Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Kelle Alden, an Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at the University of Tennessee at Martin.   Every Year, I Flunk a Decent Person During our conference, I showed my student the math. Regardless of his excellent attendance and participation, without his missing homework and essays, he would fail English. My student looked sheepish, gave excuses, promised to catch up. I no longer take it personally when students lie to me. I try to teach in the moment, to appreciate how my student smiles and greets me every day. Seeing the whole of him will help after finals, when I have to deliver my most difficult lesson. I will still smile for him next semester, even if he cannot return the gesture right away.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Recently, I had the good fortune to attend a symposium in honor of Jacqueline Jones Royster and her book Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women, published in 2000. The symposium, organized by Professors Carmen Kynard and Eric Pritchard, featured panels devoted to Royster’s work and particularly to the deep significance of Traces and to the influence it continues to have across a range of fields. Speaker after speaker related their own experiences with the text, sharing what it has meant to them and to their careers. And those of us in the audience were invited to add comments in the chat with thoughts of our own. If you do not know Traces of a Stream, or Royster’s Feminist Rhetorical Practices (co-authored with Gesa Kirsch), or her edition of Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, not to mention her award-winning and often-reprinted CCCC Chair’s Address, “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own,” I recommend them highly. Certainly, Jackie Royster’s work has guided and influenced my thinking and my teaching for decades. In the eighties, I had the great good fortune to be colleagues with Jackie at Ohio State and later to team-teach a class with her at the Bread Loaf School of English. I remember the team teaching as if it were yesterday and in fact often open my own classes by sharing the first day of that class with my students. The students all introduced themselves and explained why they were taking our course (on the power of public rhetorics). Then Jackie and I introduced ourselves, and Jackie said something that became a mantra for me: “My goal for this class is to make sure that every person learns that they have something to teach everyone else—and that they have something to learn from every other single person here.” And then I watched as Jackie made sure we accomplished that goal—and that we were aware of it and of how important it was. Confidence, humility, and gratitude—those were lessons we all learned and treasured. So, did I want to participate in this symposium in Jackie’s honor? You bet I did, and I attended every session I could, including a blockbuster keynote delivered by Jackie herself, called “Tracing the Stream: A Personal Retrospective on Learning to Think Sideways.” Calling Traces her “soul book,” Jackie recounted her goal of talking seriously, carefully, lovingly about people who had been deemed “inconsequential,” and showing how remarkable they and their lives were. In doing this work, she called on Octavia Butler (I have long known that Butler was one of Jackie’s favorite authors but did not know why until this symposium!), whom she credits for the concept of “thinking sideways,” saying that her ability to think outside the box enabled her to understand the human condition and to develop an Afro-Feminist vision expressed in a combination of fiction and fantasy that changes the way careful readers think. Butler is “emblazoned” Jackie says, in her heart, soul, and backbone, and it’s Butler who helped her form new ways and means of remembering and to “think sideways” like Butler does. Such thinking involves “acknowledging the passions we hold,” rather than striving for some kind of false objectivity or distanced assessment, then “thinking about HOW we are thinking and perceiving.” Then, use this passionate thinking to identify and write about people who might have seemed inconsequential but who were “really there” and “really consequential” in their contexts. This kind of thinking makes way for revisioning and reimagining texts and people. It also demonstrates that, without doubt that those doing “Black feminist rhetorical scholarship” are here, that they are “sane,” and that they are hard at work in the archives and well beyond. Her own archival work grows out of her long-held desire to know and understand the work of the women around her, her spiritual and intellectual forbearers and the obligation she feels to show and honor the strength of the “ancestors.” Over the decades, I have learned a great deal by heeding Jackie’s admonition to acknowledge and honor our own passions rather than trying to keep them somewhere in a box, while we produce “valid” work. This concept helped me understand not only the work that Jackie has done or why she spends time and effort remembering people like her ninth-grade history teacher, Miss Katie Johnson, who taught African American history out of her own personal library—and opened up a new world of scholarship as well as way of thinking for ger young pupil. Such lessons eventually led Jackie, in graduate school, to question all old paradigms of research and to begin rethinking—well, everything—about what constitutes research, about who and what are legitimate objects of research, about what “counts” as a source, about what is “anointed” as knowledge, and what is not. These insights have led me to broaden my own understanding of research, of its goals and processes. And to try to introduce students to this broader and more compelling understanding of research. As a result, I have seen students adopt a whole new attitude toward “research,” now seeing it as something close to them and to their lives and goals. And wanting to pursue it, in their own ways and using their own means. I hope, fervently, that I am helping students learn at least a little about “thinking sideways.” If so, I have Jacqueline Jones Royster to thank for that—and for so much more. ... View more

Don’t take anything for granted. Perhaps this is the most important lesson I learned from teaching online for four and a half semesters. In other words, this post addresses my own experiences with basic technology and also with ADHD incompatible classrooms. No one should have to teach without basic technology--and no one should take basic technology for granted, either. By basic technology, I mean a smart classroom equipped with a computer, a projector, speakers, a screen/smart board, and internet access. Nothing fancy. Or so I thought. In contemplating in-person teaching, the possibility of returning to dysfunctional technology felt daunting and frustrating. The good thing about remote learning was that I could rely on my own technological setup on Zoom, Google Docs, and the course management system to keep the course organized. Returning to the under-funded public university where I would teach as an adjunct in spring 2023 meant precarious access to the basic classroom technology I took for granted when I taught in the southwest. The public university system to which I am returning to in the northeast is touted for its low tuition, as having “more bang for your buck”—and it’s true that tuition is generally much lower than most other post-secondary institutions in our region. But what if the bang is more like an explosion? What if a bang for your buck means classrooms without basic technology and buildings with 30-year-old ventilation systems that don’t work—before and during a global pandemic. I have spent a lot of time and a lot of free writing in the last several weeks trying to figure out if I really wanted to step back into this situation and what it would take to be able to do it. There are a limited number