Boy using computer in classroom. "classroom-laptops-computers-boy" by R. Nial Bradshaw is licensed under CC BY 2.0. When Sonia Maasik and I published the first edition of Signs of Life in the USA in 1994, the Internet was only just emerging as a new medium in American life—one that had not yet significantly affected the way we consume products and entertainment, nor the ways in which goods and services are advertised. As we now know, the exponential growth of the Internet since then has changed all that. Entertainment is increasingly streamed across myriad digital platforms, and marketing has become a highly targeted matter: calculated algorithms match certain advertising to certain consumers, whose profiles have been constructed using data-mined information that has been gathered through what amount to digital spy networks. Gone are the days when advertising professionals (can you spell Mad Men?) cast about for a way of determining what, exactly, their target markets wanted through organic means; and equally gone are the days when there were but three national television networks broadcasting the same content to a relatively undifferentiated mass audience.  As I say, all this is commonly understood, but I think that this paradigm shift has reached a point where those of us who analyze popular culture through the lens of cultural semiotics in order to take the pulse, as it were, of American society, must revise our approach. This blog will be a sketch in that direction.  I was prompted to make this my inaugural topic for the 2022-23 Bits blogging year while visiting some friends over the Labor Day weekend who were watching a baseball game on TV when I dropped by. The game itself was rather dull, which wasn’t much of a surprise, but what really struck me was how dull and repetitious the advertising was. There seemed to be only two or three sponsors (insurance companies of one kind or another) who kept repeating the same uninspired advertisements. “What happened to all the car commercials and fast-food spots?” I wondered, as the same few ads rotated through each commercial break. “Where are the razor blades and after shave lotions?”  Being the incorrigible cultural semiotician that I am, I shared my thoughts with my friends, who weren’t much interested in the game either. They also happen to be very well versed in all things Internet (well, of course! they are millennials), and in the course of our conversation I learned that today’s television sets are essentially big-screen computers that are completely integrated with the Internet—which means that watching TV is no different than surfing the Web insofar as a viewer’s every move is being monitored and mined for data. And at that moment a light flashed on in my head: no wonder the advertising for the game was so half-hearted and so bereft of sponsors! Why bother with the expense of traditional, scatter-shot advertising spots when all you need to do is buy viewer data from the data marketers and then shoot targeted advertising at them on their smart phones?  The implications of all this are profound, because it means that mass culture has now been so sliced and diced into ever more granular consumer markets that attempting to determine the tenor of American life and consciousness simply by interpreting mass media content is doomed to failure. What we must do now is interpret what we don’t see on our TVs, as well as what we do. We must seek out the many sources of information and content that do not get covered in such mainstream media outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Atlantic, Slate, Vogue, and Vox, for example. We must research and analyze what those who still use outmoded technology to discover what they are seeing in the way of television content advertising, and what this tells us. It is apparent that there are now essentially two Americas when it comes to entertainment and marketing: the younger tech-savvy audiences who get their news, entertainment, and advertising exclusively via digital media, and the traditionalists who go under the radar when it comes to cultural analysis. These two groups represent a split that parallels that of the great divide in American political culture, as the latter group has, accordingly, blind-sided the high-tech pundits of political prognostication in election after election in the new millennium. ... View more

    As another school term ends, I think back on what we hope our students have learned about argumentation. Some of that knowledge has to do with analyzing the arguments made by others. I would hope that students leave an argumentation class a little less gullible than when they entered and, yes, a little less gullible than many of the people they will cross paths with in their daily lives. They need to be able to see the flaws in others’ arguments, even when they are tempted to accept those arguments. They need a vocabulary for explaining what is so wrong with so much of what passes for truth these days. As they see new controversies arise in the social and political worlds that they inhabit, they need to be able to read the most recent headlines and the most recent social media posts with a critical eye. They must understand the need for seeking common ground as a starting place for reconciling seemingly irreconcilable differences. Hopefully, they leave us knowing a little more about what sources of information to trust, including blocking out those voices that tell them that no media outlet is to be trusted. Some of that knowledge has to do with backing up their own arguments. As a new teacher, I did what was then popular and assigned one big research paper, and then after seeing the mistakes students made, wished they had another chance to get it right, but the term was over, and it was too late.  As I evolved as a teacher, I learned to teach the use of sources as a skill to be gained through practice. Students can start learning to use sources skillfully from the first time they write about something they have read. They can learn that to use sources is just that—to make use of sources to advance their own ideas. The idea is to avoid a patchwork quilt of quotations from sources that have very little of the student’s own ideas to hold them together. They can learn that a source worth using is worth identifying with more than a name in parenthesis. I would hope that by the end of the term each student can smoothly incorporate sources into his or her writing while providing the claim to authority that makes that source worth drawing on. I would hope that students leave knowing how to find good sources and how to identify which sources are good and reliable. This means learning to sift through all the chaff available online to find the seeds of value. Research is so much more than finding any old source to list on a works cited page. Recognizing and constructing successful arguments are skills that can be learned. Never has there been a greater need for citizens to have those skills. Some of the most basic rights we hold as citizens are under threat. Every time our students decide whom and what to vote for they are using the skills of argumentation. When they stand up in support of that very right to vote they are doing so as well.   Photo: "Dimension"  by KT King is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

