Debra Marquart joined the Iowa State University creative writing faculty in 1995. She received her M.A. in English from Iowa State University and her M.L.A. (Masters degree in Liberal Arts) from Moorhead State University, MN. Her poetry book, Everything's a Verb was published in 1995, followed by a spoken word CD, A Regular Dervish, which she recorded with her jazz-poetry performance project, The Bone People, in 1996. Her work has appeared in numerous journals such as the North American Review, Threepenny Review, New Letters, River City, Southern Poetry Review, The Sun, and Witness. Marquart's collection of short stories about road musicians, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories, is slated for publication in the fall of 2000.

Professor Marquart is frequently invited to read, perform, and lecture on craft and pedagogy at area universities. She has been a featured speaker at professional conferences such as the Way Up Conference, the Women in Education Conference, and the Minnesota Council of Teachers of English. In 1996, she delivered a paper, "Driving the Cul-de-Sacs: Finding Common Ground in a Racially Fragmented Classroom," at the Conference on College Composition and Communication. As the faculty adviser for The Writers' Bloc, she oversees several student-run programs: Word Up!, a spoken-word reading series; Sketch, a student literary journal; and Knotgrass, an online literary journal. As the poetry editor of Flyway Literary Review, Professor Marquart mentors several graduate student assistant editors.

In her creative writing classroom, Professor Marquart employs new approaches to teaching writing. She encourages students to fuse their poems with other art forms-music, dance, theater, and visual art-in order to create an intermedia arts dialogue. Students have described her courses as challenging but rewarding. One evaluator has written: "A Marquart course, in many ways, is a threat to one's mental status quo." For the creative writing program, she has designed two new graduate courses: "Writing to the Extremes," which encourages students to discover and explore their own submerged life-stories by reading and responding to literature that arises out of extreme experience; and a "Long Projects" course in which students envision and begin drafts on an extended project.

Professor Marquart maintains a special mission to visit area high schools and encourage young writers. With her performance project, The Bone People, she has been featured as a keynote speaker at several young writers' conferences. "She trusted us enough to let us write our own way home," one student has written. About her unique brand of engaged pedagogy, another student has observed, "In short, Deb rocks."

Fellowship Synopsis

DESCRIPTION OF FELLOWSHIP

Science teachers understand the importance of using metaphor in the classroom (imagine this red ball is the planet Mars), as do Mathematics teachers (a train is traveling west at a rate of 75 miles per hour). However, in the teaching of creative writing-a style of writing largely dependent on the development of metaphorical thinking-students are simply told to "show not tell." This well-worn maxim of good writing, "show don't tell," is often the first advice any creative writing teacher dispenses, yet it does not follow its own advice-it tells writers what to do without showing them.

In my last ten years of teaching creative writing and first-year composition, I have developed ways of using metaphor and storytelling in pedagogy to enliven the learning process and to re-engage students who for one reason or another have lost interest in the course objectives. I call these strategies, "teachable metaphors," and the development of this pedagogical technique was not intentional. Teachable metaphors arose out of moments of desperation in the classroom-twenty faces blankly staring with a look of profound boredom or utter incomprehension. "It's like when you make stew," I might say, then go on to develop a metaphor showing how making stew is like writing a poem.

One can feel a palpable shift of mood in a classroom when a teachable metaphor is introduced: the students feel that something unexpected has happened, that we've drifted off the script. It's a moment of crisis when creativity is called into action. The writer and pedagogue, bell hooks, has called this technique "engaged pedagogy" in which the teacher responds organically to the questions and issues the students bring to the study of a subject. If the teachable metaphor works (and they don't all work; some of them fall flat), a teachable moment occurs in the classroom. Silence or miscommunication is replaced with understanding, a kind of "ah-hah" experience.

The purpose of the fellowship activity is to 1) investigate how metaphor and narrative is used or can be used in teaching various disciplines across the university; 2) identify pedagogical strategies for how a teacher might intuit when a teachable metaphor is in order; 3) develop ways to arrange course materials to increase the likelihood of the occurrence of a teachable moment; 4) put teachable metaphors into practice in ISU classrooms or campus-wide activities; and 5) develop conference talks and pedagogy papers that articulate the above findings and expand theories of teachable metaphors and the teachable moment.