Leah Washburn Leah Washburn (recommended by Wallace Cleaves), Bedford New Scholar 2021, is pursuing her PhD in English Literature at The University of California, Riverside and hopes to graduate in Spring 2023. She graduated from University of Central Florida in 2018 with an MFA in Creative Writing, where she taught Intro to Creative Writing. She also worked two years on The Florida Review, coordinating undergraduate interns and providing administrative support. During her undergraduate years, she worked as a writing fellow at Rhodes College for three years. Her research interests include digital media, ludology, narratology, contemporary speculative fiction, and postmodern fiction.   What do you think is the most important recent development or pedagogical approach in teaching composition?  I don’t know if I would consider it recent, but the increase in contract grading and understanding that effort is not the same as product. Product- versus process-oriented learning has been the shape of the field for the past decades, and I think the contract grading system is just a more equitable continuation of that. I first heard about in Asao Inoue’s Anti-Racist Writing Pedagogies , where he outlines the contract he gives to his student and spends a whole class period negotiating it with them. Giving students agency and power is important in a class where they have to repeatedly share writing, an act that makes them extremely vulnerable. I appreciate that more and more the idea of effort and “productive failure” is prioritized in the composition classroom. I’m a former athlete, so it always seemed strange to me that classrooms would not give students safe spaces to fail and then learn from the failure. I’m glad that more and more pedagogy is prioritizing the student learning process and giving them safe spaces to learn from their mistakes.  What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students?  Critical reading and thinking are a vital part of the argumentative rhetorical process, and in brief semesters—or even briefer quarters—I think this gets overlooked for the sake of writing mechanics. A lot of times students hear critical reading and critical thinking and their mind goes to deep analysis of “literature” that relies on an encyclopedic understanding of fancy literary terms. That’s not what critical thinking is. They often do critical thinking in their everyday life. Questioning whether it’s better to buy off-brand cereal or the Kellogg’s bee; debating what they should wear to party; deciding how to manage their inventory in a video game. Our students are doing acts of critical thinking all the time. In my classroom, I just try to make them aware of this and then apply that to a text. Why did the author make this decision? Ok, this sentence made you feel sad—why? Encouraging the inquiring spirit is vital to building their critical reading skills.  What’s it like to co-design or work with the editorial team at Bedford/St. Martin’s?  Working with this editorial team was very wonderful because, clearly, they all listened. I know that seems like such a small thing, but (especially in academia), there tends to be times where you hit a wall where people just stop taking feedback. While maybe we Scholars didn’t know the logistical side of making ideas come to life, the editorial staff was happy to answer questions and eager to learn from us. It always felt like a conversation open to discussing how to make something the best version it could be. What have you learned from other Bedford New Scholars? No one is perfect, and the funkier the assignment, the better. Let me clarify: the more creative and personable an assignment is to your class, the better it goes. Student’s write tons of essays, but having them do something that is unique and new allows them to stretch their writing brain. And there are a lot of ways to twist an “essay” into something that fits the course requirements but also invites the students to think differently.  Leah's Assignment that Works During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Leah's assignment. For the full activity, see Dungeons and Dragons in the Composition Classroom. This assignment is designed to introduce students to the “Analyzing Stories” essay from the St. Martin’s Guide to Writing , but it can be tailored for any assignment or classroom. The goal is to help students critically think and read without revealing to them that they are actually doing it. For my class, I created four different puzzles designed to help them move toward the essay. Students got into groups of 4-5 and then each person chose a “character” to play from 6 options. Each group could only have one of each character. My challenges were geared towards citation, essay structure, analyzing stories, and general argumentation, but you can substitute whatever areas you think your students need to work on. The materials provided are the ones I came up with but change them as you will. The goal is to give students opportunities to make choices and think critically about the challenge in a “game-like” way that sneakily introduces them to information they need to know.  ... View more

Rhiannon Scharnhorst Rhiannon Scharnhorst (recommended by Samantha NeCamp), Bedford New Scholar 2021, is pursuing her hybrid PhD in Writing Studies and Victorian Literature at the University of Cincinnati, where she expects to defend her dissertation Willful Objects and Feminist Writing Practices in May 2022. She teaches a variety of courses in writing, from first-year composition to advanced topics classes, including Writing with Style and Food in Literature. She has also served as the Assistant to the Composition Program, writing and designing the department's handbook, overseeing graduate student education, and hosting the annual graduate conference. Her research draws on feminist rhetorics to make sense of objects in writing studies, including typewriters, cookbooks, and other tools. She also writes about materiality, embodiment and writing practices of nineteenth-century women writers in Great Britain.   What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students? How to communicate effectively in writing, which starts with helping students unlearn limiting beliefs about writing. So often students enter the classroom believing they are “bad” writers because a previous teacher told them they were. They see writing as a performative act, done only as a test of grammatical intelligence or syntactical prowess in the classroom. Yet they are some of the most prolific writers I’ve ever seen.  In my classroom we spend a lot of time unpacking what makes writing “good” or “bad” (hint: it’s always contextual). A well-crafted text message can be just as “good” as a brilliant essay. Both require an awareness of the rhetorical situation, the affordances of the genre, and a lot of practice. I want students to leave with an understanding of writing as a recursive process, a tool for thinking and not just a record of intelligence logged onto a page. I want them to have the confidence to try things in writing that might not work out. Writing is a skill we cultivate through practice, not something that’s given to us by a muse or higher being.  How does the next generation of students inspire you?  They refuse to live by the status quo. If they see injustice, they work to correct it. They are willing to call out bad behavior, refuse to back down when something’s not right, and are actively trying to address some of the most pressing issues in our world today. I am constantly in awe of their resilience: what they’ve lived through with the pandemic, climate crisis, racial injustices, mass shootings just in the last year is astounding. Yet they continue to fight, continue to seek out opportunities for growth and change, and are all around some of the most resilient individuals I’ve had the chance to learn from. Their vulnerability and openness about their personal struggles with issues like mental health—struggles that I myself also experienced—are also inspirational. What with all those platitudes, I can’t forget to add they are also hilarious: rhetorically adept, unabashed, irreverent. I spend a lot of time laughing with them.   What do you think instructors don't know about higher ed publishing but should? Publishers like Bedford/St. Martin’s use their power to create texts that are inclusive and equitable by recruiting and publishing diverse voices and perspectives and by asking for feedback throughout that process through programs like BNS. I mistakenly assumed higher ed publishing was more of a top-down process than a real reciprocal relationship between publishers and teachers. Instead, the editors are just as invested in creating tools and texts that challenge the status quo. The texts are continually revised, updated, diversified. They seek out students and teachers who will give them honest feedback. They commit to doing better, being better, and invest their time in figuring out how to provide material that responds to in-the-moment concerns. Most importantly, they listen!  What have you learned from other Bedford New Scholars? The struggle is real, y’all! Hearing from other dedicated teacher-scholars across the country about their teaching practices gives me hope for the future of higher education. The diversity of approaches (labor contracts, trauma-informed teaching), the variety of modalities (visual essays, memes), the shared anxieties and concerns (extremism in the classroom, pandemic issues): all helped me appreciate and reassess my own standpoint as an imperfect teacher. In particular, we revised our diversity philosophies together after a week spent thinking and discussing how to bring antiracist practices into the composition classroom.  Out of those conversations was born my commitment to “failure”: that doing important work like creating equitable and culturally relevant curriculum requires a commitment to listening, changing, apologizing, improving. There is no perfection in teaching, only the continual recommitment to this necessary work. Thank you to everyone who read, shared, or listened as we co-created this space for change.      Rhiannon’s Assignment that Works: Autoethnography  During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Rhiannon’s assignment. For the full activity, see Autoethnography. Students don’t know how they write; by that I mean they don’t know what their writing process looks like on the page as it happens. In most cases, the students I teach in introductory composition courses have never considered writing as a labored, material process. This assignment asks them to record their screens while writing, as well as the environment they work in, the people they talk to, the objects they use, and ultimately their thought process as they write. They use this primary data to write an autoethnography, detailing what they witness in the screencasts as well as any conclusions they draw after coding their compiled data.  Usually, the material realities of their lives show up on the page, from what they use to write (computers, cell phones, pen and paper) to the spaces in which they write (kitchen tables, coffee shops, beds, buses). The writing process expands, spreading from time spent typing on a screen to conversations about the assignment with roommates. They begin to reassess their own practices, interrogating what works and what doesn’t. My hope is that the assignment sets them up for future writing success by bringing their awareness to the labor behind it. ... View more

