Adopted on December 15, 1791, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was adopted as part of the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution).  Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. As with many other passages of the Constitution, the authors did not provide specific definitions of what “freedom of speech” meant to them, and so U.S. courts have been called on to help in providing guidelines for when speech is protected and when it is not, though even these issues are often far from clear.  In general, though, the U.S. has guaranteed its people the right to express their opinions (in all forms, from words to images and other media) without governmental interference or regulation, within reasonable limits. (The writers of the first amendment were surely influenced by the ancient Greek concept of parrhesia, or “open speaking,” the practice of speaking the truth, often to power; see, for instance, Foucault’s series of 1983 lectures at UC Berkeley on “truth-telling as a role.”) These limits, as defined over the years by courts, generally do not protect speech that is characterized by threats of serious harm, libel or slander, obscenities, and plagiarism. How the first amendment affects students in public schools was tested in 1965 when students at an Iowa high school wore black armbands in protest of the Vietnam War. They were suspended by the school for providing a harmful “distraction,” but the case was decided in favor of the students and their freedom of expression was upheld. The last few years have seen serious issues of freedom of speech on many college campuses across the country: should students’ right to freedom of speech allow them to shout down or chase out or disinvite controversial speakers whose views they disagree with? Should that right protect online speech for or against Israelis and/or Hamas as the battle in Gaza rages? Should a governor be able to ban the presence of certain groups on school grounds because their speech will offend others? I’m fairly certain that questions like these have been a focus on your own campus, and may be so even as I write this.   I recently read an op-ed piece in the New York Times that spoke to our current situation and provided another gloss on “free” speech. In “What ‘Snowflakes’ Get Right about Free Speech,” Ulrich Baer argues that attempts to deny the right to speak to some “should be understood as an attempt to ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater group of people, rather than censorship.” In Baer’s analysis, limiting the free speech of some can be acceptable if it will allow other marginalized members of a community a chance to take part in public discourse. Baer’s argument is surely subject to question, especially since it would often be very hard to tell which groups are more marginalized than others, or which groups might be more or less harmed by the “free” speech in question. Reading about the history of freedom of speech, about the most significant court cases regarding the issue, and about the turmoil that the right to speak (or not) is causing on our campuses today makes me think that this is surely a “teacherly moment” in which we can engage students in thinking—thinking rhetorically—about what the first amendment means today and, moreover, what they think it potentially should mean for the future. This kind of rhetorical approach would help students step back, at least for a time, from the us vs. them, right vs. wrong stances that are so emotionally appealing and consider the current controversy in light of history, of court rulings, and of other precedents. It might help them to look at alternative perspectives, to consider them carefully, and to try to figure out just where they stand on who has the right to “free” speech. An analysis like this calls for small group work, and for very careful preparation. But the possibility for greater understanding—at the very least of the deep complexity of the issue of free speech—seems to me worth the effort.     Image from Wikimedia Commons ... View more

These are dark times. Frightening, horrifying, in so many ways. Yet teachers of writing continue to teach, which is itself an act of hope. In these times, we could do worse than take a tip from poet Mary Oliver’s poem “Gratitude.” It begins with the following stanza: What did you notice? The dew-snail; the low-flying sparrow; the bat, on the wind, in the dark Oliver’s poem goes on to pose a series of additional questions:  What did you hear? When did you admire? What astonished you? What would you like to see again? What was most tender? What was most wonderful? What did you think was happening? Asking our students to answer these questions, taking time to do so with thoughtfulness, grace, and humility may bring them to feel some of the gratitude Mary Oliver’s poem embodies and evokes. Doing so certainly led me to observe, listen, and think most carefully, yielding a series of memories and images that left me full of thanks, often for such small, everyday occurrences that turn out to be full of meaning to me. I hope you and your students may have the same experience. You can find Oliver’s poem here. I hope you all have had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Andrea ... View more

This is a post about considering histories of spaces and places where teaching and learning unfold, and how work with students might more fully engage those spaces. The post ends with a video of a field trip and a brief photo essay that includes the photos highlighted in the video. I am thinking about the impact and interactions in the many histories that have occupied a single space. How much does space impact teaching and learning? Put another way, how can space be used in teaching and learning to gain knowledge from the surrounding world. This semester, I have tried to offer more opportunities for students to take part in research as an embodied experience. Ideas percolated in my head about how we might do a second on-campus field trip after our initial trip to the college art museum. I had asked the students in anonymous exit slips if they wanted another field trip before the end of the term, and they were unequivocally in agreement.  I considered what spaces on our campus might best support the third and final writing project of the course. The point of Writing Project 3, the research/revision essay, was to find connection to a major concept in James Baldwin’s “The Artist’’s Struggle for Integrity,” a source we had been reading and returning to all semester. Then I remembered the on-campus memorials to Freedom Summer, and I watched documentaries and news reports documenting Freedom Summer’s significance to the Civil Rights Movement. The information that follows is from the two sources that we viewed before the field trip, Freedom Summer: Chapter 1 by Stanley Nelson (2014 PBS American Experience) and Remembering the “Mississippi Burning” Murders (2014 CBS News). In the summer of 1964, college students from across the country took part in Freedom Summer, a voter registration drive in Mississippi, where Jim Crow laws, white citizens councils, and the Klan fought a continuous battle with full force against registering Black voters. 3 of the young civil rights workers were murdered at the start of Freedom Summer, but it took 6 more weeks to find their bodies.   