Photo Credit: Kyle BrettSarah Heidebrink-Bruno (recommended by Jenna Lay) is pursuing her PhD in English, with a concentration in literature and social justice pedagogies, at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. She expects to finish her degree in 2020 or 2021. She teaches a range of composition and rhetoric courses, including English 1, 2, and 11, in addition to interdisciplinary courses in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as well as Africana Studies. She has also taught online courses in English and WGSS, with a focus on pop culture themes, including modern relationships. Her research interests include restorative justice practices, women's literature of the 1960s-present, feminist theory and praxis, and writing center tutors' instruction.   How do you hope higher education will change in the next ten years? In the next ten years, I hope to see folks in higher education intentionally divorce themselves from the “ivory tower” image and embrace education as a truly equalizing experience — by prioritizing access to the most vulnerable and historically marginalized among us, including BIPOC, LGBTQIA folks, and differently abled, faculty, and staff. I would like to see a concerted effort to serve the community in which colleges and universities are located, in ways that the community deems desirable and appropriate. Moreover, I’d love for all of the stakeholders in colleges and universities to have a greater focus on holistic students’ experiences — ideally, academic and student affairs would work in tandem to recognize students as complex young adults, rather than essentializing one aspect of their identities in one space.    How does the next generation of students inspire you? I am constantly inspired by my students. Though my colleagues have sometimes suggested that students are generally apathetic and only interested in getting good grades/a degree, I think this stereotype ignores the larger structural issues that students must face in order to not feel the pressure to just “get it done.” In my experiences, I have been lucky to see students blossom through their research and writing processes into conscientious young adults who have strong values and ideas about the ways in which education — and the world — can change. They constantly amaze me with their curiosity and their willingness to ask difficult questions and challenge ideas that seem untrue or unjust.    What have you learned from other Bedford New Scholars? I relished the opportunity to learn with and from my fellow Bedford New Scholars during our summer orientation meetings. Specifically, I really liked learning about the different writing assignments and classroom activities that my peers have used — which I am eager to try myself! I learned a lot from their feedback and insight on my work, which I intend to use to improve my teaching this coming semester. Finally, it was reassuring to hear that we are all facing similar struggles, especially at this difficult time, and that they were willing to share different solutions and moral support for dealing with these challenges.    What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? I really appreciated the chance to meet and work with the dedicated staff at Macmillan who organize the BNS program. I admit that I had little insight into the publishing world and the process that scholars undergo as they progress from an idea to a fully-formed reference guide or handbook, etc., but I enjoyed learning about the inner mechanisms of the publishing world and the ways in which writers seek feedback from their peers as well as their editors throughout the process. (Admittedly, it was also cool to see exclusive content prior to its public release!) It was clear to me how much the editors and staff members really care about the authors they work with and that they are dedicated to producing thoughtful and helpful teaching materials (among other products).   Sarah Heidebrink-Bruno’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 Sarah’s assignment. For the full activity, see Student Information Sheet. For my “assignment that works,” I shared a version of my Student Information Sheet, a form that I typically hand out during the first week of class as a way to  Establish the tone of the course; Get to know more about my students and their learning needs;  And finally, gather information that I then use when I am lesson planning.  In the sheet, I ask them about their preferred names (if any), their pronouns (if they feel comfortable sharing that information with me), and what kinds of learning environment and activities they prefer. For example, I include a list of possible activities, such as Think-Pair-Share, answering questions in small groups, Check Out tickets, and more. They can either check off boxes in the list of options or add additional suggestions. After everyone has completed the sheet, we then discuss how we best learn and what kind of learning spaces have been the most impactful. I tell them about my own learning and teaching techniques that have worked for me in the past, with an explicit emphasis on the fact that I need and expect for them to give me feedback on pedagogical choices and activities in the classroom to make sure that I am reaching folks where they are. I will note that although I’ve used a hard copy of this form in the past, it would be very easy to create a version in Google forms (or another digital space), which would also allow the instructor to easily see what the most popular choices are. The instructor could then use that information for an ice-breaker activity or discussion at the beginning of the next class. ... View more