Hyoung Min Lee Hyoung Min Lee (recommended by Dr. Claire Carly-Miles), Bedford New Scholar 2021, is pursuing her PhD in English at Texas A&M University. She teaches Writing About Literature as a graduate teaching assistant. She has also taught Rhetoric and Composition and worked as a grader for Technical and Business Writing. She is interested in teaching 20th- and 21st-century American literature with a focus on diversity and social justice. Her research interests include theories of race and biopolitics and 20th- and 21st-century American literature, especially African American literature.   How do you engage students in your course, whether face-to-face, online, or hybrid? A method that has worked especially well for me since the global pandemic changed the way classes are conducted is to assign students discussion posts as well as response posts to their peers’ discussion posts prior to each class meeting. I make sure to directly reflect students’ discussion posts when I design my class materials. What I find to be an effective approach I take here is to cite students’ discussion posts in my course materials and give recognition to students by putting students’ names before introducing their questions. I would often highlight especially helpful parts within a discussion post and ask the student whose post I cited to elaborate further on their discussion question or begin to respond to their own question for the class. I found this to be an effective way to increase participation without the recourse to random cold calling, which can make some students feel uncomfortable, especially in online settings. I can confidently say that this method worked well for including even the less vocal students to become important contributors to class discussion.  What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students? I try to equip students with revision skills and the habit to keep revisiting one’s own writing. I try to provide students ways to approach writing as a (collaborative) process rather than a product to be quickly written and be done with. As a teacher who has acquired English language skills as a second language, I understand what it means to approach writing as a process; I continue to strive to be a better writer of English prose by revising, editing, and asking for my peers’ suggestions and advice because I cannot take my written communication skills (in English) for granted. To show that writing is a process for anyone who tries to write well, I ask students to write rough drafts for major assignments and provide them with a chance to revise their paper after receiving comments from me, their peers, and themselves. I aim to provide students an understanding that patience, resilience, and collaboration are significant for writing well. My goal is to see students’ increased awareness of their writing and decreased fear of writing by embracing writing as a process.  What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? Having majored in literature, it has been a new and challenging experience for me to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program with many scholars whose expertise firmly lies in rhetoric and composition. Although there were moments I was worried about my lack of expertise in the field of rhetoric and composition, my experiences of having taught first year composition and writing about literature courses have allowed me to join in the rich conversations that took place in the program. Among many things, this program surely deepened my interest in anti-racist pedagogy. For instance, Dr. Uzzie Cannon ’s lecture offered during the Summit week was an amazing opportunity to learn more about DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in teaching composition as well as other Scholars’ insights into social justice pedagogy. These opportunities to learn also greatly benefited me when I received an offer to review a textbook from a DEI perspective as a Bedford New Scholar. I learned so much by being a part of this wonderful program. It has been an honor for me to be a part of it. What have you learned from other Bedford New Scholars? I have learned so many valuable lessons from other Bedford New Scholars, especially during the Summit week. Having the chance to learn about other Scholars’ “assignments that work” was an amazing opportunity to grow as a scholar and teacher. I was especially impressed by the ways these creative assignments incorporated multimodality by, for instance, making students approach writing not just through traditional writing on a paper but through creating video and audio responses. As someone who is not tech-savvy but wants to move out of her comfort zone to become a better teacher, many helpful suggestions other Bedford Scholars provided for me on incorporating multimodality more in my classroom gave me confidence that I could improve my own assignment and make it more interesting. I also learned so many helpful assignment building ideas with a focus on DEI and ways to make writing fun through incorporating gaming and photography in a composition classroom.   Hyoung Min Lee’s Assignment that Works During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Hyoung Min’s assignment. For the full activity, see Creative Literature Response. I have designed a small writing assignment, a creative literary response assignment, to increase diversity and help students engage with literary texts more freely (without suppressing too much of their creative writing voice) before they submit more formally structured essays in my course on writing about literature. While assigning a creative response is a common method that many teachers have used to increase student engagement with a text, I have designed this assignment to function as a bridge between students’ creative interpretation of a text and formal analysis of the text. In preparing four prompts for the assignment, I tried to encourage diverse ways of student engagement with the texts. For instance, students who feel comfortable writing a response structured closely to a conventional literary analysis essay can choose to respond to a prompt that asks them to write from the reader’s perspective about interesting literary aspects while other students who want to approach the assignment more as a creative writing task can choose the prompts that ask them to imagine themselves as a character and write from the character’s perspective. From my teaching experience, after asking students to read each other’s posts and comment on them via Google Docs, students expressed how the practice of reading their peers’ creative literature responses offered them “new perspectives” on the texts we read in class.  ... View more

Eric D. Brown Eric D. Brown (recommended by Kyle Jensen), Bedford New Scholar 2021, is pursuing his PhD in Arizona State University’s Writing, Rhetorics and Literacies PhD program, where he studies writing technologies, writing pedagogy, and writing program administration. He has taught First-Year Composition, Persuasive Writing and Public Issues, Writing for the Professions, and Business Writing. Eric is also Assistant Director (AD) of Writing Programs, where he aids the director in growing the scope of Writing Programs and creating professional development for faculty. As Assistant Director, he also co-runs the National Day on Writing, ASU’s annual Composition Conference, and is an editor of Writing Programs’ bi-annual newsletter, Writing Notes .   How do you engage students in your course? I’ve found that one of the best ways to engage students in my courses is to show them that the writing process doesn’t have to be a lonely endeavor and that writing is hard, even for those of us who are “good” at it. I enact this approach by positioning myself as an expert on writing (what it is and how it works) but one that fails and stumbles through the writing process, just like they do. And I’ve found that students are particularly engaged with this idea when I write “live” for/with them. For example, I’ll write an email or an assignment sheet with them, talking through my thinking/rhetorical strategies and asking for advice and ideas from them. Regardless of what writing task I take on for/with them, they see me struggle to get started, stumble with wording, sidestep through typos/spelling mistakes, and go back and rework the text. In sum, they can see that “the struggle is real” when it comes to writing, showing students (who are often fearful of college writing) that even experts struggle with writing, that writing is collaborative, and that revision is essential to any writing situation.  What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? In sum, it’s pretty awesome. As a Bedford New Scholar, I get opportunities to work with Bedford/St. Martin’s on a variety of projects: feedback on textbooks, input about developing technologies, and opinions on readings for students, to name a few. It’s really great to not only get some insight into the higher ed publishing world but to contribute to that world. Meeting and interacting with the other Bedford New Scholars is also a notable highlight of the program. The virtual summit this summer gave me the chance to not only meet and interact with other new scholars, but I was able to work on projects with them and talk about what is most important to me with them: teaching. Sharing my work and sitting in on presentations for the Assignments that Work part of the summer summit was generative, as well as fun. I got a ton of great ideas for assignments to try out, and I was able to see my fellow New Scholars’ unique approaches to teaching and writing. What do you think instructors don’t know about higher ed publishing but should? I don’t think instructors know how willing and excited publishers like Bedford/St. Martin’s are to work with them, and I think this “not knowing” can lead to a view of higher ed publishing as “The Man.” While this was certainly a perception I  held in my early days as a graduate student (and before that as an adjunct), I have become persuaded otherwise. I have found higher ed publishers like Bedford/St.Martin’s to be highly invested in instructor input, experience, and in the workings/makeup of the writing programs instructors teach in. Before working with Bedford/St. Martin’s, I would not have imagined that my ideas, feedback, and support would be important to higher ed publishers, but I’ve found the opposite to be true. Furthermore, I have found that higher ed publishers like Bedford/St. Martin’s are more often than not pedagogically focused--they want to know what research is influencing our teaching, what we are doing in the classroom, why we are doing things the way we are, and how they can support that work.  