My previous three posts have looked at pedagogy and plagiarism, the nuts and bolts of AI in first-year writing class. However, I have, in a sense, been skirting around the core question for instructors and students of college composition: Do artificial intelligence programs make the teaching and learning of “academic writing” irrelevant? If ChatGPT can respond in a reasonable and clear fashion to most college writing prompts—and will doubtless do so with much more style and substance in the future—is there any need for students to take on that task themselves? Cynically, one might argue that just as Spell Check and autocorrect made proofreading skills less essential for developing writers, the far more sophisticated ChatGPT obviates the need for college composition altogether. Of course, as any instructor knows, spelling and grammar checks are only semi-successful without human oversight, and if a program as simple as spellcheck is flawed and in need of human assessment, how much more crucial will it be for the members of Generation AI to be able to evaluate, analyze and call out AI writing gone wrong. The skills that AI exhibits with such apparent effortlessness—the ability to summarize a complex topic, say, or formulate an argument—are the same skills humans will need to assess the validity of those summaries and arguments. Indeed, the power and potential of ChatGPT will require humans to become smarter, more aware and less credible than we have been to date. Perhaps just as important as strengthening our cognitive skills will be the need to double down on the development of our non-cognitive abilities, and instructors will have to model behaviors they want their students to emulate. Ray Schroeder, a senior fellow at UPCEA, the online and continuing education association, urges faculty to “continuously grow our own personal, uniquely human, capabilities such as our ethos, empathy, care and insight into our fellow humans. These will continue to set us apart from AI, for a while.” The ability to experience feelings and sensations, which no trustworthy source has yet made for ChatGPT, continues to be the dividing line between Us and It. “The difference between the AI and the human mind is sentience,” says Boris Steipe, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Toronto. “If we want to teach as an academy in the future that is going to be dominated by digital ‘thought,’ we have to understand the added value of sentience—not just what sentience is and what it does, but how we justify that it is important and important in the way that we’re going to get paid for it.” Hopefully, becoming more human will help steer us away from one of the gravest sins fomented by the AI revolution: having less trust in our students. Yes, some of them are blithely using ChatGPT without regard for the ethical implications of cheating, but many others are not, and we do the educational process a disservice when we carelessly assume the worst about what is happening outside our classrooms. Two recent Washington Post articles describe the damaging effects of AI-related mistrust. In one, a high school senior has her essay erroneously flagged by Turnitin’s new AI-writing detector. The student, Lucy Goetz, comments that being “caught” by Turnitin, which claims only a 98% accuracy, is frightening because “There is no way to prove that you didn’t cheat unless your teacher knows your writing style or trusts you as a student.” As the article’s author points out: “Unlike accusations of plagiarism, AI cheating has no source document to reference as proof.” And then there is memoirist and teacher Brian Broome, who asked his students to write a poem, then reflexively assumed one person had cheated because his poem was so strong, yet he was “a taciturn and unassuming young male student.” When he realized his mistake, Broome apologized to the student, who was “flattered by the praise” and indicated that “he wants to write more.” Broome concludes: “I can only surmise that, because of my mistake, he now knows he’s quite good at [writing]. And if that’s what progress looks like, I’ll take it.” ... View more

    The most recent politician to declare their candidacy for president in 2024 is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., one of America’s best-known anti-vaccine activists. Earlier in his career Kennedy established a reputation for himself as a prominent and respected environmentalist. When he shifted his focus in 2005 from toxicity in the environment to the alleged toxicity of childhood vaccines, however, he caught the attention of parents who distrusted vaccinations and believed that they were linked to autism in children or other medical problems. This case is an intriguing example of how Kennedy’s notoriety persuaded parents to accept his claims and refuse the substantial body of research that proved vaccines are safe. Rolling Stone published his article “Deadly Immunity” in 2005 where Kennedy warned that children were being harmed by the preservative thimerosal in childhood vaccines. The truth was that by 2001, thimerosal had been removed from all childhood vaccines. Kennedy went beyond using fraudulent data to misrepresent his sources. An article published in Scientific American, which analyzed his misuse of sources, details how he took quotations from authorities out of context to misrepresent what those authorities said and ignored basic rules for documenting research. Even Kennedy’s family eventually went public in an attempt to distance themselves from his faulty scholarship and extreme views. Their open letter is reprinted in the most recent edition of Elements of Argument. His niece and two of his siblings state, “We stand behind him in his ongoing fight to protect our environment. However, on vaccines he is wrong. . . . He is part of this campaign to attack the institutions committed to reducing the tragedy of preventable infectious diseases. He has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines.” Kennedy’s famous name seems to lend him authority and therefore, people who distrust vaccines rely on him to defend their beliefs. Those who are not familiar with his earlier writing about childhood vaccines may remember his recent opposition to the COVID-19 vaccines. An AP article in the Chicago Sun-Times summed up his extremism: “Kennedy has repeatedly invoked Nazis and the Holocaust when talking about measures aimed at mitigating the spread of COVID-19, such as mask requirements and vaccine mandates. He has apologized for some of those comments, including when he suggested that people in 2022 were worse off than Anne Frank, the teenager who died in a Nazi concentration camp after hiding with her family in a secret annex in an Amsterdam house for two years.” Michael T. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, also stated in an article by the New York Times: “His conduct ‘undercuts 50 years of public health vaccine practice, and he’s done it in a way I’ve never see anyone else do it. He is among the most dangerous because of the credibility of who he is and what his family name has brought to this issue.’” Will the fact that Kennedy continues to spread misinformation about vaccines in the face of indisputable scientific facts affect his presidential bid? Only time will tell, but in order to move past the violent division that the country has experienced over the past few years, America needs a president that leads with integrity. "39 RFK Jr"  by Felton Davis is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Jeffrey L. Jackson, a writing instructor at SUNY Cortland. "Tell us what you're feeling," a student asked me. She was the only one willing to speak. The rest of the class sat in silence as I cried in front of them. The video clip of a little boy calling his father a liar left me defenseless. The father fought to protect his son from financial hardship. The boy saw through the lies and reminded me of my own struggles as a young parent years before. I shared that with my class and realized for the first time, I had completely let my guard down in front of my students. ... View more

