Try a Learning Circle at Peer 2 Peer University

Feeling like you need a little extra help to feel confident about your writing? Today, Municipal Liaison and librarian Jordan Draves talks about Peer 2 Peer University, which they used to create their own personalized writing courses:

As a librarian who loves writing and has participated in NaNoWriMo for eons, it only made perfect sense to teach the craft to others looking to write a novel. After all, who doesn’t want free writing classes at the library?! Enter Peer 2 Peer University. P2PU is a nonprofit organization that seeks to get free online courses into libraries and community centers as Learning Circles.  

What’s a Learning Circle? These are lightly facilitated online courses that cover a wide variety of topics from creative writing to computer languages and even social justice issues. Students take the classes at home or in the library, then meet with their classmates to discuss the work and help each other succeed. This model of learning increases the chance they will finish the course, compared to taking it alone.

P2PU has several online courses related creative writing, but I took the opportunity to create my own course based on what I was looking for in a writing class with the Learning Circle model in mind. The class, entitled “Learn To Write Fiction Beginner Course”, can be found on P2PU’s list of courses. It uses online articles combined with writing exercises to teach topics such as character development, writing dialogue, and plotting your novel. Basically, it’s an 8-week intensive course geared toward teaching you the real nuts and bolts of the craft and get you writing!

When I facilitated it for the first time I advertised it as a way to prepare for National Novel Writing Month, tapping into my Municipal Liaison powers and messaging all of the participants located in my region to let them know about it. Being able to email so many writers in the area brought instant success as the class quickly filled up and we needed to close registration early! If you’re not an ML, but you want those super powers, contact your local ML and they can get the word out for you.

“What’s a Learning Circle? These are lightly facilitated online courses that cover a wide variety of topics from creative writing to computer languages and even social justice issues.”

For those who have a love of writing, this class is a lot of fun. I have now facilitated it twice, and both times it was wildly popular with many students staying in contact with each other and continuing to meet as a writing group long after the class ended. Most of the students were NaNoWriMo participants but not all of them were.

This probably sounds a bit daunting for the first time facilitator. But it’s not as scary as it sounds! As a facilitator, you don’t need to know anything about the topic because you’re not the one teaching the material and P2PU offers lots of advice for new facilitators so you’re never left feeling alone or confused. The great thing about the P2PU website is that they have a registration page for participants to register their intent to take the class. Students will also get reminder emails every week, and facilitators get a way to email the entire class at once.  

As far as my own writing classes go, students have asked for more classes on other writing topics, so I have created a second course available through P2PU entitled “Learn To Write Fiction: World-Building” which uses the same model to teach the basics of world-building for those interested in writing fantasy or science fiction.

I’m excited to bring more writing courses to the writers who need them and I hope my experiences have inspired you to try out one of the Learning Circles at P2PU, or something similar.

Jordan is a librarian in Boston who enjoys recommending good books to patrons and facilitating writing classes at the library. Their favorite food is spaghetti and their favorite cookie is chocolate chip. In 2016 they adopted a retired racing greyhound, renaming her after the main character in Josh Lanyon’s Adrien English Mystery Series, because why not name a beloved dog after a favorite character?! Jordan identifies as agender/ace and has no preferred pronouns. They also go by Anna.

Top image licensed under Creative Commons from charlesflickr on Flickr.