My twenty-something sons have a keen interest in—okay, an obsession with—the history of media. My older son teaches film and is currently teaching a course on the future of film. That requires, of course, looking back at the past and considering how digital media have changed how films are distributed. My younger son is intrigued by the idea that his even younger cousins have never lived in a world in which YouTube didn’t exist. Having been a child when VHS tapes still had to be protected from melting in a hot car, he feels like the “old man” of media who can educate the younger generation about a world they never knew. They both use their iPhones or laptops constantly to research movies. Is it obvious to note, though, that they don’t use Facebook to do research? Or that we don’t expect our students to cite Facebook as a source in a documented essay? My older son uses Facebook to disseminate his opinions about films, just like he uses a blog. Facebook is, after all, a social media or social networking service. How, then, have we reached the point of congressional hearings examining Facebook’s role in disseminating disinformation harmful to America’s youth? Facebook creates communities of users, some much larger than others, who exchange updates on their lives and information they think will be of interest to their online community. However, the information shared is only as reliable as the community member who shares it. Facebook was never meant to be a news source, except as far as personal news was concerned. Then came the Trump administration, telling its followers that the mainstream media were not to be trusted as sources of national and international news. Some people began to put more faith in what a “friend” shared on Facebook than what a major news network reported. All of us have probably been guilty of sharing information on Facebook without thinking too critically about where that information came from. Sometimes we are glad to see someone out there reinforcing what we believe and pass it along without thinking about whether it is even true. Publishers of print media have been, and continue to be aware of the danger of printing libelous content. Now those who allow disinformation in digital form to go unchecked are facing some of the same type of scrutiny. Those who run Facebook have tried to restrict what gets passed along as truth. Frances Haugen, the whistleblower who has released thousands of pages of Facebook documents, has testified about those efforts but argues that they fall far short of what it would take to eliminate the dissemination of misinformation. She points out that Facebook did tighten restrictions about what users could post in the days leading up to the 2020 Presidential election, for example, but relaxed those restrictions once the election was over—even in light of the events of January 6th—because it was profitable to do so. A portion of Haugen’s testimony has been about the lies and conspiracy theories being spread about COVID-19 via Facebook. What is posted on a social media site can seldom be considered a matter of life and death, but lives literally are at stake if readers of a post believe that Ivermectin is a cure for COVID or that vaccinations are a Democratic conspiracy. Mark Zuckerberg and the other higher-ups at Facebook can try to put in place a plan to block disinformation. In their daily lives, as they argue politics in the heated atmosphere that currently exists in our country, Facebook’s users still must bear the responsibility that any person who constructs an argument must bear for checking out the reliability of their sources. In arguments made in the context of their academic or professional lives, the rules of research and documentation haven’t changed. An argument in support of a claim is only as good as its sources and the warrants that build a bridge between claim and warrant, no matter how funny the meme or how convincing the post is on Facebook.   Image Credit: "facebook is dead" by Book Catalog is licensed under CC BY 2.0. ... View more

In my last blog I analyzed the cultural significance of the “The Crown,” this year's toast of the Emmy Awards and a major signifier of America's continuing fascination with upper-class life. So when I read L.A. Times theater critic Charles McNulty's evisceration of the Netflix soon-to-premiere-on-Broadway musical "Diana," I decided that this would be a good opportunity to explore a different angle of the topic. So, as I am prone to say at the start of many of my semiotic analyses on this blog, here goes. To begin with, any critical review that begins by calling its subject "a crassly commercial noise machine," is clearly not going to be a piece of puffery. In fact, McNulty simply loathes the thing, cutting it off at the knees with such pronouncements as "There were lyrics so deranged I felt compelled to jot them down, almost like a psychiatrist keeping a log of a patient’s more unhinged utterances," and "'Diana' clarified for me why some people not only hate musicals but also loathe those who unabashedly do." When reading such jabs one can't help but think, "C'mon Charles, don't hold back, tell us what you really think." I confess to a certain fondness for such directness, but there is a deeper cultural significance to McNulty's takedown of which the critic himself is completely aware, remarking how "During the long pandemic pause, Broadway has been forced to confront not only its dismal record on race but also its checkered history on the rights and dignity of its workers. Cluttering the space with commercial mediocrity sadly suggests a return to business as usual. For this reason, 'Diana' isn’t just bad but dangerous."  Such critical passion raises the more dispassionate question: "What do we expect from musicals, anyway? Are they art or mere entertainment?" And this is the question I wish to explore in the rest of this blog. For the musical is a genre which, from its origins in the "light" operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, occupies a liminal space between "popular" culture and "elite" culture, "low" culture and "high," commercial entertainment and art. "Higher" than the proletarian "music hall" and "lower" than, say, the royal opera, Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas defied easy cultural classification, as does the tradition that they inspired. Even the music defies easy classification, with modern composers from Andrew Lloyd Webber to Lin-Manuel Miranda digging deep into contemporary pop music as they cross over from Broadway to Billboard, and back again. McNulty's pronouncement that "Artistically, 'Diana' is soulless. The raison d'être seems to be to make money," reveals what is at stake for proponents of a Broadway tradition that, in their view, should aim high rather than low—a pop cultural standard that has been embraced ever since the Beatles and Bob Dylan raised expectations for rock music as well. So it isn't the fact that "Diana"'s score is rock-oriented that bothers McNulty (it was composed by Bon Jovi's David Bryan); the problem is that it is "composed in the cheesiest Broadway rock."  But the medium, as they say, is the message, and Netflix—a wholly commercial enterprise—is a medium that isn't designed to aim high. Its purpose is to cash in. So what we are seeing here is a repetition of what happened in the very early days of television itself, when hopes that the new medium would bring high culture into the homes of the masses collapsed into a lament that TV had instead devolved into what FCC Chair Newton Minnow famously called a "vast wasteland" in 1961. So as traditional TV comes to be overtaken by the new media, the message remains the same: cultural production within a system of corporate capitalism is guided by the imperatives of the profit motive, not the nebulous and shifting values of "high" art. The result, as I have noted so many times, is the creation of an "entertainment culture" that has transformed cultural capital into just plain capital.   Image Credit: "File:Curtain-939464.jpg" by tommybuddy is marked with CC0 1.0 ... View more

