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

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Jenna Morton-Aiken, Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy.   Voices Day 1: Welcome to Technical Writing. I cultivate tone and words to establish authority with young, mostly male, maritime cadets. Call me Dr. Their body language shouts, Stop trying, your class doesn’t matter to me. Weeks 1-3: Deploy resistance with strong voice and applied expertise as Covid-19’s shadow grows. Maybe this doesn’t suck, white gaps between double-spaced submissions whisper. Week 4: Campus abandoned, we’re all silenced. Week 5+: I’m here, I write with memes and raw emotions, my voice virtually transformed. Theirs, too—Help me, they say. I’m drowning, they say. Your words matter to me, they say. We write.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... 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

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Dr. Chris M. Anson. Chris is a Distinguished University Professor at North Carolina State University, where he is also the Director of the Campus Writing & Speaking Program.   Boot Camps and Boot Straps Four years after I taught him in a federally-funded pre-college summer program for inner-city kids who some high school teacher saw a spark in—otherwise doomed never to go to college—we crossed paths on the campus just before graduation. "Cool Chris!" he yelled—the name the students had given me in that summer writing course. "Tyrone! What's up?" We high-fived. "I got into Harvard Law!" he said with a broad smile, "and you helped, man!" A story of triumph—his, and my small piece of it. But what's wrong with us that so many live on the margins . . . and of those, with such slim chances?   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... 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

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Jennifer Gray, Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at the College of Coastal Georgia.   Video Conference The student requested a video conference on Easter Sunday at 4pm. I said yes, because it was what he selected. I grumbled privately, as it was the only day without something work-related scheduled. I left celebrations at my neighbor’s house, much to our dismay, and logged in, expecting a blank black box. Instead, there he was, with a smile, a Zoom wave, and his Walmart uniform and nametag, calling from the front seat of his car on his break during his shift on a holiday. We talked about our assignment. He revised his citing practices, and I revised my negativities.     Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... 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

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Lisa Lebduska, Professor of English and Director of College Writing at Wheaton College.   Observations As a grad student adjuncting at 3 schools, I always ran late. One rainy day, I flew into my office, changed into dry shoes, then rushed to class. When class ended, a student was waiting for me. "We just wanted you to know," she said, "that we noticed you are wearing two different shoes." I looked with horror from the beige wedge on my left, to the black pump on my right. "Why didn't anyone say anything?" "We thought it was another one of those exercises where you were trying to see if we were paying attention to details… We were."   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... 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

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

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Sonia Feder-Lewis, a Professor at Saint Mary's University of Minnesota's Graduate School of Education.   Awakening It was a dream course assignment: a small upper-level honors class in Women’s Literature. A reward near the end of graduate school. Eleven students: 10 women and one brave young man, newly separated from the Army for carefully undisclosed reasons. The women treated him gently as we read Woolf, Morrison, Erdrich, Chopin. “The Awakening is the greatest book I have ever read,” he said passionately. Two decades later, he recognizes me in a coffee shop. Without pause, he tells me the course had been his favorite. And his hardest. I do not ask why.     Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... 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

“Engaging respectfully with others” is a theme in all my textbooks, as is the need to learn how to engage with people you don’t agree with. I’ve been brought back to this topic lately close to home. I live in a small, managed community on the northern California coast dedicated to “living lightly with the land” and one another. The pandemic has brought hardships here, as everywhere, and tempers have frayed—lately over issues such as carbon sequestration, expansion of our homeowner association facilities, and—most acutely—over astronomical legal fees few seem to understand and steep increases in dues. While I have seen far more vitriol on social media, some rancor has been evident on our local list serv, though people disagree even on that: some say there’s been no rancor or vitriol, just “the truth and tough facts,” while others disagree strenuously. Lately some members have made pleas for better and more open listening, and especially for “more respect, kindness, and humility in our discourse.” One person recommended that we remember, and carefully consider, the Rotary International Four-Way Test­—"Is it the TRUTH? Is it FAIR to all concerned? Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS? Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?”—while another sent in a “think before you speak” poster from her elementary child’s classroom that asks of what you are going to say: “Is it true? Is it helpful? Is it important? Is it necessary? Is it kind?” And yet another person recommended that as we communicate with one another, we will be wise to focus on “Inquiry over Advocacy, Learning over Blame, and Impact over Intent.” All good advice—in fact, words to live and act by. But these guidelines rest on an enthymeme—or unstated assumption—that all people are worthy of and deserve respect. Articulating this assumption has provoked big-time response from my students, so much so that I have to allow plenty of time in class for discussion and debate, and we have to agree on some rules of the road, such as how long any one person can speak, how we will take turns and respond to one another, etc. I find students pretty evenly divided right now, with many insisting that respect is a human right that applies to everyone and with many others disagreeing. Both sides can offer multiple examples in support of their conviction, and a few insist that “it all depends.” Almost all students I’ve explored this question with draw the line at personal safety, saying that engaging respectfully demands that you be safe from attack, violence, and harm. Of course, this principle raises other thorny questions, such as what constitute “harm.” The best we can usually do is work through a few hypothetical case studies together, trying to decide whether the people involved can and should engage respectfully or, if not, what they should do, just how they should disengage, or how they might de-escalate the situation. These are scenarios and questions I would not have thought to ask my students 20 years ago, but today they seem important and necessary. Now I’m thinking hard about how to answer them in my textbooks that want to help all college students. It’s a tall order, and I’ll write more when I have a better handle on practical, helpful guidelines and suggestions. In the meantime, I would be grateful for some help from my wise and generous colleagues. Image Credit: "Speech bubbles at Erg" by Marc Wathieu, used under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Pamela Childers, a lifelong secondary, undergraduate and graduate school educator, writer, editor, and consultant. She enjoys collaborating with colleagues and students.   Student Teaching “Go wash your mouth out with soap!” And he did. The 8th grader returned to our grammar lesson in progress, raised his hand, and bubbled out the next answer. In Biology class, I distributed apples and asked, “Who can identify the internal parts you just dissected?” And they all did, delighted to eat their half apples. Rushing to my senior English class to discuss the Romantic poets, I passed a student at his open locker pulling out a knife. “May I have that, please?” And he handed it to me. Things were much different in 1965, I have learned.    Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines.   ... View more