What projects or course materials from Bedford/St. Martin's most pique your interest, and why? My writing program just shifted to using a common textbook (which we created with Bedford/St. Martin’s) , and Achieve is offered with the textbook. I’m excited to learn more about Achieve and use it with my students. I was able to use some of Achieve’s peer review functions this summer during the virtual summit, and I really liked many of its affordances. My institution’s current LMS has a very clunky peer review system, and I’m particularly looking forward to switching to one that allows me to shape and tweak peer review goals and that has an interface I think will be intuitive for my students. I also know that Achieve has some annotation functions, and I’m excited to use them with my students, as well.   Eric's Assignment that Works During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Eric’s assignment. For the full activity, see Remediation. One of the goals of my 101 courses is to expand for students what writing is and how it works. My “Remediation” assignment works toward this goal, as it asks students to reshape their writing for new audiences and to funnel their ideas through a new medium or genre. In sum, students are asked to take an already completed written project (usually the first major project, which asks them to explore a literacy) and funnel its ideas through another medium/“translate” it into another genre. For example, students might take their project and (re)shape it into a podcast or blog post. Remediation gets students thinking about the ever-shifting relationship among writer, audience, and text (i.e., the rhetorical situation), but also asks them to focus on how the mediums/genres in which we communicate our ideas to others consist of different kinds of media that very much are “writing.” Students are excited to expand their notions of what “counts” as writing, and one of the assignment’s selling points is in how it asks students to not only consider how certain mediums/genres appeal to certain audiences, and not others, but to consider how their writing does so as well. ... View more

Michael A. Reyes Michael A. Reyes (recommended by Danielle Dyckhoff), Bedford New Scholar 2021, earned his MA in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition at Cal State LA. He teaches in the First-Year Writing program at Cal State LA and Cal Lutheran, and leads creative writing workshops in LA public schools and organizations. His research interests are in critical affect theory, decolonial rhetorics and pedagogy, contemporary poetry and poetics, and anti-racist and formative assessments.   Is there an instructor or scholar that helped shape your career in rhet/comp? How? On the first day of class, I review a document titled “Mr. Reyes’s Metaphors, Myths, and Muses,” which is a bullet point summary of what has shaped me and my teaching. I save the syllabus for later in the week, and instead introduce the class and myself in such a way.  Students quickly notice that I draw from non-academic sources: the art of ordering at an In-N-Out drive-thru, Tik Tok trends, Bruce Lee, the art of spilling the “tea,” basketball, Simone Biles, Jerry Seinfeld, poetry, and so forth. I make the argument that we can benefit from  pluriversal knowledge production. However, I first arrived at this through my foundations in decolonial studies and critical affect studies: Walter D. Mignolo and Sara Ahmed. I’ve learned a lot from their scholarship. To see lessons in reading and writing in our most intimate and natural lives is more fascinating and long-lasting to me. So, I detached a bit from scholars as the only knowledge-holders. I invite students to hopefully find, feel, and think against hierarchies and essentialisms.   What is your greatest teaching challenge? My challenges in teaching are what I value most. I’m in this profession because each semester I love to recalibrate everything I know to be true and working in my classes. I think this serves me and my students. I don’t want to be static, ever. This is my biggest challenge right now during this moment of chaos: to sustain a strategy of mindfulness and intrinsic motivation. I like myself best when I’m in this mindset. In other words, to live by what the poet Maya Angelou says, “ Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”    What is it like to co-design or work with the editorial team at Bedford/St. Martin's? Being part of the Bedford New Scholars Program, I’ve had the opportunity so far to review two critical reading and writing textbooks, and have a say in the direction of subsequent editions. Both were different processes, and I loved my role in each one. I was given an e-book and a survey. I was asked to note areas that could align more closely with diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as areas that are most useful for my classes. Aside from reviewing, I loved that I was introduced to texts and praxis that I wouldn’t have considered if I weren’t in the program.   What projects or course materials from Bedford/St. Martin's most pique your interest, and why? Achieve ’s peer-feedback platform is fascinating to me. I was introduced to it during the Bedford New Scholars summer institute, and it answered some questions I’ve always had about peer-feedback. How can I visually represent the writing and revision process workflow? What peer-review platforms exist for the visual learner?  The peer-feedback platform provides a real useful diagram that students work through. Along each checkpoint, students accomplish tasks that work towards completing the entire diagram. Students can visualize their growth and goals. I struggle with making peer-review dynamic and organized. This platform is on to something.     Michael's Assignment that Works: During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Michael’s assignment. For the full activity, see Photo Essay. As I developed my version of the Photo Essay, I had the following goals: To segue into traditional academic discourse. To use students’ more natural media reading experiences and visual rhetoric expertise. To use the image/non-discursive to represent abstract concepts in traditional academic discourse. To make the rhetoric of style a more prominent feature in the writing process. With this in mind, I asked students to compose an essay that contained only photos. Students shot and arranged a minimum of 10 photos, using the photojournalism techniques of Rule of Thirds, Leading Lines, Symmetry and Pattern, POV, Depth, and Framing. Each photo needed to represent a specific part of a college essay (i.e., introduction paragraph; thesis statement; body paragraph topic sentence, context, quote, analysis, transition; or conclusion paragraph). The order of the photos was up to the student. Some considered that their argument was better served with a linear, delayed thesis statement structure to build suspense, and some with a more nonlinear structure that clarified the thesis statement in the first few photos to build deep reflective thought. I would ask students to later provide a rationale for their respective argumentative structure during a follow-up assignment.   ... View more

Gina Atkins Gina Atkins (recommended by Casie Fedukovich) is pursuing her MA in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. She expects to finish in May 2021. She teaches English 101: Academic Writing and Research and serves on the First-Year Writing Program Council as the MA Representative. She is also CRLA III certified. Her research interests relate to developing antiracist pedagogy, antiracist praxis, accessibility in the writing classroom, and linguistic justice. Eric D. Brown Eric D. Brown (recommended by Kyle Jensen) is pursuing his PhD in Arizona State University’s Writing, Rhetorics and Literacies PhD program, where he studies writing technologies, writing pedagogy, and writing program administration. He has taught First-Year Composition, Persuasive Writing and Public Issues, Writing for the Professions, and Business Writing. Eric is also Assistant Director (AD) of Writing Programs, where he aids the director in growing the scope of Writing Programs and creating professional development for faculty. As Assistant Director, he also co-runs the National Day on Writing, ASU’s annual Composition Conference, and is an editor of Writing Programs’ bi-annual newsletter, Writing Notes. Emily Gresbrink Emily Gresbrink (recommended by John Logie) is pursuing her PhD in Rhetoric, Scientific and Technical Communication at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. She expects to complete her degree in 2024. Emily currently teaches University Writing, housed in the First-Year Writing program. Her research interests encompass technical communication, the rhetoric of health and medicine, pandemics, rhetorical analysis, archives, bioethics, and mentoring. She also serves on the University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts Assembly as a Graduate Student Representative, co-chairs the graduate student mentoring subcommittee for the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication (CPTSC), and works with the mentoring committee for the Online Writing Centers Association (OWCA). Brendan Hawkins Brendan Hawkins (recommended by Elias Dominguez Barajas) is pursuing his PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition at Florida State University. His research, teaching, and faculty development interests and experiences span rhetorical genre studies, histories of rhetoric, online writing instruction, and general education composition classes. He serves as a College Composition Program assistant director where his primary responsibility is mentorship for first-year teachers. Hyoung Min Lee Hyoung Min Lee (recommended by Dr. Claire Carly-Miles) is pursuing her PhD in English at Texas A&M University. She teaches Writing About Literature as a graduate teaching assistant. She has also taught Rhetoric and Composition and worked as a grader for Technical and Business Writing. She is interested in teaching 20th- and 21st-century American literature with a focus on diversity and social justice. Her research interests include theories of race and biopolitics and 20th- and 21st-century American literature, especially African American literature. Courtney A. Mauck Courtney A. Mauck (recommended by Rachael Ryerson) is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at Ohio University. She expects to finish her degree in Spring 2022. At OU, she serves as Assistant Director of Composition and primarily teaches first-year writing courses. She also teaches junior composition courses themed around feminist game studies and has co-taught two graduate courses, “Teaching College English” and “Learning Transfer.” Additionally, she has received her certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies. Her research interests include digital rhetorics, multimodal composition, social media, game studies, learning transfer, and first-year writing pedagogy. Michael A. Reyes Michael A. Reyes is pursuing his MA in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition at Cal State LA. He teaches in the First-Year Writing program and leads creative writing workshops in LA public schools and organizations. His research interests are critical affect theory, decolonial rhetorics and pedagogy, contemporary poetry and poetics, creative writing pedagogy, and anti-racist and formative assessments. Jacob Richter Jacob Richter (recommended by Megan Eatman) is the Assistant Director of First Year Composition and a PhD candidate in the Rhetorics, Communication and Information Design (RCID) program at Clemson University. Jacob’s research has appeared in Computers & Composition, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments, and Textshop Experiments. He teaches First-Year Composition, technical communication, and business communication courses, and is the Assistant Communications Editor for Xchanges. Jacob’s research examines rhetorical theory, composition pedagogy, and writing in digitally networked environments. Rhiannon Scharnhorst Rhiannon Scharnhorst (recommended by Samantha NeCamp) is pursuing her hybrid PhD in Writing Studies and Victorian Literature at the University of Cincinnati, where she expects to defend her dissertation Willful Objects and Feminist Writing Practices in May 2022. She teaches a variety of courses in writing, from first-year composition to advanced topics classes, including Writing with Style and Food in Literature. She has also served as the Assistant to the Composition Program, writing and designing the department's handbook, overseeing graduate student education, and hosting the annual graduate conference. Her research draws on feminist rhetorics to make sense of objects in writing studies, including typewriters, cookbooks, and other tools. She also writes about materiality, embodiment and writing practices of nineteenth-century women writers in Great Britain.   