James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were their names. Chaney was Black and Goodman and Schwerner were white. It had been remarked that the catastrophe was made worse by the national hyper focus on the two young white men at the expense of the countless number of unsolved murders and disappearances of Black Mississippians. Indeed, when the bodies of the 3 civil rights workers were found in a dam, at the same time 8 Black bodies were recovered.  One of the white civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, had just finished his junior year at the college where I teach. 25 years after the fact, in 1989, the clock tower at the library was named after the 3 young people, and a memorial plaque with a brief history of Freedom Summer was placed at the inside foyer of the library. The clock tower can be seen all across campus and is one of the campus’s most noticeable features.  Nevertheless, with the passage of time and the presence of other catastrophes involving people from this campus, Freedom Summer was not as well known by my students. There are newer memorials for 9/11/2001 and for Covid-19. I found all of these memorials on early morning walks through campus, and felt overwhelmed by the enormity of what Walter Benjamin in Theses of the Philosophy of History calls “the wreckage upon wreckage of history … Where we perceive a chain of events, he [the Angel of History] sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”  Any of the memorial markers bearing witness to “the wreckage upon wreckage of history “ would connect to one of Baldwin’s major concepts in “Artist’s Struggle”: all safety is an illusion.  But then I considered another major concept presented by Baldwin in “Artist’s Struggle”: how artists create light from darkness. I remembered that another classroom building on campus, one of the older ones, displayed a number of inspirational quotes by prominent writers/educators on its inside and outside walls, which had been constructed as part of a building renovation two decades ago.  One of the quotes was from James Baldwin‘s essay “In Search of a Majority” reads, “The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in” (Collected Essays, p. 221). This quote captures a major concept from Artist’s Struggle and Freedom Summer: of not accepting things as they are, of working to make the world a better place, of creating light from the darkness of the wreckage of history.  Perhaps in the 2020s this concept remains hopelessly problematic, or perhaps even impossibly idealistic. After all, what unearned privileges might one possess to have the peace of mind to consider the question of making the world a better place? How can anyone processing ongoing trauma begin to consider a better world?   When I arrived on campus the day of the field trip I was greeted by a chalk art installation in front of the classroom building. One chalking posed a question that seemed related to the project of engaging with space and place: “History repeats…What follows?” This inquiry reminded me of the in-class writing prompt I had prepared as an introduction to the field trip: When we visit these sites, write down everything you notice. What does each memorial/marker look like? What is the scenery around it? What are your responses to what you see around you? What connections do you find to Baldwin’s “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity”? There are no easy answers to these questions, or answers for which words are sufficient. Instead, I offer my short video of the field trip, and the various photos of sites that comprise the video.   All photos taken by Susan Bernstein in October and November 2023.    A view from the edge of campus under a blue sky with clouds. Autumn trees in the foreground, Manhattan skyline in the background.   Chalk art on a campus sidewalk. Blue chalk on pavement: reads History Repeats…What follows?   In the summer of 1964, Queens College student Andrew Goodman joined the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. He was assigned to work on voter registration with James Earl Chaney and Michael Schwerner. Returning from a visit to a rural church, they were kidnapped and murdered. Their deaths inspired countless others to continue the struggle for equality and justice for all Americans. Dedicated on May 10, 1989.   Cheney-Goodman-Schwerner Clock Tower under a bright blue autumn sky with trees and college buildings in the background.   James Baldwin quote from “In Search of a Majority” in steel letters placed on the outside wall of a campus building: “The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.”     ... View more

  Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin toddlers, Dylan and Escher.   For me, and many of my students, this is a hard part of the semester. There is a kind of liminality to it, a neither here nor there. Midterms are over, but finals are not quite in view. It’s almost Thanksgiving, but not quite. Assignments are in full force and fall viruses are too. To keep it real, at this moment, some students may not be seeing much of a distinction between an assignment and a virus. At this time more than ever, I am thinking about how to keep students engaged in the classroom, which means it’s the time of year for some fully in-class, credit-bearing activities that take the place of take-home assignments. This semester, I stumbled upon an assignment that fits this bill: A fun activity to help students apply the concepts in Lao Tsu’s The Tao Te Ching and The Analects of Confucius. I printed out a Dear Abby advice column (later students told me that no one reads Dear Abby and I should go to Reddit instead…noted!) and we read through a letter that a woman had sent in about her new husband taking his adult child off of his insurance and asking him to pay his own way. I picked this particular advice column topic based on content from a previous class conversation about the role of parents in adult children’s lives. In groups, I had students write advice for this woman using a quotation from The Tao or The Analects. They then read the advice that was actually given to her by the advice columnist. The class discussed if their advice was different or similar to the “professional” advice and analyzed whether her response seemed to come from a more collectivist or individualist model. Students gained many insights about The Analects and The Tao and also about the information missing in the column and how we may shape our stories to try to get the advice we want. I wasn’t anticipating these additional insights, and I will say that it’s the additional insights that keep me going as a professor! I believe that the advice column assignment could be applied to a variety of content and skills-based courses. Students can be asked to give advice as characters from stories, nurses-in-training, even as numbers (would a fraction want a different outcome than a negative number?); don’t be afraid to get creative. I’ve found this to be an activity that is quite equalizing. A student may have very little knowledge of the texts we are studying, but they may have had an experience similar to one being written in the advice column—their skills and energy pair nicely with those who have deeper insights into the course texts. This particular assignment also has a quality to it that is helpful right now—it takes very little energy on the part of the professor. Students can even be the ones to search for the advice columns in class on their smart phones if pre-selecting them is too challenging given other demands this time of year. One of the mantras that keeps me going at the end of November is “Keep it simple. Keep it interesting. Make space.” Write some of the in-class activities you have used to enliven your November classrooms in the comments below! ... View more

  Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin preschoolers, Dylan and Escher.   For me, and many of my students, this is a hard part of the semester. There is a kind of liminality to it, a neither here nor there. Midterms are over, but finals are not quite in view. It’s almost Thanksgiving, but not quite. Assignments are in full force and fall viruses are too. To keep it real, at this moment, some students may not be seeing much of a distinction between an assignment and a virus. At this time more than ever, I am thinking about how to keep students engaged in the classroom, which means it’s the time of year for some fully in-class, credit-bearing activities that take the place of take-home assignments. This semester, I stumbled upon an assignment that fits this bill: A fun activity to help students apply the concepts in Lao Tsu’s The Tao Te Ching and The Analects of Confucius. I printed out a Dear Abby advice column (later students told me that no one reads Dear Abby and I should go to Reddit instead…noted!) and we read through a letter that a woman had sent in about her new husband taking his adult child off of his insurance and asking him to pay his own way. I picked this particular advice column topic based on content from a previous class conversation about the role of parents in adult children’s lives. In groups, I had students write advice for this woman using a quotation from The Tao or The Analects. They then read the advice that was actually given to her by the advice columnist. The class discussed if their advice was different or similar to the “professional” advice and analyzed whether her response seemed to come from a more collectivist or individualist model. Students gained many insights about The Analects and The Tao and also about the information missing in the column and how we may shape our stories to try to get the advice we want. I wasn’t anticipating these additional insights, and I will say that it’s the additional insights that keep me going as a professor! I believe that the advice column assignment could be applied to a variety of content and skills-based courses. Students can be asked to give advice as characters from stories, nurses-in-training, even as numbers (would a fraction want a different outcome than a negative number?); don’t be afraid to get creative. I’ve found this to be an activity that is quite equalizing. A student may have very little knowledge of the texts we are studying, but they may have had an experience similar to one being written in the advice column—their skills and energy pair nicely with those who have deeper insights into the course texts. This particular assignment also has a quality to it that is helpful right now—it takes very little energy on the part of the professor. Students can even be the ones to search for the advice columns in class on their smart phones if pre-selecting them is too challenging given other demands this time of year. One of the mantras that keeps me going at the end of November is “Keep it simple. Keep it interesting. Make space.” Write some of the in-class activities you have used to enliven your November classrooms in the comments below! ... View more

I recently asked my students a simple, open-ended question about the writer’s tone.  I had made print copies of the text, and I had projected it onto the board at the front of the room.  After a few seconds of silence, I pointed towards the first few lines of Wardle’s essay, which I read aloud: There is no such thing as writing in general. Do you doubt this claim? Test it out. Go to your desk right now and attempt to write something in general. Then I asked again,  “What sort of voice is speaking?  Can you see the boosters that we just talked about?  What do you think?” Silence.  After about ten seconds, I prodded again.  “Any thoughts?  No right or wrong here.” Still nothing.  I scanned the room.   Eight of the nine students in this corequisite section of FYC were spread across three rows of seminar tables.    They glanced from papers to laptops—and occasionally made eye contact with me.  But they did not offer any responses.   Two students were checking their phones.  I know about wait-time—I teach the concept in pedagogy and tutoring courses.   But as the seconds ticked by, the silence felt increasingly suffocating, as if the space for discussion were actually contracting, not expanding.   As the pace of the class slowed to a complete stop and the energy plummeted, my frustration rose. Photo by Nathan Dumlao via UnsplashIn fact, I was already irritated by the fact that only two of the students had participated in an online peer review the prior week, when I canceled a class session because of a conference.  I considered just ending the class with some snark:  “Since you all clearly don’t want to be here or learn anything, you can just go home.”  “I guess I can’t compete with whatever is on your phones.”  “This is a simple question, people.  Get off your phones and at least pretend to pay attention.” “If you want to get out of here on time, I suggest you make some effort to contribute.” But I held my tongue.  My son once told me he thought most students were conditioned not to trust instructors, not to respond, not to feel safe speaking in the classroom.  So, I did not chastise.  All told, we had been through several minutes of silence, so I just made a concluding comment and transitioned to the next point of focus: “I see you guys are giving this some thought—sometimes it takes a while to put those thoughts into words.  That question of tone is something you will want to consider as you get started on our next paper.  Let’s take a look at those instructions.” That session was an incredible disappointment to me—the pace, energy, and lack of participation felt like so much wasted time.  After class, I emailed my usual reminder about what students needed to do (in this case, choose the argument text they wanted to analyze), but I had no confidence that we would accomplish much in the next class.   Over the next 48 hours, I received emails from all eight of those students:  they were sending me links to the articles they had chosen, making sure that they would be good choices for the assignment.  And during the next class, all eight of them worked on annotating the language and argument components in their chosen texts.  As I walked around the room to talk to them individually, they identified the claims, audience, reasons, evidence—and even tone—in their chosen pieces.   Students who had made no obvious connection to the material two days before left the class with working thesis statements and outlines. I am so grateful for the perspective of wise students—much younger than I am—who remind me not to waste the silence. ... View more