of smart classrooms at the campus where I would teach, and those classrooms are generally poorly ventilated with little-to-no space for social distancing. The remaining classrooms offered limited promise of better ventilation, and also used portable technology incompatible with accessibility for teachers with ADHD. By portable, I mean classrooms that are not equipped with basic technology. The instructor must make reservations with IT so that technology can be brought into the classroom, and set up by IT and/or the instructor, all semester every day that the course meets. This system is perhaps a relic of an era when technology was needed only occasionally, for example, if the instructor planned to show a film. For instructors who need basic technology every day of the semester, this arrangement is not serendipitous. Here’s a short list of classrooms with portable technology that must be set up by IT and/or the instructor that, in my experience, are NOT reasonable accommodations for ADHD: Rooms where the key to a technology cabinet is provided and I must set up the technology myself and/or with IT support every day at the beginning of class. Rooms that require me to bring my own laptop to campus as part of a 1-2 hour commute (each way) on public transit, only to find out that my laptop often did not work correctly with the available technology. Rooms with no or broken window shades. In these rooms, sunlight interferes with projection and students cannot see the screen. This makes technology unusable. Before the pandemic lockdown, I was sometimes able to switch from the incompatible classroom to a smart classroom. If a smart classroom wasn't available, I struggled with inaccessible portable technology for the entire semester. In the past, because of my disabilities, I spent multiple hours attempting to find workarounds to an untenable situation. In particular, I remember that broken window shade and the piercing sunlight that rendered the screen nearly invisible. When we switched classrooms, the students and I were stuck in a space in one of the buildings desperately in need of renovation. That classroom had basic technology, but the temperature was often as high as 85 degrees. That was spring 2020, nearly three years ago. Lockdown moved all of us out of that classroom to remote learning, and the catastrophes that followed. By fall 2022, I learned, nothing had changed. That classroom was still overheated, and ventilation remained a seemingly insoluble problem across campus. Contemplating a return to a stultifying normal seemed out of the question. Preparing to teach from my bedroom during lockdown in March 2020 Photo by Susan Bernstein. March 16, 2020 Remote learning, with strong asynchronous components, greatly supports ADHD learning in sustainable ways. For instance, before the pandemic, I relied on the setup of the course management system to set up my class, supplemented by hard copies of assignments and supplements to support the assignment. When we moved online, I quickly learned that we would need workarounds for students who had difficulty accessing the course management system on mobile devices, including students with disabilities. The most significant workaround was the liquid syllabus, which operates outside the structure of the course management system and offers students a more comprehensive layout of the structure of the course (see this sample liquid syllabus for English 102 by Professor Jennifer Ortiz at West Los Angeles College). The liquid syllabus, as its name suggests, is a living document that more readily follows the flow of the course without the constraint of the course management system. I could make better use of the students’ formative and summative feedback and my field notes to make needed and more visible changes that could be explained in synchronous time, and easily accessed in asynchronous time, amplified by email and group chat. Additionally, because the liquid syllabus is more fluid that the linear structure of the course management system, I found that I struggled less with organization and time management, two issues that are often challenging for people with ADHD. If I had been wary of online courses before the pandemic, I now understand how the unlimited access to technology and asynchronous learning components are incredibly helpful for access to higher education for disabled students, and disabled teachers. Yet, throughout my leave of absence this fall, I also began to understand the contradictions of not returning to campus. While I needed access to the basic technology that remote teaching provides, I miss face-to-face encounters with students, including the spontaneity that happens when, together in the same room, technologically equipped or not, we grapple with the challenges and satisfactions of writing and learning together, even as those memories were tinged with reminders of the consequences of the lack of basic technology and poor ventilation. Even so, isolation was beginning to feel counterproductive. Teaching from my bedroom was steadily losing its novelty. In the throes of these contradictions, I worked remotely with my colleagues to attempt to find a smart classroom. Since the poor ventilation could not be ameliorated, I would have to base my decision to return on receiving reasonable accommodations, the basic technology that I have come to rely on and that offers accessibility as per ADA law. Knowing that I will have these accommodations for those with ADHD eases the way back to the classroom, as does the privilege of being able to make the choice to return to a difficult and contradictory situation. I have struggled to write what seems like a very personal post, as I struggle with the difficulties of returning to a situation with many unknown factors. What was the main point of the many drafts I attempted, then relegated to my info dump Google Doc file? In writing, breaking down the component parts of making a decision felt like a constant struggle, and the writing became as difficult as deciding whether or not to return to in-person teaching. In the end, however, I realized that writing about the struggle cannot be removed from struggling with the decision itself. So this post arrives at many conclusions. Basic technology must be a reasonable accommodation for every worker in higher education–and must be readily available for every student and every classroom. Poor ventilation and inaccessible technology are not merely metaphors–they are material consequences of the ongoing defunding of public higher education. Writing helps and writing reminds me that teaching also helps, even as the struggle continues. Reader, I am returning to an in-person classroom after nearly three years–and as fraught as it seems, also, in unexpected moments, the thought of returning fills me with joy. ... View more

