When I read Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, I found myself underlining so much that I started double underlining or even triple underlining passages that I wanted to remember. One triple underlining went to this statement: The word in language is half someone else’s… it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own. Bakhtin was arguing that meaning in language arises through dialogue, through interaction and conversation, and in this sense meaning-making is always a give and take, or a struggle, for whose meaning will gain adherence, whose “mouth” the word will end up in. Similar insights regarding words and meaning can be found in the work of I. A. Richards, Kenneth Burke, and Joseph Bentley—and I have been thinking about these concepts a lot during the last few years as I’ve watched the struggle over whose mouth the word “woke” is going to be in. In The Philosophy of Rhetoric and other works, I. A. Richards explains that in any group of words, what is missing is the meaning—because meaning arises through the interaction of the words: meaning is thus contextual and metaphorical, as well as a function of interpretation. Thus, for Richards, rhetoric becomes “the study of misunderstandings and their remedies.”  Kenneth Burke’s Language as Symbolic Action introduces the concept of “terministic screens” as a metaphor for how we are able to make meaning: language for humans is like a screen that allows us to apprehend the world, yet these screens can differ widely based on each person’s experience and context. Meanings, then, are not inherent or set, but always potentially contested. Joseph Bentley was a scholar of 18th century literature, not a rhetorician, but he developed a theory that fits well into this discussion and is very useful to rhetorical analysis. In “Semantic Gravitation: An Essay on Satiric Reduction” (Modern Language Quarterly, 1969), Bentley develops this theory as part of his analysis of how satire works, but we can see such “gravitation” at work all around us in the ways words attract and repel one another. Bentley was fond of taking a satirical love poem and showing how the startling and unexpected words associated with the woman of the poem work to pull her down, semantically, into the gutter. Other love poems, of course, do just the opposite, raising the subject of the poem to near perfection through the associated words. Jonathan Swift was a master of building such gravitational forces in both poetry and prose. All of which brings me to recent uses of the word “woke.” In “A History of “Wokeness,” Aja Romano writes: Before 2014, the call to “stay woke” was, for many people, unheard of. The idea behind it was common within Black communities at that point — the notion that staying “woke” and alert to the deceptions of other people was a basic survival tactic. But in 2014, following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, “stay woke” suddenly became the cautionary watchword of Black Lives Matter activists on the streets, used in a chilling and specific context: keeping watch for police brutality and unjust police tactics. In the years since Brown’s death, “woke” has evolved into a single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory. This framing of “woke” is bipartisan: It’s used as shorthand for political progressiveness by the left, and as a denigration of leftist culture by the right. (Vox, October 9, 2020) Romano was writing three years ago, and by now through the linguistic moves I have described above, the struggle over how “woke" will be used, interpreted, and remembered is raging. The survival tactic of acute awareness that accompanied the early history of the word has given way to a “new left” view that associates “woke” with recognition of systemic and oppressive hierarchies that characterize American history and American institutions and a focus on reparations and on watchwords of diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice that have led, on some college campuses, to ironically discriminatory policies and practices. Meanwhile, on the (far) right, woke signals those who are overly politically correct; it’s used as a slur or insult and marks an attitude that is so anti-American that it must be avoided--or outlawed, as Governor DeSantis has done in signing the Stop Woke Act that is affecting public schools across Florida and in declaring his state a place “where woke goes to die.”    Marcia Fudge with "Stay Woke Vote" t-shirt in 2018   I could go on and on giving examples of how Burke’s terministic screens, Richards’s theory of contextual meaning making, and Bentley’s semantic gravitation are at work in the struggle over “woke” – and I could speculate about Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic communication and whose “mouth” this contested term will end up in (or what else might happen to it!).  But it seems more productive to bring our students into this discussion, to ask them to discover examples of semantic gravitation at work around “woke,” to gather a body of data to examine and analyze together, and then try making up a “fact sheet” that would trace changes to the meaning of the word across time, to try their hands at writing a definition of the term that they can all accept, or even to do some field research on campus to gather fellow student responses to the word. Most important would be to give students the opportunity to put the theoretical concepts I’ve introduced above into practice and to understand how language—and meaning—shift and change under such forces. In this way, they may succeed in getting the word “woke” into their own mouths and making it their own, if only for a brief time.    Image by Rep. Marcia Fudge. ... View more

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been re-evaluating the power of digital technologies. But not, as you might expect, AI tools like ChatGPT. Actually, I’ve been pondering Google Translate.   Ten or twelve years ago, I recall discussions among ESL and FYC colleagues in which Google Translate was censured as an impediment to both language acquisition and writing development.  But within a few years, the tone had softened considerably, and many of us working with multilingual writers recognized the benefits of this Google tool for academic readers and writers trying to deal with unfamiliar vocabulary. There was a  particular value in classes with students from many language backgrounds: students with shared linguistic resources could rely on each other, but others—such as speakers of Nepali or Korean or Lingala in the class—often felt left out.  Google Translate was a resource for them, and it seemed to level the playing field. For translations of words and short sentences, this tool made sense.   Still, 1o years ago, I would not have encouraged a student to write a complete piece in a different language and produce the English version through Google Translate.     This spring, however, one of my students submitted the first draft of his literacy narrative in both Spanish and English. He had added an annotation:  the English version came from Google Translate.     My first instinct was to invite the student to my office and make it clear that he should not do this again.  But I hesitated. After all, it was not a final piece, and it was clear the student was engaged in the assignment. When I asked about his process, he explained that he just “felt more comfortable” beginning in Spanish.     So I let the process stand, and I provided feedback as I normally would, asking questions about the content, organization, word choice. The student began revising the English version. To my surprise, however, he did not delete the Spanish original on his working draft. It was a touchstone for him, a point of assessment and reflection.  