Writers at Play: A Study of the Use of Play Strategies in a College Classroom to Alleviate Writer's Block and Encourage the Development of a Writer's Authentic Voice
The purpose of this study is to observe what happens when students encounter unfamiliar strategies of play in an arena of usual seriousness, writing. The impetus behind the course as the teacher envisioned it was to encourage the students to become independent self-learners and experience the joy of writing in an authentic voice. The purpose of the researcher was to observe, document, describe, and interpret the students' responses to nontraditional play activities.
This ethnographically oriented study follows a triangular qualitative research approach of using observation, in-depth interviews, and documents such as surveys and questionnaires to find out how student participants responded to nontraditional play activities in a college writing classroom. This study differs from most research in written composition in that it focuses on play activities and students' attitudes rather than the evaluation of actual student writing, presenting students' responses, experiences, and stories in their own words as often as possible.
Chapter One presents theories of play, Zen Buddhism, and composition and how they can tap the subconscious mind to influence a writer's voice and creativity. Chapter Two describes the setting and introduces the participants, the teacher, and the researcher. Chapter Three explains the methodology of the study. Chapter Four delineates the traditional and nontraditional play activities and the students' responses to them. Chapter Five presents the students' evaluations of the course as a whole and the researcher's interpretation of the data.
The students responded more positively to the class as a whole than to each individual play exercise. Since they had been trained in traditional academic settings, some of the students were uneasy with the individual play exercises. Some were self-conscious, others impatient with what appeared to them as diversions from the serious job of learning. Most welcomed the opportunity to explore other approaches to writing. The majority of students felt that this class improved their attitude toward writing and their actual writing.
