Syllabus: Unlocking Creativity with an Accidental Professor

Lynda Barry, the award-winning author and creative force behind the genre-defying work What It Is, believes that anyone can be a writer. Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor makes her innovative lesson plans and writing exercises available to the public for home or classroom use. For the past decade, Barry has run a highly popular writing workshop for nonwriters called Writing the Unthinkable, which was featured in The New York Times Magazine. This article explores the key aspects of Barry's approach, as presented in Syllabus, and examines its impact on students and educators alike.

Lynda Barry: A Champion of Creative Engagement

Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher and found that they are very much alike. She lives in Wisconsin, where she is an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity at the University of Wisconsin Madison. In 2019, she received the “Genius grant” from the MacArthurs Fellows program. Barry's journey as an educator began somewhat unexpectedly. She is known to her students as "professor long-title," Professor Chewbacca, Professor Old Skull, or some other bizarre name that changes every semester. This unconventional approach reflects her broader philosophy of embracing spontaneity and challenging traditional academic norms. Her recognition as a MacArthur Fellow further underscores her significant contributions to fostering creative engagement through her unique pedagogical practice.

Unveiling the "Writing the Unthinkable" Workshop

Barry's course has been embraced by people of all walks of life - prison inmates, postal workers, university students, teachers, and hairdressers - for opening paths to creativity. The workshop focuses on the relationship between the hand, the brain, and spontaneous images, both written and visual. It's a messy compilation of her notes, ideas, lessons to tap into students' creativity, ways to tap into her own creativity plus pictures. Barry teaches a method of writing that focuses on the relationship between the hand, the brain, and spontaneous images, both written and visual. Syllabus takes the course plan for Barry's workshop and runs wild with it in Barry's signature densely detailed style. Collaged texts, ballpoint pen doodles, and watercolour washes adorn Syllabus' yellow lined pages, which offer advice on finding a creative voice and using memories to inspire the writing process. Syllabus has the regular content of syllabi, although it is somewhat idiosyncratically presented.

The Essence of Barry's Teaching Philosophy

Barry is first and foremost invested in inspiring people to draw, write, and create art. Barry's teaching philosophy centers on the idea that artistic practice is not a waste of time, and any worthwhile work takes time-sometimes a long time. She actively recruits students who claim that they “can’t” draw, Barry repeatedly stresses that student work is graded on effort and time, not on purported skill. Barry sincerely loves her students’ drawings, whether awkward or accomplished, and Syllabus includes many of these drawings. For Barry, drawing, as well as the arts more generally, are as much about survival as play. Save yourself! Check out this book! Even if you don’t pick up a pen, let Barry’s contagious enthusiasm wash into the rest of your life, and you just might return to that artistic project-novel? symphony?

A Deep Dive into "Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor"

Lynda Barry's Syllabus was not what I expected - but that's a good thing. Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor is the first book that will make her innovative lesson plans and writing exercises available to the public for home or classroom use. It's packaged as the aforementioned composition notebook. Barry compiled this book of lesson plans, musings, and activities, out of assignments from her classes and workshops at University of Wisconsin-Madison and elsewhere.

Visual and Tactile Engagement

Pick up Lynda Barry’s Syllabus for the first time, and it takes a while to figure out what exactly you’re holding. Lynda Barry is still a doodling schoolkid at heart. She simply does what she does even if it doesn’t fit neatly into a bookstore genre-which is precisely what makes her work so beautiful, inspiring, and powerful. The layout is unconventional and the text is mostly handwritten, so it takes your eyes a while to adjust to the way information is delivered, but once you get used to it, there are a lot of interesting ideas here for art education. The exercises presented here help students to make art without being judgmental, to understand that art takes time and regular practice, to realize that actively looking is an important part of the art process and so on. It is a book of notes, drawings, and syllabi I kept during my first three years of teaching in the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The chronology is rough and mixed up in places but all kept by hand on pages of either legal pads or in standard black and white marbled composition notebooks.

