Program Description
New Shoots is a program organized by both the Vancouver School Board and the Creative Writing Department at UBC. This partnership has existed for over 25 years. Every year, Creative Writing Master of Fine Arts (MFA) graduate students are partnered with a secondary school teacher and together they decide the curriculum, dates and times of the classes taught by the MFA student. There are two main goals for the MFA students. Firstly, to design and teach creative writing lesson plans that engage students by means of in-class writing activities. Secondly, to culture the students’ work and prepare them for submission to the New Shoots Anthology that is published every year. At the end of every New Shoots year, there is a public reading where all the students, teachers and parents are invited to see and hear the amazing artwork the students produced—plays, short stories, non-fiction pieces, poems, memoirs etc. Much fun and cake is had by all.
From January-March 2010, I worked with two English/Creative Writing classes—the first an 8/9 split with Tish Silvers, and the second an 11/12 split with Gerry Hill.
Duties
- Prepare ten lectures/writing sessions on poetry and prose for two English classes of 15+ students; create student handouts
- critique all student work
- conference with supervising teacher on student’s needs
- collect and edit student work for anthology publication
- Encourage/coach my students on public reading skills
Please visit the New Shoots Journal Excerpt page for more details on my experiences teaching my amazing secondary school students.