I just returned from the exhilarating National Women’s Studies Association conference in Minneapolis, the first time we’ve met in person since the pandemic began. The keynote address this year was by Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E Richie, whose book, Abolition. Feminism. Now. is making waves, and not just for feminist scholars. I attended pedagogically focused panels that , which invites us to think about the ways in which institutions—including universities—prop up the carceral state and also how they might work toward dismantling it. I was grateful for the community of caring instructors who invited me to consider the book in light of writing-focused classrooms. In this cultural moment, “abolition” refers to the movement to end state violence, writ large. The core argument of Davis et al’s text is that “the movement to end gender and sexual violence … can never be isolated from the work to end state violence” (2). Whether or not you subscribe to that perspective, you might agree that core aspects of “abolition” describe what we do in writing classrooms, which is to help students analyze power structures, mindsets, cultures of knowledge, and ways of being. A few of these proposed “abolitionist pedagogy” practices seem particularly useful to writing classrooms: Practicing capacity building, in which we help students name and value the expertise they bring to our classrooms; Building relationships in our classrooms that foster trust and vulnerability, often with the help of “community agreements” about dealing respectfully with conflict that students co-write in the first week. Repeated check-ins with the class are a good idea: “How are these working for us?” Do we want to revise them?” Creating an environment in which everyone (including the instructor) can take risks, fail, support one another with generosity, and try again; Understanding that our students are whole, embodied humans, and that we can value not just what they think, but also acknowledge how they feel; Practicing slowing down, (as I have written about in an earlier post) and reflecting with students on the process of reading, interpretation, and changing our minds; Envisioning writing classroom versions of “mutual aid”—people working to meet each other’s needs—with resource-sharing, pooling expertise, and modeling collaboration; Trying “ungrading” practices that address the punitive power dynamics of traditional grading. Contract grading is one approach, explained by Michael A. Reyes in a recent Bits post, but there are many other “ungrading” practices informed by social justice goals, some of which I explain here. Valuing curiosity, imagination, experimentation, and even dreaming, perhaps by teaching speculative fiction, such as the short stories in Octavia’s Brood. After all, shouldn’t our writing classrooms be a space where students begin to articulate the world they want to work toward? If none of those approaches speak to you, perhaps the “abolitionist pedagogy” panel’s simple but profound final suggestion might: consider asking your students on the final day of class, “What have we learned? What have we un-learned?” When we—and our students—understand the significance of the second question, we will fully understand why the writing classroom feels like such a revolutionary (and perhaps even an abolitionist) space. Photo by April Lidinsky, 2022 ... View more

Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin toddlers, Dylan and Escher. I have found that many of the lessons that students enjoy the most have a healthy blend of choice and surprise. I enjoy the paradox; a core aspect of choice is control and a core aspect of surprise is releasing control. One example of an engaging activity that involves choice and surprise for students is essay-tagging. Here’s how I came to it. I used to spend a lot of time grouping students for writing workshops. I’d write down observations about individual students’ writing. Then I’d try to create heterogeneous groupings with mixed skill levels and mixed interest levels. I’d also group students based on my perceptions about how they would feel interacting with groupmates at an interpersonal level: Would they like their group mates enough to work with them? For those of you who teach writing, you know that the writing workshop can be inherently fraught. Even with meticulous scaffolding, outcomes can be uneven, and the experience can be unpleasant for students for a variety of reasons, from students not showing up to students not wanting to talk to their peers about their writing. Add to that a teacher-driven workshop-group makeup, and you can get an exhausted teacher and cynical students before the writing workshop even begins. For a while, emboldened with the idea that choice matters, I started telling students to pick their own groups. There were some benefits to this, but engagement was still not at its highest, and suddenly I was getting flashbacks about being picked last for every sports game in middle school gym class. I needed another plan. Unfortunately, a plan did not emerge. For years, I just vacillated between doing writing workshops and not doing them and grouping intentionally and randomly. I had no pedagogical consistency—and no good plan in sight. Then, in 2018, when my twins were born, I started cartooning about parenting and posting my cartoons on Instagram @singlemomtwins. It was my first real foray into Instagram, and I got a bit hashtag happy. I loved how people could find what they were looking for by searching how you’d labeled your work, so I decided to see if I could apply this to my writing workshops. The idea was simple. Students would write some hashtags at the top of their essays that would identify the themes and examples in their work. I told students that their hashtags could represent big ideas or even small points that came up, and they could be playful. Give an example about your time in Australia in one of your paragraphs? That would be #Australia. Talk about persistence? #dontgiveup. Focus on the gods in ancient Greece? #Greekgoddramallamas. I didn’t limit the number of hashtags. Then, I posted each essay title (without its author) on a LMS page with the hashtags next to it. Each essay title was hyperlinked so that when students clicked on it, it would open the full essay along with its author. The essay they selected is the essay they would critique. Students picked the essay they wanted to workshop based on the hashtags that interested them and put their name next to their selection after they picked it so that everyone was chosen! (In our LMS, all I had to do was give students editing power for the page.) This activity created choice—students could pick an essay with topics that intrigued them. It also created surprise. They had no idea who wrote the essay or what it would actually be about when they clicked on it. Students loved being able to pick what they were going to read. It helped get them invested in the work. Students also appreciated that they were chosen not by randomness or personality but by what they chose to write about. I assigned students four key questions or prompts to answer about the essay they were workshopping: Usually two prompts would be technical, such as “identify the thesis statement and explain whether it contains the required components” or “select the paragraph that has the clearest sentences and explain why you think so.” The other two questions would be about engagement, such as “did this essay live up to its hashtags?” or “what might make this essay more interesting to you?” Students submitted their feedback to me for credit, and then I gave the feedback to the students whose work they critiqued, along with my comments. And that was it. That constituted the workshop. Some students talked with each other about their feedback outside of class, and it certainly would work to group students up for a debrief after this activity, but I found that the written feedback was enough to motivate students to write compelling future drafts. And now … tag, you’re it! I’d love to know what you’ve done to engage students in the essay workshop (or similar pedagogical activity). Share your thoughts by commenting below! ... View more