The student asked questions of his own, met with our writing fellows, and discussed the piece with classmates.     He has since completed two additional assignment drafts using the compose/translate/revise method.  He recognizes the potential difficulties and risks inherent in this method, and he does not use it for every assignment. He knows he has to assess meaning, word choice, paragraph structure, and syntax.   I am not sure this process would be effective for all students, but for this student in particular, the use of Google Translate in the composing process engages him in metalinguistic and meta-rhetorical talk. As Myhill and Newman have suggested:   “Learners’ capacity to think metalinguistically about writing and to enact that thinking in the composing of text is enabled through high-quality classroom talk. . . . Potentially, classroom talk can be the cultural tool which supports the construction of shared declarative metalinguistic knowledge and the psychological tool which supports writers’ cognitive capacities to use that knowledge procedurally in the shaping of their own written texts.”  (Myhill and Newman, 2016, p. 178).    My student is certainly developing “declarative metalinguistic knowledge” and using that knowledge to shape his own written texts.   In a sense, my student is deploying all the tools and resources (community, digital, and linguistic) available to him to compose, revise, and transform meaningful texts.  His process, in fact, reminds me of my son’s artwork; my son uses a host of digital tools to transform photos into abstract works of art, as in the example below.      The initial inspiration is no longer recognizable or even recoverable: each choice my son makes takes the piece further from its original source.  But those choices are thoughtful and purposeful, made according to his initial vision of the piece. We can even see the process of composition and transformation condensed in a time-lapse video of his work.         I would love to have a time-lapse video of my student’s composing process—from his freewriting and revision in Spanish, to the first iteration of an English translation, to the interactions and edits which will ultimately lead to an essay in his final portfolio. Through notes and annotations, he has already documented at least part of his process.     Ten years ago, I might have told this student that his extensive use of Google Translate wasn’t really “writing in English.”  But like my student’s narrative or my son’s artwork, I have seen my teaching transformed through disciplinary communities, interactions with students and colleagues, and a host of digital, rhetorical, and linguistic resources.  Such transformation is certainly a good thing.   Image credit: Murray Moore ... View more

  Logical fallacies can be the source of humor or the source of the most successful acts of deceit ever pulled off. To learn to avoid fallacies in their own writing, students need to practice recognizing and understanding the fallacies in what they read and hear. They will be less susceptible to flawed logic if they practice spotting it in everyday rhetoric. Commercials and ads provide plenty of examples for practice. You can ask your students to bring in or jot down examples of fallacies they find in ads and then can discuss in class what fallacies they illustrate. Here are a few examples: Faulty Use of Authority: Mila Kunis endorsing Jim Beam. False Dilemma: “Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline.” Ad Populum: “Lipton Ice Tea. Join the Dance.” Appeal to Tradition: For lemonade (or almost anything else) — "Just like grandma used to make.” It’s not always easy to categorize logical fallacies, but the important thing is for students to recognize what is wrong with the logic even if the line between types of fallacies is sometimes blurry. Remember also that the fact that an advertising strategy is not logical does not mean that it is not effective. You may want to move from such an exercise to consider logical fallacies drawn from the news, perhaps bringing in some examples and asking the students to find others.  False Analogy: The most infamous example this month has been Fox News’ Tucker Carlson’s editing 44,000 hours of January 6th footage and characterizing the remaining brief clip as the actions of innocent sightseers being escorted through the Capitol. Post Hoc or Doubtful Cause: Because some childhood inoculations are given around the same age as parents often become aware of the first symptoms of autism in their children, a group of anti-vaxxers now object to having their children inoculated. It has been proven that the inoculations do not cause autism, but the misguided belief of a few has led to a rise in the number of cases of some diseases once virtually eliminated in the U. S. Ad Hominem: It is common in politics to attack an opponent, and in this age of a decisive split between parties, those attacks are as heated as ever. An ad hominem fallacy occurs when the person making an argument is attacked instead of his or her argument. It is an attempt to distract from the issue at hand. For example, critics have been using Biden’s age to argue that he is not fit to be president of the U.S. Slippery Slope: This sort of poor reasoning is exactly why a bank failure such as the recent one in California sends shock waves through the financial community. Unfortunately, it has happened before that the failure of one or a few banks caused a panic, which caused people to pull their money out of other banks, which caused more banks to fail. It’s not hard to find examples of bad logic, but it takes practice. Students generally enjoy these exercises. The challenge comes in seeing their own flaws in logic as they draft their essays. "I must be a cat"  by Nattiebug is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

For our 2nd writing project this semester, we are working on creating multimedia projects. The intention is to create a deeper understanding of our class’s key source, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” by James Baldwin. We are returning to this source with 3 central goals in mind: To practice part-to-whole analysis, students will find a section from “Artist’s Struggle “ that caught their attention while composing Writing Project 1. They will analyze how and why this part of the text caught their attention, and explain how this section exemplifies  Baldwin’s overall message.  To prepare for Writing Project 3, the researched essay, students will engage with deeper reading of “Artist’s Struggle.” For WP 3, students will use the section from WP 2 to find an additional source by James Baldwin that speaks to connected or similar concerns. “Artist’s Struggle” presents many of the germinal themes that Baldwin revisited throughout his life, including the idea of artists bearing witness to and recording cataclysmic events in order to move audiences to action. In investigating Baldwin’s work in more depth, the hope is that students will explore and synthesize questions and concerns from across the semester. To understand Baldwin’s work more fully, students will engage with the artistic process of writing for discovery. For facilitating this part of the assignment, I will offer examples of projects that students have created in the last several years, including videos, drawings, and collages. In reconsidering the third goal, I wondered how to introduce poetry as an additional possibility for a multimedia project. Then I remembered the concept of cross out, or erasure, poems. To create an erasure poem, the Poetry Foundation suggests the following process: “Cross out words or entire phrases to make a new poem ‘within’ or ‘underneath’ the real one.”  