by Jenn Fishman and Darci Thoune This is the fifth post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a 2-day annual event hosted online and in Milwaukee, WI, by a group that includes Darci and Jenn. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “symposium.”  Professional meetings are a mixed bag, whatever we call them: conferences, conventions, institutes, seminars, or workshops. On one hand, they give us chances to share work, learn from each other, and network beyond our home programs, departments, and campuses. On the other hand, conference-going can seem obligatory (i.e., just another CV line); attending can present real hardships, financial and otherwise; and too often professional meetings reinforce institutional biases. So, how do we make choices about what to participate in, how, when, and why?  Some of us involved in the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS) recently asked ourselves these questions thinking about our own, much beloved annual event. The WIS just turned 5, and 29 of us celebrated with an article that appears in Community Literacy Journal (17.2). Our conversations were free-ranging reflections on our upstart event, a local meeting with national reach that usually registers about 100 onsite and online participants, all writers and writing educators. Talking with each other confirmed our sense that the WIS is a “happening,” which Geoff Sirc defines as “a space no one wants to leave.” That feeling was shared by one-time attendees and regular participants. It even inspired some colleagues, including Jessie Wirkus Haynes at Bellin College and Barb Clauer and Melissa Kaplan at Lansing Community College, to plan WIS satellite events that will take place on their campuses later this year.    Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin hosts the annual Writing Innovation Symposium     But what happens at the WIS or any other professional meeting to make it a “happening”: to make participants feel drawn to stay or, in our case, to return from year to year and even to extend their experience in some way?  While we don’t have a single answer or recipe to share, we have some ideas. We notice, for example, that the WIS centers us as writers as well as writing educators, and the event itself centers on interactivity that is rooted in relations. For example, in 2023 when our theme was “Writing As_____,” plenary presenter Melissa Tayles did more than talk to us about trauma-informed writing pedagogy. She got us writing and helped us develop what she described as “sustainable plans for instructor well-being and regulation in the writing process.” The next day at the plenary workshop, Barb and Melissa invited us to write collaboratively, and we spent 2 hours immersed in the collective creativity of their Community-Generated Poetry Project. Before and after these sessions, we talked to each other. We talked about the plenaries and the courses we were teaching. We talked about our students, our writing research, and our families. We swapped references and recipes. We connected as writers and writing educators—and as people. At the closing session, when a student group called The Comet Project performed some of our poems (from the plenary workshop), we were rapt. Together, we laughed at the humor they found in our words, and we were moved by the depth and emotion they discovered in our drafts. When they finished, as we applauded and applauded, it sure seemed like no one wanted to leave.  We draw from this set of observations a sense of how important it is for conferences and symposia to welcome us as we are and wish to be, both professionally and more broadly, more personally. We see how glad WIS participants are, including ourselves, to reciprocate: to offer things we know about writing and to glean new knowledge—and not just by listening. WIS taps into a shared desire for something that might be comparable to the hands-on learning that many of us like to incorporate into our classes. WIS also cultivates a robust “underlife” by giving participants so many opportunities for the exchanges they wish to have over and above–as well as before, during, and after—formal programming.  As we and our WIS colleague Jennifer Kontny embark on more formal inquiry into what makes a professional meeting a happening, we wonder how you would describe the conventions, seminars, workshops, &c. that have meant the most to you.   If you’re interested in learning more about the WIS consider joining us in Milwaukee at WIS 2024! Read our CFP here. ... View more

Like so many fellow citizens, I’ve been watching television and reading news reports—lately with horror and deep concern. In the midst of the Israel-Hamas war, college campuses have become small war zones of their own, with antisemitism and Islamophobia rampant, with university officials struggling to respond effectively. Extremism is at work almost everywhere I look, and divides seem never to have been deeper or wider. I had these deeply troubling thoughts on my mind when I stumbled on an article on “Why Campuses Need Centers for Pluralism” by Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith America and author of We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy (2022). Patel sees the current divisions on campuses reaching a crisis point, where many students “are in extreme distress, feeling profound isolation, and a handful are even taking part in actions that border on physical violence. Some are no longer willing to sit in class together. One can only imagine the tension in the dining hall, the relationships that have crumbled and the number of student groups that are melting down.” Across the country, writing teachers don’t have to imagine such tensions; they are living with them every day.  We can, of course, look on such times as offering up teachable moments—or at least we can hope for such moments, when we can guide students in gaining more information about and understanding of the history of the Middle East, though doing so is not likely to resolve current tensions or change hearts and minds. Patel admits as much, before going on to say that, as one who has devoted his life to “proactively engaging religious diversity” he believes that being able to work with people with whom you disagree is the single most important value for a diverse community. Imagine if doctors who have different views on the war in the Middle East refused to perform heart surgery together. Or if firefighters who had different politics regarding gun control refused to fight fires together. Or if Little League coaches with different views on abortion refused to coach together. Patel argues that campuses should develop Centers for Pluralism, whose goal would be to prepare students, faculty, and staff alike to engage across differences, becoming “models of cooperation between people of different identities and ideologies and training grounds for leaders who can bridge divides.” He recognizes the difficulty of doing so, especially in the present moment, arguing that too many campuses have developed policies and practices that increase tensions rather than building pluralistic cooperation, so much so that campus offices that traditionally facilitated cooperative dialogue instead “actually help fan the flames that now threaten to engulf” the campus. One example of a "Center for Pluralism" in Ottawa, Canada Patel believes that the last ten years or so have seen the growth of a robust “pluralism field,” and he gives many examples of such groups at work (see his article in Inside Higher Education for names of these groups and links to them, as well as links to a number of campus-based pluralist projects). The need for Centers for Pluralism, Patel says, has never been more crucial, first because of the horrific Middle East war we are witnessing from afar but also from deep divides over issues related to gun control, reproductive rights, or the election of 2024. What we need, in Patel’s view, are leaders who can help people who disagree on X still work effectively together on Y or Z: “We want students to be protesting respectfully on the quad, but we also need them to be working together to find cures for cancer.”  