Madhu Nadarajah (recommended by Nick Recktenwald and Tia North) is pursuing her PhD in English with a concentration in Cultural Rhetorics at the University of Oregon where she is researching the discursive practices within the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. She is currently serving as the Assistant Director of the Composition Program where she worked on redesigning the Composition Policy Handbook, helped with graduate teaching instruction, and facilitated the annual Composition Conference. She is also a Culturally Responsive Teaching Fellow in which she draws on her work in Cultural Rhetorics to provide anti-oppressive teaching principles for the wider Composition community in the classroom.     How do you ensure your classroom is inclusive, equitable, and culturally responsive? For me, community building exercises are crucial to ensuring the classroom is inclusive, equitable, and culturally responsive. Through community, students learn to trust the classroom space and become more comfortable having transparent conversations. One approach I take to help build community in my classroom is through the readings I assign. Part of my writing pedagogy is to inform students about the complexity surrounding writing studies. Many of my students are taking my class to fulfill their writing requirement and therefore are unaware about the history of writing in institutionalized settings. One reading in particular that helps students situate themselves within the history of writing studies is CCCC’s “Students Rights to their Own Language” (1974). While the article was published a little under fifty years ago, many of the concerns brought up still remain true for writing students, particularly that surrounding a student’s agency. By framing the classroom through readings like “SRTOL,” we began to have transparent conversations about voice, power structures, and community. What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students? A skill that I aim to provide my students is for them to have a greater awareness of their own rhetorical traditions. In my classroom, we define rhetorical tradition as not only a means of communicating, but also the cultural and material effects that have led us to these communicative practices. I want students to become aware of the rhetorical tradition they are bringing in, how they have come to gather those traditions, and how it interacts with the rhetorical traditions of their peers. Moreover, this awareness leads students to understand how their rhetorical traditions are part of the larger constellation of rhetorical traditions. In other words, how do these rhetorical traditions exist with one another? I believe this awareness of rhetorical traditions is an important skill for students that they can carry over to their other classes and to their lives outside of school. In particular, understanding the cultural and material effects that inform their way of communication allows students to intimately understand the weight of (physical and cultural) space.  One assignment that helps students understand their own rhetorical traditions is my “Social Literacy Assignment” (provided later in this post). I define a social literacy narrative as an exploration of a rhetorical moment that informs your awareness of a social issue (or issues) that directly impacts you and how that shapes how you communicate and interact with others. In this assignment, I also ask students to pay close attention to how subject-position cannot be separated from how you perceive and are impacted by the rhetorical moment you are reflecting on. I find this assignment (especially since I assign it early on) allows students to have a more nuanced understanding of the importance of rhetorical practices.  What is it like to be part of the Bedford New Scholars Program? The Bedford New Scholars Program provided me with an incredible opportunity to be in community with other graduate students who are also passionate about teaching and rhet/composition studies. Additionally, while we all had a background in rhetorical studies, our approaches to the field varied greatly. In turn, this offered me a great opportunity to collaborate and network. My favorite part of the Bedford New Scholars virtual Summit was the “Assignments at Work” session. This session was an opportunity for the Scholars to share and workshop an assignment or lesson plan. I received valuable feedback on my teaching assignment and I was able to learn about the exciting materials from the other instructors. The other parts of the Summit that I really enjoyed were the sessions led by the guest speakers, Dr. Andrea Lunsford and Dr. Wonderful Faison. Their individual talks were incredible and I learned so much about their pedagogical approaches. Moreover, the Bedford New Scholars Program provided me with a greater understanding of what higher-ed publishing looks like. We tend to view higher-ed publishing as these “big bad guys.” However, the Bedford New Scholars program has opened my perspective to how nuanced publishing really is. While publishing is definitely not without its faults, what I appreciated about the Bedford New Scholars Program is learning how Macmillan Learning prioritizes student perspectives in the development of their textbooks. How will the Bedford New Scholars Program affect your professional development or your classroom practice? The Bedford New Scholars Program is a collaborative and engaging experience. In particular, I learned a lot about the behind the scenes of higher-ed publishing. I think this new knowledge will help me tremendously in my professional development. One of my roles is that of an Assistant Director of Composition. Within that role, I often discuss textbook options and reflect on the newest trends in textbook content. The Bedford New Scholars Program gave me an inside look into the most current trends for writing textbooks and how that information was determined. I will be taking this new insight back into my role as we start to discuss the textbook options for the new academic year.   