My thought was that, using their selected section from “Artist’s Struggle,” students use Baldwin’s original words to create their own cross out poem. I tried out this process myself  to see how it might work and what it might look like.   First, in order to have a clear reference point, I copied a sample section into a Google Doc: If I spend weeks and months avoiding my typewriter—and I do, sharpening pencils, trying to avoid going where I know I’ve got to go—then one has got to use this to learn humility. After all, there is a kind of saving egotism too, a cruel and dangerous but also saving egotism, about the artist’s condition, which is this: I know that if I survive it, when the tears have stopped flowing or when the blood has dried, when the storm has settled, I do have a typewriter which is my torment but is also my work. If I can survive it, I can always go back there, and if I’ve not turned into a total liar, then I can use it and prepare myself in this way for the next inevitable and possibly fatal disaster. But if I find that hard to do—and I have a weapon which most people don’t have—then one must understand how hard it is for almost anybody else to do it at all. (Baldwin 68) Next, I recopied the section and added cross outs using strikethrough formatting. This was not an easy process, and I spent some time figuring out what words to keep to make meaning (and a poem!) from the original section.  If I spend weeks and months avoiding my typewriter—and I do, sharpening pencils, trying to avoid going where I know I’ve got to go—then one has got to use this to learn humility. After all, there is a kind of saving egotism too, a cruel and dangerous but also saving egotism, about the artist’s condition, which is this: I know that if I survive it, when the tears have stopped flowing or when the blood has dried, when the storm has settled, I do have a typewriter which is my torment but is also my work. If I can survive it, I can always go back there, and if I’ve not turned into a total liar, then I can use it and prepare myself in this way for the next inevitable and possibly fatal disaster. But if i find that hard to do—and I have a weapon which most people don’t have—then one must understand how hard it is for almost anybody else to do it at all.  In the process of choosing the cross outs, I found myself slowing down and reading more deeply to discover how Baldwin used language to make meaning. I noticed, as if for the first time, how Baldwin used verbs, conjunctions, and punctuation to create meaning. Even though I regularly teach these stylistic features, I realized that I was creating something new from something seemingly very familiar. I looked more closely at sentences and key words to figure out how the component parts could work together as a reimagined whole. What I discovered was that erasing words and punctuation allowed me to better understand the heart of Baldwin’s message—a condensed version, in a sense. In other words, the erasure of words helped me to concretize meaning in a text where meaning can seem abstract and elusive.  I wished I had thought of this for WP 1, I noted to myself. Perhaps it would have helped with the initial struggles with the text. On the other hand, those initial struggles seem like an important part of the process. In and out of the classroom any of us might struggle to make sense of a complicated world. The hope is that having struggled with a difficult text there will be a transfer of skills that is applicable to other situations in which students find it difficult to make meaning from a first encounter.  The final step in my process was to put my strikethrough formatted text into a Word document and to use the drawing function to cross out the words in digital purple marker. Here is a screenshot of the poem:   Cross Out Poem using a section of “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” by James Baldwin Poem and Photo by Susan Bernstein March 15, 2023. It is perhaps an interesting way to teach paraphrase, as well as a different approach to the writing process and close reading and analysis. Indeed, as with any form of interpretation based on existing evidence, I imagine that the same passage would yield many different cross out poems. But for the moment, the hope is that students will experience for themselves what it means, as artists writing for discovery, to struggle with their integrity. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Xinqiang Li, a writing instructor at Michigan State University. Class as People It’s the students who have inspired me to bring out the best in my teaching. Their eager questions, timely submissions, and even the smiley faces at the end of their emails remove my nervousness and tiredness at the beginning of the semester. They remind me to teach the class as people. Gradually, I’ve learned to imagine the class as a tea house conversation. I step off the platform, walk among the students, and change the sentence “Writing is an epistemic and recursive process” into “How many drafts do you usually write?” Then, I see eyes light up in the class. ... View more

Neil Young’s celebrated anthem “My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue)” of 1979 was a response to the punk-inspired insistence at the time that rock music was passé, at best, or dead at worst. There could be little doubt that reports of the death of rock-and-roll were highly exaggerated, as New Wave, Heavy Metal, Grunge, Alt-Rock, Post-Punk, and other new sub-genres revitalized music through the 1980s and into the ‘90s.  But as time subtracts one rock legend after another (the death of Gary Rossington being the most recent as I write these words), it may not be so premature any longer to wonder whether the once mighty House of Rock is falling into musical irrelevance. The most obvious place to start in an evaluation of the decline of rock-and-roll is with its generational history: Rock emerged in the 1950-60s as the musical voice of the Baby Boom generation, replacing jazz and swing in the pantheon of popular culture.  It evolved rapidly, producing new styles and sub-genres even as the Boomers gave way to Gen X. The sky, to borrow a line from Tom Petty, seemed to be the limit.  But a look at the most recent Grammy Awards reveals just how things have changed as the Millennials and Gen Z have settled into their place as the successors of today’s popular music.  Among the 66 awards categories this year, five were devoted to rhythm-and-blues, three to rap, and three to blues.  Lizzo won Record of the Year, and Beyoncé broke the record for Grammy awards.  For its part, Pop, as a genre in and of itself, loomed large, as it does throughout the world of contemporary popular music.  Meanwhile, there were just four categories devoted to rock, with Brandi Carlile—an alt-country star with rock-and-roll chops—taking two of them, while Ozzy Osbourne—a flash from the past if there ever was one—garnering the other two.  Adam Granduciel and The Black Keys, two more recent representatives of the rock tradition, were in the running but failed to bring home any trophies. It is evident that rock-and-roll, as we used to say, is no longer where it’s at, with such scant attention being paid to the most current bearers of the torch.  But there is more to the matter than the simple inevitabilities of generational change; after all, Gen X carried the rock tradition forward—it didn’t bury it.  