American television was born and came of age during a mid-twentieth century economic expansion that—assisted by strong unions, a progressive income tax, and the G. I. Bill—vaulted an unprecedented number of people out of working-class poverty into (relative) middle-class prosperity. Reflecting, and in many ways, ideologically shaping this transformation, the situation comedy (sitcom) emerged as the preeminent TV genre of the era with its comfortable, but never economically extravagant, households idealizing a peculiarly American institution: the suburban middle-class nuclear family. Other prominent genres of the period included variety and game shows, along with the highly mythologized (and now almost entirely extinct) Western, but it is the family sitcom that sticks in our collective memories as most representative of that time, bringing to America's living rooms images of a middle-class idyll in which a man's suburban ranch house might be his castle—but not literally. That is why I was so struck by this year's Emmy Awards, in which The Crown—a Netflix series that dramatizes the post-war history (well, quasi-history as a number of critics have hastened to point out) of the British Royal Family—walked off with most of the top honors. A glance at the Netflix website to find out more about the show further piqued my attention when I saw displayed there old world upper-class soap operas such as Versailles, Reign, Bridgerton, The Cook of Castamar, and The English Game (with its Upstairs, Downstairs-like casting). "Something is definitely going on here," I thought; "the semiotic question is 'what'?" It isn't that soapy costume dramas set in Europe (especially England) are anything new. Indeed, the aforementioned Upstairs, Downstairs headlined a constant stream of such programs on PBS's Masterpiece Theater in the 1970s, and the franchise continues (under the new name Masterpiece) to this day. There has even been a brief effort to bring back Upstairs, Downstairs. But fifty years ago, this was something new, a departure into television fare that was at once popular and somewhat exclusive, with WGBH (the Boston PBS station that introduced Masterpiece Theater to America) enjoying a highbrow reputation as the go-to network for America's cultural elite. And this is the kind of difference upon which semiotic analyses can be built. It is highly significant in this regard, then, that even as PBS was turning towards British imports featuring English high society in the seventies, ABC, NBC, and CBS were producing working-class comedies like All in the Family and Laverne & Shirley, while at the same time American popular culture as a whole was going "country," with truck drivers (Convoy) and country music stars (Coal Miner's Daughter) enjoying a kind of populist moment in the sun. This, after all, was also the era of Hee Haw. But something else was also going on, for the 1970s marks the era during which the American middle class began to fracture, with an emergent upper middle class (spearheaded by the notorious yuppies) drawing further and further away from what can best be called the struggling middle class. The current success of The Crown, and other closely related series like Downton Abbey (am I the only one who wanted the Crawleys to lose their precious estate?) is a plangent signifier of this divide, for here is elite television in more ways than one, a real-life fantasy of the ultimate in power and privilege for an ever-more-prosperous upper-middle-class audience. And what is everyone else watching? According to Variety, the three most viewed television programs (by a wide margin) in 2020-21 were 1. NFL Sunday Night Football, 2. NFL Thursday Night Football, and 3. NFL Monday Night Football—all traditional bastions of middle (and working) class viewership. Interestingly, and perhaps significantly, a show called The Equalizer is tied for number 6.   Image Credit: "Windsor Castle" by Francisco Antunes is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

Tiny Teaching Stories: Launch  Share Your Inspirational, Motivational or Funny Teaching Anecdotes With Us! Hello! I am excited to announce the launch of a new series on Bedford Bits: Tiny Teaching Stories, and to invite your participation.  What are Tiny Teaching Stories, you ask? See our introductory video or view our hub here:   To get us started, I'd like to share my own Tiny Teaching Story with you. We were small zoom squares, remote, distant, across 4 continents. In our online writing class, I talked about the need to create a classroom community; they filled the chatbox talk with fears about the pandemic, who had died, and who was in the hospital. Isabelle, in Vietnam, sprawled on her pink ruffled bedspread; Zara, in Pakistan, turned off her video to leave class for morning prayers. We understood that we would never see each other in person; we would always be at a distance, always in gallery view. And yet, when I missed class on the day my mother died, from across 4 continents they sent me poems of consolation and a bouquet of sunflowers.   Now, we want to hear from you. Send us your Tiny Teaching Story! Submit your Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com. Guidelines for submission: Stories should be no more than 100 words. Include with your submission the attached release form. Tiny Teaching Stories can be published anonymously or with attribution; please indicate your preference in your submission and include a brief one to two-sentence biography for non-anonymous publication. If you would like to, we encourage you to also submit your social media handles and a headshot (optional). Please change identifying names and details of students to protect their privacy.     ... View more

I have written before about DBLAC—Digital Black Lit and Composition—the organization founded by Khirsten L. Scott and Lou Maraj in 2016 as a digital network devoted to the support of Black graduate students and emerging scholars in the fields of literacy, composition, literature, rhetoric, and related areas. In the five years since then, this group has held transformative in-person retreats and sponsored highly successful virtual reading and writing groups. They’ve also sponsored panels at a number of national conferences. Professor Scott wrote recently alerting members and readers to the opening of the Fall 2021 writing sessions, the first of which was held just last week on September 15. DBLAC writing group sessions follow a similar format: participants register in advance and then are invited to join in on any or all of the slated activities, beginning with Pre-Writing Affirmations and Writing Goals, followed by a three-hour writing period (with a break roughly half way through) and then an hour of time for reflection. While I have not been lucky enough to be part of any of these groups yet, I continue to follow report of them and to think of them (and the equally interesting reading group sessions) as one of gifts that kept giving during the pandemic, since they were designed to be