For a recent assignment in my corequisite class, I distributed an assignment sheet, posted it online, and made in-class and online announcements to remind students of the due date, also listed in the syllabus. I sent an email as well, along with a reminder to our GroupMe chat. When I introduced the assignment in class, I wrote the assignment targets and due dates on the white board in our classroom. At the end of that session, a student stopped me from erasing the board: “Could you wait a minute?” He pulled out his phone and snapped a picture. That moment—coupled with a number of assignments not submitted on time this semester—prompted me to pay more attention to HOW my students were taking notes, or more accurately, NOT taking notes. Following best practices for accessibility, I post outlines for most class sessions online prior to class, and this semester, I have made short videos with accompanying handouts for students to watch prior to class and review after class. In the videos, I add annotations to notes and remind students to make a note of certain points. Yet consistently, students in my corequisite composition courses do not take notes: I can see that they have not opened the online notes that accompany videos. I printed one set of notes and offered bonus credit for completing annotations as students watched the online videos. No one took me up on that offer. Most come to class without pens or pencils; they sometimes open my posted outlines on laptops or phones, but with few exceptions, they neither type nor handwrite notes during class.  As I mentioned in my last post, much of the key information for my courses is available in multiple locations and multiple modalities. Corequisite students, however, are not engaging with that material. An example of note taking   In stark contrast are students in my upper division courses, who have taken all the materials offered and adapted it to their own needs, clearly engaged. When I asked them about their note-taking habits, here’s a sample of what they described: Several students talked about the value of listening—one student, for example, said she takes minimal notes in class, using just a bulleted list of key words and concepts. She struggles with writing speed and spelling, and by noting just keywords and concepts, she can keep pace with listening and fill in the details afterwards.  Another student noted that she likes taking notes by hand; it forces her to think about what is important and what she needs to write. A couple of students in my advanced grammar course create a copy of posted notes in Google Docs, and both add comments and examples during class. They can discuss the notes as they prepare for class, and they compare their understanding of the material afterwards. The shared notes become the basis of their review materials and their questions for me. Several students make copies of my handouts and use note-taking apps on tablets to annotate them during class. I have watched these students take pictures of illustrations or sentence analyses from class to insert into their digital notes. An example of a sentence diagram One of the students who takes notes by hand said she almost always re-writes them later, re-organizing and making sure things make sense while the ideas are still relatively fresh. Another student who takes notes by hand pointed out that she uses multiple colors to annotate and organize various headers and examples, and she often adds her own comments, ideas, and examples in a different color. She described the satisfaction of “3D spatial awareness” as she locates information in the pages of her notebook.  An example of a sentence diagram   The strategies differ, but each one suggests intentional engagement with the content—multimodal, personalized, and very often writing-based. These same students have emailed me, responded to my emails, and shown up in my office to talk about their learning.   Like many schools, we offer a student success course for first-year students, a course in which study strategies and note-taking skills are explicitly addressed. Yet 13 weeks into our first semester, most of these corequisite students have not engaged with the content through note-taking or taken advantage of numerous opportunities to do so. When the students meet with me in conference, I generally prod them to make notes, to bullet suggestions and then prioritize what they want to do next. But the advice is not sinking in. Our writing fellows have volunteered to put together some note-taking and online success hacks for the corequisite classes next spring, and if the corequisite students are willing, the fellows will do some one-on-one mentoring. Still, I wonder what else might work for this group. How are you encouraging your corequisite students to take notes? Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

An example of "dark academia" aesthetic Right before Halloween this year, Pamela Paul published an op-ed in The New York Times, “The Season of Dark Academia,” leveling some justified criticism at the “dark academia” aesthetic of social media fame, noting that far from the romanticized view popularized in the aesthetic, “real” academia these days is indeed dark, with 62 percent of the faculty “contingent” workers, with food insecurity rampant on college campuses, and with mental health issues skyrocketing. Paul, who is the author of eight books and former editor of the Times Book Review, says she can easily understand the appeal of an aesthetic like Dark Academia, which can offer a particular version of a “dream life” lived within the walls of ancient libraries. But she suggests there can be a pretty steep price to pay for this particular form of escapism, as her references to “real” academia make clear. Paul’s discussion of dark academia got me thinking about internet aesthetics in general, which spread like kudzu during the 2010s and 2020s on social media sites like Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok—from Cottagecore to Weirdcore, from Indie Kid to bisexual lightning, and many, many more. Linked to visual style/couture as personal style, internet aesthetics were so ubiquitous that Paul didn’t feel the need to spend much time identifying them and that the word “aesthetic” has morphed into an all-purpose adjective (as in “that’s so aesthetic”). My students have, with great good humor, tried to match me to one or more aesthetics—always, I must say, to my surprise. It is always interesting to get a glimpse of how they see me, what they assume about my “style” and my likes and dislikes. As a result, I’ve sometimes spent time asking them to do some freewriting about their relationship and reaction to internet aesthetics in general—and to how they understand their own personal styles in particular. Once they begin to write—and then to discuss—they often begin to point out the stereotyping inherent in such “aesthetics” and to mount criticisms of them as such. These discussions always lead us to consider the degree to which any kind of label attached to people can work to stereotype them, often in hurtful, harmful ways that don’t come close to capturing the “real” person so labeled. But students also point out that such aesthetics and labels can help create group identity, a kind of solidarity and togetherness that they found so sorely lacking during the pandemsic. In so many words, they tell me to “lighten up and have some fun.” But I don’t give up so easily: so I remind them that it can be fun to try on a label—or an aesthetic—if you are the one doing the choosing, but a lot less fun when others are imposing them on you. Let’s think about that for a while and then think twice (at least!) before we make assumptions about people based on what we perceive their “style” to be or to say about them. I wonder if your students are still using such aesthetics and, if so, what they see as their good—and bad—aims and uses. Photo by Ricardo Esquivel from Pexels. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Dr. Leslie Werden, a Professor of English & Rhetoric and Department Head of Humanities at Morningside University in Sioux City, Iowa. She teaches Persuasive Writing, Small Group Communication, Literary Theory & Analysis, British Literature, Page to Stage, and more.    Blaming Binaries The large post-it note, halved with a line down the middle separating a list of binaries, was left behind in the classroom. On one side: white, power, strength, leader, good. On the other: black, no control, weakness, follower, bad. The lone black student arrived in the classroom and cocked her head, glaring at the list, brows furrowed, lips tightly pressed together. “What. Is. This?” she asked her professor. A discussion about three different stories from the class before. “Thank God,” the student said. The binaries left behind, assume too much and remain misunderstood.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