For the last several weeks, I’ve been talking with teachers of writing around the country, asking about how their classes are going this term. What they have told me has been very sobering, and it corroborates what I’ve been reading in reliable national media sources about the fallout students and teachers are experiencing after the worst of the pandemic has (we hope) passed. National studies reveal drops in enrollment, some of them dramatic, as well as withdrawal from classes at an all-time high. Student learning seems to have been significantly affected at the K-12 level and, increasingly, reports from college campuses also raise the alarm: students seem changed, and they are in need of a great deal of support and help—whether they know it or not.     Among the teachers I’ve talked to most recently, several themes emerged. One involves attendance and engagement: one teacher said that her students, who are now attending class in person, attend class haphazardly, dropping in and out. When they are there, they seem as if they are very easily distracted or trying to do several things at once, as if they are still on Zoom where they could turn their cameras off. Keeping conversations on track, and especially keeping students actively engaged, seems harder than ever. Other teachers talked with me about a dramatic increase in accommodations of almost every imaginable kind, and about the mental health issues students are facing. Designing a course that can meet the needs of all students is a challenging task—one reason I always think of excellent teaching as more of an art than a science—and the task now seems exponentially more difficult, as teachers try to respond not just to the need for accommodations but to challenges presented by the very hot culture wars, with trigger warnings, cancel culture, and book/author banning ever present.  Finally, teachers talked to me about student fragility as well as student resistance—maybe not resistance so much as fear or anxiousness around learning. Writing theorist James Moffett wrote years ago about the dangers of agnosis, which he defined as “the will not to know,” a kind of willful ignorance. Students today face a world of issues, events, even facts that they may simply wish not to know—and who can blame them?! As a result, they are sometimes reluctant to read or engage topics that in some ways simply overwhelm them. But they may also resist reading—print texts especially—because they are so accustomed to sound bites, video, and short snippets of text. Asked to respond to a 12-page article that had been assigned reading, one student responded, simply, “TLDR.” That is, “too long; didn’t read.”  These conversations left me feeling at least partly glad that I am retired and no longer teaching except for occasional gigs. I say “partly,” though, because the teachers I talked to weren’t giving in, throwing in the towel. Rather, they were doubling down on their efforts to design classes, assignments, and activities that would meet students where they are and engage them, that would in Piagetian terms be just ever so slightly ahead of students, holding the bar out just a little in front of them to challenge but not discourage them. And they are asking students to help create such assignments and activities, to assume agency and become co-teachers as well as co-learners. For these reasons, I’d really love to be back at full-time work, back in a place I have always loved best: the writing classroom. What challenges are your students facing in these post-pandemic times? And how are you responding to them? Do you have stories like the ones teachers have reported to me?   Photo by marco fileccia on Unsplash ... View more

The corner I where I need to turn: Trees, a tall building, an airplane,  a pigeon sitting atop a streetlight, and a bus stop sign underneath a mostly cloudy sky. Photo by Susan Bernstein April 27, 2023 On Instagram, I follow #morningpages, a collection of writing, art, prompts, suggestions, and aphorisms inspired by Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way,  that amplify  engagement in creative activities first thing in the morning, before the day begins. I had started the semester journaling in my lesson plan book, but soon realized that I needed a smaller book, something that would fit in my crossbody bag and that I could easily reach and that would not be cumbersome or take up space from other commuters on public transit. I found a little book that was just right, and, with that problem solved, I came up with my own version of morning pages that initially was dedicated to reviewing my lesson planning and reflecting on recent classes. My journal of morning pages: Detail of a black unzipped cross body bag with  a small journal and a pen emerging from the opening. Photo  by Susan Bernstein April 28, 2023 But after spring break, a new predicament arose. Emerging from the subway and crossing the street, I noticed a new construction project blocking the bus stop. There was a notice on the back of the bus stop sign that stated the cross streets of the temporary stop. But this part of the city, a hub for public transit, is organized only partly on a grid, and some of the cross streets twist and turn. I decided to follow the grid, trying to follow other commuters who appeared to be searching for the new stop.  But that impromptu plan did not work. I found the new bus stop only by accident. My new plan, asking other commuters for directions, and trying to remember landmarks that would guide me to the correct location, also wasn’t viable. I tried mapping the route before leaving home, but the directions included curves and merges on paths that were difficult to follow in real time. On the street I lost internet access, so GPS didn’t work either. Every single time, after extending my already long commute by several minutes, it was only by coincidence that I found a bus to campus. My neurodivergent affordances were overloaded. Somehow, I needed to stay mindful of the landscape of the streets, and  retrain my brain to duplicate that new geography, so I turned to my journal of morning pages. I vented new and old frustrations and saved a final paragraph to briefly review my lesson plan. Then something unexpected happened. Frustrations vented, my head cleared and I was ready to figure out another way out of my dilemma. I followed the street grid to the nearest available bus stop, and asked the driver how to get to campus. They mentioned the bus I needed, and also where the temporary bus stop was probably located–just around the corner on a street that eventually curved into a wider boulevard.  Fragment from my journal of morning pages handwritten in black ink on lined paper: “[waiting] for the bus and very shortly afterward  the bus that I’m on now showed up.  I took photos to remember the visual landmarks. Relief! ♥️” Photo by Susan Bernstein April 28, 2023 Although my writing process often changes with each new project, I noticed some similarities between creating these morning pages and searching for the correct bus stop: Contemplation, trial and error, venting, drafting, discovery, and relief. Most significantly, however, is that writing helps me process dilemmas and–in this case, duplicate a new geography–from journal pages to everyday life. Beyond my commute and outside the classroom, the larger world presents innumerable distractions and difficulties that overload the brain. While these ever present struggles remain, I am grateful that writing a journal of morning pages holds the potential to ease working memory and to open spaces for focus and relief. ... View more