Exercises and Assignments

She does not just talk about how to write and draw but provides a series of exercises and homework assignments throughout the semester that create a scaffold allowing this to happen. Barry's students may initially think these assignments are silly - drawing tight spirals; coloring and leaving as much crayon on the page as possible; making lists of what they did, saw, and heard - and yet, she has designed these exercises to help her students pay attention, really pay attention, and let down their defenses that prevent them from taking the kinds of risks that allow them to be creative. Barry also reminded me to question what my students really need from a class and to focus my assignments, grades, and class activities around developing those skills. She requires daily diaries and weekly memorization exercises, usually of Emily Dickinson poems. Poetry memorization in an art class? But Barry firmly believes in the worth of developing an artistic practice, which takes practice, even if the particular steps to building that practice confer no obvious, immediate benefit.

The Importance of Noticing

Teaching, even relatively straightforward teaching, is not necessarily transparent to students; what we see as intentional, they often see as busy work. Barry talks about what she is doing with her students: Part of what we are doing in this class is NOTICING what we NOTICE and NOTICING MORE, but doing it in a natural way as we move through our day. Barry, in a series of comics, syllabus excerpts, and scanned assignments/commentary, documents a series of courses she taught at UW Madison between 2012-2014. Primarily, these courses were centered around two questions: first, what does it mean to embrace the artist & writer in every student -- to prioritize process over nebulous notions of talent and skill -- and second, to explore the interrelation of creative practice and the structure/function of the brain.

Impact and Reception

Barry, in a series of comics, syllabus excerpts, and scanned assignments/commentary, documents a series of courses she taught at UW Madison between 2012-2014. Primarily, these courses were centered around two questions: first, what does it mean to embrace the artist & writer in every student -- to prioritize process over nebulous notions of talent and skill -- and second, to explore the interrelation of creative practice and the structure/function of the brain. What results from these questions (apart from even more questions) is a heartfelt, deeply collaborative story about what it means to "make" an artist, dotted with prompts and journal entry suggestions. Her emphasis on the pleasures and beauties of "amateur" work and well-founded trust in the act of artmaking as generative in and of itself is a balm for me in this semi-slump. This book is seriously so exciting and thought-provoking from a creative and pedagogical perspective, so much so that, as I return this copy to the library, I'm planning to buy my own.

Critical Acclaim

“[Syllabus is] a must-read for Barry fans and deep thinkers.” -London Free Press. “[In Syllabus, Lynda Barry] continues her investigation of what an image is. This book is charming and readable and serves as an excellent guide for those seeking to break out of whatever writing and drawing styles they have been stuck in, allowing them to reopen their brains to the possibility of new creativity.

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Reader Experiences

I have read the entire book, re-read portions, and implemented some of the exercises already. Chock-full of ideas and exercises, there is so much I loved about this book. Whether you think you are creative or not, if you have tried to journal and failed, or if you simply want to look at a fun, colorful journal of a creative teacher, give yourself the gift of getting your hands on this book. This is a class I would love to take in person, but in the meanwhile, I'll keep thumbing through sections of this book. I want to tattoo this book on my brain so I can remember all of the juicy creative prompts and ideas! What a treat. I really like this book (and really responded to it) because of all the assignments. The book is filled with a lot of interesting things to do/draw illustrated with the work of her students. Easy stuff! Stuff I can do!

A Guide for Educators

I also highly recommend this book for teachers in any discipline. Barry is a sensitive and reflective teacher, and she willingly shares her failures as well as her successes. Barry also reminded me to question what my students really need from a class, and to focus my assignments, grades, and class activities around developing those skills. Barry is a sensitive and reflective teacher, and she willingly shares her failures as well as her successes.

Challenges and Considerations

Those unfamiliar with comics guru Barry's previous work may find the format and style of this title extremely jarring. The end result is discordant and sloppy and may confuse, rather than inspire, young authors. If you've got a learning style that syncs up with the optically-overloading format, this book will teach you fun ways to learn, to teach, to reach those creative moments where you thrive, etc. If you do not have a learning style that matches the contents of this book, it is still crazy fun to look at, though, again, be warned: it could hurt your eyes. And maybe your brain. While it had no real narrative through-line, and it didn't need one, I still felt that Barry failed to create any kind of cohesiveness, which bothered me from the moment I began reading until the moment I finished. Syllabus worked best when it was working toward pedagogical ends, and there were many activities, like the ubiquitous spirals that peppered the novel, that she described which I hope to one day use in a classroom myself. But it too frequently meandered off into sections that were more memoir than anything else, or into pages that would have been more at home in an actual portfolio. Ultimately, it ended up trying to be, and do, too much.

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tags: #syllabus #notes #accidental #professor