virtual. And I am especially interested in the pre-writing affirmations that participants do—a kind of activity I used to use in abbreviated fashion at the beginning of my first-year writing classes to settle us all down and get us focused. Here’s what DBLAC posted on September 15: Before setting our goals and beginning our writing activities, let's share positive affirmations about our writing intentions. Statements can vary in length and quantity. The goal here is to promote positive energy within the group. Pre-Writing Affirmations: Transformation of Silence into Action In the spirit of this theme, I turn to Audre Lorde's words in this chapter of Sister Outsider: “The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.” Lorde’s words seem to me to provide a good starting point for many of our writing classes, especially very early in the term. Reading that first sentence aloud in class, I can imagine looking directly and closely at my students, making eye contact with as many as possible, asking them to think about what it means to say “the fact that we are here” in this mid-pandemic time, and asking about what some of the silences and differences that stand between us are. And about how we might begin not just to recognize and name them but to bridge them. While I and my students wouldn’t have several hours to write, we would have 20 to 30 minutes at our disposal—along with some time for group discussion that could serve as a primer for later reflections written at leisure and brought to class the following day. I am not in the classroom (virtual or in person) this term, to my regret. But if I were, this is a prompt I would want to use—thanks to Audre Lorde and DBLAC. I believe it could well set the reflective, contemplative, interrogative tone I hope would guide our classroom deliberations throughout. If you should use this in your classroom, I’d love to hear about it and its results. And in the meantime, I recommend checking out the DBLAC website and signing up for their highly informational newsletter. Image Credit: "Pen and Paper" by kdinuraj, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

I was finishing revisions of the most recent editions of Elements of Argument and The Structure of Argument as the presidential election of 2020 was nearing its end. As the books went to press, I could make no assumptions about how the election would turn out, but that was not a new struggle for me because throughout the process of writing about argument and selecting examples of argumentation for these and prior editions, I needed to try to not let my political biases show. (I have not always been successful.) On this platform, to a community of instructors in the classroom, I can say with candor that teaching argumentation during the era of former President Donald Trump was not easy. The lasting effects of his administration make it difficult still. We have long known about media bias. We have long talked to our students about how certain networks, certain newspapers, and certain magazines can have a conservative or a liberal bias. But beyond media bias, one thing that gave Trump his surprising power over his followers was his ability to convince them that only he was telling them the truth. He convinced them that everything else was fake news. The media could not be trusted to present balanced news; they could not even be trusted to present the facts accurately. How do you support an argument, or teach your students to, when no one is telling the truth? Only that kind of cult of personality could make it possible for millions of people to refuse to take a vaccine to protect themselves against a disease that has killed over half a million people in America alone. Some people have entered the hospital with COVID still arguing that it can’t be COVID because COVID is a hoax. Only on their deathbed have some accepted the truth and begged their families to be vaccinated. This level of refusal to accept scientific truth is new. What will people from the perspective of the future think about a generation of Americans who in large numbers chose to die rather than take a vaccine advocated by the government? We still have to teach our students the difference between fact and inference. We still have to teach them how to evaluate sources. Doing so remains difficult in today’s politicized environment. The same basic guidelines for evaluation still apply. We just have to get past the emotion, and for some, that is just not possible right now. Sometimes it may be a matter of doing the most we can do under the circumstances. I happen to be in one of the states where the legislature is eager to mirror Texas’s S. B. 8 in essentially taking away women’s right to control their own bodies by making abortion illegal after six weeks and making a woman’s neighbors bounty hunters to be rewarded for turning her in if she has an abortion. I wanted to write a letter to the editor opposing passing a similar law in Arkansas. But what would I have argued in this letter, and how? It would have been pointless to try to argue in favor of abortion in general. In fact, I don’t support abortion in general, but rather under specific circumstances. A letter is hardly enough to present the complexities of my views on abortion. Too often in such discussions, we tend to focus on the most sensational cases, such as when the girl or woman is the victim of rape or incest, but doing so suggests that abortion is acceptable only in the most extreme of cases, which is also not my view. I reflected on what exactly I was advocating. For now, specifically, it was that a similar law to Texas S. B. 8 should not be passed in my state. And it wasn’t even that I was arguing that never in the future should any abortion law be passed in my state. Rather, I was responding to the push from one of our state legislators to pass a law just like Texas’s right now, before the current legislative session ends. My case was strengthened by the fact that the state senator who is advocating the newest restrictive abortion law has sponsored two similar laws that have already been struck down in federal court. Even before the court’s decision on the more recent law, our Governor admitted publicly that he knew the law was unconstitutional. Two of the three dissenting justices who failed to block Texas’s S. B 8 stated bluntly that the law was unconstitutional, and Chief Justice Roberts said the constitutionality of the law could only be considered when a specific case comes before the Court. There are facts that support my contention that it would be unwise to force a law of unclear constitutionality through our state legislation at this time, when a specific case is due to be heard by the Supreme Court in a few weeks. Add to that the fact that some states and companies are already rethinking the wisdom of doing business in Texas, and there are reasons to stop and think and not simply let emotion rule the day. Our legislature, unfortunately, probably will not do that, but what I can do at this point is to know the facts and to know exactly what I want to argue should be done. Other battles will come later, but for now, that may be the most that can be done.   Image Credit: "Supreme Court of the United States" by Phil Roeder is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