Leah Washburn   Leah Washburn (recommended by Wallace Cleaves) is pursuing her PhD in English Literature at The University of California, Riverside and hopes to graduate in Spring 2023. She graduated from University of Central Florida in 2018 with an MFA in Creative Writing, where she taught Intro to Creative Writing. She also worked two years on The Florida Review, coordinating undergraduate interns and providing administrative support. During her undergraduate years, she worked as a writing fellow at Rhodes College for three years. Her research interests include digital media, ludology, narratology, contemporary speculative fiction, and postmodern fiction. ... View more

Benesemon Simmons (recommended by Khirsten L. Scott, on behalf of DBLAC) is pursuing a PhD in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric at Syracuse University. She teaches WRT 105 and WRT 205 and serves as a writing consultant. Her research interests include Black Feminist Pedagogy, Critical Race Theory, and Activist Rhetoric.   How do you hope higher education will change in the next ten years? I hope higher education will acknowledge its complicity in white supremacy and work towards dismantling these structures. I hope higher education will implement anti-racist practices that will allow access and opportunity for everyone. I hope that higher education will not just use inclusive rhetoric, but be intentional about incorporating equitable practices through admissions, employment, retention, curriculum, and housing and demonstrate accountability through surrounding communities (for example). Ultimately, I hope higher education uses its power to prioritize the marginalized identities it professes to stand by.  Is there an instructor or scholar that helped shape your career in rhet/comp? How? Dr. Aja Y. Martinez has helped shape my career in rhet/comp. Her scholarship, instruction, mentorship, and leadership have helped me grow personally and professionally, but her presence has facilitated my survival in the field. As her work interrogates race and power, she embodies the courage and commitment that her research requires and the action it commands. I am inspired by her activism and her dedication to education, and I strive to model her brilliance in and outside the classroom. A large part of my confidence is because of the foundation she has laid: she centers marginalized voices in practice and in principle and has taught me to value my voice, ideas, and lived experiences. Her influence and example is a major reason I have taken up Counterstory in my research because I understand the need for an intervention against discourse that minimizes or misrepresents racism and I am interested in contributing to this conversation. Counterstory is essential to academia and the field of rhet/comp, and Dr. Martinez helps emphasize this, and encourages others to recognize this as well, including myself. What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? Being a part of the Bedford New Scholars program gives me an opportunity to interact with other graduate student instructors from different universities, and to engage with creative projects and practices guided by the Bedford/St. Martin’s team. Ultimately, this program is an opportunity to learn and develop as a scholar, instructor, and student of composition. We’ve shared teaching resources and received feedback, reviewed and discussed college textbooks and other educational materials, explored innovative digital platforms for the classroom, and participated in relevant conversations surrounding student performance and academia. We focused on how we can support our students and each other. The Bedford New Scholars program creates a network of colleagues that help you navigate publishing in education but also pedagogical strategies in the classroom. How will the Bedford New Scholars program affect your professional development or your classroom practice? I learned a lot by participating in the Bedford New Scholars program, and I believe the summit especially provided many things to consider and carry back to the classroom. A shared assignments activity, where we all presented our own, gave me new ideas about how to approach different areas that our students might find difficult or confusing. Specifically, exercises that included genre and synthesis were helpful to think about different ways to explain major themes in a writing course. It was also useful to explore composition texts for the classroom within groups. This allowed me to rethink how and why I use specific texts as an instructor, and emphasized the importance of prioritizing effectiveness for students. Moreover, practicing with Achieve [Macmillan’s digital learning solution] together was valuable because, while navigating the platform as a teacher, it pushes me to consider methods of revision for students more and how they can better engage in the process. Finally, I found Dr. Kendra N. Bryant’s presentation on “The Courage to Teach” to be very engaging and energizing. She challenged us to interrogate and question our pedagogical style and choices, and to examine them in relation to our teaching philosophies and the backdrop of power systems that our individual institutions represent. Her presentation was powerful and was a great way to put our students and classrooms into perspective considering the violence and social justice issues that surrounds these spaces. Ultimately, Dr. Bryant reminded us to lead with love.   Benesemon’s Assignment that Works  During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Benesemon's assignment. For the full activity, see Analyzing Primary Sources. The purpose of my Assignment that Works is to help my students analyze secondary sources for research. The first part of the assignment asks students to complete an annotated bibliography, and the second part asks students to write an essay using two of the annotations and analyzing their rhetorical features, their relationship to each other, and their relevance to the research inquiry. This assignment helps students of composition become familiar with the annotated bibliography as a genre, locate sources for their research, and consider connections between sources specific to a research topic. ... View more

    Sidney Blaylock (recommended by Kate Pantelides) is pursuing his PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition at Middle Tennessee State University. He expects to finish in May 2021. He teaches Expository Writing and Research and Argumentation. His research interests include multimodality, rhetorical analysis, new media, cultural rhetorics, digital rhetorics, film, and afrofuturism. Allison Dziuba (recommended by Jonathan Alexander) is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). She teaches courses in the lower-division writing sequence, in person during the school year and online during the summer. She also teaches the Summer Bridge writing lab, a pre-college course for incoming UCI first-years. She has served as the editorial assistant for College Composition and Communication and Rhetoric Society Quarterly. She is currently the Campus Writing & Communication Fellow at UCI. Allison's research interests include college students' self-sponsored literacy practices and extracurricular rhetorical education, and intersectional feminist approaches to rhetorical studies. Michael S. Garcia (recommended by Kimberly Harrison) is pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing at Florida International University. He expects to finish in April 2021. At FIU, he has taught Writing and Rhetoric, Writing in Action, Essay Writing, and Creative Writing: Forms and Practices. He has also taught 11th and 12th grade English at a Title I high school. As a writer, he has published short stories, essays, web articles, and poetry. Sarah Heidebrink-Bruno (recommended by Jenna Lay) is pursuing her PhD in English, with a concentration in literature and social justice pedagogies, at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. She expects to finish her degree in 2020 or 2021. She teaches a range of composition and rhetoric courses, including English 1, 2, and 11, in addition to interdisciplinary courses in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as well as Africana Studies. She has also taught online courses in English and WGSS, with a focus on pop culture themes, including modern relationships. Her research interests include restorative justice practices, women's literature of the 1960s-present, feminist theory and praxis, and writing center tutors' instruction. L. Corinne Jones (recommended by Lissa Pompous Mansfield) is completing her PhD in Texts and Technology with an emphasis in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Central Florida (UCF), where she expects to finish in Spring 2021. She currently teaches Composition II (Writing about Writing and Research Writing); in Fall 2020, she anticipates teaching Business and Technical Communication. She also works as a legal writing adjunct at Barry University (Law School). Previously, she has taught Composition I (introductory writing) at UCF, as well as First-Year composition for conditionally admitted students at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Additionally, she has worked extensively in writing centers. Her research interests include digital rhetoric; circulation studies; digital, qualitative, mixed methods and methodologies; and feminist and queer studies. Sierra Mendez (recommended by Diane Davis) is pursuing a PhD in Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. She expects to finish in May 2022. Sierra currently teaches a custom RHE 309K course entitled "Rhetoric of Texas" and serves as Assistant Director for the D.R.W.'s Digital Writing and Research Lab. In the past, she has taught "Introduction to Rhetoric and Composition" and served on the Lower Division Curriculum Committee. Before beginning her doctoral program, Sierra worked for three years for a museum branch of the San Antonio Public Library, creating educational community-based resources, installations, and programming. Her research interests concern border, material, visual, and memory rhetorics: specifically, the historical and ongoing constitution of Mexicanx bodies via narratives held both tenuously and powerfully across San Antonio’s urban space. Christopher Peace (recommended by Louis M. Maraj, on behalf of DBLAC) is pursuing a PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Kansas. He expects to finish in May 2022. He currently teaches Composition 102 and plans to teach a 203 course on Digital Storytelling in Fall 2020. He has also taught online first-year composition and world literature. His research interests include rhetorical genre studies, (African-derived) religious rhetorics, writing ecologies, spatial rhetorics, digital storytelling/mythmaking, and ecocomposition. He also serves as a professional tutor for the KU Gear Up program and is an affiliate of the Project on the History of Black Writing.   