Having spent much of my life advocating for and teaching collaboration and collaborative strategies, Patel’s argument resonates with me, and reminds me of the role writing teachers can play in creating the kind of classroom ethos that can accommodate differences and disagreements while also providing students opportunities to listen across those differences and to do so in a safe space.  Right now, as I hear of so many hate-filled acts taking place on and off campus, I know I do not have all the answers or the strategies necessary to find ways to listen to one another with the goal of understanding, especially when we do not agree. But I also know that I—like writing teachers everywhere—must keep on trying. As Wayne Booth once famously remarked, “The only real alternative to war is rhetoric”—that is to say: the kind of talking and mutual conversation that respects differences, listens actively, builds understanding, and, where possible, seeks common ground.   Image by Jozsef Varga via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

by Abigayle Farrier, Ph.D., professor of English at University of North Texas This is the fourth post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a 2-day annual event hosted online and in Milwaukee, WI. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “symposium.”  I arched my eyebrows at the text I received, double checking that the sender was, in fact, my best friend from grad school – a fellow college writing instructor – and not one of my friends who teaches elementary school. It didn’t take long for my friend, Katelyn Thompson, an instructor at Kilgore College, to explain that she was giving her students a day to do arts and crafts. In the middle of their major research paper, Katelyn asks her students to take a break from writing and draw pictures that correspond to their topic, color outside the lines, and generally return to behavior we typically relegate to our elementary school days. “Kindergarten day” has now become a permanent part of her pedagogy, and she credits improved metacognition and student engagement to this strategy. A student collage As the semester continued, I often returned to the idea of crafting in the college composition classroom and found myself wishing I had asked students to create artistic renditions of their first paper, a personal narrative. Pairing an assignment that requires students to reflect on who they are and where they came from – a topic that often results in papers on their childhood – with an arts and crafts day seemed like a perfect fit. I was eager to implement this idea of composing with art supplies, but struggled to find another obvious opportunity in my curriculum. My class that semester, in the fall of 2021, was a Monday/Wednesday class that ended at 6:50pm. For many of my students, this was the first time they had been in-person since their junior year of high school. I sat alone in my deserted office hours, looking at the lesson plan I didn’t quite feel like teaching, and knew that attendance was unlikely to be high after a draining day back from the longest vacation of the semester. I suddenly remembered “kindergarten day!” In a rather frantic dash, I gathered up old magazines the department had sitting in stacks, grabbed all the scissors, tape, and glue sticks I could see, and found – by some miracle – exactly twenty abandoned folders that could serve as canvases. I hurried to my class, expecting to encounter approximately five students who had made it back on campus. To my surprise, fifteen pairs of eyes greeted me. “Welcome to kindergarten day!” My students watched with befuddled amusement as I put only two sentences on the board: “Using the materials provided, find at least 5 images and a couple of phrases that represent your writing, writing process, and/or who you are as a writer. Create a collage in the folders provided.” Over the course of the next hour, my students chatted energetically with one another as they created works of art that spoke to not only their work in our class but to who they are as people. One student captioned an image of an opened pill with glitter spilling out: “I uncap the mess that is my brain and see what sticks.” Another wrote, “(What happens halfway through)…Things Fall Apart” and “I was flying (by the seat of my pants)” as he blended article headlines with his own descriptors of his writing process. This activity – which was intended to be a low-stakes creative assignment, ended up generating thought-provoking and quite beautiful representations of students’ identities and their relationships with writing. A student collage As I concluded the class, I asked my students to come to the board and write their own “Why I Write” statement, inspired by Terry Tempest Williams, and the reflection motivated by their collage work. We all stood there in silence for a minute after the last person finished. I generally pride myself on having an inclusive, community-based classroom, but I had never felt anything quite like this before. What had begun as a filler activity on a down day had become the most meaningful activity we did all semester. There was now a connection between the members of my class that had not existed before. This experience left us with a renewed sense of the importance of writing, of composing, of connecting with ourselves and with others. Picture of the whiteboard with my students’ “Why I Write” statements Now, I teach this activity towards the end of every semester. Students reflect on how their writing processes have changed over the course of the semester, how connections – to their homes, their communities, themselves, and our class – shape their writing, and how writing has shaped and been shaped by their identities. To be sure, our in-person, hands-on activity contrasts sharply with the digital forms of communication that are now part of our writing lives, from online meetings to AI-generated writing. But perhaps there’s something we can all learn from a return to “kindergarten days.” What other hands-on activities are you incorporating in your writing classrooms? Do you integrate creative or artistic activities into your lesson plans? Have you found this to be successful in your own classroom? I would love to hear from other instructors who have incorporated similar activities – and those who have chosen not to.   If you’re interested in learning more about the WIS consider joining us in Milwaukee at WIS 2024! Read our CFP here. ... View more