Michael S. GarciaMichael S. Garcia (recommended by Kimberly Harrison) is pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing at Florida International University. He expects to finish in April 2021. At FIU, he has taught Writing and Rhetoric, Writing in Action, Essay Writing, and Creative Writing: Forms and Practices. He has also taught 11th and 12th grade English at a Title I high school. As a writer, he has published short stories, essays, web articles, and poetry.   What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students?  We are currently living in an important social and political moment—a time rife with conflict, strife, and disinformation. Never before has there been so much (mis)information coming at us from all sides, all the time. I believe my most important role as a writing and rhetoric teacher is two-fold: I must teach students how to evaluate information through a critical lens, so they can filter out the noise and arrive at well-informed opinions; simultaneously, I must empower my students with the skills, knowledge, and confidence to express themselves in an accurate, thoughtful, and ethical way.    How will online or remote learning affect your teaching? While teaching remotely is not ideal, I have chosen to view it as a learning opportunity, a chance to grow into a more effective teacher. Keeping students active and engaged can be a challenge in the very best of times, but now, with all our teaching happening through digital tools, it is more crucial than ever to focus on student engagement. In my in-person classes, I really focus on trying my best to implement lessons and activities that engage students and keep them interested, but it is so easy to become distracted or fatigued when meeting through digital platforms like Zoom, so this aspect of my teaching will be even more important now than ever.  Also, while I already make use of digital tools and platforms in my usual in-person teaching, I will rely on them now more than ever before. I suspect that I will become more adept at using a variety of digital tools as part of the teaching process.  I anticipate that what I learn from remote teaching—not just in terms of student engagement and technology, but perhaps in other areas I haven’t considered yet—will turn this challenging time into a net-positive for my development as an educator, increasing my effectiveness as a teacher in the long term.  What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? The Bedford New Scholars program has turned out to be an invaluable experience for my personal and professional development. I have learned about the process behind creating and publishing educational materials, something I had very little idea about beforehand. The program also gave me the opportunity to collaborate with a great group of accomplished scholars from around the country that I may not have met otherwise.  Additionally, the opportunity to preview and give feedback on upcoming Bedford/St. Martin’s texts and tools that are currently being worked-on is a really cool experience. It’s great to see the thought and care that the people at Bedford/St. Martin’s put into their projects, and how important it is to them to collaborate with a varied and diverse group of educators—I think this collaborative approach helps ensure Bedford/St. Martin’s texts and tools are effective and relevant to both teachers and students.   What projects or course materials from Bedford/St. Martin's most pique your interest, and why? I was very impressed by the wide array of texts Bedford/St. Martin’s offered in my subject area; it seemed there was a text for every approach, something I wasn’t aware of before the Bedford New Scholars project.  The project I was most interested in was the Achieve learning platform. I think it’s great how the platform empowers instructors to create effective, multimodal assignments, while also encouraging and enabling collaboration—not only between the student and their instructor, but among students and their peers. It is intuitive and easy-to-use while also having depth in what it is capable of. I’m excited by the opportunities and possibilities that Achieve presents, not only in the composition classroom, but in teaching the subject of English overall.  Michael’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 Michael's assignment. For the full activity, see Discourse Community Profile.   My “Assignment That Works” is the Discourse Community Profile, the first major assignment I assign as part of the first of FIU’s two-course introductory writing sequence. For this assignment, students are asked to write a profile on a discourse community of their choice; this involves describing the discourse community, citing specific examples of discourse from this community and where it occurs, and examining what can be gleaned about this community from analyzing its use of language. Students are asked to conclude the profile with a reflection on their relationship to this discourse community, why they chose to write about it, and what they learned in the process.  The assignment sheet is designed with question-and-answer format to make the assignment prompt as clear and concise as possible. We spend the first unit of the course scaffolding up to this assignment with foundational lessons about rhetorical awareness, rhetorical strategies, how to choose the appropriate genre (this is where they learn what a “profile” is), and code-switching. Students are asked to submit a “first steps” topic proposal to ensure they understand what is being asked of them. They submit a low-stakes first draft for instructor comments and peer review, giving them time to polish their work before the final draft is due.  ... View more