In the midst of a wave of the COVID Delta variant, I took a fall and ended up in the emergency room of a hospital, where I spent the night waiting for a bed in what turned out to be a closet in the outpatient wing: there was not a single bed available elsewhere. In spite of being overwhelmed with patients, the staff were kind, caring, and attentive, managing x-rays and CT scans and other test with patience and skill and transferring me within three days to a skilled nursing facility nearby. Once settled in the new place, I had a chance to look at the written records that accompanied me, and to remark on the thoroughness and accuracy of the reports, including descriptions of the fractures and notes about my allergies to pain medication: some fine pieces of writing, I thought! I spent the next three weeks in a rehab center, and being the rhetorician that I am, I paid close attention to all the communicating I saw going on around me, both spoken and written. And in this time of almost unbelievable division and hostility in our country, of the avalanche of misinformation descending on us on social media, and of the increasingly bitter attacks and counterattacks regarding the recall of our governor here in California—I learned lessons in kindness, dignity, grace, and forbearance. I’ll share just two of these lessons here. The building I was in was a big rectangle, and once I was in a wheelchair, I could wheel from hall to hall, where I watched staff at work. Other patients did the same, including one woman with advanced dementia, whose soft smile and voice greeted me often. She would wheel slowly by, often talking about things that seemed to deal with numbers, or economics, and addressed, it seemed, primarily to herself. I later learned that she had been a long-time math teacher. She was hardly ever in her room, preferring to roam about the facility—and she had a penchant for going into any door that was open or that she could open: one night I woke to find she had wheeled into my room and was sitting inside the door, singing to herself. So the staff could have trouble keeping track of this patient, and when they located her she would often resist going back to her room. As I watched this pattern repeat, I was impressed (and more than a little humbled) by the staff members’ ability to talk with her quietly, kindly, and always respectfully, suggesting that she might want to share a cup of hot chocolate, to listen to music, or to roll around with one of the assistants as a companion—and eventually, ever so gently accompany her to her room and, at night, help her with washing and undressing and getting into bed. The way the staff spoke—as well as what they said—impressed me deeply: it was a kind of communication, a lot of it nonverbal, that I think characterizes the best teaching, and it has a persuasive power all its own. As I came to know the place better, I realized that some staff were more highly skilled at this kind of communication than others, but oh how I wished that all of us teachers could have a chance to learn from them and to pass on some of their expertise to our students. And then there was a nurses’ assistant that I will refer to as Maria. I met her my first night there, as she was cajoling a patient into eating just a bit more of her dinner, but I didn’t get to talk with her until a few days later, when she came into my room as she said “early, ahead of her schedule, to ask a question.” She had seen two books by my bed—The Everyday Writer, which I’m working on revising, and a book of poems by Rita Dove—and she wanted to ask about writing, specifically about her writing. As her story unfolded, I learned that she had come to this country with her mother and siblings to join her father, then working in the fields, when she was a child. In those days they had all managed to come legally, and they settled in to working in four areas of California, in order of crop rotation. Maria did not go to school until she was 14, and then she found herself in a public classroom, with little English and a lot of anxiety. But she also had a lot of curiosity, which her English teacher noticed. One day, the teacher asked her to stay behind at the end of class and offered a deal: if Maria would work hard, the teacher would stay after school 2 to 3 hours a day to teach her English. Maria did work hard—very, very hard. One day, her teacher said she wanted to take Maria somewhere on the weekend but Maria demurred, saying she didn’t think her father would allow it. He agreed, however, and Maria found herself at a high school graduation, something she had never heard of and could scarcely imagine. She set her sights on such a graduation, and with the ongoing support of her teacher, she graduated with fine grades and got a good job. Eventually, she completed the college work necessary to become a certified nurse’s assistant. But all the while, she told me, she was “telling stories,” writing them in both Spanish and English, and dreaming of doing more. How many Marias have you known in your career? How many times have you met someone who had a teacher like Maria’s? How many times have you been that teacher? Maria’s story has once again taught me that the work we do matters. That writing matters. That language shapes our lives even as we shape it, and that it connects us to one another. I gave Maria The Everyday Writer and another book I had with me, Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera, and I’ve sent a few more books since I got home. She has written that she hopes to visit soon, and that she will bring some of her stories with her. And that she continues to write, every single day. In the wake of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I have felt . . . discouraged. But even on a dark day filled with dark memories and darker grief, I remember the lessons I have learned from Maria, from the remarkable staff of the rehab center, and from so many students: the work we do has meaning, far beyond what we may ever know. Image Credit: "Posters of Muscular and skeletal systems anatomy chart in hospital" by shixart1985, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Emerging's fifth edition is here, and it contains some great new readings to help you encourage students to grow as citizen-actors in the world, who will deal with - and maybe even solve - many of the issues facing the world today. See this video blog about a reading that challenges our conception of the human vs. natural world divide, questioning our notions of human uniqueness and notions of the political sphere.  ... View more

Eric D. BrownEric D. Brown (recommended by Kyle Jensen), Bedford New Scholar 2021, is pursuing his PhD in Arizona State University’s Writing, Rhetorics and Literacies PhD program, where he studies writing technologies, writing pedagogy, and writing program administration. He has taught First-Year Composition, Persuasive Writing and Public Issues, Writing for the Professions, and Business Writing. Eric is also Assistant Director (AD) of Writing Programs, where he aids the director in growing the scope of Writing Programs and creating professional development for faculty. As Assistant Director, he also co-runs the National Day on Writing, ASU’s annual Composition Conference, and is an editor of Writing Programs’ bi-annual newsletter, Writing Notes.   