In a recent episode of the Mystery AI-Hype Theater Podcast, special guest Raina Bloom, Reference Services Coordinator for University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, referred to an ad for Google Pixel that aired during the Superbowl this year.  In the ad, a man uses Google AI to prepare for a job interview.  Bloom noted that the ad offers a “dark” reality, as if the man portrayed says, “I don't have any collaborators. I don't have any colleagues. I don't have any sources of support who can assist me when I'm doing this job interview or doing this research.” The best he can do is to rehearse with his Google-based LLM.   The Googleplex, Google's Headquarters in Mountain View, California.       This morning, I saw an interview with the CEO of Nomi AI, which promises an “AI companion with memory and a soul.”  Talkpal, an LLM that styles itself as a “language teacher,” promises that clients will learn five times faster. Thetawise and CK12 dangle the hope of success through AI math tutors. Google has even introduced a “co-scientist” who will collaborate with researchers to “generate novel hypotheses and research proposals.” With varying degrees of sophistication, these platforms offer the rewards of human relationships—without the humans. If efficiency and scalability are the standard metrics by which we judge educational services and budgeting, it’s clear to see where we are headed. Why pay for tutoring and support staff for corequisite and developmental English students? Just get an institutional license for an LLM! Why pay for researchers to go to conferences to network and brainstorm?  Get a “co-scientist” site license for the group. And why bother having professors keep office hours? Train AI avatars to answer student questions 24/7. Since much of the work of faculty and support staff can be off-loaded onto AI assistants, we can cut positions, reduce costs, and make education more accessible to all. If the AI startups and corporations can frame the dismantling of higher education as “restructuring” that aligns with democratic values, they will reap billions in profit. I am not a Luddite; I use and celebrate technology. My amazing students this semester use technology to compose, revise, edit, collaborate, and communicate. I am staring at a screen as I type this, and I have assigned adaptive online learning practice for my students as they develop editing skills. Still, I worry. My students deserve an instructor, not an algorithm that generates synthetic text. Granted, I don’t answer their emails at 2:00 AM, nor do I provide unlimited office hours for tutoring each week. I have the limitations common to all humans. But unlike the AI bots, I connect my students with writing fellows and writing tutors; those same tutors and I may show up for their band concerts, their sporting events, meals at the restaurants where they work, or services at the churches where they worship. The faculty and staff where I teach cheer for students at graduation and pose for pictures with them and their families; some of my students have come to my home, where we have shared a cup of coffee and worked on joint research.   My students deserve advisors who will talk to them about career choices and challenges—not AI-driven bots that get them registered quickly so that they will complete a curriculum “efficiently.”  When they have questions about financial aid, they need our human financial aid counselors, not a chatbot.   Education is both a human and a relational endeavor—based on human need and entrusted to human collaboration. We cannot protect this very human responsibility by de-humanizing it. Fast integration of AI in instruction and academic support may indeed drive down costs and yield savings to the institution. But in the end, what exactly are we saving?     Photo from Wikimedia Commons ... View more

In October of 2024, Marc Watkins opened a thoughtful discussion on open disclosure of AI tools; after considering his comments and my response to them, I created an AI disclosure guide for my spring 2025 courses. Early in this term, I explained to my students my concerns about generative AI and the rationale for using a disclosure statement for AI tools. I think I foolishly hoped that having a disclosure policy would mean that I wouldn’t have to deal with potential AI-based plagiarism in my courses. A week ago, I noticed a suspicious paragraph in theearly draft of an essay from a multilingual student in my FYC course. This student had spoken to me early on about wanting to make sure she learned English “the right way,” without recourse to AI tools that would get her in trouble. Given the overall voice and development in the essay, the presence of this one paragraph seemed surprising—and to my frustration, the student had not included an AI disclosure.  In a quiet moment before the next class, I asked her about tools she was using in her revision process, and she explained that she was avoiding AI—she was using “only the Microsoft rewrite tool” embedded in the latest version of MS-Word as a help on vocabulary in a paragraph that was giving her trouble. I had not heard of the rewrite tool, so I did some digging—and I learned it is an embedded AI feature that’s been around for a while. It promises to improve “fluency,” “phrasing,” and “readability,” according to a Microsoft blog. It’s certainly an AI-tool, but my student did not know this. After all, it was embedded in her word processing program along with grammar and spelling tools. I can envision instances where using this tool could be strategic for my multilingual international students—and also where it could lead to charges of cheating. As I thought about the growing number of tools and services available to student writers—as well as my own inability to keep up with these tools—I thought I might reconsider my AI disclosure policy. So, for the students’ second major project in the FYC course, I have asked all students to include a disclosure statement on the cover page of the project. In that statement, they should list all the tools and resources they used to develop the project, whether AI-tools, citation generators, graphic templates, translators, image generators, or even spell-checkers (for this first round). I’m also asking them to include disclosures (or acknowledgements) for human help—our writing fellows, the writing center, parents, or even peers who read over the paper. I gave them some model statements to follow: I used Google Translate to help me ___________________ in this project. I used MetaAI to create an image of ________________ to illustrate the second term in my project. I used my Canva account to design the poster presentation for this project. Kady J, my writing fellow, helped me organize my last three paragraphs. My groupmates Dani R. and Mari T. gave me suggestions on how to make the third section longer. I am sure other instructors are doing similar things—in fact, I found some similar guidance from Cummings Graduate Institute. For me, the broader form of disclosure and acknowledgement (not just AI) alleviates the pressure of determining what is and is not a form of AI, as well as what counts as an acceptable or strategic resource as opposed to cheating. In fact, these disclosures may encourage students to expand their use of resources as their strategies are validated in feedback and conferences.  Moreover, I have assured students that if they disclose their tools during the various drafting and revising stages—such that we can discuss and address anything that is not appropriate before they submit the final portfolio—they are not going to be penalized or find themselves facing accusations of cheating. While such disclosures do not eliminate the possibility of AI misuse or cheating, if students engage in the drafting process with disclosures throughout, I think we are inviting on-going conversations to support their linguistic and rhetorical development. Ultimately, students will see a record of collaboration, multimodality, and rhetorical strategy—all of which may become transferable resources for future writing.    Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash ... View more