Writing in Counter Arts and recently reprinted in Medium, journalist and digital media expert Jeff Hayward stumbled on an AI “test” offered by the Globe and Mail. Fourteen questions in all, asking a test taker to distinguish between images, voice/video clips, and texts created by humans and generative AI. Hayward was relieved, and just a little surprised, that he got all the questions in the first two sets correct: the AI generated images were somehow “just too perfect,” he said, and the voice/video cliffs felt somehow “off” to him—and his hunches paid off.  What really did surprise him, however, was the fact that he got all three of the questions about written passages wrong, thinking that the AI-generated texts sounded “more human” than those generated by humans. So an experienced working journalist, who spends time every day writing and studying writing by others, was taken in by AI. Yikes! The Globe and Mail quiz is behind a paywall, but I was able to take a look at it without being able to take it. My guess is that I would have been very lucky to get a third of the answers right—and be relatively unable to distinguish material generated by humans from those generated by generative AI. Double yikes! I’m wondering how our students fare at such tasks. And while the Globe and Mail quiz is available only to subscribers, here are a couple of other similar online quizzes that are accessible, the first from Buzzfeed and the second from the Statistics and Tech Data Library. You might want to try then out with your students. I, meanwhile, am trying to learn to get better at this kind of detection!     ... View more

This is a post about discovery drafts and WHY discovery drafts matter. When writing is viewed as a product and not a process, the benefits of discovery might easily be lost. Instead, writing becomes a matter of filling in blanks for the 5 W's + H: basic questions for fulfilling the writing prompt.  Who is the audience?  What is the prompt?  Where can information be found for correct citation style?  When is the writing due?  How long must it be?   WHY must I do this writing? The first found W’s do not include pronouns and the responses are generally straightforward. WHY is the existential question that leads to other questions: Because I said so? Because the course syllabus requires this writing? Because the department or program or school requires this writing? Because the workforce requires this writing? But WHY is this writing required–here and now?  Because writing is a means of discovering what is on my mind. As a writer with ADHD, WHY causes fireworks to explode in my brain, and the fireworks explode so fast that my prefrontal cortex can’t keep up, try as I might. I might try and try and try, but the sound of explosions fill  my ears, the fast-moving colors flood the tear ducts of my eyes. My mind is overloaded with anxiety about the polluted air that follows the fireworks, and I remember the orange sky choked with Canadian wildfire smoke a month earlier and that caused another air pollution alert. I lose focus. I don’t know where to begin. Fireworks exploding over apartment buildings near the East River with the NYC skyline in the background. Photo by Susan Bernstein, July 4, 2023   Orange sky over apartment buildings near the East River in NYC at 1:58 pm, June 7, 2023. Photo by Susan Bernstein   But those events happened months ago. Isn’t it time to move on? Isn’t time for normal, or at least a new normal, and maybe even the status quo? But must climate change be accepted as the status quo? WHY?  Enter the Discovery Draft–also called a Zero Draft or a Brain Dump–where the writer writes down whatever is in their head. In grad school, I remember being told that discovery drafts meant “just putting down anything to get started.” But, as an ADHD writer teaching students actively questioning WHY, I have since learned that focus remains crucial for getting started.  These revelations came at Halloween, a day of tricks and treats. On public transit, my co-commuters were in costume and so was I. My hair was green. I wore a witch button and a #FundCUNYnow rubber bracelet. I had candy and pretzels in my backpack for sustenance to nourish the writing process. I stopped at the campus gate to take a selfie and later noticed in the photo that the wall) holding up the gate was missing a brick. Below the missing brick was a “Do Not Enter” sign.  The purpose of the sign was to keep vehicular traffic from using an exit on campus that looked like a campus entrance. There were other entrances across the Boulevard and, since the end of random testing requirements for students, staff, and faculty, we no longer needed to show our IDs at the entrance.  Nevertheless, I began deconstructing the implications of that sign for people in the neighborhood, or those riding by in cars and buses along the busy boulevard. What was the impact of seeing “Do Not Enter” posted on a college gate? My brain felt feverish.  It was time to start writing–and it was time to share the Halloween Extra Credit Assignment. Halloween selfie by the campus gate in front of a Do Not Enter sign posted on a white brick wall. One of the bricks above the sign has noticeably deteriorated. Photo by Susan Bernstein, October 31, 2023 Halloween Extra Credit Assignment projected on a classroom smart board. The last line is whited out to protect instructor's email address and submission platform information. The assignment follows. Photo by Susan Bernstein October 31, 2023     🎃📝🎃 Halloween Extra Credit Assignment 🎃📝🎃 Write a discovery draft for WP 2. This is a preliminary rough draft that is separate from the more formal rough draft due later this week, and can be written in class. You can use the Discovery Draft for your WP 2 rough draft and for your WP 2 final copy. Your discovery draft should: Respond to the following prompt: Where do you find your inspiration for writing in English 110?: the Baldwin readings? Everyday life? The museum field trip? Another artist or artistic creation (including music)? All, some, one, or none of the above? Something else?Provide evidence from analysis of texts and artwork, everyday life, Use your intellect and imagination. Take risks with what you say and how you say it, which can include (optional and as appropriate):  Examples from personal experience. This is NOT required. You can make up fictional experiences if you would like. Figurative Language and/or Creative Genres (fan fiction,science fiction, metaphors, similes, and other poetic, spoken word, and other lyrical language).   Write at least 500 words in 2 hours– but try for 800-1000 words. Don’t worry about grammar, punctuation or spelling! Submit your discovery draft to your e-journal.   While they chose not to compose in experimental genres, students wrote about a variety of inspirations, in school and out of school: reading James Baldwin, the museum tour and workshop, social justice concerns, mental health considerations, and more that could be revised for their second writing project of the term. As is my aspirational practice, I wrote in-class with the students. I wrote to shift ADHD executive function overload to hyper focus on the present: the intersections of Halloween and pedagogical theory and practice.   My writing turned out to be the discovery draft for this Bits post about discovery drafts and why they matter. Discovery drafts matter because process matters, and process allows writers to find focus. I’m not talking about lockstep drafting of intro, body, conclusion. In a discovery draft, a potential introduction might be written at the very end. Potential body paragraphs might appear out of sequence. What I mean instead is writing out of order to discover and disentangle ideas, and taking what is found to create something new.    In other words, I still want to read and create writing that goes beyond 5 W’s+H, writing that focuses on recognizing the world not only as it is, but as it could be, writing that doesn’t sit in a writing that spurs me to action, and lifts me from despair–writing that attempts to discover a conclusion, but cannot find one, and reaches out for hope instead.   “The Possible’s slow fuse is lit By the imagination.” –Emily Dickinson. Photo by Susan Bernstein, October 3, 2023.     ... View more