A number of years ago in those long-lost days before Turnitin.com, I found myself experiencing a distinct sense of deja vu as I was reading a batch of student papers written in response to an assignment in my literary criticism and theory class.  Haven't I read this sentence before? I asked myself, and decided accordingly to conduct a Google search on it to see what would happen.  You already know where this is headed:  the search turned up an entire student essay that had been posted online in response to a similar assignment at a different university.  This compelled me to look over all the papers I had already read and graded, while putting me on the alert for those that I hadn't read yet.  In the end, I found five papers, out of a class of 35 students, in which pretty much the entire online paper had been copied and presented as original student work. I am reminded of this experience as I ponder the significance of an opinion piece by Inara Scott (an associate dean for teaching and learning in the College of Business at Oregon State University) published recently in Inside Higher Education.  Entitled "Yes, We Are in a (ChatGPT) Crisis," Scott's essay is a clarion call to everyone in higher education about just how big a problem (not "challenge;" problem) ChatGPT already is.  Lest you think that I am exaggerating, I am going to quote an entire paragraph of Scott's in full:  "Back in January, I, like many others, thought we could design our coursework to outwit students who would rely on AI to complete their assignments. I thought we could create personalized discussion questions, meaningful and engaged essay assignments, and quizzes that were sufficiently individualized to course materials that they would be AI-proof. Turns out, I was incorrect. Particularly with the arrival of GPT-4, there is very little I can assign to my undergraduates that the computer can’t at least take a stab at. Students may have to fill in a few details and remember to delete or add some phrases, but they can avoid most of the thinking—and save a lot of time. GPT-4 can write essays, compare and contrast options, answer multiple-choice questions, ace standardized tests, and it is growing in its capacity to analyze data—even a lot of data—that is fed to it. It can write code and make arguments. It tends to make things up, including citations and sources, but it’s right a lot of the time" (ChatGPT is causing an educational crisis (opinion) (insidehighered.com)). What I find especially striking about Scott's observations is how they go beyond the concerns of composition instructors to encompass, at least potentially, pretty much every subject taught in our universities.  The apparent fact that ChatGPT can take multiple choice and standardized tests, as well as write code, indicates that it has already invaded the terrain of STEM coursework, which can be heavily dependent on multiple choice and standardized testing.  At the same time, as Scott points out, there appears to be no way that instructors of wholly online courses can control the situation at all, short of failing every exam that shows over 50% of AI-generated content. This would probably not go over very well with administrators who have come to rely on online course offerings more than ever, in what I have heard called "the post-COVID" era, and who are also under extreme political pressure to show ever-increasing levels of "student success." Now, Scott is so worried about the future of higher education in such a climate that she offers both short term and long-term solutions to the problem as she sees it—solutions that I will let you read and judge for yourself.  For myself, I will only say here that what America is facing today is not only an educational crisis; it is a cultural crisis of immense significance.  For here is a paradigm shift to beat all paradigm shifts, a prospect that seems to fulfill the nightmarish vision of Kubrick and Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Will our class rosters present us with students who are all (in effect) named HAL?  And with ChatGPT writing code, will even the white collar, postindustrial workforce also be composed of indistinguishable HALs? I would suggest asking your students to write an essay contemplating such a world, but since the likelihood is that you will only get back an AI-generated essay, I will refrain from that.  It would make a dandy in-class discussion topic, however. And, not so by the way, this blog, though written on a computer, is entirely human authored.  But if some bot were to pick it up and toss it into the giant aggregation maw that feeds AI development, it could end up in a student essay some day in response to an assignment on artificial intelligence and culture change. Oy vey.  Somehow, I don't think that HAL would say that. Photo by Shantanu Kumar (2023), used under the Unsplash License. ... View more

I recently had the deep pleasure of participating in a symposium at Penn State honoring Cheryl Glenn on the occasion of her retirement. It was a grand epideictic event, with five panels of students and colleagues speaking about what they had learned from Glenn and her groundbreaking work, including scores of articles on feminism and rhetoric, feminist methodologies, women in the history of rhetoric, and writing and rhetoric pedagogies as well as books such as Rhetoric Retold; Unspoken: The Rhetoric of Silence; Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope. I got to give a presentation as well, in which I described Cheryl, who was my first PhD student when I taught at Ohio State, as unflinchingly curious, irreverently funny, fiercely determined—a 21st-century "woman of parts" whose accomplishments are legion and whose mentoring and friendship set a high standard. Every person who spoke noted how fully she embodies hope, which she differentiates, following Cornel West, from optimism, arguing that hope is what we hold onto insistently when we have good reason to believe things are not good and not looking to turn out well. In such situations, Cheryl argues, we do well to choose hope.     I thought I knew everyone at this event, but I was wrong. Two women on one of the panels were completely new to me—because they turned out to be students Cheryl had taught when they were in the tenth grade back in Marysville, Ohio, fifty-one years ago. And here they were, all these decades later, wanting to tell us about their vivid memories of the really smart, really cool, really inspiring teacher who also taught their journalism class, worked with them on school publications, and left a lifelong impression of having challenged them to be their best selves while always, always supporting them and giving them her full attention. Teachers, as Cheryl Glenn demonstrates, can make a difference. A big difference. A lasting difference. One that can last 51 years—or a lifetime. These two students went on to productive careers but did not become teachers. But the rest of us in that room were all teachers, teachers who had come together to praise and celebrate one very special teacher and congratulate her on her retirement. I left that symposium thinking of all the teachers who made a lasting impression on me, who gave me their full attention, made me feel as if my thoughts were worth listening to, and whose voices I carry with me to this day. I am thinking too of when and how I thanked and praised these teachers, and whether I did, or ever could, do so sufficiently. Who are the teachers who have most challenged, inspired, and supported you? Are you still in touch with them, or if not might you still get in touch? Now might be the perfect time to send your thanks and to praise them out loud. They most surely deserve it. Teachers celebrating teachers. Pass it on.   