The goal of cultural semiotics as I have described it in Signs of Life in the USA is to probe beneath the surface of our behavior and experience to uncover those meanings that are often hiding, as it were, in plain sight. There is nothing esoteric or hieratic about this, and all it really takes is the ability, and willingness, to set aside the more immediate claims of the phenomena that we are interpreting to reveal something yet more fundamental and often more profound. Take, for example, Elon Musk’s recent takeover of Twitter. The immediate significance of this event is obvious, confronting us with an extremely high-profile instance of the culture war that is now raging not only in America but also throughout the world: with the prospect (if not already the reality) of Twitter's being wrenched wide open to the most appalling kinds of hateful and dis-informational tweets, it is by no means an overreaction to be very worried about what this will mean for the future of our democracy and for the world as well. Quite appropriately, an enormous amount of attention is already being addressed to this very real threat. But, behind this threat lies a question that I have yet to see being asked—a very simple question that could also be asked about other extremely powerful agents (like Facebook and TikTok) in the digital age: why have we granted so much power to Twitter and the other titans of social media? After all, no one—no government, no religious authority, no traditional agent of social control—compels us to use one social medium over another, much less tolerate what amount to near-monopolies like Twitter’s. Why are even the extremists who have flocked to sites like Parler and Gettr, and for whom Truth Social was created, so eager to return to Twitter and take it over? The answer to such questions lies in a phenomenon that Malcolm Gladwell explores in his book The Tipping Point. Specifically, he posits that certain “Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do.” Though the book was published before the full rise of social media, Gladwell’s thesis regarding what he calls “the law of the few” (that is, the way that a small number of select individuals can influence the behavior of a huge number of people) sheds light on the way that Facebook, for instance, wiped out MySpace, even though MySpace got there first—or, how Apple's iPhone obliterated the Blackberry. To put this another way, in a fundamental contradiction of America's still-cherished mythology of individualism, the many follow the few in American society, conforming to what they see everyone else doing once a certain “critical mass” has been reached. Thus, with respect to the topic of this blog, we can say that people flock to Twitter because that is where the flock is.   But it doesn't have to be this way. For, to adapt the anti-war slogan of the sixties, “what if they gave a war and no one came?” we might now ask, “what if they gave a Twitter and no one tweeted?” If this question seems unthinkable, that leaving Twitter to simmer in its own juices simply cannot be contemplated, then there lies the deeper significance of Musk’s Twitter takeover: the digital age is no more self-reliant than the notoriously conformist 1950s, perhaps even less so. The promise of Apple's famous “1984” commercial that personal computing will liberate the masses has never been anything but a sales pitch promoting mass conformity on behalf of a tiny number of corporate titans who rake in all the profits and the power.     Photo by Ravi Sharma (2020) used under the Unsplash License. ... View more

    On a recent tip from Shawna Shapiro, I got to attend a virtual seminar sponsored by Brandeis University’s Language, Culture and Justice Hub, which is part of the university’s International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life. Though I tuned in a little late, I believe the webinar was organized by Professor Leigh Swigart, a linguistic anthropologist who serves as Director of the Center’s Programs in International Justice and Society. One of the early slides in the four brief presentations really resonated with me: it aimed to capture the evolution we seek in terms of diverse languages and dialects. Beginning with monolingual English on the left margin, naming the still-too-often state of affairs, arrows pointed right to tolerance of linguistic diversity and then to acceptance, respect, and finally affirmation, solidarity, and critique. This simple graphic succinctly captured the struggle we are engaged in and implicitly challenged those at the webinar (and all teachers of writing) to place themselves and their departments/colleges on the continuum: just where are we? What has led to that placement? And what will it take to move to the affirmation end of the continuum? It struck me that we can ask the same question of our students: where do they place themselves on the continuum and what led to that placement?  One other takeaway from this webinar came in Shapiro’s remarks. For Shapiro, three key terms to guide our teaching and our pedagogy and our curricula are Access, Asset, and Agency. In discussing access, she referred to her commitment to explaining the why of her courses: why she had chosen the topic, the readings, the assignments, the whole curriculum, so that students have access to her thinking—and have a chance to engage with it and to add their own responses. Access also assumes that we will consciously help students in understanding how to meet (and to critique) the expectations implicit in any course. In discussing asset, Shapiro asked how we can help students draw on their own rich linguistic, cultural, and global backgrounds and how we can bring that richness to our readings, assignments, and genres, perspectives, and so on. And finally, in terms of agency, she asked how we can help students make informed rhetorical and linguistic decisions that are consonant with their own goals.  Urging that we reject any deficit-based framework for writing and reading instruction (instead of asking what students lack but rather what the institution lacks) in favor of an assets-based perspective, Shapiro offered a couple of examples of how we can promote agency and value assets at the same time. We can, she continued, suggest that students might want to include citations in any language rather than looking for translations, thus valuing the language of the original research being cited. She also led a brief discussion on the use of names in the classroom, giving examples of asking students what they preferred to be called (and learning how to pronounce it correctly) but not rejecting out of hand what she called “additive identities,” that is, a name a student might have chosen for good personal reasons rather than just because their given name was “hard for English speakers to say.” Recognizing and respecting names is, of course, one way of adding to student agency.  Of course, offering students a wide range of choices—in readings, in assignments or projects, in forms of assessment—are other important ways of helping build a sense of personal agency and autonomy. That is a goal I believe all teachers of writing can and should aspire to! The image above, "Brandeis University" by Eric_Haines, is licensed under CC BY 2.0. ... View more