Allison Dziuba (recommended by Jonathan Alexander) is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). She teaches courses in the lower-division writing sequence, in person during the school year and online during the summer. She also teaches the Summer Bridge writing lab, a pre-college course for incoming UCI first-years. She has served as the editorial assistant for College Composition and Communication and Rhetoric Society Quarterly. She is currently the Campus Writing & Communication Fellow at UCI. Allison's research interests include college students' self-sponsored literacy practices and extracurricular rhetorical education, and intersectional feminist approaches to rhetorical studies.   What is your greatest teaching challenge? Time management. Whether I’m teaching a 50- or 80-minute class session, the time seems to fly by. I was advised early on to plan lessons around just one main point or activity. Planning more concise lessons allows me to better explain what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. It also provides space for students to shape each class with their questions and interests. As a teacher, I want to better adapt to my students’ needs, to let them drive the agenda. In sketching out the full term, it’s important for me to set reasonable goals, too. Because my university is on the quarter system, we only have 10 weeks together as a class. I have to tailor my expectations based on this relatively limited time frame and prioritize the skills and experiences I hope will be most valuable to my students (more on this below). What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students? I teach lower-division writing, which means that, for many of my students, our class is their first college-level writing experience. It’s often the smallest class that they’ve taken so far (around 20 students), so they have an opportunity to get to know their instructor and peers. Understanding that this is a potentially crucial moment in their undergraduate careers but also a brief and largely introductory one, I focus on rhetorical flexibility. That is, we aim to address the question, how does a rhetor craft messages in different genres and modes to communicate their purposes? I care deeply about what my students have to say, and so my hope is that helping to cultivate their rhetorical know-how will allow their voices to reach a variety of audiences. Students explore how they can shape communications and how messages move through the world; in so doing, they engage with the often overlapping communities to which they belong—home, college, local/regional, transnational, etc. This process of discovery animates my dissertation research as well—how do college students develop their rhetorical educations and their sense of belonging within campus and broader ecologies? What is it like to co-design or work with the editorial team at Bedford/St. Martin's? I’ve enjoyed working with the English composition editors because they’re knowledgeable about the world of writing instruction and they’re attentive to the needs of instructors. These traits, combined with their close familiarity with the Bedford catalogue, make for generative working relationships. For example, one of the workshops during the BNS summit was about developing writing assignments that are transparent in their aims—a topic that I and other teachers think about a lot—paired with a preview of a forthcoming book focused on tackling writing problems. Special kudos to Leah Rang and her team for organizing a virtual summit experience this summer that ran smoothly, covered a wide range of topics, and provided both graduate students and editorial staff opportunities to get to know one another and to ask each other productive questions about composition pedagogy. What have you learned from other Bedford New Scholars? I value the creativity and generosity of my BNS colleagues. In particular, I’m inspired by the assignments they’ve shared and their explanations of how these activities function in their classrooms. A few examples are Corinne’s gamification of teaching about the (potentially unintended) circulation and re-appropriation of texts, Kalyn’s step-by-step approach to analyzing rhetors’ source synthesis, and Sierra’s engagement of visual composition practices, as inspired by her pre–grad school career. I plan to incorporate elements of these activities into my own teaching practice. Overall, gathering this group of inquisitive, like-minded folks together for the summit lead to fruitful discussions about teaching and what we care about as teachers. These conversations and my peers’ commitment to their students will help to sustain my academic journey, and I hope to continue to cultivate these connections. Allison’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 Allison's assignment. For the full activity, see Opinion Barometer Activity  I’m sharing the “Opinion Barometer,” an in-class activity that aims to help students recognize the knowledges that they bring to the classroom and to explore nuances of rhetorical stances, beyond mere pro/con. I credit a fellow graduate student writing instructor with the spatial and interactive structure of the activity, and I’ve developed it over time to align with