The image used in this post is in the public domain. ... 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.     My colleague Kate Sanchez and I are currently working on a new YouTube channel, Present-Minded Professors, which contains meditations, activities and other musings to help educators and students build awareness skills for academic success. Kate and I like to think of mindfulness as a process of noticing what is going on in the body and the mind, and we feel that this awareness can especially help students be more present for their final exams and therefore do their best work. Here is a guided meditation for final exams to play for students. It contains a brief introduction to the practice and a meditation focused on getting one’s mind and body ready immediately before taking an exam. You can pull it up on YouTube on your phone at high volume, or you can play it on a SmartBoard. If time is a consideration, pick a short piece of the meditation to play for students, or simply give students the link to the meditation so they can listen before they come into the exam room. Do what feels comfortable for you! I always find it hard to do anything “extra” during exam time, but if you have metaphorical bandwidth, the text of the meditation is at the end of this blog post. You can feel free to modify it to suit your needs and your voice and then lead your students in the meditation. As Kate and I build our YouTube channel, we would also love your feedback, especially about topics for the videos you would like to see! Feel free to comment below or in the comments section of Present-Minded Professors on YouTube. Wishing you a meaningful end-of-semester!   A Meditation for Final Exams Hello everyone. This is Elizabeth Catanese from Present-Minded Professors.  I’m here right now to provide you with a brief meditation to help prepare your mind and body for the final exam you are about to take. Please engage with this meditation in whatever way feels helpful to you. You do not have to be good at meditation to benefit from this practice. Please see all directions as suggestions. For example, when I suggest that you close your eyes, do so only if that feels possible and comfortable. The goal of this meditation is to get your body and mind ready to take the exam. Maybe you have some extra anxious energy that is not serving you. Maybe you are a bit too calm for the task ahead. When I was taking exams, I used to be so anxious that my palms would sweat and my legs would bounce up and down. We all handle exams differently. Through this meditation you will become aware of where you are. How you are feeling is okay.  Let’s begin!  Take a deep breath and exhale. If you are comfortable doing so, close your eyes. Take a moment to notice how you feel in this moment. You may be excited and anxious. You might feel ready and annoyed that that test is not in your hands right in this moment. Simply notice. How you feel right now is valid.  Take another deep breath and exhale. What does your body need right now? If you think it would help, wiggle your fingers. Stretch your arms above your head. Notice how you feels. Is there a way you could move your body right now that would help it feels it’s best? Do so now.  Take note of the energy in the room. Relax your body for a moment and in your head give good wishes to those around you.  Take another deep breath. And exhale. As the final part of this practice, please come up with an affirmation to say to yourself if you get stuck during your exam. Say it in your head a few times. For example, I often say “I am brave and capable.” And many people like “I can do this.” Take a moment to think of one unique to you.  At this point, there is no more studying left to do for this class. It is time to show what you remember, what and how you think. I would like to extend my congratulations to you for getting this far. To get to the point of a final exam takes a lot of hard work and effort. I see and applaud your effort. Your progress is beautiful. Take a final deep breath and exhale. If you feel comfortable, open your eyes.  It is now time to take your final exam. ... View more

Here in Northern Indiana, spring has swept across the wintered landscape like a magic wand. Daffodils trumpet sunny joy, hyacinths perfume the walk to campus with clustered purple blooms, and, now, cherry trees and magnolias are foaming pink and white into the sky. What could be less appealing than buckling down and finishing the semester? I’m sure most of us feel our students’ pain. I was glad, then, to have James M. Lang’s thought-provoking Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It on hand to remind me why it’s not enough to simply inspirit students: “Keep showing up!”  The premise of Lang’s book, which I’ve written about before, is for instructors to construct class experiences—think High Impact Practices— worth students’ time and attention. In these final weeks of the semester, with thinning attendance, I realized I needed to check my messaging and class structure to be sure I was making my class worth attending.  After all, even those of us who incorporate a lot of active learning in a classroom can fall into ruts: Opening question, pair and share, work with the text in small groups, share out insights again. Next class: Often more of the same. I needed to shake things up. I appreciate Mim Moore’s recent post about High Impact Practices (HIPs) offering a range of ways to re-orient our classrooms. And with Lang and Moore as inspiration, I have been sending out emails a few days before each class meeting with teasers about why attendance is worth each student’s time. Only in class, for example, would they have the chance to: Interact with a guest speaker who has made a career out of researched writing; Practice revision strategies that are essential for final drafts; Help design the self-evaluation rubric for class participation, and then evaluate themselves; See a brief scene from a new play and discuss theatrical rhetoric with the playwright; Collaborate on a summer reading list, movie list, and song playlist on course themes; Collaborate on advice for the next class; and, Cheer one another on as we celebrate the community we have built together while emerging from difficult times. These concentrated efforts have paid off, and not only in student attendance. I’ve found that when I design a class that I think will make students excited—or at least curious—to attend, I look forward to class so much more, myself. In this way, students are cheering me across the finish line, too—despite springtime’s beckoning call. Photo by April Lidinsky (2023). ... View more