Madhu’s Assignment that Works During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Dilara’s assignment. For the full activity, see Social Literacy Narrative. My assignment asks students to write a social literacy narrative in the form of a letter. I typically assign the “Social Literacy Narrative” within the first week of the quarter in place of an “Initial Reflection” assignment. This is a great way for students to reflect and expand on their understanding of rhetoric, especially as it applies to their own space and place. The assignment asks students to consider the rhetorical moments that helped shape their awareness of social issues that directly impacted them and how that shapes the way they communicate and interact with others. It also requires students to reflect and interrogate how their subject-position plays an integral part in those rhetorical moments, especially as it informs how they communicate with other people and different communities. I offer four different examples of what I regard as a social literacy narrative so the students have an idea of how they should model their assignment. I have students write the assignment in the form of a letter because it is a style that allows for personal expression and is addressed to someone the writer specifically designates to be the recipient. Find Madhu on Twitter @MNadarajah9. ... View more

  Semester system schools are already in full swing and quarter system schools are just about to start up. Fall 2022 is here, a new school year—one that brings us students who have been through the pandemic of the last two and a half years. Many haven’t been on campus in some time, haven’t been in classes with other students and teachers. Others have been fairly isolated, or isolated on phones, which is a special kind of isolation. For the last month I have listened to stories—as I’m sure you have—about mental health issues among young people today, and I’ve listened especially to those about college students and the difficulties they are reporting. Just yesterday I heard a first-year college student being interviewed: when asked what she had lost during the last two years, she answered, simply, “myself.” I know you can fill in similar examples from your own experience, maybe even from your own family. This has always been my favorite time of year: the new school year, the new class of students, the excitement of beginning college study, the excitement of meeting, and teaching, first-year students. My favorite. Time. Of. Year. But the last two and a half years have chastened and sobered me, as I’ve spoken with so many college-bound students who are feeling distress and even fear. In such a time, my steadfast belief is that teachers of writing/reading/speaking have a special opportunity and a special obligation. We may be teaching the smallest class our students will take. We almost certainly will be meeting students one-on-one more than other faculty, either in office hour sessions or in writing center sessions. We will absolutely be sharing writing with students, reading and responding to what they have to say and, we hope, establishing a two-way connection with them.  This year, more than ever, we need to make the most of these opportunities. But I think we need to do something more: we need to introduce students to the ludic nature of rhetoric and remind them of the crucial importance of play and playfulness to their learning and to their lives.  In this endeavor, I am guided and inspired by Lynda Barry, whose One! Hundred! Demons! I have taught for eons and whose comics and especially books on creativity (Picture This, What It Is) are always on my desk, along with her brilliant syllabus.  Barry is convinced that there is an artist in each of us and that playing—playing!—is the best way to let that artist emerge. And to release anxieties of all kinds and to become creators rather than recorders or responders only. (If you’ve ever had a chance to participate in one of Barry’s workshops, you’ll have seen the magic happen: if you haven’t, take some time to read about them or find out if she will be giving workshops anywhere near you in the coming months.) Barry says that when she is working with graduate students, almost always uptight and anxious and focused laser-like on one objective—she pairs them with 3 and 4 year olds: she says sixty to ninety minutes playing with these little ones loosens everything up, shifts patterns of thought, and leads to some brilliant problem solving. And when she says playing, she means playing:  down on the floor, making things together, defining things together, even just hanging out. While I don’t have access to a bunch of preschoolers (wish I did!), I can still introduce play into our classroom: activities where I ask students to listen hard for three minutes and then describe what they heard, or hand them objects they must describe and name without opening their eyes–you can probably think of more. And we can be playful with writing: trying for limericks or witty haikus; writing a very long sentence about the process of writing a very long sentence; trying for a sentence with the most double negatives, or the most metaphors or similes. Anything to be playful and to loosen up, to relax, and then to create. I would like to make all our writing projects more fun, with more potential for play—even a research-based argument; even a research project itself. I will write more about these possibilities soon. In the meantime, I am thinking of all writing teachers and students everywhere, and hoping that, together, we can have a healthy—and a healing—year.  Image used under a standard Adobe Stock license.  ... View more

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