How do you engage students in your course? I’ve found that one of the best ways to engage students in my courses is to show them that the writing process doesn’t have to be a lonely endeavor and that writing is hard, even for those of us who are “good” at it. I enact this approach by positioning myself as an expert on writing (what it is and how it works) but one that fails and stumbles through the writing process, just like they do. And I’ve found that students are particularly engaged with this idea when I write “live” for/with them. For example, I’ll write an email or an assignment sheet with them, talking through my thinking/rhetorical strategies and asking for advice and ideas from them. Regardless of what writing task I take on for/with them, they see me struggle to get started, stumble with wording, sidestep through typos/spelling mistakes, and go back and rework the text. In sum, they can see that “the struggle is real” when it comes to writing, showing students (who are often fearful of college writing) that even experts struggle with writing, that writing is collaborative, and that revision is essential to any writing situation.  What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? In sum, it’s pretty awesome. As a Bedford New Scholar, I get opportunities to work with Bedford/St. Martin’s on a variety of projects: feedback on textbooks, input about developing technologies, and opinions on readings for students, to name a few. It’s really great to not only get some insight into the higher ed publishing world but to contribute to that world. Meeting and interacting with the other Bedford New Scholars is also a notable highlight of the program. The virtual summit this summer gave me the chance to not only meet and interact with other new scholars, but I was able to work on projects with them and talk about what is most important to me with them: teaching. Sharing my work and sitting in on presentations for the Assignments that Work part of the summer summit was generative, as well as fun. I got a ton of great ideas for assignments to try out, and I was able to see my fellow New Scholars’ unique approaches to teaching and writing. What do you think instructors don’t know about higher ed publishing but should? I don’t think instructors know how willing and excited publishers like Bedford/St. Martin’s are to work with them, and I think this “not knowing” can lead to a view of higher ed publishing as “The Man.” While this was certainly a perception I  held in my early days as a graduate student (and before that as an adjunct), I have become persuaded otherwise. I have found higher ed publishers like Bedford/St.Martin’s to be highly invested in instructor input, experience, and in the workings/makeup of the writing programs instructors teach in. Before working with Bedford/St. Martin’s, I would not have imagined that my ideas, feedback, and support would be important to higher ed publishers, but I’ve found the opposite to be true. Furthermore, I have found that higher ed publishers like Bedford/St. Martin’s are more often than not pedagogically focused--they want to know what research is influencing our teaching, what we are doing in the classroom, why we are doing things the way we are, and how they can support that work.  What projects or course materials from Bedford/St. Martin's most pique your interest, and why? My writing program just shifted to using a common textbook (which we created with Bedford/St. Martin’s), and Achieve is offered with the textbook. I’m excited to learn more about Achieve and use it with my students. I was able to use some of Achieve’s peer review functions this summer during the virtual summit, and I really liked many of its affordances. My institution’s current LMS has a very clunky peer review system, and I’m particularly looking forward to switching to one that allows me to shape and tweak peer review goals and that has an interface I think will be intuitive for my students. I also know that Achieve has some annotation functions, and I’m excited to use them with my students, as well.   Eric'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 Eric’s assignment. For the full activity, see Remediation. One of the goals of my 101 courses is to expand for students what writing is and how it works. My “Remediation” assignment works toward this goal, as it asks students to reshape their writing for new audiences and to funnel their ideas through a new medium or genre. In sum, students are asked to take an already completed written project (usually the first major project, which asks them to explore a literacy) and funnel its ideas through another medium/“translate” it into another genre. For example, students might take their project and (re)shape it into a podcast or blog post. Remediation gets students thinking about the ever-shifting relationship among writer, audience, and text (i.e., the rhetorical situation), but also asks them to focus on how the mediums/genres in which we communicate our ideas to others consist of different kinds of media that very much are “writing.” Students are excited to expand their notions of what “counts” as writing, and one of the assignment’s selling points is in how it asks students to not only consider how certain mediums/genres appeal to certain audiences, and not others, but to consider how their writing does so as well. ... View more

This post is part of the Campfire Session series from Corequisite Composition Summer Camp 2021. You can find all recorded sessions and resources from Camp here. By Christina Di Gangi, Dawson Community College The Problem: Bridging the Gap between Informative and Analytic Writing In teaching terms, I am a career literature generalist with almost sole responsibility for my college's co-requisite writing model. From my vantage point, I understand that my students struggle to bridge the gap between informative and analytic writing. Close reading is ‘back’ in part due to the CCSS (Common Core State Standards)—but while students may know how to find extensive information on a given topic, they do not always start college fully equipped to write a more analytic research paper using peer-reviewed research writing. This gap becomes especially pressing if the research paper is taught in the first-semester writing class, with students going on to write papers in their major immediately thereafter. My job is to get students up to speed. For this reason among others, reading research articles is a major focus in our co-requisite model writing labs. One Potential Solution: Inquiry Charts or I-Charts (Hoffman, 1992)  In completing ancillary graduate coursework on reading to facilitate my teaching of our co-requisite-model courses, I learned about James V. Hoffman’s 1992 Language Arts article, “Critical reading/thinking across the curriculum: Using I-charts to support learning.” Inquiry charts, or I-Charts, are graphic or cognitive organizers that K-12 students can use to map information from prior knowledge—“activating prior knowledge”—along with their reading from informative sources: This lets students build connections in ways that simply restating information from pre-selected readings does not. Hoffman proposes a model where students work together in class before moving to individual practice, but the graphic organizer concept is flexible and adaptable. Before and during reading, students have space to enter information they already know about a topic, and then space to combine this prior knowledge with additional detail and meaning from other sources that they read. The I-Chart struck me as a flexible tool. Since my first-year writing students face the challenging task of improving their facility with peer-reviewed research articles while at the same time learning how to put together a college-level research paper, I wanted to design a cognitive organizer for them that would help them both to read the research articles that they had selected and then to place those articles in level-appropriate research papers of their own.  