Engaging Students Through Writing with Professor Hoa Nguyen

From collectively writing odes to everyday objects to making good writing sound worse, Hoa Nguyen aims to actively involve students in exploring writing through practice. In this episode, she shares with Curtis and Chelsea how she imagines the classroom as a laboratory, with writing as an embodied, collaborative experiment. Through playful approaches, she helps students play with language, see their thinking, and appreciate the writer's craft. Professor Nguyen also discusses how the rise of generative AI has (and has not) impacted her teaching practice, what its use reveals about assessment, and why excitement, experimentation, and human connection matter.

Professor Hoa Nguyen is an internationally regarded writer and teacher of creative writing with over twenty years of experience across genres, ranging from intimate workshops to large-scale lectures in community and university settings. After a decade on the faculty of the Bard College MFA and the low-residency MFA program at Miami University, she is now an Assistant Professor teaching Creative Writing and Poetics in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Read the transcript: https://tinyurl.com/5c3rwnst