Today’s featured blogger is Holly Bauer, author of Food Matters: A Bedford Spotlight Reader. Food is an essential part of society. Food sustains us. Food provides our bodies with the nutrients and energy needed to stay alive and healthy. Food unites us. Whether it’s a late-night tub of ice cream with a friend or a holiday gathering, food allows us to connect with our family, friends, and even community. Food distinguishes us. Our diets portray our cultural background, identity, and racial history. And most shockingly, food divides us. Although food is integral to our livelihood, millions of people across the United States and the world do not have equitable access to healthy food. That said, how do we motivate students to care about it? The fourth edition of Food Matters offers several ways to connect students’ lived experiences to the larger social, cultural, political, and ethical realities that affect food consumption and production. Here are some potential ways to make food justice relevant to students:   Make it personal I find that students enjoy writing about food choices when they can relate their personal experiences to the broader academic questions posed by the readings. This edition features readings from Jill McCorkle and Lily Wong, who take a closer look at how their food choices reflect their identity and values. Using these readings as model texts, you can ask students to explore why they eat what they eat, how it reinforces their sense of self, and how they would be impacted if they did not have access to these foods.    Make it local Connecting issues raised by the readings to local food issues can help students understand the larger debates and complexities around food justice initiatives. You can ask students to examine campus resources, such as a basic needs hub, campus dining options, and food-based clubs or organizations. They can also research food-related organizations or projects in the neighboring communities, such as food banks, community gardens, indigenous food projects, or community groups focused on shared food values. Using Kathlyn Yee’s piece about black food co-ops in Ohio as a model, students can highlight the work these organizations do and analyze why they are needed.   Make it political, economic, historical, or cultural While eating is a shared human experience, many people give little thought to the broader implications of their food choices or the political and socioeconomic systems shaping those choices. Food choices are inevitably connected to nutritional science, agriculture, and cultural practices. They also say something about our values and the principles we live by. The readings in Food Matters suggest that we have a range of moral obligations and responsibilities related to food. Examining the political, economic, historical, and cultural aspects of food production and consumption helps us understand our moral obligations to other people and communities. Various writers, such as Bennet Goldstein, Ligaya Mishan, Katherine Wu, and S.E. Smith, offer ways to help students use a food justice lens to analyze our food system. Is access to enough healthy, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food a human right? How is food justice connected to other social issues, such as racial justice, environmental justice, and sustainability movements?   Make it global While everyone has a relationship with food and a vested interest in the current and future food supply, writing about food can also help students explore global questions and problems. How do we justify food waste and overconsumption when other parts of the world have food shortages and malnutrition? If we have the capacity to feed everyone, are we obligated to feed the world? Reading articles by Chad Frischmann and Mamta Mehra, Chidinma Iwu, and Lela Nargi can provide students with a framework for analyzing our food infrastructure and understanding its global reach.  The fourth edition of Food Matters is filled with readings about food justice that can be used to promote meaningful discourse about how our food infrastructure disenfranchises marginalized communities. Connecting students to food justice initiatives not only creates awareness, but it can also foster agency to make better food choices and/or advocate for better access. We all play a role in our food infrastructure, and if we want to see a change, we must acknowledge that every bite counts. ... View more

Today’s featured blogger is Andrew Hoffman, author of Monsters: A Bedford Spotlight Reader. Demands on instructors in English classrooms in some ways seem more complex than ever. We aim to build an inclusive curriculum. We encourage our students to think critically. We guide them to create coherent, relevant, and insightful texts. In many cases, we go beyond the standard college essay to include other forms of meaningful communication, such as videos, oral presentations, and other forms of writing. In the new edition of Monsters, there is plenty of material to inspire your students while engaging in meaningful, relevant discourse.             The third edition of Monsters includes more writings about monsters from around the world, expanding its view of monsters to encounter creatures from legends found in Native American stories, Latin American myths, as well as tales from Africa and Asia. After all, the human experience with monsters is universal. The cry of the Wendigo, the haunting of La Llorona, the allure of mermaids, and the power of dragons – the existence of these monsters creates an opportunity for students to analyze the roles that monsters play in cultures from all around the world. Students from diverse backgrounds do not have to be confined to pigeon-holed categories of monsters. They can examine the role that monsters have played in their own lives and histories, or learn about other cultures and peoples through the very nature of the monsters they create.             A key part of any inclusive instructional environment is a recognition of how identity is formed – and reformed – through various societal and cultural expectations and interactions. Monsters are a rich source for this conversation. Creators of monsters – or those who rethink and re-imagine monsters that are already in the popular imagination – come from as a diverse a background as today’s college students do. Examination of monster stories can lead students to question the presentation of sexuality, gender, and identity. For example, James Whale, director of the iconic 1933 movie Frankenstein, took advantage of the opportunity to create a sequel and loaded The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) with subversive images and allusions to queer culture that slipped past Hollywood censors and the mainstream heterosexual audience. Or, Jalondra A. Davis, a self-described “merwomanist,” shifts our attention from the European mermaid to figures from the African tradition, such as Mami Wata and the orisa. Even video games give us monsters that force us to question issues of sexual identity and its role in monster stories. These inquiries are not entirely new, so the current edition of Monsters retains seminal works, such as Carol Clover’s exploration of the Final Girl in horror films, and Jack Halberstam’s argument about the creation of a new monstrous queer gender in slasher films.             It is hard to turn around these days without encountering technology that is more advanced, mysterious, and potentially threatening. In prior generations, fears about technology gave us Godzilla and Frankenstein’s creature, but today’s technology has given us new fears with new expressions -- urban legends such as the Slit-Mouthed woman or the Momo Challenge in Japan, or the machines that use artificial intelligence and other advances in computer technology that threaten to overwhelm our ability to control our own world.  Indeed, preserving our humanity in the face of many threats is a key issue. Judith Clemens-Smucker argues that these fears can make us feel threatened by those who are different from us in her examination of the television series Stranger Things, and Fay Onyx points out many ways in which creators of monsters – intentionally or not – use harmful ableist ideas that promote damaging stereotypes. Fear – of the new, the different, and the difficult – motivates many of our monster stories.             Monsters, 3e, provides instructors with materials that can help create a classroom experience that is challenging, inclusive, insightful, and meaningful. The collection retains both primary and secondary sources that have proven successful in the classroom and adds new works from around the world from authors of different nations, races, ages, and perspectives. Ultimately, the study of monsters is really not the study of monsters; it’s the study of what it means to be human, in the past, in the present, and into tomorrow. ... View more