Driving Around on Purpose: Learning to See through Photo Essays and Visual Storytelling   Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. She also trains graduate student writing teachers in composition theory and pedagogy. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy, and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition   Overview Our family came up with the term, “Driving Around on Purpose,” when my daughter was a young child. I taught a night class once a week for many years and felt bad about not being around during that time. My daughter and husband, however, turned it into a daddy-daughter date night and happily did their own thing.  After many years, I decided to rearrange my schedule, drop the night class and return home for Wednesday nights. I was expecting that my family would be relieved that I was back on deck for that day, but they were actually a bit disappointed as they were happy with their weekly hang-time.  My daughter, in all of her young insight, asked me if I could just “drive around on purpose” during this time to keep their hang-time intact.    Photo by Kim Haimes-KornAlthough I found it funny at the time, I was not a stranger to driving around on purpose.  On the contrary, I love a drive without a destination to create chances to start out in one place and see how one thing leads to the next. As a digital storyteller I seek out unstructured opportunities to connect visually with the world, the seasons, the sights, and the unexpected events that present themselves. Driving around on purpose is really about changing your state of mind, learning how to see and live the flow life and notice things that might go unnoticed. It is about finding the right light, right angle, new connections, and the right story to tell.  For me and all the busy people I know, this is a way to step outside of our overscheduled lives and enjoy the openness of discovery, which is where stories emerge.          I bring this practice into my classes to push students to do the same thing – learn how to drive around on purpose.  One of the skills of digital storytellers is learning how to see.  Students, in their busy lives often walk quickly by and through their experiences, rather than slowing down and observing their surroundings.  The concept of driving around on purpose is perfect for students generating microcontent and telling visual stories.    The idea of the photo essay is at the center of this kind of multimodal work. Photo essays tell stories and strengthen students’ abilities to see their world in new ways. As immersive storytellers, we often find ourselves in situations where we experience and interpret reality and then represent it for others in digital spaces.     The photo essay originally emerged as a genre through journalism and lived its origins in the early magazines. The term came about when W. Eugene Smith chronicled the back stories of a Rural Country Doctor (1948) and a Nurse Midwife (1951) through landmark photo essays in the iconic Life magazine. These essays defined the genre and were followed by others in different contexts and subjects. Photojournalists told stories that created behind-the- scenes portraits, slice-of-life experiences and life in the field. The photo essay surged during the Vietnam war and other cultural and historical moments as we were able to feel the emotional impact through images. Today, the photo essay has worked its way into popular mediums through online sharing and distribution in digital spaces where both everyday composers and professional storytellers share their lives, experiences, and ideas through visual storytelling.    The Format Magazine article, Advice for an Unforgettable Photo Essay (2018) offers a working definition and characteristics of photo essays:   Possibilities, discovery, and stories: these are some of the most effective elements of a photo essay. Collections of images can help produce a narrative, evoke emotion, and guide the viewer through one or more perspectives. A well-executed photo essay doesn’t rely on a title or any prior knowledge of its creator; it narrates on its own, moving viewers through sensations, lessons, and reactions.   Photo by Ed 259 on UnsplashWhen assigning photo essays or visual microcontent, I sometimes give students prompts to sharpen their focus and feed into my class assignments. For example, I have students investigate their sense of place, look for a series of related things (digital, visual series) or search for particular composing techniques. Other times, I leave it more unstructured and ask them to go on a walk-about or exploratory journey that encourages seeking out the unexpected. I also offer opportunities to choose their own paths and drive around on purpose according to their own terms. Prompts can encourage students to follow narrative paths that “focus on the story you’re telling the viewer” or thematic paths that “speak to a specific subject.” (2018).   Photo essays are stories of discovery or ones that make a statement. They can entertain, persuade, or inform and present thoughtful connections between composed images to tell stories and communicate meaning. They are short, visual stories (microcontent) that can stand-alone or be integrated into larger projects. Steps to the Assignment:  Assign students a prompt (structured or unstructured) and ask them to venture out and take at least 10 images on their phone in which they visually represent a story or idea.  I encourage them to engage in strong composing practices as they learn to compose strong images.  Although I usually assign 10 images (for micro-stories), I encourage students to overtake and curate more than they need so they have more to choose from to create their stories. Sometimes, I intentionally assign more images, depending on the nature, purpose, and depth of the assignment. I emphasize the importance of context and varied visual perspectives (such as different distances (micro to macro), angles).   Once students collect their images, they should edit, sort, and arrange them so they tell a story, communicate an idea, or explain a perspective.  Students can prepare them for submission through an array of options: they can present them as an advancing slide show or a gallery of captioned images. They can add title slides, text, and music if they want or just let the images speak for themselves.  I usually have them include an accompanying context statement through which they discuss their purposes and processes.   Finally, students share their stories with others in either full class or small group formats to see the reactions of an active audience.  Students can also add them to existing forms and platforms such as blogs, social media posts, written articles, or other spaces.   Here are some example prompts/ideas for short photo essays:  Transformation or change  Journeys or photo walks  DIY – process of how to do something or how things work  Day-in-the-life  Community  Personal space  Profile/portraits of people  Behind the scenes  Persuasive statement towards an idea or cause  Technique driven – Composing techniques, black and white, etc. Seasonal portraits Nature Architecture  City Life Objects  Moods or emotions  Experiences or events Choose your own adventure   Reflections on the Activity: I am glad I learned how to drive around on purpose and find meaning through photo essays. It nurtured my love of visual storytelling and shaped my ability to shift my state of mind and find stories to tell. I find students also embrace these opportunities as engaging assignments that help them learn to see, critically interpret their experiences, and hone their skills as visual storytellers. ... View more