course assignments and to be relevant to the populations of students I’m teaching. Students are given statements or claims and are asked to move to a point in the classroom to indicate how much they agree or disagree with the statement. I’ve used this activity with first-year students who are encountering college-level courses and college life for the first time; the sample questions are crafted particularly with new college students in mind. I feel that the Opinion Barometer facilitates honest discussions about my students’ goals and expectations for their college careers. I’ve also used this as a warm-up activity before diving into an op-ed assignment. My intention is to boost students’ perceptions of their own expertise and to begin brainstorming topics that they have opinions about. I’d like to think more about how this activity could be adapted for an online teaching environment. Thanks to my fellow Bedford New Scholars for considering possible modifications. For instance, Sidney recommended gauging students’ opinions via an online poll and then asking them to write brief rationales for their positions. ... View more

Sidney Blaylock (recommended by Kate Pantelides) is pursuing his PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition at Middle Tennessee State University. He expects to finish in May 2021. He teaches Expository Writing and Research and Argumentation. His research interests include multimodality, rhetorical analysis, new media, cultural rhetorics, digital rhetorics, film, and afrofuturism.   What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students? The ability to understand how to critically read and assess both texts and situations. Higher education should give students the ability and the resources to evaluate information and ideas that they come in contact with and to make informed choices. This practice should not only extend to what students read or write but to their daily lives. I want students to understand that the ideologies of close reading can give them strategies that can inform their interpretation of popular culture texts in addition to great literature, which helps them find meaning in the texts they interact with on a daily basis. I also want students to understand that the idea of the rhetorical situation undergirds human activities and human communication whether it is as important as giving a presentation to colleagues on the job or as mundane as ordering a coffee at Starbucks, so that they can navigate the world as successfully as possible. Without being able to critically read and assess texts and situations, I feel that students are at a disadvantage, especially from those seeking to misuse power or misrepresent facts and situations.   What is your greatest teaching challenge? Getting students to understand that opinions, especially those that confirm a student’s own beliefs, are not facts, and cannot be relied on without question. I want students to challenge assertions found on social media, something many seem reluctant to do. I want students to look at the author of the information and to see if that person is credible--are they an expert in their field or a normal person, do they have a particular bias that you can determine, or do they seem impartial? Where does the information come from--an academic journal with multiple authors or one person’s social media account? How old is the information? My greatest teaching challenge revolves around getting students to ask questions and not simply take the information presented as fact. All humans have biases, things that they like or dislike, and I want students to understand that our biases, along with the biases of the person who is communicating with them, all are aspects of communication that must be negotiated before one can make a cogent and reasoned decision about a subject.     What have you learned from other New Bedford Scholars?  While there were many things that I learned from my fellow New Bedford Scholars during our time together at the Summit, there are three that I thought were highly important. First, like myself, I learned that getting students to learn critical thinking skills is a primary focus for all of us. We want students to understand the richness of thinking for themselves and learning how to critically evaluate information. I also learned that we each have diverse interests and experiences that inform our instruction. It is in this diversity that our strengths as educators come to the fore. I learned that my fellow Scholars have a wealth of knowledge and resources that I can draw upon to help better my own teaching. This was especially true in looking at the variety of assignments presented during the Summit. It was amazing to see the various types of assignments that integrated multimodal ways of learning. Seeing all of this amazing work helped to inspire me for the upcoming semester. I, too, want to create innovative and highly multimodal assignments that my students will see as fun, challenging, and inspiring, in addition to being informative.     