Incorporating creative writing exercises in history courses can heighten students' critical reading and analytical skills in an active learning model. We identify and define two types of possible assignments that use model texts as their locus: centripetal, which focuses on specific context and disciplinary terms, and centrifugal, which address…

In this application brief I share a case study assignment I used in my "Leadership in Complex Organizations" classes to promote creativity in problem solving. I sorted Ph.D. students into two teams and trained them to use creative writing techniques to "encode" theory into their own cases. A sense of competition emerged. Later,…

This article proposes a theatrically oriented, thematically structured course model for the upper level undergraduate German curriculum. The traditional focus on staging a single play in the German foreign language theater practicum neglects theater's potential to explore other literary genres and cultural texts and runs the danger of…

This article presents a public speaking assignment that takes the study of rhetoric seriously. First, it shifts the approach from the common typology of informative, persuasive, and ceremonial speeches toward forensic, deliberative, and epideictic rhetoric. Second, this assignment takes rhetoric seriously by generating the understanding that all…

Argues that asking students to write in concrete images about specific events and places serves to emphasize the importance of writing from detailed personal experiences. (RL)

Discusses writing assignments that allowed students who were uneasy with writing to relax and create, while also allowing more confident students enough creative latitude to take some imaginative risks. Presents samples of student writings that resulted from the assignments. (RL)

A teacher describes a creative writing assignment in which students wrote their own obituaries. (SP)

Offers 10 classroom-tested assignments that result in successful writing experiences and assist students in developing creative and critical thinking skills. (RL)

A poet relates her personal writing problems, which she resolved by completing some of the assignments she had used in her classes. (RL)

Each of these ten creative writing assignments includes a model poem, a writing idea, and suggested discussions or activities related to the writing idea. The assignments can be used to stimulate either poetry or prose writing. (Author/AA)

Presents an assignment sequence, based on James Moffett's sequence of narrative types, designed to teach the various points of view most often used by authors. Provides instructions, including names of model texts for students to write pieces imitating such narrative techniques as interior monologue, correspondence, dramatic monologue, diary,…

Describes a teaching method in which high school sophomores (1) read A. Munro's "Connection," a short story connecting the author to her family origins; (2) interview relatives about their personal history; and (3) compose vignettes based on the notes collected during a three-week period. Provides numerous questions and prompts used to help the…

Reports on a "summing up" assignment at the end of a course on the fiction of J. D. Salinger. Notes the way students used parodies to display their knowledge of Salinger's style and recurrent themes. Offers one student-written parody as an example. (RL)