For the last month or so, it’s been awards season at colleges and universities across the country—and of course I am especially interested in awards for student writing. A week ago, I had the pleasure of joining one such event at Stanford for the annual Oral Presentation of Research Awards, given every year to students in the second-year required writing course. While individual classes in this course are themed so that students can elect a class on a topic that appeals to them, all students prepare an extensive research-based argument—and then “remediate” it into a fifteen-minute oral presentation. Over the years since we first introduced this course and assignment in the early 2000s, this assignment has consistently engaged students’ imaginations—and effort. Over and over again, they tell us that having an opportunity to “boil down” a lengthy written text into a memorable oral presentation is one of their most rewarding challenges. It’s no surprise that this assignment, or some version of it, is now common in writing programs, as students learn the importance of being able to communicate the results of often difficult-to-follow research to public audiences with clarity and verve. Imagine my delight, then, as I listened to these four students describe their research and receive commendations for their work (including a generous cash award as well as several books chosen especially for them by their instructors): Ijeoma Alozie, “What Heartbeats are Worth Listening To,” about medical neglect and “misogynoir” in medical institutions, Liv Jenks, “Charting a Car-Free Point Forward: Addressing Resident Opposition to Green Urbanism,” which featured extensive field-based research on local attitudes, Amantina Rossi, “Pelo Melo: An Exploration of the Dominican Mother-Daughter Dynamics Regarding Hair, Beauty, and Professionalism,” about inter-generational tensions surrounding expectations and desires, and Haley Stafford, “Environmental Equity at Bay: Climate-Driven Evictions in Jakarta, Indonesia,” about causes and effects in a city that is literally sinking. As I listened to these four second-year students, I was struck by the range of their research interests, by their understanding of the methodologies available to them, and especially by their eloquence: while their comments were clearly crafted, they were delivered with such poise, openness, clarity, and audience awareness that they seemed to be in conversation directly with me. That these students have all had their personal and educational lives disrupted during the last two-plus years of a pandemic made their savoir faire all the more remarkable—a celebration truly to be cherished. I hope your school year is winding down as well as possible and that you may have some much-needed R and R during the summer months. I am going to be taking a break from Bedford Bits for a while myself, looking for ways to enjoy life’s good and simple pleasures. As I do so, I will be thinking of writing teachers and students everywhere with admiration. Image Credit: Photo 839 by NappyStock, used under a Public Domain license ... View more

Michael A. Reyes teaches first-year writing and literature of the Americas at Cal Lutheran University and Cal State LA. He specializes in rhetorical genre theory and contemporary Latinx docupoetry. He’s also the Assistant Editor of Poetry at The Offing and a former member of the Bedford New Scholars Advisory Board.   Two years ago, a Cal State LA student petition circulated around social media. It was a petition to grant all students at the university A’s. The reason? The coronavirus pandemic had made any equitable learning, and therefore fair distribution of grades, impossible. The petition was thesis-driven and so well-organized with diverse appeals and sources. It was truly a great demonstration of the critical thinking and writing I hope to inspire in my students! It was this spring 2020 petition that sparked my interest in seeking alternatives to traditional grade and point systems. I agreed with the students’ argument that the difference between a passing and failing grade is less about being apathetic and instead much more to do with resources and accessibility. So, I spent the summer developing my own version of Asao B. Inoue’s course grading contract, which I was assigned to read during my graduate studies. My goal was to introduce to students a new way of being motivated that didn’t include the pressure and standardization of letter grades on their assignments. The outcome would be the same: receive a final course grade. But, how I guided them to that outcome would be extremely different. Instead of receiving a letter grade or point value, all assignments would receive a “Complete” or an “Incomplete.” In doing so, I imagined that I would further open my classrooms to a pluriversality of writing and reading levels, especially when a student’s “best” may look a lot different during the pandemic. I presented the grading contract to my classes on day one of the fall 2020 semester. It included my rationale for the contract: to decentralize my role and instead place students as authorities in their own reading and writing growth; to acknowledge labor over expertise and understand that one semester is not enough to dictate “meeting” or “advanced” reading and writing skills; and to have students be motivated by feedback and collaboration. The grading contract also included the table I’d use to determine their final course grades: Final Course Grade # of Missing or Incomplete Assignments A 0-2 A- 3 B+ 4 B 5 B- 6 C+ 7 C 8 C- 9 No Credit 10 or more   To my surprise, no students protested (and haven’t during my 2 years of using it). They each accepted the terms, and saw it as a chance to, as one first-year student noted in a post-grading contract reflection assignment: “. . . take your time and try to write as well as you can without fear that everything has to be perfect. For this class you will find your writing style and your voice. It sounds cheesy I know but I’m being serious.” My obvious concern was that students would take it for granted and submit haphazard work, but that was never an issue. I credit my use of a TILT framework that clearly communicated what would constitute a “Complete” for each assignment. Additionally, this called on me to revise a few of my weekly reading responses and rhetorical précis assignments to be less frequent but a bit more challenging. For instance, I only assigned one homework assignment per week, which would ideally allow for student comprehension and transformation to sink in. Students would therefore not be punished for taking natural pauses to work through difficulties. The quality of my assignments seemed to also improve since I had to design them for productive difficulties. I anticipated that the less frequent and more manageable the assignments were, while still promoting productive struggle, the more students had a real chance to think about their thinking and then submit. It’s been two years since first implementing a course grading contract in all my classes, from developmental to advanced composition, and even in inter-American literature courses. Summer breaks seem to be my reflection periods. So, as a new one approaches, I’m committing to working through a few realizations I’ve made—some good, some not so good: In an access-oriented institution with no corequisites, this allowed for students to be comfortable with where they were at—truly living up to the age-old motto of meeting students where they’re at. My grading anxiety reduced so much. I no longer worried about the high stakes implications of giving a student one point more or one point less on an assignment. Students were more encouraged to read the feedback to see how I and their peers were interpreting their choices. I also saw a lot more risks! Although I tried, not all assignments required the same amount of “labor,” so some missed assignments were higher stakes than others. To be honest, I’m still unsure about how to address this. Can and should a final draft of an essay carry the same weight as a 200-word reading response? I concluded that students, particularly in my composition classes, should check in more frequently with the grading contract (not just at the beginning and end) via journal reflections to build a more thorough understanding about the value of this system. In other words, I want to build more feedback loops for me to see how students are processing their growth and not associating this with the discourse of grades. I wondered how a course grading contract’s value changes depending on the course. I found it valuable for creativity and risk-taking in my upper-division courses where students already had a stronger grasp of university rhetorical genres and had less confusion about “hidden curriculum.” However, I found it valuable for inspiring affective approaches to my first-year composition classes. These students could freely unlearn and learn academic assumptions and writing conventions. In other words, learn academic conventions through play. The grading contract did not interfere with course outlines nor department common reading and writing assignments, which was always my leading pitch to my department chairs and program directors. My approach, after presenting it at an end-of-semester English department showcase, was adopted in the Graduate Teaching Associate’s Program at Cal State LA and moved tenured faculty to have informal and formal conversations about assessments. The talks, however, have slowed down. I imagine next steps would be the chair forming a committee. This entire move was DEIJ-motivated—a desire to move away from the arbitrariness of grades and points. However, how can I better rationalize my final course grade table? At the moment, to be honest, it does read a bit arbitrarily – the line between three missing assignments and four, between an A and a B, can be a thin one. Achieving equity can’t happen in one semester. Equity is urgent, but I’m finding it okay to be slow-paced to allow for deeper reflections along the way. And, to allow for more energy into making one strong and detailed contribution, as opposed to many mediocre ones during a semester. ... View more

