Downstream: Using Springboards to Write with the Current

Drawing on 20 years of experience teaching creative writing in Oregon’s public schools, Paulann Petersen offers a weekend workshop devoted to engaging the writer in each of your students. Using Paulann’s springboards, you’ll model—by doing your own writing—many of these classroom ideas. Through the delights of practice, you’ll learn how writers can be gently launched into the river of words, letting language carry them along in its current.

A springboard is not a topic, not an assignment, not genre-specific (it might generate a poem or a reminiscence, a prose poem or the beginning of a story). A springboard is a triggering device that Paulann developed over years of trial and error—a device that transformed her own teaching life and generated remarkable work from students.

Paulann promises you’ll leave this workshop with a tote bag full of field-tested creative writing activities, ones ready for immediate use in your classroom. You’ll leave with a teaching template you can refine and reconfigure for years to come.

Dates: Saturday and Sunday, October 4 and 5, 2008
Time: 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Location: Roger's Hall, room 218
Instructor: Paulann Petersen
Noncredit/PDU: 15 hours, $250
Continuing Education: CEED/CELA 812, 1 semester credit, $350

Registration Information

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