COMPOSITION STUDIES BY DIANE K. OLSON, PHD, WRITING, TEACHING AND CRITICISM

Expressivism is the equivalent of unleashing the creative arts on the academy.  Expressivism is practicing, in writing, the creative art of self-discovery and learning about the larger world.

Too often, however, the creative arts have been either segregated to specialized art and theatre classes or marginalized in the academy -- rather than being holistically integrated into the entire curriculum and all of the disciplines, where they might transform the curriculum by offering a creative reenvisioning of learning.  The creative arts have even been marginalized in English departments, where creative writing is often segregated from the practice of interpretation and reading texts and then underfunded, undervalued and underpromoted in relationship to literary studies.  There are so many ways these divisions might be challenged and transformed through seeing the curriculum through the eyes of expressivism.  Integrating expressivism into a literary studies class, for example, might mean having students try seeing the text through the eyes of the writer (or poet or artist) and imagine what went into the creative process of producing the text that is being studied.  More on this later.