  Brittny M. Byrom (recommended by Michael Harker) is a PhD student in Rhetoric and Composition and serves as the Associate Director of Technology and Finance of the Georgia State University Writing Studio. Her primary research focuses on the intersection of theories of rhetorical empathy and beauty and justice. Her work in writing center research concentrates on developing balanced practices between tutor emotional labor and collaborative learning environments. Brittny began teaching in 2017 and began working in writing centers in 2015.     What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students? The most important skills I aim to provide students are self-reflection and critical analysis. I design my course with ideas of Rhetorical Empathy (Lisa Blankenship & Eric Leake) and justice (Elaine Scarry). My primary goal is to provide diverse materials and design engaging activities that help students communicate their reactions to content while making space for fellow students to communicate their own reactions. Understanding why we react in certain ways to certain material and discussing how we each respond to similar material differently demonstrates how to read and interpret texts from distinct perspectives and lenses. I believe such reflexive practices prepare students for productive critical analysis discussions. By knowing how we reached a conclusion and discussing different perspectives, students can more thoroughly and thoughtfully explain their arguments and the rationale backing up their stance.  The most common issue I have found students struggling with is figuring out what they want to say about a topic. They come with some facts and details; however, they struggle to say anything about the mound of evidence provided. I hope that by helping students develop self-reflection skills they can figure out what they want to say and why they want to say it.  How do you ensure your course is inclusive, equitable, and culturally responsive? Georgia State University serves a diverse population who come from a wide range of backgrounds. In order to engage students and create an inclusive classroom, I intentionally diversify the course’s reading list so it includes content creators of various racial and ethnic backgrounds, gender and gender identities, sexual orientations, religious backgrounds, socioeconomic backgrounds, and persons with disabilities. By having course materials representing different identities and backgrounds, students can—hopefully—find someone with whom they identify and someone they have never before encountered. Routinely adjusting the reading list and mindfully making space for diverse creators demonstrates the thoughtful practices and skills I want my students to develop. Given that my students are from diverse backgrounds—often folks from minority groups and systemically disenfranchised backgrounds—I acquainted myself with my university’s abundant student resources. I provide students with a list of additional resources in the syllabus and through our online learning system with up-to-date information, and we spend a day reviewing those resources. I practice the adage, “you cannot write when you have a leaky roof.” Life happens; hopefully, we can provide access to resources that support students’ needs. What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program?  I have enjoyed being a part of the Bedford New Scholars program! As a fifth-year PhD student, I encourage incoming graduate students to create community among each other in our department; however, the longer I’m in my program the more I recognize the importance of meeting scholars outside of my university as well as meeting the publishers who work in our fields. While this recognition is obvious to seasoned academics—especially since these meetings are common activities occurring at academic conferences—many current graduate students have not had the opportunity to participate due to pandemic concerns. The connections we make as junior scholars are crucial for graduates completing their programs and heading into the job market.  Thankfully, the BNS program provides such opportunities while accommodating travel concerns. This program has provided me the opportunity to meet with fellow scholars who are as excited about teaching, join workshops with leading scholars in my field, and learn about the publishing process. Additionally, the BNS program afforded me opportunities to work on projects that align with my academic and teaching interests.  What have you learned from other Bedford New Scholars? During the “Assignments that Work” presentations, I learned creative ways to teach students common concepts. For example, Laura Hardin Marshall presented how she teaches MLA formatting using a menu. She designed two menus—one using typical menu formatting and one with that formatting removed—to demonstrate to her students the importance of formatting! It is easier to teach the importance and use of formatting by having students read through and respond to a common item that has a lot of detailed formatting that has had that formatting removed. Creative visuals such as Laura’s example are valuable teaching tools that aid students see the importance of the concepts that we instructors try to teach. Talking students through each step of MLA formatting is not as eye catching as a menu with no formatting. It is those interesting and visually jarring pieces that can lead to productive conversations about the day-to-day concepts students need to learn.  Brittny’s Assignment that Works During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Brittny’s assignment. For the full activity, see Photo Essay. I presented my “What is Beauty: A Photo Essay” assignment during the Assignments that Work workshop. The assignment requires students to identify something they consider beautiful—I typically theme my courses, and this particular class was themed on beauty—and they take photos of that person/place/thing. The main requirements are that students must take the photo themselves (screenshots do not count) and organize their photos and caption-style paragraphs in a narrative form. This assignment establishes the topic students will research for the rest of the semester, so clarity is essential. The goals of this assignment are to (1) get students thinking creatively about their research topics, (2) get students reflecting on what emotionally moves them and why, and (3) get students utilizing, often overlooked, campus resources such as borrowing camera equipment. I developed this assignment because I was tired of grading essays about perfunctory and, frankly, boring topics. In order to complete the photo essay assignment well, students are pushed to be creative and thoughtful about their noun that represents beauty since they will be researching that topic for the remainder of the course. My students enjoy the challenge! Find Brittny on Twitter and Instagram @brittnybyrom. ... 