Content alert for sexist language, white supremacy, racist violence, and suicide.  If you are having thoughts of suicide, you are not alone. A mental health professional can help. Call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988, or visit https://www.speakingofsuicide.com/resources/    This week I am reading Heather Clark’s Red Comet, a recent biography of Sylvia Plath, poet and author of the novel The Bell Jar. I was fascinated to learn that Plath once taught as an adjunct at her alma mater, Smith College, in 1957-58. Plath had a temporary, renewable one-year appointment, and in the fall semester she taught three sections of first-year English. Plath quit this position after her first year because it was, she discovered, untenable with her life’s work as a writer. In a letter to her brother Warren in the fall of 1957, Plath reveals: . . . the sacrifice of energy and life blood I’m making for this job is all out of proportion to the good I am doing in it. . . I am sacrificing my energy, writing, & versatile intellectual life for grubbing over 66 Hawthorne papers a week and trying to be articulate in front of a rough class of spoiled bitches. (Clark 509) The excerpt of this letter, with its dated, sexist language, may be shocking to some, and Plath  probably did not intend for the public to read it. All the same, the sentiments Plath expresses are unsurprising. Teaching first-year English was new to Plath, and she had recently returned to the United States from England, where she had finished a second bachelor’s degree at Cambridge University. Plath had survived rigorous academics, severe mental illness, a suicide attempt, shock treatment, and incarceration in a mental hospital in Massachusetts. As a twenty-five year old neurodivergent woman, Plath was used to fighting her way back to the fragile equilibrium of the intellectual life that she craved. Adjuncting, as suggested in her letter to Warren, used up too much of her time and energy  to maintain a clear focus on her own writing (Clark 509). In the late 1950s, the first semester of first-year English at Smith was focused on literature written in English, especially Romantic and Modernist writers whose predominance was beginning to fade for the younger generation. Five years later, James Baldwin (eight years older than Plath) wrote “As Much Truth as One Can Bear.” This 1962 essay considers the emergence of younger post-World War II writers, and especially those writers who approach their work from a very different sensibility: We are the generation that must throw everything into the endeavor to remake America into what we say we want it to be. Without this endeavor, we will perish. However immoral or subversive this may sound to some, it is the writer who must always remember that morality, if it is to remain or become morality, must be perpetually examined, cracked, changed, made new. (Baldwin 50) For Baldwin, writers have a special responsibility to examine, dismantle, and “remake” America, not in the service of perpetuating a fantasy, but for forging new ground for the greater good, beyond individual writing lives. Indeed, in this essay, the reader can find one of Baldwin’s most well-known adages, a quote that reinforces his point about the urgent necessity of social transformation: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” The fact that Baldwin and Plath wrote as near contemporaries in the late 1950s and early 1960s is interesting to me. Even as Clark contextualizes Plath’s life and work with details from post-World War II history, any consciousness of the Civil Rights Movement appears to be absent. In this way, Plath’s concerns might be seen through the lens of what Koa Beck identifies as White Feminism (also see Mathew and Hariharan).Baldwin, who was Black and grew up in Harlem, left the United States for exile in France in the late 1940s. His hope was to discover his vocation as a writer away from white supremacy in America. But in 1957, as the Civil Rights Movement continued to unfold, Baldwin returned to the United States to bear witness, to engage with writing and activism (See I Am Not Your Negro by Raoul Peck and James Baldwin: A Biography by David Leeming). I link Baldwin and Plath through the year 1957: Plath’s year as a struggling adjunct, and Baldwin’s return to the United States. In fall of 1957, nine Little Rock, Arkansas teenagers (known as the Little Rock Nine) became the first Black students to attend Little Rock’s Central High School. The Arkansas governor called in the National Guard to prevent the students from entering the school. White supremacist riots ensued to keep the Little Rock Nine out of Central High School, and eventually President Eisenhower sent the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to quell the rioting and to escort the Little Rock Nine students to school (also see Warriors Don’t Cry by Melba Patillo Beals).  Photo credit: The U.S. Army At a sixty-five year distance, it seems peculiar that the author of Plath’s biography, although making use of Plath’s copiously written journals and letters, makes no mention of these national events in Red Comet. I am puzzled by this absence, until I consider white supremacy, white privilege, and the overwhelmingly white poets of Plath’s acquaintance. What turns might American Literature have taken if that generation of poets followed Baldwin’s call to reckon with the truth? What might Sylvia Plath have contributed to this reckoning, as a struggling adjunct “sacrificing her energy”?  Work/life balance, Plath suggested in 1957, was an impossible fantasy. In 2022, life as an adjunct often feels critically unbalanced and extremely isolating. Yet, in a subsequent lecture, Baldwin advocates  that his audience must “engage in the struggle, which is universal and daily, of all human beings on the face of this globe to get to become human beings” (63). That is, even as people appear to inhabit different worlds or spheres of influence, these worlds touch each other, intersect and collide. Struggle is a means of survival, and Baldwin reiterates that his  audience must take action if change is to occur. For Baldwin, struggle for the greater good offers “artistic integrity” and is often “our only hope” (67). For adjuncts, contingent work remains destabilizing and often, as Sylvia Plath discovered, debilitating. Even so, as the struggle of the Little Rock Nine affirms, history unfurls in and out of classrooms. Participating in, and acknowledging and bearing witness to struggle might serve as a means of connection for students and teachers. In the face of formidable challenges, even acknowledgment might seem painful and exhausting, but no less necessary, in troubling times.   Works Cited Baldwin, James. “As Much Truth As One Can Bear.” The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, edited by Randall Kenan, Pantheon Books, 2010, pp. 50-57. Baldwin, James. “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.” The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, edited by Randall Kenan, Pantheon Books, 2010, pp. 63-70. Clark, Heather. Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. Penguin Random House, 2021. ... View more

  Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin toddlers, Dylan and Escher.   I hypothesize that the link between happiness and success is greater than many of us can imagine. On the one hand, this is obvious. Doing laundry doesn’t make me happy; when I put it off, it makes me less happy. I then have even less motivation for completing the task and less success. Relatedly, I could have 15 assignments that I do not enjoy grading take three times as long to grade as the 60 larger assignments that I’m excited about grading. For me, happiness creates energy. Importantly, I have found that my own happiness can give students energy as well: Quick feedback is energizing; a smile directed at a student can be invigorating for them;  saying “I love x topic” creates a boost that often makes students dig into the reading sooner. There are a million small ways that our happiness can rub off on students and help them succeed. I do not think that teachers need to jump up and down excitedly at the front of the classroom or ignore the vast array of other human emotions and mental health issues that are parts of our lives. I am a happy teacher who also struggles with anxiety and often feels a sense of sadness, especially in the times we are living in now. The kind of happiness I’m advocating for is a sense of joy and centeredness in teaching—the kind of happiness that, most simply put, allows me to look forward to my job more often than not and the kind of happiness that reminds students of my commitment to them. One