I recently recorded a pedagogy podcast concerning supplemental instruction (SI) in the most difficult first and second-year courses at my university, sharing the Zoom platform with a colleague from psychology and another from math.  Our conversation began with a discussion of difficulty.  What leads us to perceive something as difficult?  The ratio of time and effort required?  The subject matter itself?  Comments on Rate My Professor?    We talked about the benefits of working our way through difficulties, as well as strategies for motivating ourselves to stick with challenges—from growth mindset to research-based study strategies such as spacing (spreading smaller amounts of study over days or weeks rather than cramming at the last minute).  Cramming and spacing can both yield immediate benefits on a test, but the knowledge gained through cramming is less likely to persist, while learning acquired over time tends to last longer.     But what motivates students to exert energy to space their studies strategically or to connect with SI and other campus resources?  Sharing our own struggles, bringing former students and peers to show how their learning extends beyond the classroom—all of this can help students see potential in difficulty and address the “when will I ever use this” question that seems to arise in so many of our class conversations.     Such conversations, however, address the students who recognize and respond to the difficulty inherent in our assignments.  But what about students who do not seem to be aware of that difficulty?    I recall using a variation of Mariolina Salvatori’s difficulty assignment in one of my FYC courses at a community college a few years ago.   I drew on Salvatori and Donohue’s book, The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty, and this insightful piece from Meghan Sweeney and Maureen McBride in creating the assignment:  students were invited to explore their difficulties in reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman.”  I was surprised by a handful of students who wrote that they encountered no difficulties at all in the reading.  It was clear from subsequent work that they had not actually grasped basic details of the reading, much less nuances of key themes.    This semester, I have not used the difficult paper per se, although I have incorporated elements of its structure into the reflective pieces students have written over the semester.  And I am once again befuddled by a disconnect between what I perceive as the difficulties embedded in the course and the students’ assessment of their own writing practices.     After reviewing the grading specifications for the final portfolio—an end-of-the year project to which I devote the final three weeks of class—I asked students to estimate the amount of time they would need to complete final revisions, edits, and annotations (reflective notes) for the curated portfolio.  Several suggested that at least an hour— “maybe even two”—might be needed.   Many of these students do not yet have full first drafts; they need to complete substantive revisions and extensive editing for at least 4 pieces (2500+ words).    In short, it appears that most students have underestimated the time and effort required for accomplishing the portfolio. I am used to complaints that the portfolio requirements are too difficult; I am not so accustomed to assertions that “it’s no big deal.”   Now I am wondering how best to communicate realistic assessments of what is required to my students, and yet also invite them to enter this process that—despite difficulty—can bring energy, magic, and incredible satisfaction.  My consternation echoes a concern articulated (and explored in depth in this post) by one of my heroes in FYC/developmental/corequisite work, Cheryl Hogue Smith: During this post-COVID sea change, however, I feel like students are in an academic version of The Matrix, not knowing a world of learning exists outside of their passive realities, not even knowing there’s a red or blue pill to choose from. And it’s this fight I don’t know how to win.   Photo by marco fileccia on UnsplashI don’t have answers, but this is just one of the difficult questions I will consider this summer.  I hope to look more into recent publications in the scholarship of teaching and learning, such as this open access collection published by the Association for the Teaching of Psychology.  I am also working through a collaborative investigation of the ways students use language to position themselves in relation to difficult materials in advanced courses.  I will review student work and my own feedback from this current semester.   Then I will tweak (yet again) my syllabi in preparation for fall courses.       How are you helping your students recognize, value, and persevere through difficulty?  How do you help those who are overwhelmed by difficulty—and also those who don’t even perceive that difficulty?  As always, I would love to hear from you. ... View more

When I was a grad student at Ohio State University, one of the professors in the department insisted that the sign announcing our department be changed from “English Department” to “Department of English,” and I remember the debate that ensued on the ramifications of that grammatical shift and the high dudgeon many colleagues worked themselves into over it. I also remember at the time thinking what an odd name it was in any event. Though I had read William Riley Parker’s 1967 essay “Where Do English Departments Come From?” and understood the lineage that had shifted, at Harvard, from rhetoric, briefly to folklore, and then to literature, and particularly literature in English, the name still seemed odd to me, given what I knew about the Department I was currently studying in. “English” did not seem parallel, to me, with the Departments of German or Spanish or Chinese. In my department, students studied and wrote dissertations on literature in English and sometimes literature in translation, certainly, but also on the history and theory of rhetoric, on folklore, on creative and other forms of writing. So “English” just seemed an odd name to me.    University Hall at Ohio State University   So odd, in fact, that in the 80s I advocated for changing the name of our departments, arguing that our name should reflect the work that we actually do. My arguments went . . . nowhere. Nevertheless, as the years wore on and as scholars of rhetoric and literacy/writing studies began to grow in number, some departments began to change their names (Oregon State, for example, went from “English” to “Writing, Literature, and Film” and new departments, separated from English, grew up around the country, with names like “Writing and Media Studies” or “Writing and Rhetoric Studies” or “Rhetoric, Media, and Social Change,” “Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication,” and so on, names that signal more clearly what the department studies and values than does the single and vague word “English.” In “The Colonialism and Racism of the ‘English’ Department,” Elizabethada A. Wright doesn’t consider this slow evolution away from “English” and doesn’t cite William Riley Parker’s work or a number of others, such as Gerald Graff or John Guillory or Robert Scholes, who examine and question the formation and practices of “English.” But that is not the focus of Wright’s critique, which centers on the hegemony of English and of its colonializing tendencies. In this regard, I was expecting to encounter the work of James Slevin, whose Introducing English includes a searing indictment of the earliest attempts to force “English” on native inhabitants.  