I had the most wonderful teacher for a pseudo-independent study English class my ninth grade year. Her name was Ms. Wright and to this day I remember the class activities and assignments we did and have now realized that many of them were expressivist in nature.
One such assignment was a guided free writing exercise: she would give us an opening line and have us write off of it for a bit of time, such as "It was a wonderful party until..."
Another assignment I loved was when she had us design our own creative space--in our imaginations. She used relaxation exercises to help us imagine our "space" and then had us both draw our "spaces" and describe them with full detail in writing.
The reason I loved these exercises so much was because I felt so creative in other writing I did. The best part about this camp is that it helps to open up your writing and creativity in all areas of learning.
I do align myself with the cognitivists and the social constructionists though as well. I think that learning the revision process and being forced to go through it is good for improving writing skills and I think we need more of this later on in school (namely college). I also believe it is important to be able to write for the field that you are entering as it can be very difficult to learn how a discourse community communicates (as I found out when trying to write for my discourse community--science).
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Alisha--I too have fond expressivist memories, but maybe that's because the writing I do professionally is most closely aligned to the kind of writing expressivists tend to do. It *is* my discourse community. Maybe you are a frustrated novelist??
Anyway, I wanted to say that I was largely dismissive of those kinds of creative assignments...until I taught at a community college. I discovered those assignments were necessary to help students feel like they had lives worth examining, a goal that sometimes trumped job training.
I didn't have any expressivist teachers in high school or college, but my mother was earning a master's degree in education when I would come home from UCSB, and we often discussed her final project of creating a language arts workbook for junior high students.
A component in that workbook was creating what Mom called "sentence starter" prompts (such as Alisha describes). The writing was then developed and revised, and Mom encouraged the classroom feel of a writing community out of the various responses that were shared.
I'll always remember how important she thought those exercises were and how warmly most of her students responded to them. I agree that we often don't give younger students much credit for having lives worth examining, experiences that are complex, or thoughts that warrant expression. Writing teachers should be very wary of ageism creeping into their pedagogy. I think Mom's sentence starters were excellent openers for budding writers and showed an older person's respect for young minds.
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