  I received two emails from students in my FYC composition course recently. While not the exact wording or details, the emails looked something like this: Dear Dr. Moore, I am not feeling well, and I don’t want to make anyone else sick. I won’t be in class this morning. I saw on the syllabus that we are doing peer workshops in class today, and I have downloaded the handout. Is this something I could make up, maybe virtually or with another class? Please let me know what else I need to do. Thank you for your time. Your student   Dear Dr. Moore, My car won’t start, so I won’t be in class this morning. I apologize for any inconvenience. Best, Your student The first email aligns with my syllabus policies for FYC; students who request alternative assignments in a timely manner can earn participation points for class activities that they miss. It’s specific and respectful; it also shows me that the student has taken advantage of resources such as the syllabus and the online course platform. The second, however, baffles me a bit—and I’ve been encountering similar language more often over the past few semesters. I am not sure what inconvenience the student is causing: I will be teaching the course regardless of whether or not the student is present. If no group work or assigned presentations are occurring, the student’s absence will not inconvenience me in any way. What might be an inconvenience is the expectation that I will take the initiative to ensure the student does not lose ground—informing the student what activities were missed, sending the handout, creating the alternative assignment, negotiating extensions if needed, etc. In some cases, students assume that notifying me of an absence “covers them”—they need not think about my course until they return, at which point they expect that I will provide (without being asked) a re-cap of what was missed, copies of handouts, and a revised schedule to follow until they are “back with the flow of the class.” When students who have missed class (with or without a perfunctory apology for “the inconvenience”) ask me to “go over the handout” or explain a concept on which I had dedicated significant time during the session they missed, I must pause and restrain the snarky response that first comes to mind—similar to retorts that arise when I am asked, “Did we do anything last class?” I don’t want to engage in stereotyping (what’s wrong with this generation?) or blame-casting (what are those high school teachers telling them?). Nor will I cast a rose-colored nostalgia over my own college days to suggest that (pre-internet and email) my college cohort knew better, taking full responsibility for their own learning. Still, I cannot deny the frustration of unrealistic student expectations, which I suspect all colleagues teaching FYC and corequisite courses experience. I understand why, given all that gets dumped into the course objectives in FYC, the idea that we are going to teach students how to write an email regarding an absence and how to behave following that absence—basically, how to be a college student—seems unreasonable. But consider how a discussion of the ideal “absence email” (which for me would be like the first email in this post) offers an opportunity for rhetorical meta-talk: a discussion of audience, purpose, exigence, ethos construction, and genre. This past week, I did just that—I used an early-semester syllabus review to explain what information I hoped to see when students inform me of an absence: the fact that they’re missing (a reason isn’t always required, although it’s often appreciated), what they’ve done because of the absence (i.e., reviewed the syllabus, asked a friend for notes, etc.), and any specific requests (alternative assignment, an office visit later in the week, an extension of deadlines, etc.). I will revisit the model throughout the term, not only as a reminder of what I expect, but also as an illustration of linguistic and rhetorical concepts we are discussing. I’ll have to see if I am still getting “sorry for the inconvenience” absence emails in May. Photo by No Revisions on Unsplash ... View more

On Tuesday, January 14, 2025, I walked into a composition classroom to start what is my 67th full semester of college teaching (there are more than 80 if I count summer terms). As part of my first-day introductions, I told them how excited I was to start the semester with them; after all, I love what I do. I told them a little bit about the first project we would be working on—a literacy narrative—which would give them a chance to tell their stories about language, reading, and writing. Some of them looked skeptical, but I know they have stories to tell. There is always a story to tell—even though students don’t always recognize their stories at first. They have to sift through memories and experiences, building narratives that will make sense of them.  Through this class, they will learn that we don’t always know the thesis or the ending when we start writing, but we keep writing. The narratives and reports and essays and blogs and reflections will come. . . eventually. Later that afternoon, I walked into the Writing Fellows seminar, and I asked the six advanced students in the group what brought them to that particular moment, to the work of the writing fellows. As they shared their stories, they expressed some surprise at how they moved from their first semester in college to a paid internship as a writing fellow. Most had not planned for it, but they found the fellows as they “kept writing”–and finding their story. One had started at the local technical school, in an HVAC program, but discovered during his first-year comp class the exhilaration of having his writing taken seriously. He transferred to our university and became an English major. One of our fellows said she had changed majors five times before she found her home in English. Another had actually applied for the fellows’ job during his first year, despite not having the qualifications, because he needed on-campus employment. A year later, he applied again and is now a senior fellow. Others talked about meetings with advisors (often because of scheduling conflicts or classes that were needed but unavailable) that made them aware of unexpected opportunities, including the writing fellows option. Some had met peers who were writing fellows or supplemental instructors on campus, and they recognized the power of listening, helping, encouraging—skills they could develop through our program.  Like the first-year writers composing literacy narratives, the fellows are finding narrative threads in their own experiences—using language to make sense of the various pieces, discovering who they are in the process.  During the fellows’ seminar session, I shared some of my own story—from graduate school in linguistics to positions teaching composition, English, and applied linguistics (in a university, in an intensive English program, in community colleges, in a church, and even in a chicken processing plant). As a graduate student, I could not have foreseen what my teaching journey would look like, but I have been blessed by hundreds of colleagues, editors, friends, and students, each of whom contributed to my story. While it wasn’t the story I intended to tell back in the early 1990s, to be sure, it is a story that makes sense to me now.  And after 35 years, I still love what I do.  So I am encouraging my students in this moment, whether they are starting college or working as writing fellows: they don’t need to have mapped out their entire story yet. If they remain awake and aware, looking at where they have been, building new relationships, stepping into new opportunities, finding and doing what they love (and letting go of what they don’t), the story will come together eventually. It will make sense.  How do you tell your story in your teaching?  ... View more

Marisa Koulen Marisa Koulen is pursuing her PhD in English concentrating on Rhetoric, Composition, and Pedagogy at the University of Houston. She has taught a range of courses including First Year Writing I, First Year Writing II, and Advanced Composition. Marisa's teaching philosophy centers on acknowledging all students as writers and challenging them to critically engage in making meaning through social justice and advocacy writing. Her research explores the intersection of antiracist writing assessment and multimodal composition pedagogy. As a first-generation American and college student, Marisa is passionate about supporting students, especially those from marginalized communities, navigate the transformative power of education and literacy.       How does the next generation of students inspire you?  The next generation of students inspires me with their increasing awareness of social justice and their willingness to challenge systems of inequality. They enter the classroom with a powerful sense of activism and a desire to make their voices heard, even in my first year writing classes. These students push me, as an educator, to be more reflective, to deconstruct barriers to learning, and to make sure my classroom is a place where all voices are acknowledged and valued. Their courage to question norms and advocate for change invigorates my commitment to building inclusive and responsive writing assignments in my classroom.   