An article I wrote in 2021 explores the value of using concordancing software as a tool for pedagogical reflection. The practice is simple: faculty collect a set of assignments, reflections, or open-ended evaluations from students into a single document, and the resulting file is analyzed via word cloud software (such as this free version) or a concordancing program (such as AntConc) to discover patterns of lexical use that point to dominant themes in the data.    In May, as I am wrapping up my first semester as coordinator of a Writing Fellows program (tied closely this past year to our first-year composition and corequisite courses), I have decided to look at the second-semester reflections of the student fellows through the lens of lexical analysis. As might be expected, the most common noun mentioned was students; after all, the fellows program is student-centered, and tutoring reflections understandably center on the fellows’ interactions with students. But among the many other words that were highlighted in my analysis, one in particular stood out:  wait. When I looked more closely, it was clear that students used this word only when conjoined to another: time. Wait-time was a concept that one of the fellows had encountered as part of training she had received as a supplemental instructor for our university; she later chose an article about wait-time in second-language instruction as a basis for a seminar discussion she led. The fellows group as a whole latched onto this idea as a critical factor—not just for tutoring, but for writing, learning, and thinking in general.    Wait-time—for processing, exploring, testing ideas, playing with language—underlies much of the learning process. (And as I pointed out in a post a couple of weeks ago, our time-bound schedules for classes and semesters often militate against wait-time, both on a macro and micro scale.) When wait-time is offered, learners move forward at a pace that suits them, and they can (perhaps) carry ideas forward as well, ideas that might otherwise have been abandoned in the effort to keep up with the instructor or the tutor or the clock.   After two intense semesters of collaborative learning with these student writing fellows, we are facing a long summer break. Fortunately, all but one of the fellows will be returning to the program in the fall; in fact, I considered this past week giving the fellows some sort of summer assignment—reading a book, journaling, revising their “philosophy of tutoring” statements, mapping out personal goals for the fall, or doing some thematic coding of data we collected during the past year. But I think, instead, I am going to consider this summer an extended form of wait-time—just to see what happens, both for the fellows and for myself. Many of them will be doing what I would assign anyway, as part of their normal routines. But I don’t want to determine what that practice looks like for any of them; I’d like to see where this wait-time takes them—as writers, tutors, readers, and whatever else they are becoming.   Our work in first-year composition programs—and with other undergraduate programs—is always going to be constrained by institutional schedules and timeframes. But having seen the results of wait-time across semesters (as well as across months or years in creative and collaborative projects), I am wondering how we might invite extended wait-time in spite of those institutional constraints.  Any thoughts? I’ll be considering that question this summer—and waiting to see what possibilities emerge. ... View more

  Lately I have been spending a lot of time in Malibu Creek State Park, a spectacular setting popular with deer, coyotes, skunks, mallards, geese, herons, hikers, runners, rock climbers, mountain bikers, and movie/TV buffs—the latter due to the many productions whose outdoor scenes have been filmed here over the years on what used to be land owned by 20th Century Fox. Visitors may recognize scenic backdrops from cinematic classics such as How Green Was My Valley, Planet of the Apes, and (most famously) M*A*S*H—both the movie and television spinoff. While I am tempted to write here about the tricky passage from the park's Century Lake to the M*A*S*H filming site (tricky, at least, for a sixty-something man on a mountain bike), that topic isn't really pertinent to a cultural-semiotic analysis. The M*A*S*H franchise, on the other hand, most certainly is. So here goes. As with most semiotic analyses, the key to the analysis begins in a difference, in this case, the difference between the popular movie of 1970 and the even more popular television series of 1972-1983 (for the sake of brevity, I am not including the 1968 novel upon which both the movie and the series were based). To begin with, then, in the days before subscription networks like HBO broke through the limitations placed upon commercial television, M*A*S*H the movie could be much raunchier, and gorier, than the TV series ever could be. The differences between the two in that respect signify just how much things have changed since the 1970s, with TV fare like The Sopranos and Game of Thrones pushing boundaries that not even the movies dared to explore fifty years ago. Much more significantly, the blatant sexism of M*A*S*H the movie was considerably toned down in the television version, reflecting (especially as the series developed) the growing influence of the women's movement on American popular culture through the course of the decade. Any extended analysis of the M*A*S*H franchise would accordingly need to take both of these differences into account. But my focus here will be upon another difference, the difference, that is to say, between the way that the movie and the series mediated America's experience of the Vietnam War, for while both were clearly understood as metaphors for that war, their takes on it were quite distinct from one another. The movie presented a sharp satirical attack on the conduct of an increasingly unpopular war as U.S. Army officials led their unwilling conscripts into harm’s way. The series, on the other hand, softened that attack considerably (the development of the character of Colonel Sherman T. Potter—who does not appear in the film—is particularly striking in this respect) to focus instead on a more generic anti-war sentiment. This gentling down of the film's biting satire is probably what most accounts for the immense success of the TV series, a success reflected in the fact that 105.9 million viewers (almost half of the U.S. population at the time) tuned in for its final episode, even though, unlike television series such as The X-Files and Lost, it had no tangled webs to unweave, nor, unlike shows such as Game of Thrones, did it have a complex, series-long plot line to bring to a conclusion. In the series finale, the Korean War simply ends and the characters head home. But the broad sweep of its final audience shows how M*A*S*H managed to bring together tens of millions of Americans who, not so very long before, had been bitterly divided by a failed war—and the larger cultural conflicts that accompanied that failure. This achievement was not accomplished by accident, for the M*A*S*H series went out of its way to give something to almost everyone. For those who had opposed the Vietnam War, it maintained the anti-war vibe of the movie, along with a gentler version of its sixties-style attacks on military authority. But for those who resented the anti-Vietnam War movement, there was that far less caustic, much more simply comedic, take on the armed services, with a fatherly Colonel Potter and a buffoonish Major Frank Burns (face it, Larry Linville was no Robert Duvall) to soothe them. And, probably most important of all, there was Alan Alda (no Donald Sutherland was he) as Hawkeye Pierce, irreverent and full of mischief but ultimately a sentimental and even reassuring emotional anchor through eleven seasons. The role that would establish Alda as the face of a new kind of masculinity: the so-called “sensitive man of the 1970s.”  