Kalyn Prince (recommended by Roxanne Mountford) is pursuing her PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Writing Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She serves as the Senior Assistant Director of First-Year Composition and teaches first-year writing. She has also co-taught a composition theory survey course for graduate students in the OU English Department. Her research interests include public argumentation, nostalgia as ethos, and rhetorical analysis. Josh Scheidler (recommended by Brian Gogan) is pursuing his MA in English with an emphasis on Medieval Language and Literature at Western Michigan University (WMU). He expects to finish in May 2021. He teaches WMU's first-year writing course, Thought and Writing, as a graduate teaching assistant. His research interests include ethics and politics in medieval literature, first-year writing pedagogy, rhetorical analysis, and new materialist environmental rhetoric.     Benesemon Simmons (recommended by Khirsten L. Scott, on behalf of DBLAC) is pursuing a PhD in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric at Syracuse University. She teaches WRT 105 and WRT 205 and serves as a writing consultant. Her research interests include Black Feminist Pedagogy, Critical Race Theory, and Activist Rhetoric.   For biographies of Bedford New Scholars in previous years,   click here.   ... View more

Josh Scheidler (recommended by Brian Gogan) is pursuing his MA in English with an emphasis on Medieval Language and Literature at Western Michigan University (WMU). He expects to finish in May 2021. He teaches WMU's first-year writing course, Thought and Writing, as a graduate teaching assistant. His research interests include ethics and politics in medieval literature, first-year writing pedagogy, rhetorical analysis, and new materialist environmental rhetoric.   What is your greatest teaching challenge? Right now, connecting with students the way I could face-to-face is proving to be challenging. There are often delays in internet connection that create a distance between students and their peers, and students and me, which also proves challenging. Right now, I’m working with students to help them become familiar with online spaces and how to navigate that learning curve; I know it took me a period of time to become acclimated to the online infrastructure we use in our program. But the work I’m doing with students to familiarize them with our online platforms and the resources we are using for remote instruction has allowed some connection with students. I’ve been pleasantly surprised that students have reached out to me, and one even called me early in the semester. Making connections online is challenging—especially considering we are working from a distance and with seemingly indiscriminate internet lag—but the vast amount of energy needed to build and sustain relationships requires us to be all in. How will online or remote learning affect your teaching? Remote learning is slow. The first two class sessions I have in Fall 2020 are 75 minutes each, but time has seemed to just disappear with these classes. It’s almost as if class is over just as soon as we’ve started. So, I am trying to give students exercises and activities that don’t ask them to traverse the various online platforms we are using so their time can be spent writing rather than navigating unfamiliar places. Remote teaching has truly highlighted the necessity of a writing instructor, or indeed any instructor, to demonstrate everything , give clear instructions, and explain what is being asked of students simply and thoroughly. The many ways to miscommunicate or misunderstand with online learning underscores the need to continue practicing with and developing written communication skills. Remote learning is making me work harder to ensure my students are given instruction and practice that will help them develop useful skills for the future. What projects or course materials from Bedford/St. Martin's most pique your interest, and why? What is exciting to you about Achieve and why? I think Achieve is really cool. Being able to view a timeline and visualize progression through the peer review process is extremely helpful and can give students a way to plan their homework more efficiently. Having to finish one step before moving to the next step is critical in making sure students take the time they need to complete one task before moving to another task. Most importantly, though, the timeline functions as a visualization of a writing process, which is crucial for those who think writing is nothing but a product or a paper turned in for credit. It can demonstrate writing to be something that is shaped by place, time, iteration or need.  The depth of the revision planning in Achieve is absolutely fantastic. I enjoy there being a built-in reflection too. That there is an entire process for writing that is streamlined in this way — with revision plans built from peer reviews and a means for clearly tracking the changes from one iteration of the writing to the next — is incredibly useful for gauging student progress, development, and need. Having all of this integrated with an online learning platform or LMS is awesome to me. It really deals with the problem that I’ve encountered where students are being asked to go from one platform to the next, with peer review in one place and assignments submitted for a grade in another; this back-and-forth gets confusing for students and takes valuable time away from writing and developing successful writing habits. The activities that students have to do online should not obscure their endeavor to learn writing.    Josh's Assignment that Works During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Josh's assignment. For the full activity, see Paragraph Cohesion Activity. This activity asks students to consider how paragraphs work with one another at the sentence level. The goals of the assignment are two-fold: I want students to practice working with another to solve writing problems, and I want to play an enjoyable game in class with students to give them individualized instruction when they need it. This activity approximates the peer review students will engage in with each other to determine what works in writing. It also lets me practice working with students somewhat individually, despite being in groups. This activity is something I do near the beginning of the semester as students are still developing relationships with one another and with me, and it has helped students to become comfortable working with one another.  ... View more

Kalyn Prince (recommended by Roxanne Mountford) is pursuing her PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Writing Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She serves as the Senior Assistant Director of First-Year Composition and teaches first-year writing. She has also co-taught a composition theory survey course for graduate students in the OU English Department. Her research interests include public argumentation, nostalgia as ethos, and rhetorical analysis.   How does the next generation of students inspire you? I’m constantly impressed by my students’ inclination towards advocacy—both personal advocacy and advocacy for others. My students are not content to learn about rhetoric and writing in the abstract. They want to engage in the world and find solutions to the problems we discuss in the classroom. From Black Lives Matter to TikTok, this group of students actively takes a stand on injustice and is uniquely capable of doing so with their various social literacies. My job as their teacher is to help them think critically about the issues they care about, teaching them to thoughtfully analyze the arguments and stakeholders in the issue and consider their own unique abilities to intervene. How do you hope higher education will change in the next ten years? My hope is that higher education will follow the lead of this generation and find better ways to leave the classroom. In the time of COVID-19 and worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, it can come as no shock that composition studies cannot only reside in the university. So many of us enter into higher education—both as students and instructors—hoping to make meaningful change for the communities we care about, but instead our work gets trapped in the halls of the university, never to breathe the air outside. It is my hope that those of us in higher education will continue to intervene in public discourse from our place in the university and that we will increasingly find ways of becoming scholar activists, joining our students in understanding and crafting arguments that will have a real-world impact. What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? Being part of the Bedford New Scholars program has been such a rewarding experience. It’s been so encouraging to work with other graduate students with whom I share research and teaching interests, discovering that they have the same goals and frustrations that I do! The Scholars have shared insight from their home institutions’ writing programs, which provides a unique opportunity to get a sense of what is going on in composition classrooms across the nation. It’s uplifting to discover our mutual hopes and concerns for teaching composition in 2020 and exciting to think that these passionate, brilliant Scholars will be directing writing programs in the future. I’ve also loved getting to work with the editorial team at Bedford/St. Martin’s as they guide us through textbook, program, and catalog reviews. They consistently impress me with their thoughtfulness and intentionality, time and time again thinking of incredible solutions to challenges we face in the writing classroom and designing course materials that our students can find accessible and instructive. The entire experience has been a delight, and I’m so grateful to have this opportunity. How will the Bedford New Scholars program affect your professional development or your classroom practice? This program has inspired me to be more intentional in how I craft my classroom activities. During our Summit Week, Kendra N. Bryant ran a session on teaching philosophies and Shelley Reid ran a session on assignment design. What both of these sessions had in common was emphasizing the imperativeness of having classroom practices that match teaching philosophies and student learning goals. While this should seem obvious, it can be easy to lose sight of our ultimate goals when building small classroom activities or homework assignments. But just because our project or essay assignments are sound doesn’t mean the rest of the course is. The Bedford New Scholars program has reignited my concern for backwards design in lesson planning and inspired me to be even more intentional in crafting smaller activities to ensure that I’m giving students every opportunity to thoroughly develop critical thinking skills that will allow them to make change in the world.   