To see what deeper causes are behind the decline of rock we have to examine its racial rather than generational history. As I note in the introduction to the eighth chapter of the 10th edition of Signs of Life in the USA, “Tangled Roots: The Cultural Politics of Popular Music,” the history of American pop music is marked by racial co-creativity combined with racial marginalization and suppression, and the history of rock-and-roll is no exception.  Co-created by such pioneers as Rosetta Tharpe, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddly, and Little Richard, along with Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly, early rock-and-roll was very quickly segregated and stratified. Black performers were shunted to the side (often re-categorized into rhythm-and-blues), while white performers, most strikingly by way of the British Invasion, became the face and future of rock-and-roll.  Rock, in short, became coded as White. The ongoing waxing of such genres as rhythm-and-blues, soul, and rap, when seen against the waning of rock, perhaps suggests a cultural shift away from this history of racial repression in music, as well as the emergence of a new social dynamic in the world of contemporary music.   Photo by Mick Haupt (2020), used under the Unsplash License. ... View more

The work I have done on listening—inspired by Krista Ratcliff’s groundbreaking Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness (2005), and by long talks about “soundscapes” with a good friend who is blind—led me to stumble onto sound studies, which focuses on the concept of “sound” in modern times and most recently on technologies of sound. And then when I read Nicole Furlonge’s magical Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature (2018), I started trying hard to hear the voices in books—and to hear, really hear, the voices of those around me, particularly students. So, you can imagine that when I ran across a book called Permission to Speak: How to Change What Power Sounds Like (2023), I was instantly intrigued. This book, by speech coach and linguist Samara Bey, grew out of Bey’s experience of literally losing her voice during her grad school years, and her discovery that the troublesome nodules growing on her vocal cords and impeding her speech were caused by: her lowering her voice, mostly unconsciously, to a tone not comfortable for her. In attempts to sound a certain way—a powerful way—she had come close to silencing herself. This experience led, eventually, to her career as a speech coach and consultant, working with professionals ranging from Pierce Brosnan to Gal Gadot, and others who want help finding or reclaiming their voice. What does power sound like to you?   What intrigued Bey in her studies of voices was the “authoritative voice” she heard so much about. How did one acquire such a voice? She discusses this at some length in her introduction, but it turns out the voice of authority sounds like “straight, white, rich, remarkably large men… They are who we tend to believe. They are out experts and anchors and leaders and heroes.” Take a look at courses on “executive presence” or “how to sound like a leader,” she says, and you’ll find advice to speak slowly, keeping your voice low and steady and avoiding emotion. Hence the subtitle of her book: How to Change What Power Sounds Like. In eight chapters, she guides readers (speakers!) through discussions of breathing, vocal tics and habits, pitch and tone, the use of emotion, liking your own voice, and owning the words you choose to use. She asks, “How could we be seen and heard when we’re scrambling to hide the parts of ourselves that don’t fit the standard and squeezing our voices into the mold that was never meant to fit us?” —and goes on to argue that we can resist that “standard” and, indeed, even change it. Bey provides lots and lots of concrete examples of learning to hear and to really like your own voice, and how to inhabit it in ways that will connect you to other people. It’s her belief (and her experience) that learning about and embodying your own voice is the path toward “fundamental human coexistence” and to the “promise of belonging and the pleasure of community. It’s saying Let’s care about things together. Public speaking is just caring about things together, bigger.” Bey invites readers to join her in figuring out how they sound when they “actually believe that”—and to join her in a movement to change what power sounds like. I haven’t finished reading this book yet, but I can already see excellent applications for teaching, and for learning to listen not only to our students’ attempts to emulate the standard “voice of authority” but to the voices that carry their deepest sense of self.   Photo by Bogomil Mihaylov on Unsplash. ... View more

I have found necessary community this year in the pedagogical reading groups offered through our University Center for Excellence in Teaching. I was notably inspired by Kevin M. Gannon’s bold book Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto, which I have written about before. And while I’m still reading James M. Lang’s thought-provoking Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It, I have also written about his helpful reminder that “dis-traction” means “to drag something apart.” Taken together, I’ve come to realize that when we hold our students’ attention, we are holding the classroom community together, too. I’d been feeling like this semester had a pre-pandemic zhuzh to it, but now that midterms are hitting and spring break isn’t yet here, students are noticeably dragging and less engaged in discussion. Christine Cucciarre’s recent “Tiny Teaching Story” about the lingering weight of the pandemic is a sorrowful snapshot of this strange moment. This past week, all these threads twined together as I attended a webinar by Gannon on “A Pedagogy of Hope During the Time of Monsters,” hosted by IUPUI’s Center for Teaching and Learning. According to Gannon, the “monsters” of today are the anti-democratic and anti-education forces at work in the U.S., but the “hope” comes from remembering that we can inspire agency in our students. Writing classrooms are a good place for that work. Gannon noted that learning is a social act that has both cognitive and affective components. Successful instructors give students opportunities to connect thinking and feeling, and to connect with one another. Those connections, Lang argues, are what hold students’ attention in the classroom. Similarly, Lang encourages instructors to make time in a class for students to reflect on their deeply-felt core values, citing studies which show that values-affirmation exercises can help students better articulate and access their pro-social beliefs. With both Gannon and Lang in mind, I zhuzhed my usual mid-semester student self-reflection  by asking my students to list their core values in their notes at the start of class. After a few minutes, I asked them to share what they wished to with peers around them.  After some uncertainty, a buzz slowly rose in the room. Students were smiling, nodding heads, affirming one another. After a few more minutes, we listed what they’d been talking about on the board, and students seemed to find the overlap in their values revelatory. Their list included: kindness, truthfulness, generosity, humility, open-mindedness, respect for diversity, honesty (and more). Almost poetically, the sun poked through Indiana’s winter perma-cloud at this moment, flooding our classroom with warmth just as I chalked the last inspirational word. That got a laugh. With that valued conversation warming the room, I asked students to reflect for me on their progress in the course so far. How are they challenging themselves? What are they happiest with? How are they hoping to grow by the semester’s end? Since I will be handing these reflections back to them at the semester’s end for their summative reflections, I also urged them to write an encouraging note to their future selves. I was initially met with some nervous chuckles, but when I collected the papers, I was touched to see how many students were as kind and encouraging to themselves as they had been in many discussions with one another. In his talk, Gannon quoted abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba: “Hope is a discipline—an action, a practice.” In those sunshine-washed moments in our classroom this week, that’s what I witnessed. To me, and to my students, I believe, this practice felt necessary.   Photo by April Lidinsky (2023) ... View more

  Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin toddlers, Dylan and Escher.   Many times in my teaching career, I've found myself hovering over students to make sure I can help them if they need it. There is nothing innately wrong with my desire to help; it’s just that many of us have this desire to help so ingrained in us that we can go overboard. I will never forget when a student said "Professor, please step away from my computer. I've got this. Also, you scared the crap out of me." I often have to remind myself to step back (literally!) and trust students. In contemplating my propensity for hovering, I’ve thought about how my late grandmother, Mabel, would send her four children out the door to explore nature, fully trusting their ability to play and learn independently. As part of my commitment to be more like Grandmom Mabel and not be a helicopter professor, I’ve made a commitment to incorporate in each unit of study at least one self-directed student activity that takes place during the class timeframe but outside of the walls of the classroom. Recently, I designed a photography activity for my Humanities 101 class that was based on Ancient Chinese philosophy and aesthetics: specifically, Taoism, ancient Chinese landscape painting, and Confucianism. I asked students to pair up and take twenty-five minutes in the halls of the college or outside on nearby Spring Garden Street to take a photo with a smartphone (or make a drawing) that represented an element of one of the spiritual or aesthetic philosophies. Afterward, students answered questions about their photograph, what the composition represented, and how contemporary American culture was present in their photo. Students’ responses were rich; they identified spaces on campus meant for collaboration that wound up being devoid of students. They talked about how architecture communicates feelings of stability even if that stability might not exist, and they mentioned some of their thoughts about why our college’s new learning commons might mirror a more collectivist ideology, despite the fact that we are living in an individualistic culture. A few students who had been shy about participating in class showed their creativity in this activity by turning Wawa coffee cups into timber-frame-inspired ancient Chinese architecture and photographing the results. Without my hovering over and actively surveilling them, my students could breathe, think, and engage with each other more freely, all in service of our class’s learning goals. Because the activity happened during class time, we were able to debrief and look at the photos together once they returned to our classroom, while the energy of their discoveries was still alive in the students. Be like Grandmom Mabel: open the door and send students through it. And with a lesson plan that invites students back at the end of class to share and synthesize their discoveries as a group, you can confirm, as I have, that students make important discoveries and take insight-producing creative risks when freed from the distracting noise of a helicopter hovering nearby. ... View more

The news about Open AI’s ChatGPT changes on a daily basis, so good or bad ideas about how to address it may be quickly upended. However, I would like generate what I hope is a useful list of ways our colleagues in various writing-based fields are addressing the challenges, and opportunities, this new technology presents. In this month’s post, I’ll begin with strategies that view the artificial intelligence chatbot as, at best, a nuisance, and at worst an existential threat to the future of education—an invention that is harmful rather than salutary. Next month, I’ll focus on approaches that actively seek to engage with ChatGPT, to make it a tool for learning. Do nothing. In “Why I’m Not Worried About My Students Using ChatGPT,” University of Wisconsin-Madison philosophy professor Lawrence Shapiro reckons that if only about 6 of the 28 students in his class are likely to cheat with ChatGPT (his calculations are a bit mysterious), then “It makes no sense to me that I should deprive 22 students who can richly benefit from having to write papers only to prevent the other six from cheating (some of whom might have cheated even without the help of a chatbot).” He argues that “the cheaters are only hurting themselves — unless we respond to them by removing writing assignments from the syllabus.” His conclusion: “I say, who cares?” Responding to Shapiro’s article, former English instructor Jane Leibbrand writes that “Lawrence Shapiro’s head is in the clouds.” From her experience, she says she can assure Shapiro “that close to 100 percent, if not all, of his students will use ChatGPT if they have access to it to write themes for his class. This technology is too much of a temptation for anybody not to use it.” Whether the percentage of likely cheaters is 20% or almost 100%—how could we ever know?—doing nothing seems like a poor option. As high school English teacher Peter Greene writes in Forbes, ChatGPT is “not the apocalypse, but it’s not a nothingburger, either.” Don’t grade. If doing nothing is not a realistic option, what should an instructor do? One idea making the rounds is to eliminate grading altogether. Dartmouth philosophy professor and cognitive science program chair Adina Roskies is blunt: “I certainly am not interested in grading a lot of papers that are written by a machine because it’s extremely time consuming…And it’s not a learning experience for the student, it’s a huge waste of time.” She muses: “Maybe I’ll just stop grading, because it’s not about the grading. It’s about learning stuff and learning how to think about stuff.” The case against grades—they are biased against certain groups, they cause too much stress, they don’t accurately measure performance, they take the fun out of education, etc.