What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students? The most important skill I aim to provide my students is the ability to critically reflect on their own learning and writing processes and provide/receive feedback. Reflection encourages students to become aware of their growth, understand the reasons behind their choices, and see their learning as ongoing. This metacognitive skill not only empowers them to develop as writers in my class, but also to become lifelong learners, confident in adapting their skills to new contexts. By fostering feedback and reflection, I also equip them with the tools needed to navigate and shape the world around them, both in writing and beyond. Whether using digital platforms like Padlet for anonymous feedback or facilitating breakout room activities in online classes, I prioritize spaces where students feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and supporting each other. Regular reflections and interactive discussions (like word clouds and other visualizers) are integrated to ensure that learning is a shared and dynamic process. To ensure my course is inclusive, equitable, and culturally responsive, I center my teaching around representation, linguistic diversity, and equitable assessment practices. I use labor-based grading to value students’ efforts rather than imposing traditional language norms, allowing them to take risks and grow as writers. I also encourage students to draw on their personal and cultural experiences in their writing, which allows their unique voices to flourish in the classroom. Additionally, consistent feedback mechanisms allow me to adapt the course based on students’ expressed needs. Experience giving and receiving feedback is invaluable in the classroom, as these skills transfer beyond just writing.   Marisa's Assignment That Works Below is a brief synopsis of Marisa's assignment. For the full activity, see Logical Fallacies in the Wild.    The "Logical Fallacies in the Wild" assignment is designed to bridge the critical rhetorical analysis skills discussed in the course textbook and in professional academic examples with students' lived experiences, emphasizing the situated nature of communication across diverse discourse communities. Its primary goal is to cultivate an awareness of how logical fallacies are not only pervasive but also ideologically loaded, particularly within the context of consumer culture on social media platforms. By requiring students to locate fallacies in advertisements found during their own personal social media use, this assignment actively situates their learning within spaces that shape and reflect their identities. This assignment helps students acknowledge that rhetoric operates everywhere! ... View more

I recently wrote about my struggle with AI overload, a post prompted by an email predicting that AI would soon take over the “routine work of scholarly editing and publication.”  What, I wonder, makes something routine in scholarship or academia? My social media feed, guided by my history of clicks, has lately been flooded with advertisements for AI platforms that promise to clear my hectic schedule by picking up some of the drudgery of my job—specifically, providing feedback on student writing, crafting standard letters, or even putting together meeting agendas.  Apparently, those tasks are “routine” and can be handed over to a trained LLM (Large-Language Model). For a fee, of course. Except I don’t think of these as routine.  (Well, maybe writing agendas could be seen as routine; still, I think reducing the number of required committee meetings and service responsibilities for faculty who teach four or five courses per term is a more helpful solution than letting a machine throw together a bulleted list of agenda items.  Just a thought.) I suspect that most of us who teach composition would not agree that response to writing is so “routine” that it should be handed off to an algorithm.  But what about other tasks, such as annual self-evaluations or recommendation letters for students? Over the Thanksgiving break, I wrote three recommendations for students applying to graduate programs.  The process took over six hours of my “vacation days.”  Surely, one might suggest, I could have saved time by generating a letter template from ChatGPT and tweaking the details, right? My answer, without hesitation, is “no way.”  It’s not that I produced something particularly masterful in those letters over six hours, nor do I expect that the letters will be the deciding factor for graduate admissions committees.  And given enough detail, could the AI produce something similar?  Perhaps.  But the AI will not have the joy of reviewing, remembering, discovering forgotten moments and sorting through assignments, emails, projects, or random hand-written artifacts from these students, who have shaped the way I teach just as much as I shaped their undergraduate experiences. For each student, the process began with a review of a CV, followed by a transcript review to find all the classes taken with me, as well as classes in which the student worked with me as a supplemental instructor or writing fellow.  I looked for conference presentations and academic service—noting that two of the three students attended faculty-focused conferences to present research with me.  I thought about my initial impressions of each one and how those impressions changed as I saw their particular passions appear in course projects—or as I came to rely on their help as supplemental instructors in my classes.  I recalled when they frustrated me, when they made me laugh, and when they made me think differently about concepts or my own teaching practices.   I imagined what each would bring to a graduate program, of course, but I also tried to articulate what they brought to our undergraduate program—and to me.  My teaching is better because of these students, and I wanted to articulate why as part of these letters.  I suppose one could say that given all this information, ChatGPT could have produced an effective letter.  But truthfully, the letter wrote itself once I had worked through the process of remembering.  And I suppose others might suggest that it was the extraordinary qualities of these particular students that made the writing process meaningful; had the students not been quite so stellar, perhaps the process would have felt more routine—and perhaps I would have given it over to the AI in that case. But I don’t think so.  My limited interactions with students who are not quite so remarkable still contain valuable stories and possibilities.  Reviewing those stories is not a waste of my time, however constrained that time may be.  So, I am back to my original question: what qualifies a task as “routine” to the extent that it can be relegated to AI?  Who decides that?  And how will those decisions—whoever makes them—impact our work going forward?  These are just some of the questions that give me pause.  For now, I need to proofread some recommendation letters.  ... View more

Toni Morrison published her slim non-fiction meditation, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, in 1993. The historical context shimmers in my memory. In 1991, my graduate cohort analyzed every moment of Anita Hill’s testimony about her harrowing harassment from then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. In response, 1992 ushered in the “Year of the Woman,” with a record number of women being elected and re-elected to the Senate. In those years, people everywhere were talking about narratives about sexism and racism that haunted American culture. Without explicitly referencing those political touchstones, Morrison published Playing in the Dark the next year, to challenge readers to consider all the ways language shapes our literary, cultural, and political imaginations. Just after the recent election, I taught the Preface and Chapter One of Playing in the Dark to my writing students. I was moved to hear from them how relevant they find Morrison’s insights, now. Morrison writes specifically about the ways racism haunts the sentences and plot lines — often through pointed silences — of celebrated literary classics written by white writers, from Edgar Alan Poe, to Henry James, to William Faulkner, to Flannery O’Connor. Morrison guides readers through her own process of learning to see the repression and functions of Blackness as tools for moving forward white characters’ development. Morrison offers many examples of Black characters who function only to turn the plot, including the Countess in James' What Maisie Knew (13). These are active writerly choices, Morrison argues. Those choices have cultural and political weight that affect both victims of racism and those who perpetuate the racism (11). In other words, as my students concluded after some discussion, Morrison shows us why, as both readers and writers, we must take language seriously. Our language shapes our entire world views. Morrison locates her own readerly awakening as the moment when she "stopped reading as a reader and began to read as a writer” (15). She continues, “Yes, I wanted to identify those moments when American literature was complicit in the fabrication of racism, but equally important, I wanted to see when literature exploded and undermined it” (16). Morrison calls both writers and readers to action:  Every writerly decision we make — and learn to pay attention to as readers — builds a world of consequences. This crucial insight — that we must learn to “read as writers” and “write as readers” —  is the