OATdb Archive - Sam Houston State University

OATdb Archive

2012 - 2013

Creative Writing, Publishing, And Editing MFA

Goal

Develop Skills And Knowledge Base In Creative Writing

Students who graduate with a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) will have developed the requisite skills and knowledge base in creative writing.

Objective

To Write Literary Short Fiction In A Realist Narrative Mode

Students in the MFA program in creative writing, editing, and publishing will be able to produce quality literary works of short fiction in a realist narrative mode.

Indicator

Writing Assessment

In the graduate fiction workshop, ENG 5331, students will be required to submit, workshop, and revise three complete short stories. Near the end of the semester, the professor will ask each student to submit one of his or her pieces, written in a realist narrative mode, to be included in the assessment. In the realist mode, writers should be able to create fully imagined and compelling three-dimensional characters; artfully rendered settings, whether of this world or another; surprising and convincing plots and structures; original and texturally rich language, including metaphors and other kinds of figurative language; and, ultimately, stories that either say something new or that find a new way to say something we thought we already knew about the complex human experience. Three members of the Department of English faculty will evaluate each of the stories based on a rubric that asks them to consider the following fundamental characteristics of the realist narrative mode: characters, setting, plot, structure, language, point of view, and originality.

Criterion

80 Percent In Each Of Seven Criteria

We anticipate that 85 percent of the students enrolled should be able to score higher than 80 percent in each of the seven criteria.

Finding

Assessment To Be Completed For 2013-2014

Because of the small number of students enrolled in the first year of the program (there were five in the course last spring to be included in this assessment), we've elected to delay completion of the assessment until we have a better sample size.

Action

Assessment

Goal

Student Recruitment

We are a very new program and have only a handful of students enrolled. Our goal is to recruit qualified students to enroll in the MFA program.

Objective

Recruit Qualified And Exceptional Students

We will recruit and accept into the program only students who can reasonably be expected to succeed within it.

KPI

Student Recruitment

Through visits and advertising campaigns to English majors and minors, undergraduate creative writing classes, venues such as Poets & Writers, The Writer's Chronicle, and tables at the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference and Bookfair, we hope to recruit between five and ten students to begin the MFA at SHSU.

Result

Student Recruitment

Action

Assessment

For the fall of 2013, we accepted five students and four enrolled. We currently have ten students active in this our second year. We continue to seek productive ways to establish name-recognition for our program and to inform students about our program.

With these goals in mind, we advertised in Poets & Writers and The Writer's Chronicle as well as locally (suburban Houston newspapers) and recruited at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Boston in February. We see our advertising on a national level as part of our long-term goals and the establishment of program identity and name-recognition.

Significant to our recruiting efforts as we move forward will be the new website for the program, which launched this fall, as well as the annual reading series, which we are continuing this year, and the publicity that surrounds it. We are hopeful as well that our forthcoming partnership with the National Book Foundation, via its National Book Awards on Campus Program (just the second such program in the nation), will bring increased and regular attention to the MFA program.

We're also launching a new online literary journal, The Gordion Review, open to submissions only from graduate students and run by our graduate students, and believe that this, too, will help to spread the word about the MFA program at SHSU.

The great majority of students who have applied and who have been accepted come from within SHSU's traditional footprint. A number of the students have come from out of our undergraduate program. While we are glad to be of service to those students, we wish to continue to extend our reach, and are continuing to seek ways by which to accomplish this, including via social media as well as more traditional media.

Update to previous cycle's plan for continuous improvement N/A

Plan for continuous improvement The primary goal at this stage of the program--we're in just our second year--remains to recruit students into the program and to recruit the best students possible. While we are pleased to have the students enrolled that we do, we recognize that we are not yet drawing the numbers nor the caliber of student (in general) that we one day hope to be able to say we do.

Significant to our recruiting efforts as we move forward will be our forthcoming partnership with the National Book Foundation, via its National Book Awards on Campus Program (just the second such program in the nation). We expect that this program will bring increased and regular attention to the MFA program, both regionally and nationally. Because the National Book Foundation is a long-established and highly visible entity, based in New York City and at the heart of the book-publishing industry, our association with the National Book Awards (one of the most prestigious annual awards in American publishing) should garner us significant attention. It will also serve as a marker for prospective students as the kind of experience they can expect to have on a regular basis, with attention not only from our permanent faculty, but from some of the best writers in America who will visit our campus and community each year. The NBAOC Program will be the marquee event in our annual reading series, another key recruiting and publicity mechanism. The reading series provides opportunities to draw prospective students to campus and to provide them with a positive experience that might lead them to strongly consider SHSU for their MFA.

We're also making efforts to take advantage of the digital world. We launched a new website for the program this fall, and believe that it will serve as a useful tool not only for our currently enrolled students, but for prospective students. As with everyone else, we maintain an active presence on Facebook and will consider a venture into Twitter.

We're also launching a new online literary journal this spring, The Gordion Review, open to submissions only from graduate students and run by our graduate students, and believe that this, too, will help to spread the word about the MFA program at SHSU. Given the emphasis in our program upon editing and publishing, the new journal provides yet one more opportunity for students to be involved in the publishing experience.

The great majority of students who have applied and who have been accepted come from within SHSU's traditional footprint. A number of the students have come from out of our undergraduate program. While we are glad to be of service to those students, we wish to continue to extend our reach, and are continuing to seek ways by which to accomplish this, including via social media as well as more traditional media. We encourage our faculty to be active in conferences and book festivals, both regionally and nationally, including, for example, the Houston Indie Book Fest in the case of the former, and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual conference in the case of the latter. In each case, we are seeking to establish our profile and to recruit both for the short-term and for the long-term.