On Bad and Good Workshop Spaces
On Bad and Good Workshop Spaces
Desk description
Creative Writing is uniquely centred around the workshop — and that’s where I’d like to start today.
I’m going to make a few observations about the material environment of the Creative Writing workshop, in relation to teaching, mental health, and aesthetics.
The desks, the lighting, the vibe.
All students find having their writing workshopped extremely stressful. I can remember shaking with nerves, absolutely jangling, as I walked through the last fire door before arriving at the Arthur Miller Centre. This was in 1994/5, at UEA (the University of East Anglia).
The Arthur Miller Centre was a plain, grey-blue-carpeted classroom. Unusually, it was furnished with swingy black chairs said to have been used by contestants in Mastermind. This was where we met Malcolm Bradbury, and where he sat, wearing a grey tweed jacket with vinyl elbows, swinging in his own black chair and gently encouraging us to critique rather than maul one another. Or vice versa, depending on how mischievous he was feeling.
Almost all students are likely to be very unsettled, emotionally, by a positive or negative reaction from a group of ten or eleven peers — however helpfully it is framed as constructive feedback.
At UEA, there was a lot of crying in the bar afterwards; and a fair deal of storming off from the bar.
Workshopping your writing is exposing; student writers feel very anatomized — but this is part of the structure of the discipline. It’s where you see yourself clearly.
In most universities, the workshop room is likely to be a standard teaching room, set up, when the first student walks in, for a lecture. In other words, there will be a whiteboard or screen at the front, and perhaps an immovable lectern — upon which sits a computer screen and keyboard, and from which PowerPoint can be controlled. The traditional desks and chairs, or chairs with tablet arms, will be set up in rows, forward facing.
Before the workshop begins, these need to be rearranged. If there is space, it is likely that most of the desks will have to be judderingly shifted to the side. The remainder will be arranged in an oblong or square so that the workshop can happen with all the students facing one another. If there’s a bit more space, then a circle is better.
This furniture moving was just part of my job, although very often the students would help. After a few weeks, the most friendly and helpful classes would start to arrive early, and to rearrange the layout before I’d got there. I was always very grateful to them for this.
Some of the teaching rooms I’ve used at Birkbeck College and elsewhere contain so many desks (heavy ones), that it is impossible to clear enough space for a circular or even a square set-up. I have often had to run a workshop in what is a lecture format. This means, to add to their stress, that students are often receiving feedback from someone sitting directly behind them that they can’t see. It also means that the tutor remains a distant, lecturing authority, rather than a member of a close reading group — perhaps an authoritative member, but not a physically dominating one.
There are other factors that can make this classroom environment feel hostile. The main one is that it reminds students of school, which they may have left the previous years or a few decades earlier.
The harsh acoustics, the hard, fluorescent lighting, the hectoring posters on the noticeboard, the disrepair of tables and the wobbliness of chairs.
However much a student liked school, the attitude it fostered towards listening learning, and how learning best takes place, is completely different to how they’ll be expected to be in a workshop.
This is far from ideal.
Tomorrow we’ll look at something much closer to that.