way to achieve joy and centeredness is through activities that nurture the mind and body. For some of us, these may be self-care activities like swimming, massage, meditation or yoga—all wonderful but sometimes costly experiences for a profession that for many does not pay well. There are other activities like browsing library shelves, working on sleep hygiene, and chatting with friends about daily life challenges on a walk. Great also! When I engage in some of these mindful practices, my body is much more centered and ready to teach. All this is to say if your academic institution is having a free ten-minute chair massage, do not inadvertently forgo the opportunity as I did today! And yet, there is something simpler that can be done to increase professor happiness. It is to ask yourself, when lesson planning “do I like this activity?” or, to use the language of Marie Kondo, author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, “does this lesson ‘spark joy’”? If your lesson plan does not spark joy for you at least half the time, you may consider selecting an alternate approach. One moment when I realized my lessons were not sparking joy related to subject and verb agreement. I love teaching sentence boundaries and created an acronym to help students remember the parts of sentences, linked the acronym to Philly pharmacies, and even created a scavenger hunt activity where students look for run-ons and fragments on bulletin boards throughout the campus.  I genuinely believe that being able to know where a sentence begins and ends is a huge step toward literacy and success—and a form of my own cultural capital that should be shared. However, subject verb agreement…not so much. Correcting students’ use of third person singular verbs (i.e., she knows rather than she know) frankly felt racist to me, especially because it lacked any regard for or mention of Black English. How did my unhappiness about this topic translate to the classroom? Instead of speaking about my true belief that what I was about to teach was racist, I would apologize for a lesson that was about to be “boring” but was part of the “student learning outcomes.” I would stumble through lectures and give out worksheets for practice—a far cry from the way I like to teach. Eventually, it dawned on me that because of my perception that teaching subject/verb agreement was racist, it was not sparking joy. And yet, I couldn’t really stop because this was a student learning outcome. I’m sure many of us can relate to simply being required to teach something that we may not want to teach. However, I felt that there had to be a way to spark more joy. I changed the subject verb agreement lessons so that they discussed power dynamics imbedded in language, and I made explicit that I felt uncomfortable teaching this grammar concept as it was originally being presented. I was interested in students’ perspectives. I found some other voices on YouTube on similar issues related to language and power, like an amazing TED talk by Jamila Lyiscott and a clip from a lecture by Ta Nehisi Coates. Then I learned that my colleague, Alexine Fleck, had been doing these kinds of lessons for years and years--far before I came to them--as had a whole host of faculty at Community College of Philadelphia, where I teach. Feeling more connected to my colleague made me happy; hearing student voices about these ideas made me happy; not feeling locked into a certain requirement made me happy. Students no longer glazed over when we went over this concept. They too were energized. If you find that a lesson is not sparking joy for you, do not throw it out completely. Instead, try to figure out why and what can be done about it. It is often only the slightest modification that can make a difference. Maybe it’s just a brief discussion question about the topic—a planned tangent or a walk outside with students for 10 minutes to think more about an idea. I used to think I was beholden above all to institutional requirements, and now, thankfully, I also feel beholden to my own judgement, my own joy, and above all to my students’ success. In terms of getting my laundry done though, I would welcome suggestions. ... View more

The following interview with professors Jami Blaauw-Hara of North Central Michigan College and Mark Blauuw-Hara of the University of Toronto-Mississauga was conducted via email in August of 2022. This is the third of four parts.   David Starkey: You’ve both published quite a bit in books and scholarly journals. Why do you think that’s an important activity for working teachers? It can obviously be incredibly demanding for two-year college faculty, where scholarship often is not only unrewarded, it’s sometimes looked down upon, as a distraction from classroom teaching.   Jami Blaauw-Hara: There is so little support for scholarly work at the community college level! My dean announces faculty publications in emails, but this was often met with some amount of side-eye from colleagues for trying so hard. Since the community college is not oriented around producing original scholarship, I often need to convince administration and colleagues that I have knowledge in a particular area because I have published on it. Using teaching lore to inform practice more than scholarship is strong at community colleges. I also understand the struggle. At my school, we teach 15 credits per semester, except for summer, and many add overload onto that. We are rewarded more for taking on overload than we are for the time spent writing articles. However, scholarship has been invaluable in my teaching. I bring in drafts, discuss my roadblocks, share editor feedback, and help my students understand that writing is a highly detailed, interactive, reflexive process that changes you in the end. I believe I’m a better writing teacher for spending the time on scholarship, even if it’s just to share how writing scares me too!   Mark Blaauw-Hara: There are three main reasons that I think publishing and presenting regularly is important for two-year college faculty. First of all, and probably most importantly, putting a publication or presentation together forces you to examine what you’re doing in the classroom and articulate why you do it. That leads to better practice. Secondly, I think it’s great to work with others in your department or across the country–we can learn from one another, and it builds a sense of community among two-year folks. It can be a lonely job otherwise. And thirdly, although I greatly appreciate it when four-year scholars write about the two-year context, we really need to be a part of that conversation as well. We shouldn’t just be written about–we need to have our own voices out there.   DS: Mark, you’re the author of From Military to Academy (Utah State, 2021), which focuses on the writing and learning experiences of student military veterans. What are some of the main lessons you learned from writing the book?   MBH: I wrote that book because I like working with student veterans, and I myself wanted to understand them better. One of the main things I learned is that they come to college with some very important strengths that they developed in the military, and those strengths can help them in college. For example, they are great at achieving clearly defined missions, and they actually have quite a bit of experience with reading and writing, it’s just that in the military, writing tends to be much more direct than in academia. If we can help them transfer those skills to college, we can set them up to be more successful. And for the record, I think we should approach all of our students similarly–instead of thinking that someone who has been out of school for awhile in the workforce, say, has a lot to make up, we should ask what strengths and skills they’ve developed that will help them in the classroom.   DS: And Jami, you’ve led the Reading Apprenticeship program at North Central. We hear so much talk about how writing instructors need to become better teachers of reading. What elements of the program are particularly conducive to making that happen?   