Jennifer Duncan has been teaching English for twenty years, first at Chattanooga State Community College in Tennessee and now at Georgia State University’s Perimeter College in Atlanta, GA where she is Associate Professor of English.  For the last ten years, she has focused exclusively on online teaching concentrating on creating authentic and meaningful learning opportunities for students in composition and literature courses.     As I talk to writing teachers about incorporating AI into their writing instruction, a recurring theme keeps crashing the conversation like a super villain in a spandex suit: the enigmatic concept of voice. How do we protect and nurture individual voices in a world where AI is poised to make us all sound like Ultron?  How do we prevent a linguistic snap from erasing marginalized voices? How do we keep all of the creative universe from becoming one enormous Marvel franchise of caped conformity? For me, the question is simpler: How can I even get my students invested in finding the power of their voices instead of just obeying the “rules” of writing to get a “good grade?” In a world where every freshman has an Insta-identity, will they care enough to craft and curate their writing as carefully as their online persona?  Surely no one wants their writing to be labeled “basic,” right? Since AI is a weapon that threatens to destroy the soul of writing, I started experimenting to find out if I could use it as a tool instead. My experiment was elementary: I asked ChatGPT to explain how voice works as a rhetorical tool. It’s the type of question my students might ask if they wanted a textbook-style answer, and it produced a pretty textbook explanation. Now, as Ultron would say, “It’s time for some mind games.” Next, I asked ChatGPT to explain the same concept to me using the voice of Peter Elbow⁠—again, pretty standard.  Then, I asked it to teach me in the voice of Ms. Rachel, the preschool education YouTuber.  Sure enough, I got a lesson sprinkled with upbeat images (literally, she told me that a vivid image is “like putting sprinkles on a cupcake”) and an affirmation that my writing voice could show readers who I am and make my message stand out.  To counteract the unicorns and rainbows, I next instructed ChatGPT to explain using the voice of Winston Churchill. As expected, there were a lot of “dear friends” and comparisons between the “realm of rhetoric and warfare.”  A clear voice could “mean the difference between victory and defeat.” Of course, I proceeded to spend way too much time “doing the voices” until I finally drew the line at Super Mario’s “Let’s-a talk about-a rhetorical voice, woohoo!” Nevertheless, the experiment provided a potential game plan. If my students could look at these examples and identify the speaker, could they also identify the tone, word choice, sentence structure, and assumed audience that created each “voice”? This could be the first step in having them start to make the rhetorical choices that could uncover their own voice⁠—their origin story. Photo by Shantanu Kumar via Pexels I know it’s a silly assignment; I told you that I asked ChatGPT to impersonate a video game plumber, so I’m obviously not trying to outsmart anyone here. I am trying to leverage what AI does well⁠— imitation⁠—to lead my students to find and celebrate their own unique voice, or as ChatGPT Shakespeare would put it, to “write the verses of their own poetic soliloquy.” The experiment also opens up the possibility of larger conversations about both language and AI. Ask ChatGPT Jay-Z to talk about rhetorical voice and you won’t hear from an innovative artist who has crafted a voice, persona, and brand that is globally recognizable; you’ll get some pretty bad 90s rap lingo and some truly awful stereotyping. Why? Congratulations⁠—you’ve just motivated students to talk about the bias of AI generated language as well as the models upon which it was trained. It’s also a chance to talk about WHY protecting diverse voices is even more important in the post-AI world. In doing all this, will we uncover all the answers? Of course not, but maybe students will realize the importance of having these conversations with other humans and not depending on AI Iron Man to answer for them. ... View more

In my third post on the work being done by two-year college teacher-scholars who contributed to Teaching Accelerated and Corequisite Composition (Utah State UP, 2023), I spoke with Jill Darley-Vanis and Melissa Favara of Clark College in Vancouver, Washington. Jill Darley-Vanis has been teaching at Clark College since 2000. Her research, conference presentations, and published works focus on assignment design, transfer theory, and more equitable classroom practices. She has been published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College and in the book Transparent Design in Higher Education Teaching and Leadership. Jill has also presented at College Composition and Communication (CCC), First-Year Experience (FYE), Two-Year College English Association (TYCA), and the State of Washington’s Assessment in Teaching and Learning (ATL) conferences. Melissa Favara began teaching at Clark College in 2007. For the past decade, her teaching has focused on accelerated composition, both in the Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training (I-BEST) and Accelerated Learning (ALP) programs. She has presented on learning communities at the National Learning Communities Conference (NLCC) and on creating vulnerability spaces in the ALP classroom at the Modern Language Association conference. Melissa writes creative nonfiction that has been published in street roots, Metro Parent, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. Jill and Melissa’s chapter, “Reflective Practices in Teaching for Transfer,” argues for writing instruction that encourages “composition students’ awareness of writing as a portable skill,” one they can carry with them as they transfer from their first-year composition class to other writing-based courses. In Jill and Melissa’s practice, “a typical assignment sequence moves the student from analysis and writing about writing in different genres to producing work in new genres, those better suited for the given message and of interest to the student.” Jill and Melissa “put [their] heads together” for answers to my questions, so their responses are in a single voice. When I asked which elements of their chapter they felt were especially relevant for instructors of accelerated and corequisite composition, they replied that “reflection is central and center, particularly as it is the vehicle to change students’ perceptions of their own stories and their own potential.” They add that “in a moment of shrinking student populations and readily available work that pays well but may not provide avenues for further personal and intellectual development over time, the ability to reflect as a vehicle for change is all the more pressing.” Ultimately, they wanted their chapter to “provide faculty with not only theory, but also take-it-to-class plans for a learning sequence.”    