NewsAndrea MacPherson talks storytelling, student engagement, and the art of facilitation

Andrea MacPherson talks storytelling, student engagement, and the art of facilitation

This article was published on October 7, 2015 and may be out of date. To maintain our historical record, The Cascade does not update or remove outdated articles.
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By Rachel Tait (Contributor) – Email

MacPherson says teaching is about facilitating ideas already within students while they work on their material.
Image Credit: Andrea MacPherson

Prof Talk is The Cascade’s oral history series, featuring the people best qualified to talk about what UFV has been like over the course of its first few decades: its professors.

Andrea MacPherson is a creative writing professor at UFV. She has been a full-time professor here for 10 years, and her teaching focus is on poetry and fiction. She has been published in a number of literary journals and is the author of the recent poetry collection Ellipses.

How long have you been at UFV?

I started teaching professionally in 2005 and I got a permanent type B position in fall of 2009 — I’ve been teaching for 6 years. I know it does not seem that long, but it is. I like the small classes — that kind of more intimate community that you have with students and faculty here. It’s great!

What brought you to UFV? What inspired you to come and teach here?

Originally, I proposed creative writing classes here because when I started here there were only two or three. It was a really popular area, but it needed a lot of growth. So when Jim Anderson was the department head I contacted him about the possibility of creating some courses. That is what initially brought me out to UFV. I saw holes that could be filled.

What courses did you create?

We started off with historical fiction, then novel writing, then worked our way backwards and added in ENGL 104, that is an introduction to all genres. We got more specific with advanced poetry and advanced fiction along the way.

How do the courses you’re teaching now differ from when you started teaching?

There are just a lot more! To be more specific, we are really committed to looking at different genres and different areas of student interest. That has been helping develop courses and getting them to a place where students have more choice and more options of paths they want to follow when taking creative writing classes.

What kinds of changes have you made in your teaching approaches or methods over time? Or have you found one style that works?

I think the biggest change I have made over time is positioning the upper-level classes. Instead of doing smaller groups for workshopping, just doing one large seminar for it so that everyone is reading all their peers’ work and giving feedback on it. I find it works better when I can facilitate it and work through and moderate their discussions. Additionally, I think I’ve also started asking for more specific project proposals or ideas of how they wanted to approach the material, whereas before we would kind of fly by the seat of our pants. I am now looking for more pre-writing and planning, and all of those things as well.

Have there been any colleagues or students that have been particularly helpful or influential in what you do as a teacher?

I think when I first started John Carroll was the only other person teaching creative writing, and I got a lot from him in terms of what he found has worked in his classes and how to approach different kinds of material or different projects within a creative writing class. He was fabulous along the way.

I am always learning things from students. It’s every couple years that a core group you see moving through the academic stream are really dedicated, really working on original and exciting material; that is really inspirational to instructors as well.

What kinds of projects, research, pedagogy, or course development have you worked on at UFV?

Lots of course development! There have been a lot of genre-specific things. All of my research is always for creative projects. It’s ranged from residential schools to the troubles in Ireland in the late ‘60s, so it’s quite wide in terms of research.

While we often talk of UFV as a single entity, each student or teacher will take something different out of it. How would you describe what you’ve taken out of UFV and how you’re still changing it?

I think what I have taken out of it is the idea of building smaller communities within a community. I see a lot of students really striving for those communities, wanting places to belong or groups to belong in, and kind of making it a core part of their education. Finding their place — whether in independent writing groups, or something like The Cascade, or the English Students Association — and seeing those kinds of groups forming and changing over time has been interesting to see. I think it always informs your teaching as well; seeing the engagement of the student body is an exciting thing to see.

Do you have any advice for aspiring students who want to major in English or follow in your footsteps and teach?

Read everything and write as much as you can! It really is like any other kind of fine art. You learn about painting by looking at paintings and painting. It’s the same with writing and reading: the more you read, the more you determine what you like and the styles you are drawn to, and cultivate your own voice and style. It’s essential to any young writer. So part of that is writing, writing, writing as much as you can, and reading widely and often.

What is your favourite aspect of creative writing?

My favourite aspect is kind of when the idea behind the project finally becomes concrete and you can start immersing yourself in the writing process — when you start seeing new subplots come up, or new storylines opening, or things coming together you hadn’t anticipated. There is something almost magical when all these things collide and the story has a life of its own. That point is probably my favourite part of the process.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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