Kalyn’s Assignment that Works During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Kalyn's assignment. For the full activity, see  Synthesizing Primary Research. I’ve found that when I ask students to engage with real-world social/political groups or organizations, they often have trouble synthesizing all of their primary research, secondary research, and analysis. Such synthesis is crucial for students to be able to develop in critical thinking, understand the nuances of a group’s political engagement, and consider their own stake in these issues. To help them practice synthesis, I run students through this scaffolding activity where they begin to consider how synthesis works in documentary-style television shows. Students watch a clip of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown (any documentary-style clip could work) and then respond to a series of questions regarding the different research components being synthesized in the segment. For this activity, you can customize the questions and materials to better fit with your classroom language and the skills you’ve been developing with your students. ... View more

Christopher Peace (recommended by Louis M. Maraj, on behalf of DBLAC) is pursuing a PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Kansas. He expects to finish in May 2022. He currently teaches Composition 102 and plans to teach a 203 course on Digital Storytelling in Fall 2020. He has also taught online first-year composition and world literature. His research interests include rhetorical genre studies, (African-derived) religious rhetorics, writing ecologies, spatial rhetorics, digital storytelling/mythmaking, and ecocomposition. He also serves as a professional tutor for the KU Gear Up program and is an affiliate of the Project on the History of Black Writing.   What do you think is the most important recent development in teaching composition? The recent materialist turn in rhetoric and composition is important for teaching composition because it provides language to describe the multifaceted spatial dimensions of language and composition. Engaging with the spatial dimension of language is articulated through genre, which is the dimensions of typified communication that responds to the rhetorical situation. Rhetorical genre theory and mapping allows for a spatial engagement with composition in innovative ways, especially for multimodal composition. I’m interested in multigenre projects in composition: writers compose in multiple genres that are connected rhetorically, and they explain how different genres circulate differently in discourse communities. I think projects like this ask students to engage materially with certain discourse. One of the most important pedagogical shifts in composition studies has been the move from product-centered teaching to process-centered teaching. Instead of student writers focusing on the product of writing, process-centered pedagogy focuses on the multiple processes that occur during the act of writing. A focus on materiality expands on the situatedness of writing in an academic context, and I think it has given students more options in completing the tasks they must solve in coursework. What is your greatest teaching challenge? My proposed class for the Fall semester was canceled due to low enrollment, and I am now teaching a Professional Writing class. The Professional Writing course is divided into two eight-week online courses, and the modules for the courses are already set up for me. Therefore, I don't have as much control with this course as I did with my proposed course. I have some control over the syllabus, but my department has suggested that I shouldn’t change anything because everything is already set up for the online course. Currently, my difficulties with teaching involve moving around content to make it more comfortable for me to navigate. With the syllabus already designed, it feels like I have to learn just as much as the students, and it places me in a less stable situation when speaking through the course material. This course is generally online, but I want to make sure my students access the learning goals of this course in a way that is just as effective as an in-person course. I enjoy small-group conferences, so I will definitely find a way to implement that more into this online course. What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? I’m sure my experience with the Bedford New Scholars program has been unique due to the current pandemic, but our distanced situation hasn’t stopped the success of the program. Reviewing Everything’s an Argument was one of my first experiences as a Bedford New Scholar. First of all, I was surprised that my opinion mattered enough to be asked to review a well-known textbook. I’m really excited to be a part of that process as an upcoming academic, and an instructor who teaches argumentation frequently in composition courses. I believe that reviewing textbooks at this level is necessary for the cultural inclusion needed in the texts we normalize in academia. The BNS Summit was engaging and made me aware of my pedagogical leanings. It was really great to share teaching experiences with other Scholars. Although we couldn’t meet physically, the breakout sessions during the summit were personal and added a layer of closeness needed to have a successful experience. I didn’t feel out of place when it came to interactions with others. I know this experience will be beneficial to my future in rhetoric and composition, and to any editorial opportunities that may come my way. What have you learned from other Bedford New Scholars? I learned the most from other Bedford New Scholars during the summit. During the “Assignments that Work,” I learned a lot of practical moves from other Scholars. One Scholar reviewed a student information sheet—I had never thought to do the assignment in the way the Scholar presented it, especially since the assignment was geared toward preferred learning styles. I think more assessments like this could impact how my semester is set up toward the beginning of the course. I enjoyed another Scholar’s assignment that scaffolded synthesizing primary research by asking students to identify the rhetorical situations present in interviews, observations, and analyses. I’m always looking for ways to make primary research easier for students to follow, so having them see another person do primary research is a great way to explore synthesis. I liked sharing our teaching philosophies as well. The philosophies were articulated in multiple ways, and I gained several ideas about the complexities of my own dispositions to teaching. As Dr. Kendra Bryant mentioned, “philosophy” is about the love of knowledge. Being with a group of scholars to talk through the inspirational and emotional impulses of our teaching philosophies helped me articulate why I’m on this journey of completing this doctoral degree.   Christopher Peace’s Assignment that Works During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Christopher's assignment. For the full activity, see Multigenre Dystopian Invention. The Multigenre Dystopian Project is a multigenre project that asks students to invent a dystopian society through the creation of multiple genres. A dystopia is often characterized by an authoritarian or totalitarian form of governing and normalized social control of space, with seen or unseen intentions. It suggests different kinds of repressive social control systems, a lack or total absence of individual freedoms and expressions, and a state of constant warfare or violence. In this multigenre project, students create an original (as possible) dystopian society using written and visual genres. They come up with a fictional (or twistedly realistic) place that is intended to be perfect but has gone wrong due to some external reasons. Students invent social media, medical, and legal genres that express tension between the governing body and protesting citizens. This project aims to connect rhetoric of place and space with genres of writing, power, and control. I like this project because students combine rhetoric, creative writing, and literature together in a way that is unlike the standard essay—students are usually excited to be as multimodal as possible when creating different genres for their dystopias. ... View more

Sierra Mendez (recommended by Diane Davis) is pursuing a PhD in Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. She expects to finish in May 2022. Sierra currently teaches a custom RHE 309K course entitled "Rhetoric of Texas" and serves as Assistant Director for the D.R.W.'s Digital Writing and Research Lab. In the past, she has taught "Introduction to Rhetoric and Composition" and served on the Lower Division Curriculum Committee. Before beginning her doctoral program, Sierra worked for three years for a museum branch of the San Antonio Public Library, creating educational community-based resources, installations, and programming. Her research interests concern border, material, visual, and memory rhetorics: specifically, the historical and ongoing constitution of Mexicanx bodies via narratives held both tenuously and powerfully across San Antonio’s urban space.   