Writing In The Arts and Neurodiversity: Pioneering Two Specialized 202s

I’m delighted to announce a new course that I’ve developed and will be teaching next spring: English 202B: Writing in the Arts.  The course is geared toward those majoring in the fine arts — writing, music, theatre, film/video, dance, architecture, visual art/design and who may be interested in arts education, promotion, or administration.This course will provide a practical approach to handling the writing tasks that you might face in these careers, including bios and personal statements, artist resumes, marketing/promotional copy, press releases, grants/proposals, reviews/criticism, and writing for the web.

Would you please circulate information about this course to your students?  The course is capped at 24 students, and I’m hoping to draw a mix from several colleges, including Liberal Arts, Communications Arts and Sciences, Arts and Architecture, and Education.  Registration controls are in place on the course, so applicants will be directed to contact the English Dept. to enroll.

Feel free to contact me at sxt10@psu.edu with any questions, and thank you very much!!

The organizing principle behind English 202A: For and With Neurodiversity is the concept of the spectrum: for example, within the social science fields, we have a spectrum of over-lapping protocols, priorities, and values, with hard science on one extreme end of the spectrum and art on the other; in the realm of human development, we have a spectrum of physical and behavioral possibilities with “normal” anchoring (rather ambiguously) the center. As a way of unifying our diverse class community (multiple disciplines, personalities, backgrounds, bodies) we will be using readings on neurodiversity as our anchor, allowing individual interests to fan out from that point in whatever direction your curiosity takes you.

One of the most open-minded writers of our time, George Saunders, provides us during this tumultuous summer of 2016 with an inspiring vocabulary to use alongside our class metaphor: in a July 7 New Yorker article, Saunders writes about the liberal-conservative split as simply two necessary, interactive tensions that rely on each other to pull the human group back to a balanced center. He names the split “other curious” (liberal end of the spectrum) and “other cautious” (conservative end of the spectrum). Interestingly, we could potentially describe people with the neurodiverse ASD label as “other neutral”—and begin to see the ways in which every point on the spectrum has its contribution. We will be conducting our classroom discussions and workshops and projects with the starting point that as long as we are each rhetorically respectful, we can each assume the worth of our particular point of origin and reference—and we can all learn from each other.

For more information, contact Judy McKelvey at jlm24@psu.edu