JBH: Reading Apprenticeship (RA) was a part of our work as an Achieving the Dream college, so there was institutional support for the training we needed. For me, it transformed reading much like my participation in the National Writing Project (NWP) transformed writing. We were asked to return to our own reading and understand our strategies as readers and see ourselves as mentors for apprentice readers. It reminded me that reading skill goes far beyond the ability to decode words and made me aware of all that I bring to reading that my students don’t yet understand. Just like the NWP helped me focus on my own writing to inform how I teach writing, RA helped me focus on my own reading to inform how I teach reading. One strategy that really stuck with me is returning to a place of confusion by working on very challenging texts. When I was asked to read cellular microbiology, my strategies for reading became very clear to me. I was aware of practices I did not even realize that I use like reading context clues, looking at sentence structures, annotation, slowing down, and asking questions. If I talk about how I read, I can help my students understand how to read with purpose and skill. Just like I share my writing projects in progress, I share reading that initially leaves me flummoxed and what strategies I used to understand it.    ... View more

A colleague recently shared this meme on her Facebook page, condensing a sentiment I’m hearing again and again in the hallways and Zoom meetings: what will it take for students to take responsibility for keeping up with their classes? We’ve all heard the comments and the questions: I couldn’t come last week. Did we do anything important? So what are we doing? (I’ve written about this one before!) I didn’t really understand the reading. (But I had asked them three times for questions.) Was the paper due today?   What was the topic again? When is it due? (After I’ve distributed and reviewed a handout with the due date.) Could you give me an example? (After I’ve just gone over 10 examples.) I couldn’t find it in the online course shell.  (And the online program shows the student has not logged in for two weeks.) Could you send me a list of everything I’ve missed for the last two weeks? Could you send me a list of my missing assignments? Could you tell me what my current average is and which assignments I have to finish in order to pass? (When all grades and the current average is posted online.) Did you see my email? (I answered the email within an hour after it was sent.) Could you just text me when something is due? (Reminders are set to go out in the online course shell, and we have a chat group, too.) What can I do to get extra credit? (The student asking has not done over a third of the written assignments.) And so it goes. When I started teaching, I could never have imagined the resources available to us as instructors to keep students informed: social media groups, weekly planners, assignments guides, online course shells with calendars and reminders, syllabi with links, mass emails/texts, etc. Yet some students—particularly students in my corequisite writing courses—still find themselves completely bewildered by the process of finding course materials.   My colleagues and I are equally bewildered. What else can we do? Many of our students are taking courses like University 101, designed to help them figure it out. And in our classes, redundancies are built in: information is repeated and posted in multiple places. We review, we remind, we send instructions, we conference, and we walk students through the process (sometimes more than once).  We remind ourselves that “doing college” is a lot like learning a new language; the rules that govern behavior are implicit, so we do what we can to make those rules explicit. We build partnerships to support students, we walk them to the writing center, and we repeat ourselves (without rolling our eyes).   And then at times, we get fed up and rant a little in our offices or in a Zoom meeting. But even after the rant, some of us wonder if there’s a strategy we have not tried yet.   How are you helping your students—especially first-generation, non-traditional, or multilingual students—build strategies for navigating college on their own? How are you responding to those difficult questions? I would love to hear from you. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

  One ballot initiative that  Arkansas voters will decide on this year is whether to legalize recreational marijuana. Voting for or against this measure would seem to be a fairly clear-cut decision: either you are for or against letting those twenty-one and older purchase small amounts of marijuana for personal use. Thus far, marijuana use is only legal for medical purposes in Arkansas. The choice of claims is clear: You should vote for Issue #4, or you should vote against Issue #4. This is a perfect example, however, to let students see the subtleties of argumentation as they play out in the real world. Frankly, most students would not oppose legislation that would allow the purchase of recreational marijuana. Students who do oppose would argue the physical harm that comes from smoking marijuana or the dangers of driving under the influence. They would need to provide support for their assertions from states where marijuana has already been legalized. Let’s focus, though, on why even those who support the legalization of marijuana are split over this vote. Consider the first portion of the long legal title of the amendment: “An amendment to the Arkansas Constitution authorizing possession and use of cannabis (i.e., marijuana) by adults, but acknowledging that possession and sale of cannabis remain illegal under federal law; authorizing licensed adult use dispensaries to sell adult use cannabis produced by licensed medical and adult use cultivation facilities . . . .” (That is about 10% of the title.) So, under the new law, an adult in Arkansas could legally possess one ounce of marijuana for non-medical purposes, recognizing that the drug is still illegal under federal law. Users cannot grow marijuana for their own use. Medical marijuana users can use the recreational allowance and medical marijuana would no longer be taxed, but non-medical would. Students can be pushed to see the limitations of what seemed like a “no-brainer” in voting for recreational marijuana. Users can only have a small amount in their possession at any time. Recreational marijuana will be taxed. Users cannot grow their own marijuana. Marijuana retailers will be limited. Small growers will have a hard time competing with large dispensaries due to planting restrictions. The price of marijuana will go up. Some students may find the restrictions imposed on small marijuana businesses appealing because it will lessen the amount of low-quality marijuana in the market. This amendment also makes it more difficult for people under the legal age to get marijuana due to the tight dispensary restrictions. These restrictions have unfair implications for small businesses and marijuana users, which does not reflect the changes that Arkansas voters desired when they called for a recreational marijuana amendment. This all began as a grassroots effort by voters, but in the hands of the state legislature, the amendment has failed its voting population. Now Arkansas voters face a quandary: Vote for an amendment that would allow them to buy marijuana according to very strict guidelines rather than completely miss the opportunity to legalize recreational marijuana or hope to pass a more fair amendment in the future. This example shows why it is important for students to understand and consider the implications of their arguments. A good argument in theory can have adverse effects when applied to a real-life situation. "Vote"  by Alexander Beeby is licensed under CC BY 2.0   ... View more