—has been made for years, and abolishing grading might well make academic life easier for both students and teachers. For some students, it could shift their focus from easy last-minute ploys to complete an assignment (like using ChatGPT) to the more rewarding endeavor of actually learning the course material. However, there’s no guarantee that such a transformation would take place. If students are given course credit without having to do any work, if there is no organized way of assessing and evaluating their progress, the meaning of a degree would, in the eyes of many future employers, be minimal. Grade using narrative evaluations. Many students and professors, especially those enrolled in STEM courses, would openly rebel against doing away with grades, but there is an alternative: narrative or performance evaluations. This option may make more sense in the humanities where, after all, such evaluations have been around for a long time at institutions like Antioch University, Evergreen State College, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Clearly, this method of grading would not eliminate ChatGPT cheating, but it would insist that instructors provide a written overview of their students’ class performance, which could address lack of drafts, major inconsistencies between in-class and out of class writing, and so on. Use AI to fight AI. If technology is the problem, might it also be the solution? In February, ChatGPT introduced a new tool, AI Text Classifier, which helps detect the difference between human and computer-generated text, and no doubt other plagiarism detection software focusing on AI speech will soon be on the market. Still, these products are themselves fallible. Ian Bogost notes in The Atlantic that “As OpenAI explains, the tool will likely yield a lot of false positives and negatives, sometimes with great confidence. In one example, given the first lines of the Book of Genesis, the software concluded that it was likely to be AI-generated. God, the first AI.” Forbid the use of ChatGPT. While the gesture may seem quixotic, many institutions have already forbidden the use of ChatGPT by their students. In January, for instance, New York City Schools banned ChatGPT. A spokesperson for the schools claimed the move was the result of “concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of contents.” Oxford and Cambridge both recently prohibited ChatGPT, declaring its use would be considered “academic misconduct.” And yet outlawing ChatGPT will not affect the very students that are most likely to use it. It certainly won’t make it go away. If the solution were that simple, there would be no international furor—and no need for this blog post, or the one next month, where we’ll look at Open AI as a source of positive discussion and learning.   ... View more

Have you ever heard anyone use the “flight attendant speech” as a rationale for self-care? First put on your own oxygen mask, and then assist those around you.      That illustration—which has nearly attained the status of cliché—came to my mind this weekend as I attended a conference focused on student success: students are more likely to succeed in our classrooms when we attend to the needs of those who teach and support them. I learned, for example, about resources related to ADHD and autism (such as Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman), not only because they would illuminate the struggles of my students, but also because I have co-workers with autism or ADHD.  It was a subtle shift, to be sure, but I heard this refrain again and again: the support and accommodations we design for students should extend to instructors, tutors, success coaches, counselors, and testing coordinators—these needs don’t “expire” when the diploma is earned.     Work in higher education may abound with insecurities: “I couldn’t afford the conference hotel—we had to find a cheaper place.” “Our co-presenter made a video—she lost her funding for the conference.” “These are great ideas, but I am not allowed to make any changes to the online course assignments or prompts.  Even if it’s not working for my students, I can’t alter any course components.” “I was diagnosed with autism as an adult—and I was not sure what would happen if the people I work with found out.” “The room is so bright—and I can’t dim the lights. I am always on the verge of a migraine.”  “I can’t tell them about my chronic pain or request accommodations. I am lucky to have a job, and I can’t risk it.” “I can’t say no to the overload, even though the pay barely covers my extra child-care and travel.” “I generally pack a bag with toilet paper, paper towels, and a ream of printing paper—I can’t count on there being any when I get to campus.” “They tell me I must teach online to keep the job, but I don’t have reliable internet at home.” “They said our restrooms are ADA compliant, but only about a few of them actually are.  I have to take an elevator up two floors to get to the restroom that I can use with my wheelchair—and someone is constantly putting signs and boxes in the hallway outside that restroom.” Photo by youssef naddam on Unsplash And of course, there are the realities of political scrutiny in higher education, efforts to undermine academic freedom or tenure protections, and added burdens for faculty to ensure student success or achieve metrics of productivity.  Moreover, policy decisions about developmental education and corequisite instruction are often made in accordance with narratives (even false narratives, as Alexandros Goudas has carefully documented over the past decade) that are far removed from our daily work with students. After over 15 years in community colleges, I know the feeling of being at the tail end of a very long chain, with no voice to speak truth—the reality of our classrooms—to those in power.     I am sure most of you do not need me to point out the precarious conditions of our labor—conditions some of you may be dealing with daily. You well know how these conditions affect our students’ learning. But I needed the reminder this past weekend.     How are you addressing insecurities facing colleagues at your institution? ... View more

  When we ask our students to read and analyze arguments, we may ask them to locate the one sentence that best sums up the claim being made in the reading. When there is not a single sentence that does so, we can ask them to try to sum up what they think the claim is in one sentence. It is useful to point out that in a longer piece of writing, there may be claims within that claim that are developed in a paragraph or a part of the larger piece. A topic sentence may serve as the claim that an individual paragraph is making. All of these smaller claims, which may also serve as topic sentences, work together to support the larger claim of the whole piece. Providing support for any claim is crucial to the success of an argument. Our students need to be able to identify the different types of support offered in support of claims. When it is their turn to write an argument, they can check through the types of support to determine if they have used all available means of support for their particular topic. Logos, or a logical appeal, generally depends on inductive or deductive reasoning or the relationship between specifics and generalizations. Many arguments require the support of specific examples to convince a reader of the truth of a claim. For a short in-class assignment, you can ask students to find an article that uses logos appeals as examples and bring them to class for further discussion about how this appeal is used. Then, have students write a paragraph in which they support the claim using information from the article as their support.     Here’s another short exercise you can use to have students consider the link between claim and support. Display the results of a survey,  presented in a graph or chart form (you may have to remove the headline or summarizing statements).  