How will online or remote learning affect your teaching? The sudden and total switch to online instruction in the last year has been an enormous challenge for students and teachers. Luckily, I have worked at U.T.’s Digital Writing & Research Lab for four years, so I have spent time thinking about engaging, accessible online content and learning about necessary equipment and softwares. This shift is still an enormous challenge for me. I like to create malleable classrooms that respond to what is happening in the news, in student’s lives, and in our classroom in real time. In a traditional setting, I depend on face-to-face interaction with and between my students to know their struggles and interests. Moving online, however, requires content be produced ahead of time. In some ways, this is good because I am learning to be more structured and methodical (a hilarious notion, if you know me). It also means I hear more from students who are not as comfortable speaking aloud in class. In other ways, this is not good because it means my pre-recorded lectures have less room to respond to the news, to students’ lives, and to what our classroom is being. This fall, particularly, will be an enormous challenge because I’m teaching Intro to Visual Rhetoric: #2020PresidentialElection — topics that require response. How does the next generation of students inspire you? This generation of students faces enormous challenges. I am constantly moved by their willingness to engage in spite of the upheaval that surrounds them. This past spring, I fully expected after Spring Break this past year for most of my class to just say “eff this” and quit turning work in or turn in shoddy work; I wouldn’t have blamed any of them for doing so. But none of them did. They continued to participate in class activities and small group discussions via Zoom; they continued to respond thoughtfully to writing assignments, many of them turning in better work than they had previously; and they continued to seek out help through office hours and meetings. This generation of students, perhaps because of their exposure to social media and constant political chaos, seems much more willing and able than my generation to engage with complexity and to engage with humanity’s multiplicities. What have you learned from other Bedford New Scholars? I deeply appreciated learning from other instructors at Bedford New Scholars. I wish we had been able to spend more time talking one-on-one, but I know that is an experience not easily replicable online. I appreciated the group’s commitment to students as individuals. There was very real concern for who each student is and where they come from and what they need. There was very real attention to socio-economic backgrounds and issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation that produce often unchecked inequity in the classroom. Also, our guest speakers Kendra N. Bryant and Shelley Reid, were both incredible to listen to. What is exciting to you about Achieve and why? I am very excited about the feedback process enabled by Achieve. Most commonly-implemented online learning systems seem to conceive of paper feedback as an afterthought, but Achieve implements the paper into its design as an ongoing process. I am interested in how Achieve could help support portfolio-style and other nontraditional grading systems that don’t insist on the assignment of an opaque yet completely subjective letter grade.   Sierra’s Assignment That Works During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Sierra's assignment. For the full activity, see Drawing Arguments (Prewriting Activity). I like to do this pre-writing class activity in the final unit of class. It’s fun and it helps students generate ideas and structure for their final argumentative essay and accompanying argumentative infographic. Prior to this activity, students should generally know what they want to write/argue about. In this activity, to loosen up their brains, students start by drawing an object (a unicorn, Batman, whatever) for increasingly shorter increments of time. At the end of this first part, they will have four versions of the object with different degrees of detail and, somewhere in there, something recognizable as the essence of the object. I always let them talk to each other about what they’ve made/discovered and share with the class if they want. This kind of drawing and forced quick thinking gets their brains moving and raises room energy. It also helps them think about the pieces that make a thing. The activity then asks students to go through the same steps again but, this time, writing about their argument for increasingly shorter periods of time. When they are done, they will have their topic, something like a thesis, primary paragraph claims, and key details and evidence. I’ve done this activity with undergraduate and graduate students. It seems to help most people think more creatively and openly about their argument. ... View more

L. Corinne Jones(recommended by Lissa Pompous Mansfield) is completing her PhD in Texts and Technology with an emphasis in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Central Florida (UCF), where she expects to finish in Spring 2021. She currently teaches Composition II (Writing about Writing and Research Writing); in Fall 2020, she anticipates teaching Business and Technical Communication. She also works as a legal writing adjunct at Barry University (Law School). Previously, she has taught Composition I (introductory writing) at UCF, as well as First-Year composition for conditionally admitted students at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Additionally, she has worked extensively in writing centers. Her research interests include digital rhetoric; circulation studies; digital, qualitative, mixed methods and methodologies; and feminist and queer studies.   How does the next generation of students inspire you? The next generation of students inspire me in so many ways. While I have only had the pleasure to teach this next generation of students for a few years now, I am particularly impressed with not only how resilient and determined my students are, but also how civic-minded and socially and politically active they are. My own students have faced incredible challenges both before and during the transition to online learning, and they have all overcome those challenges with both grace and tenacity. However, my own students and the next generation of students generally have consistently not let their challenges define them; instead they have turned these challenges into rhetorically and civically productive spaces for change. In my limited experience, this next generation of students is concerned with not only earning a passing grade, but with developing skills to use as they become agents of larger systemic changes.    How do you hope higher education will change in the next ten years? Relatedly, I hope that higher education responds to this next generation of students and their needs, both at their local institutions and more systemically. Though my students have proven that they can overcome challenges, I recognize that suggesting that success is achieved solely through individual will and hard work overlooks the neoliberal ideologies about individualism and the white supremacist systems that undergird higher education. So, I hope that higher education will respond to students’ stated needs, and I hope that higher education will work to actively change policies that negatively impact current students, prospective students, and the communities in which colleges and universities are embedded. This might include rethinking things like standardized tests, as we are already seeing some universities do. Ultimately, I hope that higher education both reflects and serves the larger community.  For those who work in higher education, I would also like to see higher education shift to recognize and value different types of labor and to compensate non-tenure track faculty and graduate student workers fairly and according to this unrecognized labor. Part of this change might also include shifting to valuing interdisciplinary work that traverses traditional disciplinary boundaries and expectations.    What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? Being part of the Bedford New Scholars program was an enlightening experience; first, I had the opportunity to learn about other programs and approaches to teaching writing. I loved having the opportunity to learn about the other scholars’ creative and smart assignments that they created to address their particular institutional contexts and students. Just as importantly, I appreciated hearing their rationales and reasoning behind their design choices as their explanations sparked new ideas for me and my own classroom assignments and practices. They all challenged me to rethink and reevaluate my own practices to try to better meet the needs of my own students.  Second, I appreciated learning about the publishing process. I found it helpful to learn about the layered decisions that publishers make when choosing a topic for a textbook, as well as when deciding on the content, chapters, and skills covered in those textbooks. It helps me to know more about the decisions, affordances, and constraints, which educational publishing companies face in developing new materials because now I have a better understanding of what to expect.    How will the Bedford New Scholars program affect your professional development or your classroom practice? The Bedford New Scholars Program has affected my professional development and classroom practices in a number of ways. First, and most obviously, it has given me a lot of new ideas and things to think about as I move forward on my own pedagogical path. As I noted above, I was very impressed with the fellow scholars’ assignments, as well as their thoughtful approaches to classroom practices more generally. Moving forward, I would like to adopt some of their practices in my own classrooms, and I hope to draw from some of their ideas presented in the institute and posted here on the Macmillan English Community (with credit, of course!).  Second, while I have been interested in the challenges of online pedagogy and been an online student myself, participating in the Bedford New Scholars program online has made me think more critically about how to approach online pedagogy in the fall semester. I now know more about the work and the cognitive load (switching between screens, etc.) from a student perspective. The experience reinforced my belief that students will need grace and understanding from teachers in the upcoming semester.     Corinne’s Assignment that Works During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Corinne's assignment. For the full activity, see Rhetorical Velocity: A Game of Strategy and Chance. At my university, GTAs use Writing about Writing , which uses complex writing studies texts to get students thinking metacognitively about their rhetorical choices. Sometimes, students struggle with the readings, so I try to ground some of the dense readings in in-class games. For this assignment, students read about the concept of “rhetorical velocity,” which broadly refers to how online rhetors strategically compose texts for rapid Internet spread and re-appropriation (Ridolfo & DeVoss, 2009). Importantly, rhetorical velocity is beyond the control of the rhetor, thereby disturbing the concept of the singular author. After a scaffolded discussion defining terms, students put the concept to use in a game. In the game, students get onto teams and select attributes which can add to the rhetorical velocity of their online compositions in fictive scenarios. However, when selecting these attributes, students are unaware of consequences of their online compositions, some of which lose their team points. After the game, students discuss the rhetorical velocity of their texts and the extent to which they had control (and responsibility) over those texts and their consequences. Once students understand the concept of rhetorical velocity, they can use it in their own literacy narratives or profiles of other authors. ... View more