central tenet of From Inquiry to Academic Writing (5e), my co-authored book with Stuart Greene. We scaffold for students specific steps for the reading approach Toni Morrison calls for in literary texts, with an eye for the implications of every writerly decision in academic texts. These steps strengthen critical reading strategies, of course; that’s what we mean by “reading as a writer.” But the steps also help students name the decisions and moves of academic writing so that they can practice them in their own writing, with real readers in mind; that what's we mean by “writing as a reader." Here is our five-step Rhetorical Analysis assignment (62), which can be adapted to many different assignments: Identify the situation. What motivates the writer to write? Identify the writer's purpose. What does the writer want readers to do or think about? Identify the writer's claims. What is the writer's main claim? What minor claims does the writer make? Identify appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos. How does the writer establish credibility, develop a relationship with readers, and use evidence to support a claim? Identify the writer's audience. What do you know about the writer's audience? What does the writer's language imply about the readers? What about the writer's references? The structure of the text? These steps can help students with any level of expertise flex the necessary muscles to be more effective readers and writers, and to understand the consequences of every word choice. As Morrison reminds us — and my students affirm — those consequences for our cultural and political imaginations can be dire, or downright inspiring. ... View more

Hayden Kindrat Hayden Kindrat is pursuing his PhD in English Literature at Stony Brook University (SUNY), with a focus in American and Anglophone literature, science fiction, and environmental fiction and ideas (all in the mid-twentieth century). He has taught courses in Stony Brook's English Department and Department of Writing and Rhetoric. He lives in Queens in New York City.               What do you think is the most important recent development or pedagogical approach in teaching composition? Generative AI, for sure. I don’t think any development in the past has had so much potential to disembody and disincorporate the actual process of writing to such a degree. Students are using AI to write papers, AI-generated papers are being published in academic journals. When we read it, we can usually intuitively sense that something is wrong, but we can’t always put our fingers on why; we are already talking about using AI to detect AI writing.    It is especially important, too, because of its consequences on morale, which we’re already seeing. It is challenging for instructors; it has necessitated a presumption of guilt, so that we feed our students’ work into specious and faulty detection software; there is an atmosphere of paranoia shared in by students and instructors alike. Every semester for the last few years I have had students approach me with their concerns about their work being arbitrarily flagged for plagiarism, and every semester I receive papers that have clearly been written using AI — but I do not have the tools or the resources to definitively prove it, because the technology is evolving and changing faster than institutions can adapt.    It already seems like it is necessitating a total overhaul of how we administer even the most basic and fundamental writing instruction, and a reconsideration of what is or should be sought or valued in student writing. It’s disorienting to think about!     What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students? Probably to think meaningfully and critically and what they write, how they’re writing, and all of the other processes that go into writing. And, of course, to think the same way about what they read or otherwise consume. I use the word “consume” because I think, with the way we are inundated with information and sensory input, deliberation tends to go out the window. We’re basically being conditioned to take information about as consciously as we take in oxygen. To take in as much as possible, as quickly as possible. I think it’s important to impart to students that everything they take in can and should be scrutinized for how it works, what it is saying, what the purpose or the intent behind it is, the nature and logic of its rhetoric, and so on.    In college writing courses, this is especially relevant to argumentation. Encouraging students to slow down, to think about what they’re saying, the best way to say it depending on the audience, and what evidence needs to be provided to actually convince an audience of something, is key — and one way to do this is to teach them to parse these same elements in the things they read, see, watch, and hear.    Hayden's Assignment That Works Below is a brief synopsis of Hayden's assignment. For the full activity, see Database Scavenger Hunt.   This activity is designed to acquaint WRT 102 students with the databases accessible to them through Stony Brook University’s libraries. It takes place in the classroom. I usually set aside forty-five minutes to an hour for this activity.   Students are asked to bring their laptops to class, and to break into groups of four. I give the entire class a search task to complete which will involve the use of advanced search options, database directories and research guides, boolean operators (AND, OR), and phrase searching with quotation marks, which they’ve become glancingly familiar with prior to this activity. The first team to complete the task gets a point (candy, extra credit, etc), but they have to demonstrate for the class how they arrived at their search result on the classroom’s overhead.   Some of these tasks involve whittling down massive search results by whatever means they can think of, from hundreds of thousands of results, to hundreds, to a single search result. For example: “Make a search query involving ‘Shakespeare’ that yields a single search result.” Others involve using date ranges, such as “Find me the earliest mention of Stony Brook’s mascot, Wolfie, in a newspaper,” or, “Find a contemporaneous review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, or, “Tell me something about the Long Island Railroad in 1976.” Others still are a bit more open ended, such as “Find me a weird New York State animal fact.”   I’ve done a variation of this activity later in the semester, after students have chosen their research topics and we have discussed “scholarly” and “popular” sources and Joseph Bizup’s BEAM method. Students work individually or in groups to find articles, and also to evaluate the articles in real time. I’ve found that responses tend to be interesting in what they reveal about how deeply students are thinking about the nature of the information they’re pulling, potentially for sources and evidence in their own writing. Some get very nitty-gritty with the advanced search features of a given database, others sidestep it all and wade into the morass of thousands or even millions of results for a basic query. And almost every time I do this assignment, I have a couple students who just try to use Google, which can create some problems when it comes to actually accessing an article behind an institutional paywall.  ... View more

by Jenn Fishman This is a post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach held annually in Milwaukee, WI. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.” On the 5th anniversary of the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), we held a series of conversations for a 2023 issue of Community Literacy Journal. In one of them, a dialogue about “Takeaways,” WIS Steering Committee member Aleisha Balestri describes the 5-minute flashtalk she gave at WIS ‘22. It was about her efforts to “vex” faculty-only conversations about students’ engagement with writing at the College of DuPage, where she teaches. Her strategy was as direct as it was elegant in its simplicity: she invited students to participate, resulting in “a very powerful conversation.”  Aleisha concludes her remarks by saying: “I would love to see WIS bring students to the forefront,” and all of us on the WIS Steering Committee agreed. Although undergraduate writers participated in the first three symposia (2018-2020), they did not return when WIS came back from a year-long, COVID-compelled hiatus. As a result, undergraduate writers were not part of the first hybrid symposium, “Writing As ______,” in 2022 or “Write it Out” in 2023. Likewise, they did not benefit from the company of the first two cohorts of Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellows or the first international WIS attendees.  