What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? It is an amazing experience! Not only are you working with the editorial team at Bedford/St. Martin’s, you also have access to nine other scholars who are in your field. This allows you to collaborate and interact in order to help shape the future of student learning. The editorial team at Bedford/St. Martin’s are an extremely knowledgeable and friendly group of people to work with, and are exceedingly helpful by explaining the reasons behind the decisions that are needed in the publishing world. Moreover, they also listen, which is a rare quality these days. They actively solicit feedback and truly want to know when something is working well, so that they continue it or expand it. However, they also want to know when something isn’t working, so that they can find a way to address the issue and fix it so that it works better the next time. Finally, being part of the Bedford New Scholars program is fun! The editorial team made sure that we found time to socialize and to collaborate in several fun and interesting ways--even on Zoom.   Sidney Blaylock Jr.’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 Sidney's assignment. You can view the full details here: "Go Forth and Find" “Go Forth and Find” is a short lesson, designed to be mostly done over a class meeting or two. At the beginning of the unit discussing genre, I ask students to pair off and use their phones to take pictures of various “genre” items in the room, in the hall, in the building, and around campus (this can be modified to safe areas for virtual learning). I ask them to find information/instructions, a bulletin board, a poster, a graphic/image, a sign, and a “wildcard” (which can be any interesting item they found during the search). We then come together and discuss the various items that we’ve found, specifically noting the various affordances and constraints of the genre — looking for ways the items follow convention or the ways in which they deviate from the norm. This assignment tries to encourage critical learning and thinking in a fun way that helps students learn from (and with) their peers. Also, since the assignment happens early in the semester, it is a great way to, hopefully, form the bonds that will allow the class to grow into a strong learning community together.  ... View more

This blog post was originally posted on May 7, 2020. Before the pandemic, I had never heard of Zoom. What a difference a couple of months can make! Now, like most of you I expect, I find myself “zooming” on a daily basis: Boards I serve on meet via Zoom; community volunteer groups gather via Zoom; classes convene via Zoom. Last week I even “zoomed” with the four young men who rescued me and two friends from the Christ Church Cathedral when it was destroyed in a 2011 earthquake in New Zealand; with a former student and his two young children; and with a group of women who were sharing, virtually, wine and cheese. I feel a bit zoomed out! During these sessions, I’ve also had an opportunity to see myself in the little Hollywood Squares boxes—or sometimes on full screen—and it’s been sobering. Of course I look my age—it is what it is!—but to me I look WORSE, sometimes much worse, than in real life. Have you or your students had the same experience? Thinking about this screen presence reminded me of a “media prep” session I was part of eons ago when I was on the MLA Executive Council. A media consultant came in to coach us on how to present ourselves on TV. I remember the consultant telling us that on television, the camera exaggerates everything: “if you barely lick your lips,” she said, “it will look like your tongue is all the way out of your mouth.” And she showed us what she meant! She also coached us to lean slightly forward when looking into the TV camera, telling us that even a slight backward lean would come across as “slouching.”  I don’t remember anything else, but these tips came back to me as I was looking at a Zoom session (or Skype or FaceTime or . . .). What can I do, I wondered, and what can I recommend that instructors and students do to make the most of Zoom and similar sessions? Some ideas came quickly to mind: Make sure you’re in a quiet and uncluttered space so that nothing distracts from what you’re saying. Pay attention to where the light is coming from so that it’s not shining directly down on you, creating weird shadows, or washing everything out. (Some people recommend using a selfie ring light, but I don’t have one of those so I look for places where the natural light is soft and clear.) If you’re using a laptop, prop it up on books so that you can look slightly up and into the camera rather than down at it. And remember to actually look into the camera—something I constantly forget to do! Dress simply in clothes that don’t glitter or glisten. (I learned this tip before a TV appearance where the host insisted I change clothes entirely because the suit I was wearing had a sheen to it which caused a lot of glare on camera. Who knew?!) I’m sure professional media folks can offer a lot more tips, and you probably know more too. (Please send them to me!) In this new world of living online—which we may be doing for the rest of this year—I for one need all the help I can get. So here’s looking at you, kid—on Zoom! Image Credit: Pixabay Image 5059828 by Tumisu, used under the Pixabay License ... View more