Thus M*A*S*H the TV show mediated and reflected the social movement of a decade when America pulled back from the tumults of the sixties, softening many of the sharp edges of that more revolutionary time (those now-ridiculed male hairstyles were long-hair lite, while seventies-style "soft rock" speaks for itself) as the counter-culture came of age and joined the Establishment—a process that would find its own reflection in 1983's The Big Chill. But there were other historical processes at work, because even as Americans gathered around the small screen for the final episode of M*A*S*H, a counter-revolution was already underway. The Reagan era had begun, and with it a continuation of the culture wars that had pulled America apart in the sixties, and which continue to divide the country into ever-more-hostile camps. And it is highly unlikely—if not flat out impossible—that any television series today (or, for that matter, any artifact of popular culture), could ever achieve what M*A*S*H managed to achieve: a brief moment of cultural concord.     Image Credit: "M*A*S*H Jeep" by contraption is marked with CC BY 2.0. ... View more

  We live in disheartening times when disinformation is disseminated as if it were truth. And millions of people accept it as truth because they want to believe it. Disinformation is fueled by pathos, building on negative emotions like anger, hatred and even fear. Although pathos is an instrumental tool in argumentation, solely relying on pathos in arguments can create a skewed perception and spark horrifying (and even deadly) events like the Capitol Attack of 2021.  Recent findings by the January 6th Committee prove that the disinformation spread by Russia allowed former President Trump to breed distrust in the validity of democracy and attempt to unlawfully deny his successor his presidency. While here in America we are dealing with that truth, we see in Russia an autocrat set on denying his people the truth. President Putin has stopped the publication of reports about what is really going on in Ukraine. Hitler used the same tactic to hide the truth of what he did in Germany. At that time, it was possible to hide the facts from the world in a way that is no longer possible. Now we have social media to fill in the gaps when all journalists except those sympathetic to the Kremlin have been silenced. We have reporters on the ground in Ukraine to report firsthand on what is happening as it happens. Putin is so afraid of the truth that he wants to control the language used to describe what Russian troops are doing in Ukraine. To do so, he has imposed a fifteen-year prison sentence on those who call the attack on Ukraine what it is: a war. One Russian journalist, Maria Ovsyannikova, an editor and producer at Russian state broadcaster Channel One, was brave enough to storm her own news network during broadcasting with a sign that read "Stop the war! Don't believe propaganda! They're lying to you here!" Ovsyannikova told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, "I have been feeling a cognitive dissonance, more and more, between my beliefs and what we say on air." In a statement prepared before her protest, Ovsyannikova said, “Unfortunately, I have been working at Channel One during recent years, working on Kremlin propaganda. And now I am very ashamed. I am ashamed that I’ve allowed the lies to be said on the TV screens. I am ashamed that I let the Russian people be zombified.” Ovsyannikova was released after fourteen hours of interrogation with a small fine but could still face harsher consequences. She argues that half of the Russian people disapprove of the war in Ukraine. Another term that Russians are using to distort reality is "Nazi.” They are trying to justify their attacks on Ukrainians by saying that they are Nazis. There is no explanation of why they think that is true, but it is a term that connects the Ukrainian people with a known evil, so the use of the term is another strategy to hide the truth of what they are doing—massacring civilians. There can be no validity to any argument that is not based in truth. No conclusion is valid if it is not based on facts or inferences grounded in reality. That is, unless acceptance is based on fear or unquestioning allegiance.   Photo: "Russian TV protester opens up about stunt"  by Just Click's With A Camera is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

In his lecture “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity,” James Baldwin begins with a list of words that, for him, hold unclear meanings, words such as: artist, integrity, courage, nobility, democracy, peace, peace-loving, and warlike. He writes:  And yet one is compelled to recognize that all these imprecise words are attempts made by us all to get to something which is real and which lives behind the words. … The terrible thing is that the reality behind all these words depends on choices one has got to make, for ever and ever and ever, every day. (63)    Each time I teach Baldwin’s lecture, I try to create new lenses for reading, writing, and discussion. This process reminds me how students struggle with the long sentences, dense paragraphs, and often, as Baldwin suggests, “imprecise words” that help to make meaning for readers. Because the words are imprecise, new meaning can be derived from them each time, and so I struggle along with students to find new meaning.    In a recent semester, after listening to audio of Baldwin reading his lecture, my students found a connection that was new to many of us. In his lyrics for “Shattered Dreams,” the American rapper Earl Sweatshirt samples Baldwin’s phrase “imprecise words.” The imprecise words of the early 1960s brought immediate connection to the “terrible…reality of all these words” for the late 2010s.    Connections across generations are crucial for me in teaching and learning Baldwin’s work. Imprecise words cannot possibly encapsulate or pin down to the unspeakable realities of everyday life. “Artist’s Struggle” offers a means of connecting one’s own struggle to the suffering of others. In bearing witness to struggle and suffering, perhaps one comes to understand how imprecise words cannot possibly describe the “terrible…reality.” As Baldwin suggests, the artist’s struggle for integrity, truth, and honesty, imprecise as those words might be, “is almost our only hope” – and for Baldwin that hope is writing (67).   As our class has passed the midterm mark, I decided to try a thought experiment to learn which “imprecise words” stand out in Baldwin’s lecture, in my writing assignment about the lecture, and on students’ self-assessment of their own writing on Baldwin’s lecture. I used Data Basic.io Word Counter because, in addition to a word cloud similar to Wordle, Word Counter would give me quantitative data of how often specific words were used and the context in which the words were used. Following are the word clouds generated by Word Counter, as well as the word most often in each text. The website for quantitative data is linked after each word cloud.    “Artist’s Struggle” 3503 words Most common words: One and People, tied at 23 occurrences each  https://databasic.io/en/wordcounter/results/6257233ef83b9c09cb6ed389?submit=true    While People was used 23 times, the word does not show up in any of the phrases in the quantitative data. One occurs most often with the verbs “is” and “has.” My interpretation here is that these two words  are interchangeable. Baldwin wants to gain the support of his audience and to invest in their own struggles for integrity and truth. If the audience can bear witness to their own struggles and their own suffering, then perhaps they can also come to a stronger place of empathic action in the early 1960s struggles for Civil Rights.   