The literature on undergraduate research in writing studies helps explain what happened. In The Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies, Sophia Abbot, Hannah Bellowoar, and Eric E. Hall discuss some of the many internal and external challenges that mentors of undergraduate researchers face. The list includes everything from lack of time outside the classroom to lack of material support. Writing instructors and administrators who organize course- or program-related showcases experience similar difficulties, even though the rewards for helping undergraduate writers go public are great. It’s no mistake that undergraduate research is one of the original high impact educational practices, and we’ve all seen students gain not only confidence but also intellectual and proto-professional insight when their writing circulates through publications or presentations delivered beyond the classroom With all of the above in mind, we committed to welcoming undergraduates back to the symposium in 2024. Full credit goes to Max Gray, a digital scholarship librarian at Marquette University and a WIS Steering Committee member, for the lightbulb moment that made it possible. Max suggested going digital and inviting undergrads to share pre-recorded, audio and video compositions, which could be featured both during and after each WIS. Running with that idea, Aleisha, Max, and I dreamt up a new program genre, the 3-minute flare, and the rest is WIS history. In 2024 the WIS theme was “Writing Human/s,” and the flares we received were a testament to how much humanness can be conveyed in 120 seconds of writing. Click through our digital showcase and find a love letter, a villanelle, and other poetry. Listen to ruminations on AI, COVID, and group communication as well as penmanship and writing in nature. Meet students who are haunted by writing and tormented by writer’s block. Their flares burn alongside those by students who are grounded and comforted by writing as “the light [they] turn to in the darkness.” Contributors span first-year students and super seniors. They are majors in everything from English to engineering and psychology, and they identify many ways, including as writers and readers-turned-writers. Together, the first cache of WIS flares confirms there may be no more powerful string of words than the declaration: “I am a writer.” Looking ahead to WIS ‘25, we invite you and your students to contribute. The importance of writing educators—teachers, mentors, and advisors—is legible in the flares we received as well as the shoutouts that authors gave to the teachers and mentors who supported their efforts, including Darcie Thoune at UW-La Crosse, Kat O’Meara and Laurie MacDiarmid at St. Norbert College, and Nila Horner at Michigan Tech.  The WIS ‘25 theme is mise en place, the culinary term for putting everything in place before starting to cook, especially in a professional kitchen. We’ve adopted this phrase as not only a metaphor for getting ready to write but also a pathway to exploring the interrelationships between writing and food. In addition, we have cooked up a second genre for undergraduate writers. To complement 3-minute flares we are also inviting 30-second sparks.  You and yours are cordially invited to join us. The prompts for flares and sparks as well as a proposal guide are available online, and submissions are due 12/13. Proposals for other WIS genres—flashtalks, workshops, posters, artifacts, displays, performances, and installations—are due 10/25. Registration opens in early November.  ... View more

Elizabeth Novotny Elizabeth Novotny is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture at Michigan Technological University. She teaches First-Year Composition and other writing courses, such as Advanced Composition and Technical and Professional Communication. She is also a Composition Graduate Assistant and assists the program director in delivering instruction in the graduate-level Composition Pedagogy and orientation for new instructors, as well as supporting curriculum development and administrative tasks. Elizabeth’s research interests include writing studies, pedagogy, rhetorical theory, and continental philosophy. For her dissertation, she is working on a project that examines the relationship between FYC student conceptions of rhetorical agency and their writing practice.         How does the next generation of students inspire you? In our composition course at Michigan Tech, students research a topic of their choice throughout the semester. The variety of topics is amazing! Just last semester, I read about microtransactions in gaming, improving air traffic flow, the evolution of jazz music, factors impacting the processed food industry, linear infrastructure’s effect on wildlife, and much more. Students always keep me on my toes and remind me that there’s more to learn. I am constantly impressed by the questions they ask and the answers they find, and it’s inspiring to see them pursue their interests and gain confidence as researchers. My favorite part of teaching is being a genuinely interested and invested reader of student work.   How do you engage students in your course, whether f2f, online, or hybrid? Too often, students think that struggling with writing means that they are bad at it or there is something wrong with them. At Michigan Tech, a STEM-focused institution, we have a lot of students who are hesitant about writing. To engage them, I focus on making my own writing process visible, especially messy works-in-progress. It is important to acknowledge that writing is not perfectible and that it is difficult for everyone, not just for beginner or novice writers. Students need to see me as a fellow writer who is engaged in the same kinds of activities that I am asking them to do. For example, I share critical feedback I’ve received on my own writing and talk about the writing or research projects I’m currently working on. I’ll share examples of pieces of my undergraduate work in comparison to more recent work to demonstrate my growth. Another strategy I will often use is completing an activity along with students and projecting my work on the board as I do it. These kinds of practices lead to a comfortable classroom environment where it is accepted and encouraged to struggle. As a class, we view a challenging writing or reading experience as evidence that we are ready to learn something new.   Elizabeth's Assignment That Works Below is a brief synopsis of Elizabeth's assignment. For the full activity, see the Exploring Place assignment prompt. The assignment I presented during Assignments that Work is a supplementary assignment that I created collaboratively with another PhD student in my program, Kendall Belopavlovich. This assignment asks students to reflect on their story of being in the Keweenaw (the area where Michigan Tech is located) and go to a new place of their choice. Students explore their chosen place, and while they’re there, write a reflection on how their experience of being in the Keweenaw has changed as a result of interacting with that place. Students have responded very positively to this assignment. Most often, students mention a newfound appreciation for the unique natural beauty of the area or observe cultural differences that come from living in a remote place. Many students also express that this assignment has helped them value exploration and curiosity about the places around them. From my Assignments that Work presentation, I received valuable feedback from the other Bedford New Scholars that will help develop the assignment further. For example, I might have students complete a pre-reflection in a familiar place, which will allow them to reflect more intentionally about what changes they notice about themselves and about their writing when they go to a new place. I also got new ideas for incorporating multimodal elements into this assignment, such as asking students to make a map of how they moved through space and how they communicated there. I’m excited about making these updates moving forward! ... View more

Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. She also trains graduate student teachers in composition theory and pedagogy. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She is a regular contributor to this Multimodal Monday academic blog since 2014. She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy, and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition I incorporate visual and multimodal image work in most of my classes. In addition to writing prompts, I have students compose representative images and send them out on what I call curation events. I have described some of these in earlier posts where I have students curate playlists, strike out on visual journeys, and even attend live curation events where they create content for community partners. Image curation involves the processes of collection, selection, interpretation, creation, and sharing. The act of curation provides students with valuable skills that they can use in their academic, personal, and professional lives. It enhances critical thinking, creative composing, and is essential for digital writing where visuals are an integral part of the genre. Like any act of composition, image curation is about understanding your rhetorical situation: Your subjects, audiences, purposes, and contexts. We use these components to filter our collections and shape our perceptions. As a curator, we need an open awareness of what is around us and the connections between things that make them collections.  Click here to see Sample Image Archive  We can use different parameters as we create our image assignments such as chronological or thematic arrangements. We can give students particular prompts to guide their attention or present opportunities for them to choose their own collections. I use them for the purposes of invention and brainstorming ideas, arrangement as they organize their thoughts, and drafting as they incorporate them into their final products. Students already participate in acts of curation through social media where they collect, select, edit and distribute their images to tell stories. We curate and archive family photos, events, and objects that create systematic portraits of our lives over time. If you ever have participated in any of these activities, you know that you must be organized to make it work. We have all searched hopelessly for lost files or that one image that is randomly assigned by our computers if we do not define the parameters. It sounds obvious but students often do not know the value of archiving and organizing content in a digital world. I find that teaching students about archive organization is time well spent. I start at the beginning. File naming is important for easy retrieval down the line. Students do not really think about this as part of the process and haphazardly choose non-descript names such as “project one” or “my assignment.” I teach them to be specific and informative so they can glance at the file name and know something about what is inside. This might include their initials, title of the project, and dates among other things. I encourage them to think beyond the individual document, image, or file and see the bigger picture of how these things relate to and differentiate themselves from other things within their larger archival space. This often involves creating thoughtful folders and sub-folders to categorize their work. Basic Course Archive example   I also benefit as a teacher when I build in consistent naming protocols for files and folders so that we are intentionally structuring individual and class archives of their work over the term. This helps with their own work but also helps me when I go to evaluate so I do not have to spend my time searching and opening randomly named files to find the right assignments. I also see my whole class as an archiving opportunity for collecting, reflecting, and sharing student work (as well as my own scholarly research). You can use any platform, but I like a class Google Drive where students create individual and team folders for all to view. This is especially important when students curate and archive for community partners because they can easily share these organized folders with clients (preparing them for strong professional communication). Google provides a free, universal archive space with easy access and plenty of online support. I tried something new this semester and added Weekly Image Archive assignments where students showcase their work. Once again, I return to Google slides and have students choose one image from their weekly assignment to add to that week’s collaborative archive slideshow. They go through their own archives and select an image that speaks to the assignment and demonstrates strong visual composition. They include their name and a short description of the image and its meaning. We then show them to the class which reinforces that week’s lessons. It also gives students more ownership and pride in their work and helps us define quality by viewing strong work from their classmates. It does not take up too much class time as we create it together on the spot at the start of class. This activity raises the bar when students know they will be sharing their work with others rather than just turning it in to their teacher for evaluation. It is a time of both admiration and learning. Archives give us the opportunity to go back and reuse and repurpose images for future projects and new content. They provide digital, historical spaces for us to store, preserve, and revisit our work over time. I usually have students reflect upon their archived spaces at the end of the term to articulate their learning which gives them an overview perspective to see their work as an interconnected collection instead of isolated individual assignments. Although archiving is a skill that we assume students already have, I find they benefit from dedicated instruction towards these organizational practices. ... View more

by Darci Thoune, Kelly Blewett, and Kat O’Meara   This post is part of an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach that meets annually online and in Milwaukee, WI, led by Chief Capacitator Jenn Fishman. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.”   As others have explored in previous posts about the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), part of its success has always been rooted in our commitment to the small. In many ways, we’re fortunate to be in a field that offers such a spectrum of professional development opportunities (flagship conferences, regional conferences, webinars, publications). And we imagine our small gathering, with its emphasis on writing innovation, community-building, and mentoring, as complementary to this abundance of opportunity in the field. Events like the WIS, because it’s small, can cater to particular needs, interests and whims of writing instructors in our corner of academia. We’re not the only ones doing this work though. Organizations like the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) have been successfully marshaling the small for decades with their regional affiliates program and, more recently, with their decision to hold one-day regional gatherings in summer of 2024 in lieu of holding a national conference. Glimpsing Regional Conferences and Affiliates within CWPA Kelly Blewett, WPA at Indiana University East and current president of CWPA CWPA’s decision to hold regional conferences in 2024 was informed by our commitment to the small. It’s so valuable for WPAs in a particular region to come together officially and under the banner of larger organizations to connect, trade information, and think together about the work we do. We modeled these regional events on a longstanding event hosted by the Carolinas affiliate called “Meeting in the Middle,” which, incredibly, just held its 18th annual gathering last February. Wendy Sharer, a current editor of WPA Journal who is a member of that affiliate, explained what makes that annual event work so well: it is affordable, interactive, has a social component built around ample breaks, shared meals, and people can attend within an easy driving distance. A small ad hoc regional conference committee, which included both Wendy and me, built these components into the call for the CWPA regional events in 2024. From Florida to Maryland to Wisconsin to Illinois to Texas, WPAs gathered, to learn, to connect. Connecting like this doesn’t have to require a lot of work. As Wendy pointed out, sessions built around a prompt like “Share a problem that your program is currently working on” often lead to rich, vibrant discussion that require little advance preparation.t is tremendously valuable to know the people who are WPAing around you, and I think that’s why we currently have 14 affiliates within CWPA. (Applications are always open for more.)  