow, 33-34).

Here is an assignment from our class, where a student created an infographic for a writing course that incorporates Expressive Pedagogy.

What can Expressive Pedagogy look like in the ENC 1101 classroom?

• Frequent free writing that helps students explore & discover ideas.

• Use of peer response assignments so that students can experience having their work received by an audience.

• Group work where students share their writing with one another in order to expose the students to other voices, experiences, and perspectives.

• Journaling on connections between the course content and the students’ own lives. Have students write weekly about day-to-day things they observe and relate them to the course.

• Reflective writing assignments where students track one's writing and observe how their writing style changes, improves, and adapts to the situation and needs of the assignment.

• Encourage students to embrace and incorporate their languages/dialects within their own texts. Allowing this in the classroom works to remove the privilege from Standard American English and can democratize language use and develop the voices of student writers who are not as well versed in SAE.

Expressive Pedagogy Resources

• Gloria Anzaldua: "How to Tame a Wild Tongue"

• Suresh Canagarajah: "Codemeshing in Academic Writing"

• CCCC: "Students’ Right to Their Own Language"