Assignment for Writing Project 1, 981 words Most common word Baldwin, with 30 occurrences  https://databasic.io/en/wordcounter/results/62572437f83b9c00eab72202    Baldwin was used most frequently with “respond” and “response.” The purpose of the assignment was to offer students an opportunity to think through their interpretations of Baldwin’s work, and how Baldwin might respond to their interpretations.   A sampling of approximately 20 students’ self-assessments for Writing Project 1 7662 words The most common word is writing, with 124 occurrences https://databasic.io/en/wordcounter/results/62570d68f83b9c098ad24f9f    Writing  is used most often by students as both an adjective, as in “Writing Project,” and as a noun, “high school writing,” “college writing,” and composing writing. Students were responding to the following self-assessment prompt: Self-Assessment: At least 3 paragraphs that respond to these questions What did you learn from preparing for and composing this writing project?   What were your struggles with this writing project? What might you do similarly and differently moving forward? For example, how might journals be useful to free writing your ideas? What differences do you notice between high school and college writing?    From this prompt, it seems clear that students were using the words I provided to respond to the questions. This past academic year, I have noticed that students are asking for more explicit directions for each assignment, and are taking care to follow the directions exactly as written. My hope in teaching Baldwin is to present another view of writing, that the tools at writers’  disposal are “imprecise words.” From those “imprecise words,” Baldwin suggests, writers must attempt to struggle with integrity, to imagine themselves as artists.    In his conclusion, Baldwin asserts to the audience, “It is time to ask very hard questions and to take very rude positions. And no matter at what price” (69). Hard questions and rude positions remind me that, as a teacher, I want to do more assigning students to follow explicit directions. In fact, my hope is that students will come to question the purpose of the directions, and if the directions might not be revised to create a more inclusive atmosphere for students to grow as writers. Directions themselves are imprecise words, which is why the outcome often differs from the initial expectation. In this way, one might learn to bear witness to difference, and to  “get to something which is real and which lives behind the words.” In this way, perhaps, one can grow as a writer.     Baldwin, James. "The Artist's Struggle for Integrity." The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, edited by Randall Kenan, Pantheon Books, 2010, pp. 63-70.    ... View more

I tried a new assignment this spring, inspired by the electrifying writer, Rebecca Solnit. I can’t stop thinking about it, and my students can’t stop talking about the way it has changed the way they see — and map — their environments. In particular, it has led them to appreciate the power of language, and sparked a desire to research and revise place names all around them. Solnit, as you may know, is a lover of maps. She captures the ways they make meaning in her wonderful collection, Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, co-produced with a geographer. In her "City of Women" map, for example, she provocatively reimagines the New York City subway system, with women’s names marking places we mostly know from historical men: Washington, Hudson, Frick, Rockefeller. Solnit says of her map that it "was made to sing the praises of the extraordinary women who have, since the beginning, been shapers and heroes of this city that has always been, secretly, a City of Women"— think Woodhull, Sanger, Chisolm. After reading Solnit’s essay, I invited students to apply her method to a location that means something to them, and to investigate place names and propose alternatives that would make hidden histories visible. I have rarely seen students so energized to revise existing texts, nor so inspired to propose alternatives. Some students discovered the place names in their hometowns only celebrated the white men responsible for the genocide of indigenous peoples. Some found street names in their neighborhood ignored the Black residents who profoundly shaped the community. Hardly any found women’s names on street signs, stadiums, or parks. Armed with scholarly research on the power of naming, and their own passions and perspectives, students re-wrote area maps and designed keys with biographies that explained their newly proposed place names. We all learned a lot as they celebrated local suffragists, ballplayers in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, Black reformers, women schoolteachers, Indigenous peoples, and grandmothers who they believe deserve to be celebrated as community-builders. I have never seen a group of students so jazzed about sharing their work, nor an assignment that students were still talking about months after they turned them in. My students’ projects have reminded me of the unexpectedly emotional response I had to visiting the Women's Rights Pioneers Monument last summer. Meredith Bergman’s sculpture was installed in Central Park on August 26, 2020, to commemorate the passing of the 19th Amendment and is one of the few monuments of historical women in the city. As I lingered over the details in the strong, bronze faces of Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, other passers-by stopped to marvel at the significance of seeing women honored this way, to name them, and recognize their work. A mother with tears in her eyes patted her young daughter’s back, and a pair of white-haired women clutched one another’s hands, saying, “This matters. This matters so much.”   Image Credit: Photo of the author at the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in Central Park, New York City, provided by the author. ... View more

I recently had the great pleasure of visiting Sarah Ruffing Robbins’s Authorship Seminar at TCU, where the students were not only reading about theories of authorship, and about collaborative authorship in particular, but also taking the opportunity to collaborate themselves and to view collaboration as an act rather than simply an object of study. The inimitable Carrie Leverenz joined in as well for one of the most lively and informative discussions I’ve had in a long time. Attending this seminar gave me a chance to relive my own long history with what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar call the “anxiety of authorship” that is particular to women, beginning with Lisa Ede’s and my decision to co-author an essay in honor of our mutual mentor, Edward P.J. Corbett, early in our careers—and the push-back and outright resistance we got to this idea from colleagues and department administrators as well as from Corbett himself. That response led us to theorize collaboration as a form of resistance and as a feminist undertaking, and led to a series of articles and two books on these issues. Today, questions of authorship and collaboration are more fraught, and more exciting, than ever as new technologies allow not only for larger and larger collaborations—for the kind of “authorless prose” characteristic of, say, Wikipedia—but also for questions about machine authorship. Such questions also resonate with works such as Clint Smith’s award-winning How the Word is Passed, which students in the seminar I attended are reading. The oral history project that Smith details in this absolutely compelling story represents another form of collaboration, one that brings forth voices and stories long ignored or forgotten.     Professor Robbins also shared their Cultural Stewardship Authoring Project, an assignment that invites students in the class to gather several current “covid era” artifacts (from March 2020 to March 2022) and develop labeling, description, and commentary on them for possible inclusion in the TCU archives. Professor Robbins calls it a multilayered aesthetic/historical collaboration.  