As a WPA myself, I’ve informally met several of my counterparts at local events and while there is some crossover among the Indiana writing programs, I am a firm believer that more crossover would be a good thing for everyone. When I think about the next chapter of my own career, fostering an Indiana affiliate program is on my list of things to do, and I’m grateful that such an affiliate could be endorsed and supported by the CWPA. Small But Mighty—A Regional Collaboration in Wisconsin Kat O’Meara, WPA at St. Norbert College in De Pere, WI   Darci and I formally established the Wisconsin Affiliate through CWPA in 2021, but our small but mighty collection of Wisco WPAs did not formally meet until the opportunity arose for regional conferences this summer of 2024. This event was super exciting to plan, and we decided to take a “less is more” approach, considering it was our inaugural session. We had two goals for the day: To establish a foundation for our Wisco Affiliate, and to use this precious time together to collaborate on WPA projects and issues. We coordinated a space at St. Norbert College utilizing our $500 WPA Affiliate start-up grant (offered to all new affiliates!), and we procured catering from a local sandwich shop in De Pere, Wisconsin. And perhaps the most exciting detail (for Darci and me) was the creation of a WI WPA t-shirt for all attendees to take home with them. To our surprise and delight, a solid dozen WPAs from all over Wisconsin heeded the call. We were a vibrant, interesting collection of administrators hailing from four-year public universities, mid-sized private universities, technical colleges, and small liberal arts colleges. The common threads, of course, were our ties to the Dairy State and the college student writers we all serve. After brief introductions, each attendee shared a WPA-specific project (or problem) to see where we could find through-lines and connections, and to offer initial strategies and support. The “projects and problems” brainstorm revealed some common woes: helping all faculty see themselves as writing teachers, rising numbers of students who need more foundational writing and academic support, balancing expertise and power with general austerity across changing institutional landscapes. But what also emerged were hopeful commonalities like our mutual desire for sharing resources (for placement, for teaching research skills) and how we can lean on one another across the state—even if we are each at our own institutions. While we have a long way to go before the Wisco Affiliate is on the level with a longstanding affiliate like Carolinas, the July meeting was an imperative first step toward some authentic statewide collaboration, and I’m so glad we did it. In hindsight, I’m proud of the foundation Darci and I were able to lay in July, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with fellow writing program administrators with the support of the CWPA.   The theme for WIS ‘25 is mise en place, a culinary term for putting things in place before cooking, especially in a professional kitchen. For us, it’s a metaphor for getting ready to write as well as a pathway to exploring the interrelationship between writing and food. Join us online or in Milwaukee, WI, January 30-31, 2025. Proposals are welcome through 10/25 and, for undergraduate writers, through 12/13. Registration opens in early November. ... View more

by Jessie Wirkus Haynes and Jenn Fishman This post is part of an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach organized by a group of cross-institutional colleagues including Jessie and Jenn. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.”    It’s no secret that professional conferences can be inaccessible in myriad ways. Too often they cost too much physically as well as financially, and panels of 3 to 5 people reading 15- to 20-minute papers can be difficult—or impossible—to follow without a range of resources that are not always readily available. What so many of us want —and feel we need—are opportunities to connect with colleagues and share ideas. Whether online or onsite, we hunger to have the kinds of back-and-forths that spark on-the-spot aha moments, spur and deepen professional relations, and enable new teaching and research possibilities.    That’s what motivated us to collaborate with campus colleagues Elizabeth Gibes and Kelsey Otero to start the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS) in 2018. At the time, Elizabeth was a digital scholarship and research librarian, and Kelsey helmed Marquette’s Social Innovation Initiative. Through our cross-disciplinary collaboration, we founded an event that features short talks, hands-on workshops, and multiple formal and informal opportunities to interact over the course of two days. For us, it was a recipe that worked, and participants over the years have described WIS as a respite, a space for reflection, a good venue for trying out new things, and a place where participants of all ranks, roles, and career stages can find inspiration as well as space for growth and change.    A key part of the WIS process is the post-symposium debrief, where the Steering Committee meets to discuss the immediate past WIS and look ahead to the next. One of the latest innovations to emerge from these discussions is the WIS satellite. The idea is to share the spirit of WIS beyond the annual 2-day symposium by inviting past participants to lead WIS-related happenings at their home institutions. As a group, we liked the idea of expanding access to WIS through additional events, and we were eager to find out how satellites could be tailored to suit different campuses’ and communities’ interests and needs. In particular, we hoped satellites might encourage interdepartmental and local cross-institutional collaborations around writing and writing education.    Thanks to Jessie’s initiative and leadership, her campus, Bellin College, hosted the first WIS satellite on March 18th, 2024. Bellin is a private college specializing in healthcare education in Green Bay, Wisconsin. As Jessie recalls:    When the WIS steering committee suggested an expansion into satellite events, I knew that Bellin College was the perfect place for this to happen. Often, in the STEM or healthcare settings, students and faculty can forget the importance of writing. As the lone English faculty member at the institution, I am highly invested in sharing the importance of writing for the healthcare professions to emphasize that writing isn’t just grammar or citation styles like APA; rather, it is an everyday practice, including charting, narrative medicine, professional research, literature reviews, research critiques, scholarly papers (and more). By effectively learning rhetoric and writing, students learn how to communicate successfully with a diverse set of patients, making healthcare more effective, compassionate, and equitable. My desire was both to innovate and to collaborate: I want students and faculty to think about writing as critical thinking, to see the humanities as a necessary part of healthcare, something that creates empathy and the ability to successfully interact with patients, caregivers, co-workers, and organizations.   Bellin College was extremely supportive of this idea, and Dr. Casey Rentmeester, Professor of Philosophy and Director of Academic Success, played a huge role in making this an interdisciplinary event as he spoke of empathy, philosophy, and the importance of the humanities in the healthcare field. In addition, I wanted to bring the satellite back to my WIS roots, so I asked Dr. Lilly Campbell, Associate Professor of English at Marquette University and Director of Foundations Instruction, to speak on her recent research about empathy and working with simulations in healthcare settings. I also encouraged students to share their experiences with writing, focusing on how writing has affected them both as students and as current/future healthcare providers. Most importantly, I wanted the event to end with discussion, thought, and a collaborative sharing of ideas and ways to improve. My goal was to set up an event that focused on writing and the humanities in healthcare as ways to improve empathy, critical thought, and, as a result, healthcare outcomes.   The reactions to our satellite surpassed expectations, thanks, in large part, to the inspiring talks by Dr. Rentmeester and Dr. Campbell as well as the work done by our administrative assistant, Mary Roffers. The satellite allowed us to focus on the specific institutional needs of a college focused on healthcare during a 90 minute session, which could be attended live or virtually. The audience consisted mainly of students with several faculty and staff members, but it was a collaborative and energizing experience that will help change and shape our next generation of providers. Students talked about it for weeks afterwards, and I’ve had many students tell me that they thought they were merely healthcare students, but they realize now that they are also writers. "Blinn College in Bryan, TX IMG 1035" by Billy Hathorn at en.wikipedia is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. The Bellin College WIS satellite is just the beginning. Already, Jessie and her colleagues are planning the next one, and colleagues around the country have been considering how a WIS satellite might help them amplify ongoing efforts or jump-start long-time plans. There are many organizational offshoots that offer parallel opportunities, including National Writing Project sites, Rhetoric Society of America student chapters, and Council of Writing Program Administrators regional affiliates. We encourage Bedford Bits readers to connect with the organizations in your orbit and then dream big through small conferences, symposia, and professional meetings.   The theme for WIS ‘25 is mise en place, a culinary term for putting things in place before cooking, especially in a professional kitchen. For us, it’s a metaphor for getting ready to write as well as a pathway to exploring the interrelationship between writing and food. Join us online or in Milwaukee, WI, January 30-31, 2025. Proposals are welcome through 10/25 and, for undergraduate writers, through 12/13. Registration opens in early November.  ... View more