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.   My First Teacher Letitia, my Welsh Grammie, took me at three to the circus in Philadelphia, while Mother worked at a switchboard and Dad was still overseas after the war. She read me poetry and prose long after I had started teaching English and recited Shakespeare for the Princeton Women’s Club in her late seventies, an age I am close to reaching. When I last visited her in the dementia ward of the nursing home, she looked up at me from her wrinkled pillow, smiled and said, “I raised you, didn’t I?” I nodded, and we both shared an unforgotten memory.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

  Rachel Marks (recommended by Angela Rounsaville) is pursuing her PhD in Texts and Technology with an emphasis in Digital Humanities at the University of Central Florida, where she expects to defend her dissertation “On your Left!”: Exploring Queerness, Masculinity, and Race in the Marvel “Captain America” Fandom in May 2024. She currently teaches the first-year writing course Composition II: Situated Inquiry of Writing and Rhetoric and has taught Composition I: Introduction to Writing Studies in the past. She has also served as a consultant at the University Writing Center and as a student editor on Stylus: A Journal of First-Year Writing. Her research focuses on LGBT representation in popular media, fan interaction and critique on social media platforms, and how fans respond to representations of queer characters in the media. How do you engage students in your course, whether f2f, online, or hybrid?  I normally teach face-to-face classes, and I like to balance the time I’m lecturing with hands-on activities, particularly activities that get students thinking about their semester-long research projects. These activities include quick-writes or brainstorming activities, where students spend 5-10 minutes writing about their thoughts on a reading or on an upcoming paper. I also have group activities, where students can collaborate in order to apply something we’re learning in class to a real-world situation. One example is my rhetorical situation activity, where students evaluate the rhetorical situation in a video discussing the creation of Pandora at Disney World. While I do spend some time in each class lecturing, I try to hold student attention with visuals like slides, example papers, and videos relating to that day's topic. On days when we’re preparing for a major paper to be due, we have peer review sessions as well as workshops where students can receive feedback from their peers, discuss their papers, implement feedback, and ask questions. I also hold “one-on-one” conferences each semester, where in lieu of class, every student individually can bring in their work and discuss their research projects with me, getting feedback on their writing in real time.  What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students?  I want my students to gain a deeper understanding of how writing works in the world, as well as gain writing and research skills that they can take into their majors and career. I first want my students to realize that there is writing all around them, in everything they do, whether that’s posting on social media, applying for a job, or taking notes for classes. Then, for their research projects, they choose a community that they're involved in and study how writing and communication helps that community to function and meet its goals. I then have them take the research they collect from both their communities and our library database to create a research article in the style of an academic journal. This gives them awareness of both common academic genres and scholarly research, as well as everyday writing that occurs in their communities. Many of the students going through the composition program, particularly at my university, are in the sciences or in engineering and don’t particularly “like writing.” I want them to realize that writing is an important skill to have, both in and outside of the classroom, even if you aren’t in the humanities disciplines.  What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? This program is a unique opportunity to be able to hear from scholars and professionals in the composition and higher education fields that are outside of my university. So far, I’ve really enjoyed being able to collaborate with other composition instructors and share teaching ideas, work with the editorial team to learn more about instructional materials, and hear from composition pedagogy experts. Our Bedford New Scholars summit allowed us an open environment to talk about new teaching ideas and learn about interesting course materials, both textbooks and digital tools. I’ve been surprised at how much I have in common with other composition instructors in both the challenges associated with teaching as well as the rewards.  However, I’ve also appreciated how many different approaches to engaging students I’ve been exposed to that I wouldn’t have been otherwise.  