Podcast: Teaching a Writers’ Room

In this episode Jessica and I talk to Katharina about a five-day block seminar that she taught in February 2020 entitled “Confronting the Climate Crisis: A Writers’ Room for Cultural Scholars”. The goal of the seminar was that each participating student writes a blog post on an issue related to the cultural production and interpretation of the climate crisis.

On the first day, students conceptualized their entry. On days two and three they wrote draft text, to then receive peer review, and revise, proofread and finalize their draft, so that it could be published on the university website by day five (see link below).

In this first part of our conversation Katharina talks about how the combination of tight structure, relaxed atmosphere, and a lot of freedom to explore their own writing processes enabled students to write fast and focused and produce a publishable text within just five days, and also about why both the topic of the climate crisis and the format of a blog worked well for many students.

In the second part of our conversation, Katharina talks us through the individual days of her seminar in more detail. We also talk about the usefulness of the Pomodoro technique and the importance of revision.

Links

• Climate Crisis Blog
• Online LehrBar on Thursday, October 29, 13:00 called “Produktiv und kollaborativ schreiben im Blockseminar” which Katharina has been initiated and will attend together with Lea Hildermeier and Laurenz Junker who took part in the class (in German)
• Original course commentary
• on Ecolinguistics: Ecolinguistics on Wikipedia and Arran Stibbe’s book Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By
• Pomodoro Technique

Music © by Lily Olason.