Next, ask students to write a topic sentence they could support using the information in the survey. Then instruct students to actually use the information in the survey to write a paragraph supporting their topic sentence. It is important to note that usually a variety of different topic sentences could be supported with a graphic that is rich in data. Pathos, or emotional appeal, maybe a bit more difficult to pinpoint but can also be crucial to the success of an argument, depending on the topic. It may be easy to argue that new laws that restrict voter access are being passed, a claim of fact. It may take an additional emotional appeal to argue that they should not be, a claim of policy. The emotional appeal can come from explaining the effects these restrictions will have on individual Americans. One article that appears in both Elements of Argument and The Structure of Argument that illustrates the emotional appeal well is “An Unjust Sacrifice” by Father Robert A. Sirico. This article is based on a true case in which a judge had ordered that eight-week-old conjoined twins be separated. If they were not separated, both twins would inevitably die. The surgery to separate them would mean that the weaker of the twins would not survive, but the stronger one would. The matter was in court because the parents were not willing to sacrifice one of their children even if it was the only way for the other to survive. Sirico, a Catholic priest, defends the parents’ point of view. The headlines are full of stories that illustrate the relationship between claim and support. The arguments that should be viewed with skepticism are those that provide little or no support for the claim—or that depend on faulty information. Articles on these controversial issues can complement the examples provided in the textbook and keep the study of argument up to date. "Scales of Justice Law Dictionary Gavel USA Flag"  by Allen Allen is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

A few weeks ago I climbed the steps at 100 East End Avenue in New York, which the independent Chapin school calls home. I was there to celebrate teachers, the mission driving The Academy for Teachers, a nonprofit dedicated to honoring and supporting teachers “as valued professionals in need of the latest knowledge and inspiration.” Conceived of and directed by teacher and writer Sam Swope (see his The Araboolies of Liberty Street and I am a Pencil, for example), the Academy urges all of us to give teachers the R E S P E C T that Aretha sings about, along with “the support they need to keep them where they belong—in the classroom inspiring our children for years to come.” In pursuit of this goal, Sam and his team at the Academy offer “master classes” for teachers from public, private, and charter schools to attend three ninety-minute sessions led by artists and thinkers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Gloria Steinem, Jane Goodall, Julia Alvarez, Robert Battle, and others. The intense workshops and conversations led by these experts continue to enrich and inspire the teachers who get to spend time with them, so much so that these teachers are four times more likely than others to stay in the classroom, often against the great odds that all of us know about. The faculty for these master classes come from across the disciplines and artistic fields. On this particular evening, we are gathering to hear The Kronos Quartet perform “A Teacher’s Suite,” commissioned by the Academy to honor teachers and featuring the voices of many of the Academy fellows who have participated in master classes. Kronos had led transformative master classes for the Academy, working with teachers of music to bring new ways of thinking and experiencing music into their classrooms, and this concert followed up on those classes and showcased Kronos’s own interest in and dedication to teaching and to learning.     A teacher teaches a classroom of students   I was sitting with a large group of teachers that evening as we experienced the magic that Kronos so often produces: I could actually feel the room expand with hope and pride as the music cascading around us, could feel what it means for teachers to feel honored and respected. Such a small thing, giving respect. And yet it can change lives and, perhaps, the world. In addition to master classes and special performances, the Academy publishes small chapbooks, written by master class teachers—about a teacher who was important to them. I have a collection of these gems, and looking through them now I’m drawn to one by Jacqueline Woodson, author of Brown Girl Dreaming. She remembers “Ms. Pat,” who “taught me most about what it meant to move through the world as an empath, as a philanthropist, as a thinker, as a doer, as a truly good human being.” Ms. Pat, she goes on, “rarely stepped into our classrooms. Instead, she invited us into her office—and she guided us. She truly guided us.” A teacher like that, Woodson concludes, “stays with you for a lifetime.”   I hope that each of us has a “Ms. Pat” held close in our memories, and I hope that our students will all encounter such teachers, those who will be with them for a lifetime. In the meantime, if you are reading this and have a few spare moments, check out the Academy for Teachers, and consider contributing to their mission. Director Sam Swope dreams of similar academies springing up in cities across the country, all dedicated to supporting and honoring teachers. That’s a dream I can believe in.    Image by Kenny Eliason.    ... View more

At midterm, I wondered about creating a space for imagination to take hold—away, if only for a moment, from the stressors students and teachers alike experience at mid-semester in and out of school. So I decided to do midterm icebreaker questions using the learning management system’s discussion board.  My hope is that icebreakers will allow students an interactive and alternative space for writing that would also be outside the box of working on rough drafts and revisions for their first writing project. After searching the web, I found several helpful resources for questions, such as Roommate Icebreakers | Roommate Relationships from Dickinson College, Icebreaker Activities from Ohio State Teaching and Learning Center, and Online Icebreaker Ideas from the University of Washington, Bothell.  First, the questions would not require students to disclose any personal information about themselves, their families, or friends. The questions would not make assumptions about students’ class backgrounds by asking about their childhood, travel experiences, food preferences, or living arrangements. There are so many reasons that students might feel uncomfortable about disclosing such personal details, including immigration status, food and housing insecurity, funding their own education or taking care of family responsibilities that precluded leisure time for extensive travel, or even for summer vacations.  Next, taking inspiration from the live streamed HopePunk session that I attended remotely at 4C23, I wanted students to focus on imagination and to reflect on potentially positive aspects of their lives. The presenters for the HopePunk session, Jennie Vaughn, Cynthia Mwenja, and Erin Chandler, emphasized teaching with radical kindness toward students in a student-centered classroom. The hope is that students, in the wake of the pandemic, would extend the same kindness toward themselves.  After much consideration, I composed the following questions: What five words describe you best and why did you choose those words? What do you value in your life? How does that value inspire your world in and out of school? What is your dream writing space and why would you want to write there? If you could meet any historical figure, who would you choose and why? What would be your superhero name and your superpower? Why? If you had to create a slogan for your life, what would it be and why? What is the strangest ice-breaker question you have been asked? I wanted to test out the questions by attempting to respond to a question myself. The question I chose was number five: What would be your superhero name and your superpower? Why? As a neurodivergent teacher and learner, I identified my superpower as hyper focus. Hyper focus allows me to write and plan lessons anywhere, especially on my long commutes on public transit to and from campus. I keep a small journal in my bag and write to keep track of my thoughts coming and going to class.   