This is a multi-part project that includes, in addition to the writing up of the artifacts and their historical context, reflections on the students’ own authorial processes, on what they have learned about the complex concept of “authorship,” and on what implications this learning has for highlighting cultural diversity in the archives. During class, they talked about the ways in which “covid culture” was so often intersectional, noting that for women the pandemic cut across so many aspects of their lives in ways that called for enormous reserves of energy. The class spent some time talking through these intersections in their own lives and about the artifacts they were thinking of choosing—everything from a vaccination card to a poem discovered during the pandemic to the page of a diary or a photo of a “quarantine room.”  Students will present artifacts in a future class, along with their interpretation of and reflections on them, a session I am very much hoping to attend so that I can thank these students and Professors Robbins and Leverenz for this deeply engaging experience. The project students are working on is, of course, deeply collaborative, and one that also raises issues of authorship, co- or multiple-authorship, and intellectual property or ownership issues. I can imagine a similar assignment in a first-year writing classroom, and I expect that if students curated such an archival project, their university library might be very interested in displaying it or in adding it to their own archives. All food for thought—and an encouragement to keep creating assignments that call for creative collaboration. Image Credit: Photo 824 by CreateHERStock, used under a Public Domain license ... View more

This blog series is written by Julia Domenicucci, an editor at Macmillan Learning, in conjunction with Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. Class discussion can be a great way to engage students with each other and with course materials. Using podcasts as the basis for a discussion in your composition course can also serve as a nice change from talking about the usual essays, stories, or instructional content. This blog post outlines some discussion ideas for using podcasts in two ways—talking about podcasts and talking about the content of podcasts. Podcasts are well-established, but their popularity seems to increase every day—and for good reason! They are engaging and creative, and they cover every topic imaginable. They are also great for the classroom: you can use them to encourage student engagement and introduce multimodality.  LaunchPad and Achieve products include assignable, ad-free Grammar Girl podcasts, which you can use to support your lessons. You can assign one (or more!) of these suggested podcasts for students to listen to before class. Each podcast also comes with a complete transcript, which is perfect for students who prefer to read the content. To learn more about digital products and purchasing options, please visit Macmillan's English catalog or speak with your sales representative.   If you are using LaunchPad, refer to the unit “Grammar Girl Podcasts” for instructions on assigning podcasts. You can also find the same information on the support page "Assign Grammar Girl Podcasts."  If you are using Achieve, you can find information on assigning Grammar Girl in Achieve on the support page “Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course.” If your English Achieve product is copyright year 2021 or later, you are able to use a folder of suggested Grammar Girl podcasts in your course; please see “Using Suggested Grammar Girl Podcasts in Achieve for English Products” for more information.   Using Grammar Girl Podcasts to Talk about Podcasts as a Medium Pre-Class Work: Assign two Grammar Girl podcasts of varying lengths for your students to listen to before your next class. Suggest they make notes about the podcasts like they would for other readings or content assigned in class. For a longer podcast, you might assign “The Proto-Indo-European Language” (15:45) or “Bare Infinitivals” (15:12) or “Affect versus Effect” (09:15) and for a shorter podcast you might assign “Hyphens in Ages” (02:28) or “Pronoun Order” (02:55) or “Momentarily or In a Moment?” (01:43). Tip: If you’re using Achieve, see “Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course” and “Create an Assessment” for help with making Grammar Girl podcasts available to students. Discussion: In class, assign your students to small groups of 3-4 students, either in person or virtually. Ask them to discuss the following points: How do we, as a group, define “podcast”? How do podcasts differ from lectures, videos, or audiobooks? How are they similar? What are examples of podcasts we have listened to? How are the two Grammar Girl podcasts we listened to similar? Different? What is the structure of each of the podcasts we listened to? Is there an introduction, middle, and/or conclusion?  What are the other defining elements of these podcasts? How did the content inform the length of each podcast? Did either podcast feel too long or too short? If too long, what information could have been removed? If too short, what could have been added? What questions do I still have after listening to this podcast, either about the content or about how it was created? Reflection: After discussing in their groups, ask each student to write a summary of the group’s thoughts. Come back to discuss the questions, and each group’s answers, as a class. Tip: If you are using an Achieve English course, consider creating a custom Writing Assignment that students can use to submit their reflections. Refer to the article “Guide to Writing assignments for instructors” for help with Writing Assignments.   Using Grammar Girl Podcasts to Generate Discussion around a Topic Pre-Class Work: Assign two Grammar Girl podcasts on a topic (or similar topics) you want your students to work with. As they listen, ask students to record the following for each podcast: 1 thing they learned 1 question they still have 1 personal connection (to an experience, piece of writing, class, etc.) Tip: If you’re using Achieve, consider assigning podcasts from the folder of suggested Grammar Girl podcasts in your course; please see “Using Suggested Grammar Girl Podcasts in Achieve for English Products” for more information. Or, you can assign podcasts from the categories that these podcasts are organized into, like “Academic Reading, Writing, and Speaking,” “Adjectives and Adverbs,” or “Word Usage.” See “Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course” for help with assigning podcasts other than those in the suggested podcasts folder. Discussion: In class, assign your students to small groups of 3-4 students. Ask them to discuss the following points: Summarize the topic(s) covered in the podcast. What were the differences between how the podcasts addressed the topic(s)? The lessons learned from each podcast. Were any of our takeaways the same? Similar? The questions we still have. How might we find the answers to these questions? Presentation: Students should then take their findings and create a short 3-4 minute presentation based on their discussions. The presentation should include a summary, their takeaways, and any remaining questions. Encourage students to use visuals (images, graphs) as well as text, and cite their sources (the podcasts, the image creators, etc.). Each group can then present to their classmates, or the presentations can be shared online.   This semester, be sure to check out our other Grammar Girl assignment ideas. You can access previous posts from the Bedford Bits home page or by visiting “30+ Grammar Girl Assignments for Your Next Class” on the Quick and Dirty Tips website (these assignments are based on some of the blog posts, and six of them include downloadable PDFs!).   Have you used Grammar Girl—or any other podcasts—in your classes? Let us know in the comments. We’d love to hear from you and learn about how you are using podcasts this semester—or in past semesters!   Credit: "Old phone" by nicolasnova is marked with CC BY 2.0. ... View more