Nevertheless, I take the point of Wright’s article seriously, and I think all of us—especially all of us in departments of “English” should be at work right now examining how when and why our departments came by that name, articulating the mission that name suggests and comparing it with the missions that other, alternative names could carry forward. We would also do well to be asking our students what they think of the name of our departments – in what ways the name seems appropriate and adequate to what they are studying and learning in their classes and what alternative names they might suggest, along with their rationales for doing so. What’s in a name? A very great deal. Years ago, my colleague Nicholas Howe said if he could form a department of his own, he would call it “The Department of Interesting People.” I am still not sure what my department title would be, but I know it would aim at using language together to create a better future. And it would NOT be “English.” What would your department name be—and why?   The image in this post is in the public domain. ... View more

The most difficult times of the pandemic often felt like living in a chrysalis, and for the sake of metaphor, I can imagine a butterfly emerging. With imagination, I can picture the butterfly wondering what happens next. Where will they go? What will they do? How will they avoid the predators that eat butterflies for breakfast?  Butterfly at the Voelker Orth Museum, Bird Sanctuary, and Victorian Garden Queens, NY Photo by Susan Bernstein, July 27, 2022   That metaphor seems like college right now–all of us, students and teachers, emerging from the chrysalis. Teachers might remember what college was like before March 2020. A teacher, newly emergent, might feel nostalgia for pre-pandemic classrooms, for the time before the devastating memories of transitioning to online learning in the midst of a global emergency. The chrysalis formed in that transition. The hope of returning to normalcy kept the chrysalis viable.   This is not necessarily the fault of teachers, and especially not the fault of contingent faculty, who exist in a labor system that offers no stability. For contingent faculty, there is no normalcy. Students who are entering college for the first time also have not experienced normalcy; they cannot find comfort in the memory of pre-pandemic college classrooms because no memory exists, and nostalgia also does not exist. What first-time-in-college students–and especially FirstGen and BIPOC students–encounter in college classrooms is their complete reality of college: College might include pre-pandemic relics that now might not make much sense, including general education requirements, course overloads necessary to complete general education requirements, and expensive unpaid parking fees (on campuses with too few parking spaces, no less) that place holds on registration for the next semester. This list does not include student loans and the astronomical financial costs of college, many of which seem opaque, such as the high costs of required materials for required courses. This is the only college world the students have ever known. No wonder, then, that many people do not stay in college, or choose not to enroll at all.  Yet these alternatives to college completion are not the same as a chrysalis that fails to develop. The butterfly still emerges, and still searches for the means to launch their flight. College could well have been that means, but a launch pad littered with obstacles fabricated from nostalgia offers precious little space to begin a successful flight. Success in the wake of this pandemic must be differently measured. But that is not all. College also needs to change. The launching pad needs to be cleared of pre-pandemic debris that served no one before March 2020, and that three years later remains intolerable.  The butterfly emerges from the chrysalis, and in that moment of emergence, the world is made new. In that moment, attention must be paid. This is not a metaphor, but a call to refuse nostalgia and to refuse normalcy. This is a call for change. ... View more

If, as I noted in last month’s post, attempting to keep students from using chat generative pre-trained transformers is all but impossible, how might ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence language programs be used productively for teaching and learning? That’s a question that has already generated a tremendous amount of thought and research among educators, with the proliferation of ideas and suggestions growing on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Among the resources I recommend are the work being done by Anna Mills, who curates AI Text Generators: Sources to Stimulate Discussion Among Teachers for the WAC Clearinghouse, and Rhonda Grego, Dean of the School of English and Humanities at Midlands Technical College in Columbia, South Carolina, who has created a detailed and annotated list of scholarly articles with a focus on classes in which writing is a major component of the syllabus. As with my previous posts, the rapid development of AI, and educators’ responses to its perils and triumphs, means the following ideas are only suggestions, places to begin. Actively assign ChatGPT as part of the coursework. While we want our class discussion to be models of invention and creativity, ChatGPT obviously offers a much quicker way to generate essay ideas worth discussing. Rather than a desultory ten or fifteen minutes with students kicking around one or two obvious or half-formed ideas, they could spend their time evaluating and critiquing the ideas offered by GPT, which is particularly adept at generating pros and cons for specific arguments. AI appears equally deft at summarizing complex arguments. Students can practice this essential skill by writing their own summaries of readings or topics in-class, then comparing them with AI-generated summaries. Conversely, the AI summary can be created first, then dissected by the class for flaws and omissions, of which there are sure to be some. Indeed, just about any early-process writing activity, from generating a thesis to locating sources to creating an outline, can be supplemented, or complicated, by AI input. In this model, AI acts as a kind of tutor, prompting students to try ideas, answering questions, responding to student concerns and skepticism--essentially becoming something like the online writing guide that so many software developers have worked so long to create. Allow students to use ChatGPT as they wish, but ask them to be honest about how they have used it. Once students begin using AI as a partner, it will be tempting for them to say, as they might to an overeager parent, “You’re so good at this, why don’t you just go ahead and do it yourself?” If, as we will see in next month’s post, detecting this sort of plagiarism is problematic, should we just give in and acknowledge its inevitability? Ethan Mollick, a professor of management at Wharton, concedes: “I think everybody is cheating ... I mean, it’s happening. So what I’m asking students to do is just be honest with me.... Tell me what they use ChatGPT for, tell me what they used as prompts to get it to do what they want, and that’s all I’m asking from them. We’re in a world where this is happening, but now it’s just going to be at an even grander scale.” Clearly, this