There’s something about the kinesthetic work of handwriting and the intentionality of keeping a specific journal book for these purposes that doesn’t usually happen on electronic devices, even as I compose my blog digitally. The journal is an open space for free writing (in other words, perfect for hyper focus), and sometimes I can repurpose parts of the journal for more formal writing.  Nevertheless, I struggled with creating a superhero name. But then my transfer stop came and I had to switch from the train to the bus.  Walking delicately through the slushy remains of the previous evening snowstorm, I had a flash of insight. My superhero name would be the Masked Commuter. There are still a fair amount of commuters in my city who mask on public transit and I am one of them. I mask to fight the evils of coronavirus, and as a buffer for residual anxiety in public spaces. Anxiety, of course, is the kryptonite of hyper focus, the shadow side. Anxiety is hyper focusing on the triggers that activate anxiety.  Flow, the superpower, is the hyper focus needed for working for a better world, fighting Coronavirus, planning lessons, teaching, and writing. Hyper focus in flow is what opens public transit as a writing space and allows me to tap into the imagination needed for teaching in person in the wake of this pandemic. Imagination then builds on the flow of hyper focus, and serves as an additional superpower for the Masked Commuter. Flow, and any superpower, can be used  to reflect and act on alternative approaches to persistent problems. The purpose, as ever, is to offer opportunities for students, and ourselves, to learn and grow as writers.    What is your superpower?   Photo  by Susan Bernstein January 26, 2023     ... View more

For years – decades maybe!—I taught a course on the history of writing, a subject that has long fascinated me and that I found could be very engaging to undergraduate students as well. When I asked them “where does writing come from,” I was usually greeted with blank stares: writing is so ubiquitous, so all around them, that surely it must have always been with us. That’s more true of speech, which developed from communicating through sounds: unless a particular condition prevent it, we develop speech naturally and socially, without being formally taught. But writing, not so much: we must be taught to write, to make the marks that carry meaning. Writing’s history can be traced back at least 45,000 years ago to cave drawings in Indonesian islands and a bit later in Spain and France. These paintings tell stories about animals and people: they are spellbinding in their vigor and beauty and show how determined people have been to communicate across time and space. But such paintings did not create systems of writing. Those seem to have grown out of token systems for counting, cataloguing, and trading agricultural products used in 4th millennium BCE Mesopotamia–which led to cuneiform, the Sumerian script that is one of, if not the earliest, known system of writing. And cuneiform is the script used circa 2265 BCE by Enheduanna (whose name means “ornament of heaven”), high priestess of the moon god and daughter of Sargon the Great, who helped link the Sumerian goddess Inanna to the Akkadian goddess Ishtar and, in doing so, helped create a common belief system necessary to the founding of what some consider the world’s first empire.   Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad   Enheduanna wrote numerous temple hymns and three long poems dedicated to the all-powerful goddess of love and war, Inanna. But Enheduanna did even more than write poems that were copied out by school children for hundreds of years: she also claimed authorship, the first writer we know of to do so. In her poem “Exaltation of Inanna,” she compares her writing with giving birth:   I have given birth, Oh exalted lady, [to this song] for you. That which I recited to you at midnight May the singer repeat it to you at noon!    And in concluding one of her temple hymns, she says: “The compiler of the tablet [is] Enheduanna. My lord, that which has been created [here] no one has created before.” The translations of Enheduana’s work, completed only in the early twentieth century, reveal her as a gifted poet, with a strong and commanding voice that weaves personal narrative into her praise for Inanna. Enheduanna’s voice echoes down to us some 4500 years later with haunting clarity, marking one moment in the long history of writing: from exterior to interior and back, from recording information to expressing an embodied agent.  This winter, New York’s Morgan Library has mounted an exhibit about Enheduanna and other women who were actively participating in Mesopotamian society of the time. Called “She Who Wrote,” the exhibit presents nearly 100 artefacts, including cuneiform tablets and wall plaques as well as cylinder seals that show the many ways in which women participated in society at this time—as weavers, bakers, brewers, potters, musicians, and more. In a place and time when women were allowed to own property (think of that!), these cylinders show women sitting with men, perhaps as equals. Enheduanna captures much about her own life and times, in writing, a legacy that has survived to the present day, providing a haunting reminder of how long and how intricately writing has been entwined with human development. This short post can barely scratch the surface of writing’s history, or of its relationship to how we see, think, feel, and know. But together with speech, which supesedes it, this technology has profoundly shaped us and our worlds. Amid the current angst over ChatGPT and other advances in Artificial Intelligence, it is wise to recall some of this history, to recall how writing has evolved to meet society’s needs and purposes (often related to business and commerce in the West, to ritual in the East), how It has shifted, changed, and adapted to needs and circumstances, as well as to other technologies. Plato mourned the development of writing, saying it would kill memory and sever connections between speakers and their audiences. In some ways, he was right, though other memory systems stepped in to help (see Mary Carruthers’s riveting account of such systems in her The Book of Memory). And it’s easy to argue that writing did much to bring people together rather than to separate then. But changes to technology have always engendered anxiety and fear, demanding that we attend carefully and thoughtfully to the consequences—both intended and unintended—of such changes.  Today, we are clearly in a period of profound shifts in communication, and it is difficult to see where they will lead. But I am certain that while the capacities and uses (perhaps even the definition) of writing will shift and change, writing will continue to evolve. And writing, we should recall, has been a thoroughly human endeavor throughout its long history. It remains to be seen whether non-human machines can build the same kind of symbiotic relationship—between human mind and written codes—that has brought us into this challenging new territory.     The image used in this post is in the public domain. ... View more