The Poetry Café: An On-line Writing Workshop for Refugee and Newcomer Youth

Breakout Room F

The objective of this paper is to discuss the use of cross-disciplinary partnerships to design and implement a creative writing workshop for English-language learners (ELLs) in an online setting. The methodology utilized collaborative, cross-disciplinary feedback and revision cycles to identify key areas of consideration in facilitating the workshop. The findings revealed cultural and grammatical considerations, emotional nuance considerations, idiomatic language considerations, and internal translation and time considerations in the creative writing process for ELLs. In addition, a reflection, after the completion of the workshop, revealed that while the curriculum successfully implemented three scholarly fields of knowledge, the advances made by this cross-disciplinary partnership hit substantial obstacles when delivered over a virtual platform.