I note that instructors can prepare students to use a cognitive organizer like the I-Chart within the natural flow of class, as they teach students to search, organize, analyze, and write about research topics. Within our co-requisite model, I find that students benefit from preparatory instruction both on isolating the content of research articles and on writing about individual research articles before moving to a longer paper. Two preparatory techniques that I would highlight are quizzes and short reviews: For quizzes, I have students practice isolating the methods and findings of abstracts, then of whole short research articles. I pick level-appropriate articles and have them annotate their copies as well as practice writing analytic clusters and paragraphs using page numbers and quotations from the articles.  Writing short reviews of single research articles helps students improve in that genre but also prepares them to write a summative research paper in my class, basically a review of research. Using the I-Chart to Plan and Draft Beginning College Research Papers Preparatory work on isolating the features and key points of peer-reviewed research articles prepares students to complete an I-Chart or similar cognitive organizer, which they can then use to structure and complete shorter and longer research assignments. Students can practice using multiple articles to complete an I-Chart in groups before moving to individual practice; they can then apply the technique to the topic of their own paper, whether that topic be pre-assigned or self-selected. Once the table has been completed, students have a visual that should suggest to most how writing about their chosen articles can be organized in a longer framework such as a research paper. In my first-semester writing class, students are specifically asked to organize their final research papers as a survey of current research using six or more research articles. Again, this is a very flexible technique. I have students write a three-source midterm, more of a ‘sandbox’ for the final paper than a full-length research paper, and then write a final paper using six or more peer-reviewed sources—but the I-Chart can easily be adapted to the needs of your particular class. For example, students could use the I-Chart to organize thoughts about a set of theme-based readings before they get into research writing; if they were more advanced, they could write about six articles for a draft around midterm and expand the number of sources for their final project. Some students may even want to change the organizing categories to suit their thought process a little better, which has certainly worked for students of mine in the past. As I emphasize to students, the goal is to track their personal analysis of the peer-reviewed research sources that they are using, then to place them in the context of their future thinking and writing—rather than to have a beautifully completed chart. An added bonus is that students can learn to detach their analytic process from trying to produce beautiful writing—they can focus on organizing and showing their thought process before they turn to redraft and polish their work.  Given all of these benefits, it is my hope that this use of a graphic organizer to facilitate analytic reading and writing for beginning college students is an honest use of a technique from the teaching of reading, a field from which—in terms of my own teaching, certainly—I still feel that I have much to learn. ... View more

At Stanford, May has always been my second favorite month of the year. First is always September, when fall term opens and we welcome a new class of students: nothing can match the excitement and anticipation I feel then. But May comes very close because that is the month we celebrate writing, with awards presented to first-year writing students, second-year writing students, and students in writing in the majors courses. Over the decades, I have been consistently elated by the depth of research, the quality of thought, and the unique voices that these awards honor. Traditionally, these awards—like similar ones all over the country—were presented at receptions on campus, with friends and family and instructors there to congratulate and celebrate the writers. But then came the pandemic, the shutdown of the entire area, and the shift online. Like teachers everywhere, the Program in Writing and Rhetoric instructors at Stanford, under the always brilliant leadership of Adam Banks, Marvin Diogenes, and Christine Alfano, worked ceaselessly to adapt to the new learning and teaching environment and to meet students—and student needs—wherever they were. And like students everywhere, our students worked to meet the challenges of online writing seminars, learning to work together in online teams, to deal with the glitches and intricacies of Zoom and other virtual meeting spaces, and to try to stay connected, to build and maintain a virtual classroom ethos. It hasn’t always been pretty: I’ve talked with teachers across the country who were exhausted, frustrated, and stretched beyond the limit, and more than once I’ve wondered whether I shouldn’t be thankful to be retired (I taught a small online grad class in summer 2020 but nothing more). Yet here we are, over a year after the lockdown and shift, and I’m wondering how best to recognize and celebrate the student research and writing and speaking that occurred during this pandemic, online year. Thinking through this issue led our writing program to make this announcement: Since Spring 2020, all PWR 2 courses have been taught online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Typically, Lunsford award [the award for second-year writing students] honorees would present in front of a live audience and two winners would be selected. Giving and recording an oral presentation in an online environment provides both new challenges but also new possibilities and we saw a range of creative and powerful responses to oral presentation research. We've created a gallery of Spring/Summer 2020 honorees, Fall 2020 honorees, and Winter 2021 honorees, featuring the exemplary work that students produced in their fully online environments. So this year, the program decided to honor every student nominated by an instructor—and to create a gallery of the work of these students for all to enjoy. I’ve been dipping into these galleries for the past week and I have been impressed, over and over again, by both the research these students have conducted during this very strange and very trying year and their presentation of that research. So once again, May is bringing me great happiness in the form of these remarkable presentations. Please dip in too! I’ll be taking a summer break from blog postings as I anticipate a new fall term and some form of returning to campus. I will be catching up on reading, doing some writing and research, and working in my community organic garden. And I will be thinking of teachers of writing everywhere, and of our students, wishing for a healthy, productive, and restorative summer for all. Image Credit: "MacBook Minimal Setup" by MattsMacintosh, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

