8. Creativity and Writing: The Postcard Project

The purpose of the conference presentation upon which this paper is inspired was to present an innovative approach to motivate students to write in a second language during a first-year Spanish class. Usually, students comply with writing exercises that convey basic thoughts, due to constrained vocabulary and limited knowledge of grammatical concepts. The pieces they create are often simple repetitions of material already present in the textbook. In this case, the idea was to create a project that would be developed during the whole academic year. It consisted of creating a story of 100 words or less that would provoke the reader to think beyond the text and also motivate him/her to make connections between the title, the content, and the hidden message of the story. The format was a postcard, and the students had to add a creative piece of art on one side of the postcard and a story on the opposite side. The artwork was intended to add to the story. The objective of the project was for students to use their higher order cognitive abilities and subsequently realize higher levels of achievement (Burrowes, 2003; Railsback, 2002).The activity also aimed to encourage deeper student learning and self-regulated learning behaviours (Herington, 2008). The challenge was obvious: would students feel intimidated when presented with the project? How would they respond to the strict demands of the assignment? How would they deal with the creative aspect? How would they respond to formative feedback? How would they react to the public exhibition of their work? Throughout this article, responses to these queries are presented along with a discussion on how the activity could be applied across disciplines with similar end results. I hope this is the beginning of a productive dialogue.