Morgellons, the controversial disease at the heart of Leslie Jamison’s essay “Devil’s Bait,” differs from COVID-19 in significant ways. And yet Jamison’s central question seems usefully relevant to the current pandemic and its concomitant quarantine measures. She writes: This isn’t an essay about whether or not Morgellons disease is real. That’s probably obvious by now. It’s an essay about what kinds of reality are considered prerequisites for compassion. It’s about this strange sympathetic limbo: Is it wrong to call it empathy when you trust the fact of suffering, but not the source?  I’ve been thinking about empathy quite a bit in relation to social distancing. On the one hand, social distancing is a selfish act: it keeps me safe from infection. On the other hand, though, social distancing is an ethical duty. It’s as much about protecting others—others I may not even know—as it is about protecting myself. Part of what enables me to make the sacrifices required of social distancing is empathy, much like the empathy Jamison comes to feel for the sufferers of Morgellons disease. And empathy hasn’t simply enabled social distancing; it’s also engendered prolific acts of kindness in response to the pandemic.   What I like about using Jamison in this context is that her essay offers a kind of limit case for empathy. With COVID-19, the suffering is all too real, all too visible. But Morgellons is a disease that may not be a disease. As the quotation above makes clear, Jamison works from the reality of suffering to formulate an empathetic response and that’s a useful maneuver for students to consider.   There are, too, some other interesting connections between Jamison’s discussion of Morgellons and the COVID-19 pandemic: Like Morgellons, some still insist that COVID-19 is a hoax or caused by 5G cellular towers. Like Morgellons, there currently is no cure for COVID-19 Like Morgellons, the pandemic has prompted dangerous bogus treatments, including zinc and tonic water, colloidal silver, and, sadly, fish tank cleaner. Jamison’s experience with sufferers of Morgellons, like so many people in the pandemic today, reminds us that fear and desperation are themselves contagious and deadly.   Here are some writing assignments you might consider: Using Jamison and one other reading (from class or that you have located on your own), write an essay about the role of empathy in mitigating epidemics and pandemics. Considering the ambivalent report about Morgellons from the Centers for Disease Control and the self-activism of those with Morgellons, write a paper about the respective responsibilities of governments and individuals in response to disease. What are the best strategies for distributing reliable information about a disease? Use Jamison and any research you might want to do on COVID-19 to support your response. How is the experience of dealing with a chronic disease different from other kinds of disease? Use Jamison, and if you have a chronic disease yourself, your own experience.   Empathy is one of the core concepts in this edition of Emerging. It’s times like these that really demonstrate the value of thinking and writing about it. Emerging Intelligence      Image Credit: Pixabay Image 4939288 by geralt, used under the Pixabay License ... View more

The last three assignments in the Incubator series of assignments that I have designed for my technical writing courses are directly related to one another. Students write a Short Proposal for the White Paper and the Research Poster projects that they will complete during the second half of the term. In today’s post, I will share this proposal with you. Because I want them to focus their energy on the major report (the white paper), I ask for a short, memo-based proposal, rather than a longer document. The topic proposal assignment gives students very specific guidelines to follow so that the more in-depth coverage from the textbook does not lead them to do more than they need to. My underlying goal for the activity is two-fold: I want them to learn how to write a research proposal, but just as importantly, I want to spot-check their topics for the white paper and research poster before they get too far into the project. As with previous assignments in this series, the proposal assignment below is an example that has some minor changes to remove specific information that is relevant only to the students in my classes. References to “Markel & Selber” in the assignment refer to chapters in the class textbook Technical Communication by Mike Markel and Stuart Selber. Technical Writing Proposal Assignment Background You will write a short proposal that presents the topic you will explore for your white paper and poster presentation. Your proposal should explain not only what the topic is but how it relates to your company (and therefore your career field and major) and the incubator goal of public outreach and education. The Scenario Today, you received the following memo, asking you to submit a proposal for a white paper and related poster presentation:  Ut Prosim Incubator    1872 Inventors Way, Blacksburg, Virginia 24060      Interoffice Memo     To: All Incubator Companies From: Traci Gardner, Ut Prosim Director Subject: RFP: White Papers and Poster Presentations for December Publication Date: October 1, 2018 Our Public Outreach Office is requesting proposals for white papers and research posters that will inform non-expert readers about a technical topic relevant to the work and mission of your company. These documents will share what we do and why we do it with the university, alumni, and local community. Your documents will also contribute directly to our goal of public outreach and education by adding to our growing library of documents that inform website readers about how science, technology, and engineering work. As an objective white paper, accepted documents will either provide knowledge or information about a subject relevant to your company or provide solutions to a problem or challenge that relates to your company—or even a combination of both goals. These white papers will also be the basis of a presentation that will be part of the quarterly poster session we sponsor for