approach is not without its drawbacks. What criteria are we using to grade student work not actually produced by students? Whom (or What), exactly, are we grading? Mollick’s proposal may but pragmatic, but it is not far from a tactic discussed last month: not grading at all. Emphasize the writing process and have students show their work. A more productive approach is to insist that students be transparent about their own writing processes. While we may preach the gospel of process, too often, especially for teachers with heavy composition loads, it’s much easier simply to assess product. Among the many recommendations composition teachers have made for responding to AI, two occur frequently: 1) Have students do more work in class, with the teacher maintaining a productively intrusive presence from the beginning to the end of the assignment, and 2) insist that each of those stages in the process is read and assessed by the instructor to ensure that the work is consistent with the student’s own writing. If ChatGPT is part of the process, its use should be akin to that of tutoring session or a database search, and every aspect of its use should be well-documented. Prioritize quality over quantity. An emphasis on an instructor’s close involvement in the composition process, in tandem with AI’s ease in creating competent product—ChatGPT can meet a semester’s word count in a couple of minutes—should encourage educators to move away from word count as a mark of achievement and toward fewer essays, with more drafts, more in-class work, and more attention to detail. Again, students may consult AI as they compose, but the instructor’s emphasis should be on helping them craft their own sentences and paragraphs rather than cutting and pasting ready-made computer-generated prose. Assign multimodal writing. Many professors devoted to multimodal composition have been frustrated by the pace at which their colleagues have adopted non-alphabetic writing practices, but ChatGPT’s wizardry with words should go a long way towards making college composition classes places where, in addition to written text, “essays” consist of images, sound, video, computer graphics, and whatever else persuasively forwards an argument. Insist on accuracy and facts. Those who are doubtful of AI’s impending ability to conquer the world often point to the wild inaccuracies to which it is given. In class, let AI have its say on the topic under discussion, then have students do their best to identify what is false or misstated. Because ChatGPT is so error-prone, students will need to be more alert than ever to fact-checking information, certainly a worthwhile development in our era of exaggerations, lies and blatant misinformation. Nurture the individual writer. ChatGPT relies on groupthink and hivemind; its prose lacks individual creativity and flair. Media Studies professor Ian Bogost compared a conversation with ChatGPT to “every other interaction one has on the internet, where some guy (always a guy) tries to convert the skim of a Wikipedia article into a case of definitive expertise.” Bloviating generalizations that anyone can make are just as unappealing in college writing as they ever were. Instead, we writing teachers should be cultivating the distinctive voice given to every human being. In class, analyze the prose of ChatGPT, pointing out its blandness, the fact that, as Bogost notes, the writing is “formulaic in structure, style, and content” and “consistently uninteresting as prose.” Rewrite sentences and paragraphs to rehumanize AI’s list of facts and figures. Peter Elbow, Anne Lamott, Natalie Ginsberg: be ready in the wings; we may need you. ... View more

One year ago, I wrote here about the threat of a Constitutional crisis. In doing so, I cited a speech made by Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court, on the occasion of the 200th birthday of the Constitution in 1987. Marshall wrote, “I plan to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution as a living document, including the Bill of Rights and the other amendments protecting individual freedoms and human rights.” He continued, “Along the way, new constitutional principles have emerged to meet the challenges of a changing society. The progress has been dramatic, and it will continue. The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 could not have envisioned these changes. They could not have imagined, nor would they have accepted, that the document they were drafting would one day be construed by a Supreme Court to which had been appointed a woman and the descendent of an African slave. ‘We the People’ no longer enslave, but the credit does not belong to the Framers. It belongs to those who refused to acquiesce in outdated notions of ‘liberty,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘equality,’ and who strived to better them.” Since the 2020 elections, across our nation, dozens of laws have been proposed—and most of them have been passed—that acquiesce in outdated notions of liberty, justice, and equality. Often these laws have been passed with their proponents knowing full they will not withstand a constitutional challenge. They do, however, reveal the biases of those who support them. They also reveal why Marshall was right in stressing that the Constitution was and must remain a living document. For example, there is endless debate about what rights to gun ownership are established by the Second Amendment, an amendment written before bullets as we know them had even been invented, let alone semiautomatic weapons. When Marshall wrote of “new constitutional principles [which] have emerged to meet the challenges of a changing society,” he had in mind, among others, the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which ended slavery and the denial of the vote based on race, respectively. During his lifetime, he saw progress toward a more just and equal nation. Had he lived into the twenty-first century, he would have been horrified to see us moving backward. Last week Marshall would have seen a glaring backward movement in the area of racial justice as he watched with the rest of the nation what happened in Tennessee. The Tennessee state legislature expelled Rep. Justin J. Pearson and Rep. Justin Jones, two young black representatives because they took part in a peaceful protest against the gun violence that most recently took six lives at an elementary school in Nashville. These representatives were removed from political office after being duly elected by their constituents, leaving those constituents temporarily without representation. Representative Gloria Johnson, a white Democrat, participated in the same protest but was not removed from office. Ironically, quiet racial gerrymandering of voting districts is what brought into power state legislatures that are able to get by with such blatant injustices. While both Rep. Justin J. Pearson and Rep. Justin Jones have been reinstated, the backlash from their expulsion will unravel in the weeks to come. Our Constitution assumed men of honor would be the ones enforcing it. Unfortunately, as the Constitution evolves we may have to legislate standards of integrity as well. For the better part of 200 years, Americans used the power of the vote to say no to politicians involved in a scandal or espousing blatant racism—except in the South, where that remains a problem. Our Founders didn’t think they needed to be made explicit. Perhaps today they do.   "Constitution"  by EpicTop10.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more