[For Part 1 of “Beyond Standardized English: A Personal Journey,” click here.] I began trying to put what I had been learning in the 70s and 80s into practice, and in 1993, I added a chapter on “Language Variety” to the first textbook I ever wrote, The St. Martin’s Handbook. This chapter attempted to embody the principles of Students’ Right to Their Own Language and to recognize and value the legitimacy of ALL languages and dialects. As far as I know, this was the first composition handbook to take such a position, however timid and naive, and it is one I have tried to build on and refine and expand as I have written other textbooks. And I kept trying to learn. One way was through developing a course I taught for years at Stanford and at the Bread Loaf School of English called “The Language Wars.” This course began with the struggle over vernacular literacies in many countries; then moved to the obsessive insistence of early U.S. “settlers” that the native population learn English, no matter what; through the withholding of literacy from indigenous people and African Americans; through the intricacies of “the Ebonics debate;” and to the powerful work of writers of color who were moving beyond—way, way beyond—“standardized” English. Teaching that course was about the most fun I could imagine, especially because, unlike me, my students almost always “got it” immediately and went on to produce brilliant writing that pushed beyond all manner of “standardized” boundaries. This steep learning curve was, for me, often a painful and humbling journey, one that led me to fully recognize the roles that literacy in general and writing in particular have played in regulating and oppressing many—and to analyze or try to analyze my own motives and complicities. It led me to study and appreciate as many Englishes as I possibly could along with what Peter Elbow calls “vernacular eloquence” and what Carmen Kynard called “vernacular insurrections,” and to approach the teaching of writing and writing development—always—as a learner. It has also led me back to a renewed appreciation of basic rhetorical principles and particularly to the notion that rhetoric cannot operate when choice is not present. That means that as teachers we must always begin with writers’ choices, with what they want their writing to do, to whom they wish to speak, and why they are writing in the first place. This sense of writing as an act, as a doing, as a making—rather than the mere noting down of thought—is powerful for teachers and students alike. I watched this sense of writing as doing and making grow in the students I followed in the five-year Stanford Study of Writing, as they moved from viewing writing as a perfunctory way to get a grade to viewing writing and especially good writing as “making something good happen in the world.” This same sense of writing as doing is emerging in The Wayfinding Project of Jonathan Alexander, Karen Lunsford, and Carl Whithaus, who reported this finding during the 2021 CCCC meeting. What I find encouraging about such findings in general, but especially about how teachers of writing can capitalize on them, is that NOW—thanks to persistent and courageous scholars and teachers of color—the tools and strategies students have at their disposal in pursuing writing as doing and making are so much more diverse, more varied, and more powerful in this time of “vernacular eloquence” and “vernacular insurrections.” As Elaine Richardson, Adam Banks, Keith Gilyard, Gwendolyn D. Pough, Vershawn Ashanti Young, Aja Y. Martinez, Damián Baca, Jaime Armin Mejía, John R. Rickford, Christina Devereaux Ramírez, Khirsten L. Scott, Lou Maraj, and scores of other teachers and scholars of color are demonstrating every single day, these strategies—from the deployment of spoken soul to autoethnography, hashtagging, signifying, rhetorical reclamations, narrative framing, and dozens of others—are being used brilliantly by student writers today. It’s more than high time, then, for white teachers like me not simply to recognize varieties of English as valid and valuable, not just to honor students’ rights to their own languages, not just to teach about these strategies—I’ve been trying to do that for decades—but to invite students to put these concepts into practice, to use strategies characteristic of their own languages and dialects in their own writing-as-doing, all within a rhetorical framework that encompasses their particular purposes for writing, their particular aims and goals for reaching their particular audiences. And it means a lot more learning—in fact, continuous and ongoing learning—as I investigate rhetorical strategies across a wide range of vernacular literacies, and as I engage students in similar investigations. Most of all, it means continuing to ask all students to join me in investigating the history of “standardized” languages, recognizing the way such regulation has served the forces of systematic racism and much more, and exploring ways to resist such regulation while using all the available means vernacular literacies provide for speaking truths, for connecting with audiences, for moving forward toward more just and more inclusive ways of communicating with one another. As I’ve said, for me, this has been a steep and often daunting uphill journey, one that is still challenging me to examine my own assumptions and biases, my own blind spots, and my own limited and limiting abilities. But it is also one I continue to embrace with humility—and with hope. Image Credit: "Modern Languages..." by LeafLanguages, used under a CC0 1.0 license ... View more

Sonia Maasik, my wife and co-author through 10 editions of Signs of Life in the U.S.A. and three editions of California Dreams and Realities, passed away at 12:50 p.m. on May 10, 2021. I was by her side at the end, as well as during an extraordinary two or three hours the night before when she summoned the very last of her strength to break through the increasing drip of pain killers and the coming darkness she knew only too well was approaching, to utter words that those of us who were there now realize she must have been preparing for some time, gathering and hoarding her dwindling strength and waiting for just the right moment to say them. Those words, in all truth, were simply and entirely words of love, prefaced by explicit declarations that these were her last words. She so wanted us to understand this. She was so triumphant when she saw that we did understand. She was so brave. More than this on such a public medium as the World Wide Web would be out of place. But I want to note, once again, that the creation of Signs of Life in the U.S.A. was entirely Sonia's idea. I thought that it was a very good idea from the start, but it bears pointing out that it was Sonia's. The books that have descended from Sonia's brainstorm over twenty-five years ago will be a part of her legacy; the other will be the love that she felt for, and inspired in, those who knew and worked with her: at UCLA, at Bedford/St. Martin's, and in our home. ... View more