How will the Bedford New Scholars program affect your professional development or your classroom practice? The Bedford New Scholars program has given me a greater appreciation for higher education publishing and the possibilities for interactive materials that can be incorporated into my courses. I plan to take better advantage of the variety of rhetoric and composition textbooks Bedford offers, as well as supplemental materials like classroom activities, assignment ideas, and multimodal texts like videos. This program has also encouraged me to think “outside the box” when it comes to my teaching and lesson planning. I have seen the kinds of assignments, lessons, and conversations with students that are possible and am excited to incorporate new ideas and approaches to my practice. The “Assignments that Work” workshop encouraged me to share my own assignment ideas with others to get feedback and also provided me with an archive of assignment ideas that I can potentially adapt for my own course in the future.  Rachel’s Assignment that Works During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Rachel’s assignment. For the full activity, see Peer Review Worksheet. My assignment that works is a worksheet used for in-class peer review sessions. For this, students bring in their rough drafts, swap papers with a partner, and give each other feedback while they are together and can collaborate. However, when I first did peer review in class, there wasn't enough structure—students didn’t know how to respond to their peer’s papers, so they would either comment on sentence-level errors or make generic comments like “good job” or “interesting topic.” They now complete a peer review worksheet which is based on the rubric for their major papers. For each section of the rubric, students say whether their peers completed that component, what they did well, and what they can improve upon or clarify. At the end, they give summative end comments with overall impressions of the paper and questions for their peers. This not only helps students focus on the goals of the assignment and the most pertinent parts of the paper when giving feedback, but also helps them review the requirements of the assignment for themselves. Lastly, since I base my feedback on the rubric, this peer review worksheet helps students give their peers feedback in a similar way.  Find Rachel on Twitter @RachelKatMarks. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Rhona Blaker. Blaker is an adjunct instructor of English at Glendale Community College, where she also serves as the Campus Coordinator for Contexualized Teaching and Learning.   From the Pantry Most mornings I stare at my own face next to twenty-five black squares. One Thursday, desperate for human contact, I begged the students to reveal their faces. Three students complied. Later, a young woman e-mailed to say she never turns her camera on because she takes class on a tablet while sitting in a pantry, trying to escape the ten other people who live in her apartment. I apologized for imagining English 101 was ever about me and rejoiced when she later wrote to say she had been accepted to UCLA after earning a 4.0 GPA in her community college closet.     Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Dr. Meridith Leo. Leo teaches courses in Composition and Rhetoric as well as Creative Non-Fiction at Suffolk County Community College’s Ammerman Campus. Dr. Leo earned her Ph.D. at St. John’s University where she focused on narratives of difference and belonging along with culturally responsive literacy narratives. Her research at St. John’s University led to work in Co-Requisite (ALP) coursework which is detailed in her dissertation “Integrating Emerging Writers into the Post-Remedial College: A Consideration of Accelerated Learning Programs.”   No Sleep, Only Teach Ding. It's 3 am. I should be sleeping but I'm not. That's the 3rd email from Katia. Ding. There goes another email. It's Jeremiah this time. Do I get up? The emails will just keep coming; they're awake. I guess it's time to start the day. Computer on. Login complete. Virtual meeting links sent. Black tiles slowly fade to Katia and Jeremiah. "Good morning. What's going on?" My voice is cracking as it wakes. Simultaneously I hear: "We need help with our essays!" Through a yawn, I manage to say, "Okay let's see what we can work through. Don't worry. We'll figure it out."     Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Carmen Misé, Assistant Professor of English and Communications at Miami Dade College - North Campus. Misé is an insatiable reader and greatly enjoys film. Her favorite genre is horror (mystery, suspense, thrillers, sci-fi). She writes non-fiction and poetry, enjoys being outdoors and spending time with family, friends, and her dog Hamlet. Misé just became a first-time mom. She believes in aliens, and yes, the Earth is round.   Hello! As I logged into Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, using the recommended browser, and triple checking my Internet connection, I instantly dreaded the sea of silence in our “classroom.” The silhouettes of “users.” No faces, no voices. I felt like that one time I shouted, “Hello!,” as I stood at the Grand Canyon's South Rim. My salutation echoed through time and space, but I did not know its end destination or if anyone heard me. That day would be different. We laughed and talked about our favorite local restaurants. I met everyone's cat. We didn't cover thesis statements, but I was OK with that.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines.  ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Dr. Nancy E. Wilson, Associate Professor and Directory of Lower Division Studies at Texas State University. Epiphanies Asked to share an epiphany, Misha mentions that while watching a YouTube video of a KKK grand wizard, she recognized that they had something in common: as an African American, she also wishes to preserve her racial heritage. When the class expresses alarm, Misha clarifies that she knows about the KKK’s hatred of African Americans; however, during quarantine she resolved to stop condemning and canceling others. Doing so made her feel superior but left her ignorant. She suggested that as a class we “run toward” uncomfortable topics and try to understand why people think what they think. Every class needs a Misha.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... 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

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