I'm currently reading Plurilingual Pedagogies for Multilingual Writing Classrooms, edited by Kay M. Losey and Gail Shuck, and it includes Shawna Shapiro's "'Language and Social Justice': A (Surprisingly) Plurilingual First-Year Seminar." While this essay has not helped me make clear distinctions between plurilingualism and translingualism, it has reminded me of the critically important work Shapiro has been doing for years now, slowly and steadily and carefully building a case for putting critical language awareness at the heart of our writing classrooms and our writing curricula. I've been privileged in the last year or so to follow Shapiro's work closely and to be part of a group with whom she shared chapters of her new book, Cultivating Critical Language Awareness in the Writing Classroom. This book is thoroughly grounded in theory and research, but also in the daily practicalities of teaching writing. In fact, I'd say that is one significant hallmark of all Shapiro's work: the weaving of theory and practice, along with the insistence on collaboration and on attending with great care to the voices of students. This new book has been called a critical "toolkit for supporting and embracing linguistic diversity" in writing classes, and it certainly is that, though the "toolkit" is embedded in a rich historical and theoretical context. The same can be said for her recent essay on language and social justice: it walks the walk and talks the talk of "plurilingual pedagogy," always in the service of student writers/speakers, and always deeply collaborative. In this case, the students are key collaborators in creating the principles the course rests on as well as in shaping its curriculum. We hear their voices loud and clear throughout the essay, culminating in student writing for a "Writing beyond the Classroom" assignment that invited students to use their entire writing and linguistic repertoires. The two poems and the presentation of them described at the end of the essay demonstrate the power of mixing languages, of the human voice, and of the possibilities embodied in a plurilingual pedagogy. There are other terrific essays in Plurilingual Pedagogies for Multilingual Writing Classrooms, and I expect I will be writing about them in due time. But today, I want to recommend Shapiro's article in particular—and her book. When I think back on my early days of teaching, with only an MA in literature, I know I would have given just about anything to have had these resources at my disposal. But in addition to her book and many articles, Shapiro is building an amazing online resource for all of us. Called the CLA Collective, this is first a companion website to Shapiro's book, but as I know from many conversations with her, Shawna sees it as potentially so much more. Rather, she envisions it as a gathering space or hub for all teachers of writing, one where we can share and learn from one another. (You can join the Collective by going to the "Connect" page and simply signing up.) But even in its early stages, the site is full of information and resources, including syllabi, handouts, readings, "Shawna's 'Top 5' lists of other websites"—and more. If you are looking for ways to promote social justice in and through your pedagogy and to encourage and enable linguistic pluralism—while attending to everything else your university expects of you AND teaching multiple courses every single term—then this new book and website can be of enormous help. Maybe I'll see you at the CLA Collective! Image Credit: "Stack of thin flexicover books on reflective table" by Horia Varlan, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Commenting on student papers, for me, involves a lot of sipping tea and staring into space. So, my eyes often rest on this young tree growing across the street from my work table at home. Springtime floats on the breeze some days in March in Indiana, but buds are still tight, so I can see clearly the serpentine structure of this tree. I admire the way it has veered off course — due to wind, or kids hanging on low branches (there’s a school nearby) — and then found its way back to the vertical climb. How? Through continued growth. Yes, I’m dealing in metaphor here; it’s an occupational hazard of English majors. But now that we’re midway through the semester, it’s a good time to check in with students — and with ourselves as instructors — to see what’s going well, and what we might do differently as we all continue to grow. Andrea Lunsford’s recent post, “On Engaging Respectfully,” reminds us of the power of using our writing classrooms to help students practice (including failing and trying again) the skills we need now for deep, thorny, and necessary conversations in this divided world. Self-reflection and self-assessment are also skills our students take with them into other courses and far beyond. For many years, I’ve given over to students the power to assess their own participation. If you’d like to dip your toe into the practice of “Ungrading,” handing students the responsibility for this aspect of their evaluation is a low-stakes and high-impact place to begin, since “participation” grades are inherently subjective from the instructor’s perspective. As I wrote about here, students tend to handle this responsibility with seriousness and aplomb if they are offered some guidance and encouragement to reward themselves for growth. In my classes, we reflect in the first days of the semester on the power of taking risks and stretching ourselves as learners. Students set specific participation goals for themselves. Now that we’re midway through the semester, it’s helpful to carve out class time for self-reflection to see if they think they are veering off course, and how they would like to continue to grow. The assignment doesn’t take long: In a paragraph, please reflect on your own participation and attendance in this course up to this point in the semester. How are you challenging yourself? What are you pleased with? How would you like to progress or grow between now and the end of the semester? Remember that at the end of the semester, I will ask you to weigh in with a written self-assessment and numbers (out of a possible 200 points) about your attendance and participation over the whole semester. This is a time to pause and reflect and set some goals for the rest of our time together. I’m always illuminated by their self-assessments, which are often humble and frequently funny. They help me evaluate whether I’m doing enough to structure democratic discussions and activities that engage each individual. Like students, at this point in the semester, I, too, can fall back on tried and tired activities that don’t push any of us into new territory.  I see self-assessment as more than a “course correction,” though that might be part of what happens with this assignment. But that phrase doesn’t capture the value I see in that serpentine tree, more interesting for its serpentine journey. Nor does it capture the environment I try to cultivate in my classroom, where students can transform themselves by taking risks, often by failing for a bit while trying something new, rather than following the straight line of what they’ve always done to succeed in school.  Wisdom, strength, and even grace come from allowing ourselves to veer into new territory, reflecting on what we learn along the way.   Image Credit: Photograph taken by the post’s author, April Lidinsky ... View more

When Harper & Row, way back in 1990 when it was still called Harper & Row, picked up my book The Signs of Our Time: Semiotics: The Hidden Messages of Environments, Objects, and Cultural Images (1988) for republication in their Perennial Library series, they made a subtle change in the subtitle of the book, changing it to The Secret Meanings of Everyday Life. I had no say in the matter, but I knew why they made the change: clearly the idea was to make the title more intriguing for potential readers who, in this conspiracy-obsessed society of ours, believe that a lot is being hidden from them and they want to find out what it is because they think that it is doing them harm. (It bears noting that I didn't have anything to do with the original subtitle either, which also attempts to pique reader interest with a promise of revelation, of a lifting of the veil on something that has been concealed, something dangerous.) In reality, however, the practice of cultural semiotics has nothing at all to do with concealment or secrecy. If there is any element of occultation at all in the matter it is simply that of what is hidden in plain sight, of what appears to us right there in the open inviting us to ask questions about it, questions that can be answered by looking at other perfectly visible cultural phenomena that both contextualize and explain what we are seeing through what I call "systems of association and difference" in every edition of Signs of Life the USA, the book that grew out of The Signs of Our Time way back in 1994. Take, for example, the recent headline from the Los Angeles news source KTLA: "Super Bowl commercials: Heavy on celebrities and nostalgia".  