As I write this, my final blog of the season, I find myself thinking of that awful day in September 2001 when it appeared, briefly, that writing about popular culture at all was beside the point. Sonia and I were working on the fourth edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A. at the time, and with pundits everywhere predicting that things were never going to be the same in America, we both wondered whether we should go through with it at a time when the World Trade Center was burning and the nation would soon be at war. However, it didn't take long to see that popular culture in America was not going to disappear into the ashes, but rather it was going to become more important than ever. After 9/11, Americans rallied around events such as the Concert for New York City, the World Series, and the Super Bowl. And so, we continued with our work. When the full force of the COVID-19 pandemic struck America in the late winter and early spring of 2020, we were already well into the copy editing stage of the 10th edition of Signs of Life, so there was never any question of going through with it. But now, over a year since the calamity broke, the question of just what American popular culture is going to look like going forward has emerged again. This time it appears that, unlike twenty years ago, some things really are going to change. For it is becoming ever clearer that, just as the shock of the Civil War accelerated historical developments that were probably inevitable anyway, the pandemic has jumpstarted trends that are transforming the way pop culture is both delivered and consumed in America, and it is likely that these changes will be permanent. To begin with the delivery side of the matter, the most dramatic change can be found in what is happening to the movie theater industry. Traditional movie theaters were already under siege by the emergence of new content providers like Netflix, but the forced closure of theaters all over the country has left the industry in tatters. Americans still watch movies, of course, but more and more it is becoming a private, digitally streamed experience. A sign of the effect that this is having on American audiences is the drastic decline in interest in such venerable institutions as the annual Oscar award ceremony. Feeling little connection with films that they have not seen—or if they have seen them, not in the publicly shared space of a movie theater—Americans appear to be losing a sense of connection not only with movies but with each other as well. And here is where the cultural significance lies. When America turned to popular culture for solace in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it did so (largely) in a spirit of national unity, which is simply unthinkable today after twenty years of digital development that has splintered what was once regarded as a "common culture" into a myriad of niche markets. But more significantly, twenty years of political polarization has had an even more profound impact as Americans, ensconced in their highly partisan news-and-entertainment silos, are not only not consuming the same media products, they are not living in the same reality either. And so, when we eventually do emerge from the pandemic (just as the Civil War finally did come to a military end), not only will America have changed, but its popular culture will have as well—perhaps beyond recognition.   "Alone in a Movie Theater" by Studio Sarah Lou is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

While not all aspects of the shift to online and hybrid instruction have been smooth—and many will be jettisoned or revamped significantly in future semesters—I have found one unexpected boon in the process: new possibilities for asynchronous discussions.  I had taught composition online prior to the onset of the pandemic, but in 2020 I shifted my corequisite courses online as well—and in the fall, I was asked to teach both composition and corequisite as hybrids, so that I had half my class on Tuesdays and the other half on Thursdays. Thus, students could interact with some class members only in the online space, since they were never together in the classroom.  In the first online iteration of my corequisite/composition course (summer 2020), I converted one of my favorite in-class group activities involving quote and paraphrase to the discussion board in our LMS. The results were mediocre, at best. It was obvious students needed some coaching, not only on the logistics of posting, but also on strategies for reading and managing a conversation that is threaded—with multiple strands of thought unfolding in tandem.  The subsequent hybrid format in the fall allowed me to do some of that coaching, both via video and in class.  In the hybrid format, I also extended the length of discussions to at least two weeks, if not longer, inviting students to return to discussions multiple times, leading ultimately to a set of “reflect and review” questions after discussions closed: which posts challenged you to think differently? Why? Which posts generated the most responses? Why? These questions helped students situate discussions within rhetorical contexts, particularly when they connected our course discussions to more familiar types of online communication. But as part of the writing about writing focus in my first-year and corequisite pairing, I’ve found another discussion style that seems to engage students more than traditional prompts: the multimodal gallery. I’ve used two of these in my composition classes, both with success. The first gallery occurs as students are working on a researched profile of a discourse community, which is the second major project in the class. As students begin the process, they read definitions of a discourse community, either from John Swales or Dan Melzer. Using that theoretical information as background, they research a discourse community and profile its shared goals, means of communication, language choices, common genres, and ways of recognizing members.  For the gallery discussion in the online classroom space, students then create a multimodal piece to introduce their chosen discourse community and one aspect of its communicative practices to the rest of the class. The multimodal pieces are shared via the online discussion, and students respond to each other in two ways: first, they talk about the rhetorical choices made in the multimodal piece itself, indicating aspects that drew their attention and or seemed problematic for some reason. Then, they ask questions about the discourse community in relation to the class readings. In a later multimodal gallery, pairs of students are assigned a key term for rhetorical and lexical analysis—terms which students will be expected to use in the final paper for the course: claim, counterargument, concessions, ethos, logos, pathos, as well as some of the terms used by Ken Hyland to describe a writer’s stance or engagement strategies, including booster, hedge, aside, self-mention, and directive. Students find definitions from class readings, and they design a multimodal composition to define and illustrate the target term. Once again, students can respond initially to the composition itself, but they also build on the content: students practice illustrating these terms, composing their own paragraphs to show the terms at work, and identifying the strategies they used. (Later, I’d like to add a component in which students talk about how these concepts translate to multimodal compositions, but we haven’t done that yet). This discussion familiarizes students with the terms they will be using as the basis for their final assignment—in which they profile the rhetorical context of an argument about writing and analyze the structure and effectiveness of that argument. These discussions occur over two or three week spans, allowing students time to think, respond, read, and respond again. Critically, by the time the discussion has ended, students will have composed not only a multimodal piece, but an additional 500 to 800 words focused on the meaning-making possibilities of different texts. In short, I think these discussions would qualify as what Myhill and Newman call “high-quality classroom talk” about writing that supports students’ metalinguistic and writing development. How have you used asynchronous discussions to encourage writing development and talk about writing in your first-year composition classes? ... View more