the local community in December. As an extension, additional investors and clients also attend the session, so you have the potential to make critical connections for your business. These white papers and poster presentations are due by November 26 [Portfolio 2 due date] and will be published in the December 2018 release on the Incubator website. White Paper Expectations Length: 25 pages or less. Document Design: Polished, professional layout that relies on design strategies that increase the document’s readability. You are encouraged to use a non-traditional format that incorporates sidebars, columns, and other visually-interesting design strategies. Please do not include a cover page. Graphics and Visual Elements: Include relevant graphical elements (e.g., photos, illustrations, graphs, tables). All graphical elements must be your company’s intellectual property, or you must provide complete documentation. Graphical elements that are not your own intellectual property must meet fair use guidelines. Research Support: Information must be supported by fully-documented research, including relevant quotations. In addition to citing published research studies, you can take advantage of the campus community by tapping university experts on the topic you are discussing. Documentation Format: APA citation style (or the appropriate style for your field, if desired—for instance, an electrical engineer can use IEEE). Submission Format: *.doc, *docx, *.pdf, or Google Document link. Additional criteria and examples will be provided once proposals are accepted. Poster Presentation Expectations Size: 48" X 36", presented in landscape orientation (horizontal). Document Design: Polished, professional layout that relies on design strategies that increase the document’s readability. Must use appropriately-sized headings, text, and images. Graphics and Visual Elements: Include as many relevant graphical elements (e.g., photos, illustrations, graphs, tables) as necessary to present your ideas. All graphical elements must be your company’s intellectual property, or you must provide complete documentation. Graphical elements that are not your own intellectual property must meet fair use guidelines. Research Support: Information must be supported by fully-documented research, including short, relevant quotations. In addition to citing published research studies, you can take advantage of the campus community by tapping university experts on the topic you are discussing. Documentation Format: APA citation style (or the appropriate style for your field, if desired—for instance, an electrical engineer can use IEEE). Submission Format: *.ppt, *pptx, or Google Slides link. Additional criteria and examples will be provided once proposals are accepted. Proposal Requirements Your proposal should be in memo format, be no more than four pages in length, and provide the following information to help us gauge the appropriateness of the topic for December publication: Background (or Introduction) Give some background on your topic, your experiences with it to date, what you already know, etc. Then clearly state, “[We, OR your company name, OR similar] would like to produce a white paper and poster presentation on [your topic] for the following reasons: . . . .” In your statement, explain your motivations for sharing information about the topic with the public. Areas to be Studied Provide more details on the proposed topic for your white paper and poster presentation so that the Public Outreach Office understands the approach you will take. Consider the following questions: What are the key points you will explore or explain? What are some questions you will ask and try to answer in this white paper and poster presentation? How do the areas to be studied relate to your company’s mission? What ethical and/or intercultural and global issues will you consider as you examine the topic you have chosen? Methods of Research Explain how you will gather the information that you present in your white paper and poster presentation. Tell the Public Outreach Office your research strategy by outlining exactly how are you planning to gather information and find answers to your questions explored in the white paper and poster presentation. Timetable Share a calendar that includes the target dates for various milestones that will lead to completion of your white paper and poster presentation. Be sure that your schedule allows you to finish by the white paper and poster presentation due date, November 26 [Portfolio 2 due date]. Qualifications Explain why you are qualified to do this research and outline the skills you have that will help you deal with this topic effectively. Request for Approval Ask for approval; ask for guidance, articulate your biggest concerns at this point; ask for suggestions about next right steps; provide contact information. Due Dates October 8, 2018: Proposal submitted as a memo, addressed to me and to Manolito Reyna Bautista, Manager of the Public Outreach Office November 26, 2018: Finished White Paper and Poster submitted [in Canvas, as part of Portfolio 2] Any Questions? If you need any help with your proposal, please let me know or contact my assistant, Leslie Crow <lcrow@utprosimincubator.org>. Relevant Details Note: These details apply to all of the projects you include in your portfolio. Your company’s address is [Your Company Name], Ut Prosim Incubator, 1872 Inventors Way, Suite #[you choose a number], Blacksburg, Virginia 24060. Your company’s phone number is 540-555-5555. You may create a fictional