Now, over the years I have performed a lot of semiotic analyses of Super Bowl commercials, both of individual advertisements and of the way that the ads have become almost as important as the game itself. I have analyzed puppies and vampires, office workers and blue jeans, attack dogs and pink bunnies .  .  .  the list goes on and on. But this time I want to look not at any particular Super Bowl LVI ads per se, but what has been said about them generally in the mass media. Here are some more headlines to give you some idea of their drift: "Touchdown or fumble? Check out the celebrities who star in the 2022 Super Bowl ads"; "Here are the top celebrity 2022 Super Bowl commercials"; "The Super Bowl ads showed celebrities rule the world. We’re just buying stuff in it"; and so on and so forth. So it isn't just KTLA that noticed how celebrity performers dominated this year's Super Bowl advert extravaganza. As I say, it's all in plain sight. But what does it tell us? We can begin our analysis with a simple question: to wit, why were there so many celebrity adverts at this year's Super Bowl?; to which KTLA offers a succinct answer: Off the field, Super Bowl advertisers were in a tough competition of their own. Advertisers shelled out up to $7 million for 30 seconds of airtime during the Super Bowl, so they pulled out all the stops to win over the estimated 100 million people that tune into the game. Big stars, humor and a heavy dose of nostalgia were prevalent throughout the night. So far so good, but now we are faced with another question: how does such star power translate into effective advertising? The answer to this question is practically self-evident: Americans are not only entertained by celebrities—and thus associate their pleasure in watching celebrity ads with the products being advertised, enhancing the possibility that they will purchase them—they also tend to identify with, and, accordingly, to trust them. Advertisers have known this for a very long time, so the system to which the Super Bowl LVI ads belong is a large and historically well-grounded one. In one sense, then, the ads this year were nothing new. But the fact that so many mass media reports highlighted the sheer volume of celebrity ads this time around marks a difference, a difference not in kind but in degree. There just seem to have been a lot more celebrities featured in this year's Super Bowl ads than there have been in past years, and this difference raises further cultural-semiotic questions. One such question could be, what is it with celebrities anyway these days?, and George Packer's essay "Celebrating Inequality" (which you can find on pages 86-88 in the 10th edition of Signs of Life in the USA) provides a trenchant answer. As my head note to Packer's analysis puts it: "Our age is lousy with celebrities," George Packer quips .  .  .  and it’s only getting worse. Indeed, in tough times like today’s, when the gap between the rich and the poor yawns ever wider, celebrities loom larger on the social horizon than they have in more equitable times, overshadowing the rest of us. And we’re not just talking about entertainers. Indeed, as Packer notes, they include entrepreneurs, bankers, computer engineers, real estate developers, media executives, journalists, politicians, scientists, and even chefs. And as the new celebrity deities gobble up whatever opportunities are left in America, Packer believes, America itself is turning backward to the days of the Jazz Age and Jay Gatsby. So, meet the new celebrity gods; same as the old celebrity gods — or "something far more perverse." Packer's essay was written in 2013, and since then the situation has only intensified, with Super Bowl LVI being just one signifier of this intensification. In the intervening years the power of the Internet "influencer" has also grown, along with that of the traditional celebrity, within a social environment in which fewer and fewer people are taking up more and more space. The Super Bowl ads are a case in point. Advert roles that once went to non-celebrity performers are increasingly going to the already successful. This is not trivial if you are a budding actor yourself, because television advertising has long been a gateway to an economically sustainable career for non-celebrity performers. When we expand the system further, we can see, for example, how the career path of journalism has been similarly affected, with only a handful of celebrity journalists raking in most of the money while the rest flounder as freelancers or simply give their writing away for nothing. And I hardly need to explain how the adjunctification of higher education is affecting many of the members of the Macmillan Learning community, as a shrinking number of TED-talk-level celebrity professors enjoy a growing proportion of the financial rewards. The list of examples could go on and on. As I say, all of this is in plain sight. There is no conspiracy. One only needs to look at what is going on all around us, and our own participation in it. Thus, in what constitutes nothing less than a betrayal of the American dream, the victims of a society that is producing fewer and fewer "winners" and more and more "losers" are looking in the wrong places for the sources of their distress, laughing at funny Super Bowl commercials starring A-list performers when the joke, in the end, is on them.   Image Credit: "365 x36 Guinea Pig Conspiracy" by David Masters is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

I wonder how many teachers of writing are beginning to think it’s time to take a linguistic time out and think through a number of terms that are coming at us from all sides. Here are just a few of them: bilingual (and in particular “dominant bilingual,” “balanced bilingual,” ”incipient bilingual,” etc.), multilingual, metrolingual, polylingual, plurilingual, translingual, languaging. . . I could go on and on. And I’ve been reading as fast as I can, trying to keep track of all the permutations of these terms, the controversies swirling around them, and the ideological freight that each term carries. Not to mention the choices hard-working teachers have to make, often on the fly. In Marshall and Moore’s 2018 study “Plurilingualism Amid the Panoply of Lingualisms: Addressing Critiques and Misconceptions in Education,” published in the International Journal of Multilingualism, they distinguish plurilingualism (which comes from European theorists) by saying that it moves away “from the view of languages as separate, parallel, autonomous systems based on discourses of complete competencies to a view that recognizes hybridity and varying degrees of competence between and within languages” (3)—except that such a distinction also seems to apply to translingualism, and perhaps other terms as well. One very recent book that is helping me think about these terms is Kay M. Losey and Gail Shuck’s edited volume Plurilingual Pedagogies for Multilingual Writing Classrooms, though its title demonstrates terministic slippage at work. From what I’ve read of this book so far, the authors seem to be making a very strong case for moving swiftly away from the heretofore dominant English-only approach in writing classes (a good start) to what they present as a plurilingual approach that would recognize and value “the many proficiencies students bring with them to the classroom” and thus create “a classroom climate of mutual respect and admiration, fostering self-efficacy and self-confidence in learners” in which “students’ full identities and backgrounds. . . would become an essential, honored part of the classroom community” (2). I applaud this approach—but it seems to me characteristic of translingual and even multilingual approaches as well. I feel like I am swimming in alphabet soup. I clearly need to stop complaining, dig deeper, and do much more reading. And then perhaps I can write something that will clarify these terms—if only for myself. Words—and definitions—matter. So if you can clarify distinctions among these terms, I am all ears and would appreciate the help! Image Credit: "Hostelling International 19" by orijinal, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more