As they looked back on “Reflective Practices in Teaching for Transfer” from the perspective of more than a year since its completion, they noted, “As we learn more and more about critical language awareness (CLA) and its intersection with Writing for Transfer (WfT), we see more and more pathways for change as well as challenges and layers for the shift that urgently needs to happen in the classroom.” Specifically, they believe: [T]here is an opportunity to think about positionality as a tie to WfT: genres are situated within various discourse communities in the same ways individuals and policies are situated within systems of power. We continue to see a need for further understanding and developments in what equitable opportunities for learning/educational justice look like in the classroom,” including “questions of Standard Language Ideology (SLI). They add: “Even what we understood five years ago now seems antiquated and simple. People of color are ‘taking back their narrative,’ as Toni Morrison says, so what does this look like in this moment, and how can we change the larger system to serve?” Jill and Melissa are both enthusiastic and worried about issues that preoccupy many of the other instructors I spoke with. They “are excited about the change that comes about in corequisite instruction, the way that students in the coreq group go from passive to active or from follower to leader.” However, they “are concerned about AI and what it wants to take from the individual: the process of writing allows the individual to experience and appreciate organizing thought and training the self as a thinker, so the temptation [of using AI] and its ubiquitous nature are real.”   ... View more

Here at UNG, I am always teaching writing: first-year composition/corequisite, ESOL pedagogy, introduction to linguistics, an intermediate and advanced grammar sequence, and applied linguistics for language instructors.  As my colleagues in composition and rhetoric know—and as Elizabeth Wardle has argued forcefully—“there is no such thing as writing in general.”  Consider the following course project in my sophomore-level grammar class, often an English major’s first encounter with a disciplinary style that is fundamentally different from the expectations of high school, FYC, or literature survey courses.   What’s the assignment?  Students pick a sentence containing a syntactic or lexical structure deemed incorrect—or at least contested—according to some grammar or usage guides.  Students then identify the issue, describe the structure, research it in dictionaries and style guides, and ultimately collect data from media sources, corpus databases, and tools such as the Google N-gram viewer.  From this data, they make an argument concerning the usage and status of the structure.  I ask students to complete five checkpoints as the project develops.  By the third checkpoint, most students realize how different this paper will be from previous academic assignments.  Some of them panic. Most of these students are English majors who have strong sense of their own style and confidence about writing in familiar forms—arguments and literary analyses.   They have not, however, written extensively about language, nor have they worked with the types of sources required for this paper, much less primary data sources.  So, while we are learning about grammar, we are also learning how to write like grammarians—or linguists.  In addition to checkpoints, I require peer review sessions with our writing fellows, the writing center, or our supplemental peer instructor.   I ask students to submit final drafts with annotations to show how they incorporated feedback from peers, and I also ask them to reflect on my feedback and submit a response. I urge them to think about how they have grown not only in their understanding of syntactic concepts but also writing concepts—and what they will take with them going forward. We use the following handout as students begin drafting their papers.  On the left side are concepts that are common to all writing situations—and despite the novelty of this assignment, students do have experience from which to draw.  On the right side are specific realizations of these concepts in the context of writing about grammar.  But we can also use this sheet to consider other assignments they will encounter—and to think about how to adapt their writing to fit new contexts.  We are always teaching writing, indeed. ... View more

I’ve been following the journalism of Clive Thompson ever since I encountered his writing in the early days of Wired, and over the years I’ve learned not only from his Wired columns but from books like Smarter Than You Think: How How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better (2013) and Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World (2019), and most recently from is columns in Medium, where he sometimes posts about his own writing process. In one post, for example, he wrote about his ongoing battles with procrastination and said that one way he helps avoid the worst bouts of it is by “parking downhill.” By that he means that when he is writing a draft, he always stops work “downhill,” that is at an “easy” place where he knows what is coming next. That helps the next day when he sits down to take up the task at hand again. This is a good tip, one I have often shared with students, many of whom are master procrastinators. In another post titled “One Weird Trick for Writing a First Draft,” Thompson says that once he has done his research and needs to begin writing, he will begin doing almost anything but that: “rearranging my desk, tackling old email, going down Wikipedia rat holes.” (Do you know the feeling? In fact, in drafting this blog post I am avoiding work on a foreword I have promised to write!) Thompson argues that procrastination is ultimately about fear—fear of getting stuck, that words won’t come, that the project is above and beyond his capabilities, and so on. My students share some of these fears, as well as others; and that fear stands in the way of their progress. But Thompson to the rescue. He says he has developed “four rules for writing first-draft prose,” and they are pretty interesting: Begin each paragraph with a hyphen Lower-case the first letter of every sentence Don’t put a period at the end of a sentence (though question marks and exclamation points are OK) Instead, end each sentence with two forward slashes// These “rules” help, Thompson argues, because they make his writing look provisional, unfinished, not really “official,” and therefore not so threatening of failure. As he says, he can “regard the sentences and paragraphs as a form of clay that I’m still just sort of generally shifting around . . . [it is] still under construction.” This kind of “under construction” writing doesn’t look “finished,” and so he is less tempted to spend time obsessing on revising a phrase, choosing perfect punctuation, etc. Instead, he can just keep on going. His provisional writing seems like “Lego bricks I’m combining and recombining to see what shape they might make.” He is also less attached to such provisional writing, so he finds it easier to toss it if it just isn’t going anywhere.  Thompson says he leaves his drafts in their “provisional” format until the day before they are due. “This frees me up,” he says, “on this final day to become an obsessive about word choice on a sentence-by-sentence level” and on tempo, rhythm, pacing. I think students will like the way Thompson thinks as well as his self-deprecating and witty openness about his own processes of composing. And they may even decide to try out some of his “tricks.”    Photo by Nick Morrison ... View more