Photo Credit: Kyle Brett Sarah Heidebrink-Bruno (recommended by Jenna Lay) is pursuing her PhD in English, with a concentration in literature and social justice pedagogies, at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. She expects to finish her degree in 2020 or 2021. She teaches a range of composition and rhetoric courses, including English 1, 2, and 11, in addition to interdisciplinary courses in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as well as Africana Studies. She has also taught online courses in English and WGSS, with a focus on pop culture themes, including modern relationships. Her research interests include restorative justice practices, women's literature of the 1960s-present, feminist theory and praxis, and writing center tutors' instruction.   How do you hope higher education will change in the next ten years? In the next ten years, I hope to see folks in higher education intentionally divorce themselves from the “ivory tower” image and embrace education as a truly equalizing experience — by prioritizing access to the most vulnerable and historically marginalized among us, including BIPOC, LGBTQIA folks, and differently abled, faculty, and staff. I would like to see a concerted effort to serve the community in which colleges and universities are located, in ways that the community deems desirable and appropriate. Moreover, I’d love for all of the stakeholders in colleges and universities to have a greater focus on holistic students’ experiences — ideally, academic and student affairs would work in tandem to recognize students as complex young adults, rather than essentializing one aspect of their identities in one space.    How does the next generation of students inspire you? I am constantly inspired by my students. Though my colleagues have sometimes suggested that students are generally apathetic and only interested in getting good grades/a degree, I think this stereotype ignores the larger structural issues that students must face in order to not feel the pressure to just “get it done.” In my experiences, I have been lucky to see students blossom through their research and writing processes into conscientious young adults who have strong values and ideas about the ways in which education — and the world — can change. They constantly amaze me with their curiosity and their willingness to ask difficult questions and challenge ideas that seem untrue or unjust.    What have you learned from other Bedford New Scholars? I relished the opportunity to learn with and from my fellow Bedford New Scholars during our summer orientation meetings. Specifically, I really liked learning about the different writing assignments and classroom activities that my peers have used — which I am eager to try myself! I learned a lot from their feedback and insight on my work, which I intend to use to improve my teaching this coming semester. Finally, it was reassuring to hear that we are all facing similar struggles, especially at this difficult time, and that they were willing to share different solutions and moral support for dealing with these challenges.    What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? I really appreciated the chance to meet and work with the dedicated staff at Macmillan who organize the BNS program. I admit that I had little insight into the publishing world and the process that scholars undergo as they progress from an idea to a fully-formed reference guide or handbook, etc., but I enjoyed learning about the inner mechanisms of the publishing world and the ways in which writers seek feedback from their peers as well as their editors throughout the process. (Admittedly, it was also cool to see exclusive content prior to its public release!) It was clear to me how much the editors and staff members really care about the authors they work with and that they are dedicated to producing thoughtful and helpful teaching materials (among other products).   Sarah Heidebrink-Bruno’s Assignment that Works During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Sarah’s assignment. For the full activity, see Student Information Sheet. For my “assignment that works,” I shared a version of my Student Information Sheet, a form that I typically hand out during the first week of class as a way to  Establish the tone of the course; Get to know more about my students and their learning needs;  And finally, gather information that I then use when I am lesson planning.  In the sheet, I ask them about their preferred names (if any), their pronouns (if they feel comfortable sharing that information with me), and what kinds of learning environment and activities they prefer. For example, I include a list of possible activities, such as Think-Pair-Share, answering questions in small groups, Check Out tickets, and more. They can either check off boxes in the list of options or add additional suggestions. After everyone has completed the sheet, we then discuss how we best learn and what kind of learning spaces have been the most impactful. I tell them about my own learning and teaching techniques that have worked for me in the past, with an explicit emphasis on the fact that I need and expect for them to give me feedback on pedagogical choices and activities in the classroom to make sure that I am reaching folks where they are. I will note that although I’ve used a hard copy of this form in the past, it would be very easy to create a version in Google forms (or another digital space), which would also allow the instructor to easily see what the most popular choices are. The instructor could then use that information for an ice-breaker activity or discussion at the beginning of the next class. ... View more

Michael S. Garcia Michael S. Garcia (recommended by Kimberly Harrison) is pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing at Florida International University. He expects to finish in April 2021. At FIU, he has taught Writing and Rhetoric, Writing in Action, Essay Writing, and Creative Writing: Forms and Practices. He has also taught 11th and 12th grade English at a Title I high school. As a writer, he has published short stories, essays, web articles, and poetry.   What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students?  We are currently living in an important social and political moment—a time rife with conflict, strife, and disinformation. Never before has there been so much (mis)information coming at us from all sides, all the time. I believe my most important role as a writing and rhetoric teacher is two-fold: I must teach students how to evaluate information through a critical lens, so they can filter out the noise and arrive at well-informed opinions; simultaneously, I must empower my students with the skills, knowledge, and confidence to express themselves in an accurate, thoughtful, and ethical way.    How will online or remote learning affect your teaching? While teaching remotely is not ideal, I have chosen to view it as a learning opportunity, a chance to grow into a more effective teacher. Keeping students active and engaged can be a challenge in the very best of times, but now, with all our teaching happening through digital tools, it is more crucial than ever to focus on student engagement. In my in-person classes, I really focus on trying my best to implement lessons and activities that engage students and keep them interested, but it is so easy to become distracted or fatigued when meeting through digital platforms like Zoom, so this aspect of my teaching will be even more important now than ever.  Also, while I already make use of digital tools and platforms in my usual in-person teaching, I will rely on them now more than ever before. I suspect that I will become more adept at using a variety of digital tools as part of the teaching process.  I anticipate that what I learn from remote teaching—not just in terms of student engagement and technology, but perhaps in other areas I haven’t considered yet—will turn this challenging time into a net-positive for my development as an educator, increasing my effectiveness as a teacher in the long term.  What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? The Bedford New Scholars program has turned out to be an invaluable experience for my personal and professional development. I have learned about the process behind creating and publishing educational materials, something I had very little idea about beforehand. The program also gave me the opportunity to collaborate with a great group of accomplished scholars from around the country that I may not have met otherwise.  Additionally, the opportunity to preview and give feedback on upcoming Bedford/St. Martin’s texts and tools that are currently being worked-on is a really cool experience. It’s great to see the thought and care that the people at Bedford/St. Martin’s put into their projects, and how important it is to them to collaborate with a varied and diverse group of educators—I think this collaborative approach helps ensure Bedford/St. Martin’s texts and tools are effective and relevant to both teachers and students.   What projects or course materials from Bedford/St. Martin's most pique your interest, and why? I was very impressed by the wide array of texts Bedford/St. Martin’s offered in my subject area; it seemed there was a text for every approach, something I wasn’t aware of before the Bedford New Scholars project.  The project I was most interested in was the Achieve learning platform. I think it’s great how the platform empowers instructors to create effective, multimodal assignments, while also encouraging and enabling collaboration—not only between the student and their instructor, but among students and their peers. It is intuitive and easy-to-use while also having depth in what it is capable of. I’m excited by the opportunities and possibilities that Achieve presents, not only in the composition classroom, but in teaching the subject of English overall.  Michael’s Assignment That Works During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Michael's assignment. For the full activity, see Discourse Community Profile.   My “Assignment That Works” is the Discourse Community Profile , the first major assignment I assign as part of the first of FIU’s two-course introductory writing sequence. For this assignment, students are asked to write a profile on a discourse community of their choice; this involves describing the discourse community, citing specific examples of discourse from this community and where it occurs, and examining what can be gleaned about this community from analyzing its use of language. Students are asked to conclude the profile with a reflection on their relationship to this discourse community, why they chose to write about it, and what they learned in the process.  The assignment sheet is designed with question-and-answer format to make the assignment prompt as clear and concise as possible. We spend the first unit of the course scaffolding up to this assignment with foundational lessons about rhetorical awareness, rhetorical strategies, how to choose the appropriate genre (this is where they learn what a “profile” is), and code-switching. Students are asked to submit a “first steps” topic proposal to ensure they understand what is being asked of them. They submit a low-stakes first draft for instructor comments and peer review, giving them time to polish their work before the final draft is due.  ... View more