Internet domain for your company, and use that domain for a web page address and your email addresses. If you’d like, you may create other information (including a logo) for your company as appropriate. Be sure that you use the information that you create consistently across all of your projects. The Project Assignment Step 1: Decide on the focus for your white paper and poster presentation(which you will write as future projects). Your focus will be to inform non-expert readers about a technical topic that is related to your company (and therefore, related to your career field and major). Try to limit yourself to topics with which you have some expertise (or at least some experience) to simplify the research process. These example white papers may help you think of appropriate topics and/or approaches: White Paper on Studying the Safety of the Childhood Immunization Schedule (CDC) The Flint Water Crisis and Its Health Consequences (AccessScience) Funding Trees for Health (The Nature Conservancy) Microsoft Password Guidance (MSFT)  The Model of Good Health (ASME) Step 2: Examine the information about proposals in Markel & Selber. The textbook provides complete details on how to write proposals. Follow the textbook as you work on your project. In particular, be sure that you do the following: Follow the “GUIDELINES: Demonstrating Your Professionalism in a Proposal” (starting on page 430 of Markel & Selber) to ensure you adopt the appropriate tone. Use the “ETHICS NOTE: WRITING HONEST PROPOSALS” (starting on page 430 of Markel & Selber) to make your proposal professionally acceptable. Work through the “GUIDELINES: Introducing a Proposal” (starting on page 432 of Markel & Selber) to gather information for your proposal’s Background section. Explore the information in the “Tech Tip: Why and How to Create a Gantt Chart” (starting on page 436 of Markel & Selber) to see an effective strategy for explaining your timetable. Step 3: Write the proposals for your white paper and poster presentation. Compose your proposal, as requested in The Scenario above, with all the details you have gathered. Review the assessment guidelines below to ensure you have met all the requirements for the proposal. As you work, also keep the following points in mind: Use plain language to make the ideas in your proposal are easy to find and read. Refer to the resources from Module 2 as needed. Follow all relevant ethical guidelines as you work using the Writer’s Checklist at the end of Chapter 2 (on page 40 of Markel & Selber). Follow the suggestions for emphasizing important information, using the Writer’s Checklist for Chapter 9 (on page 211 of Markel & Selber) to check your work. Use the Writer’s Checklist for Chapter 11 (on page 288 of Markel & Selber) to ensure that your document takes advantage of design principles to make it reader-friendly. Make a good impression with accuracy and correctness. Your document should be polished and professional. Step 4: Check your draft against the Writer’s Checklist. Be sure that you include the required features for instructions. Review your project, using the Writer's Checklist for Chapter 16 (on page 439 of Markel & Selber) and the Assessment Criteria below. Step 5: Review your draft for design and basic writing errors. Everything you write should use accurate/appropriate image editing, grammar, spelling, punctuation, mechanics, linking, and formatting. These are important basic writing skills that you should have developed in high school. Review your project, using the Writer’s Checklist at the end of Markel & Selber, Chapter 10 (on page 242 of Markel & Selber). You can also consult the information on “Sentence-Level Issues” in Markel & Selber, “Appendix, Part 😧 Guidelines for Multilingual Writers (ESL)” (on page 683 of Markel & Selber). While the section is labeled for multilingual writers, it is useful for everyone. It includes explanations and examples for many common mistakes writers make. Step 6: Submit your draft to your Writing Group in Canvas. Post a rough draft of your Proposal to your Writing Group in Canvas in the 10/04 Draft Feedback Discussion in Canvas. Additional instructions are in the Discussion. If you do not post your draft by noon on Sunday, October 7, your group may not have time to provide feedback. Step 7: Provide feedback to your Writing Group in Canvas. Provide feedback to the members of your writing group in the 10/04 Draft Feedback Discussion in Canvas, by October 8 (end of the grace period). Use the information on the Writing Groups page to provide constructive feedback that will help your group members make concrete improvements to their drafts. You are not obligated to provide feedback for any drafts posted afternoon on Sunday, October 7. Step 8: Revise your draft. Use the feedback that you receive from your group members to revise and improve your document. You can share your draft again with your Writing Group if you desire. As you revise, keep in mind the advice in the steps above, as well as the Assessment Criteria below. Step 9: Include a polished version of your project in Project Portfolio 2, due November 26. Have your Proposal finished and ready for submission in your Project Portfolio 2, which is due Monday, November 26. The grace period for Project Portfolio 1 ends at 11:59PM on Thursday, November 29. Assessment Criteria For All Technical Writing Projects All technical writing projects should meet the following general criteria: Makes a good first impression as a polished and professional document. Meets the needs of the intended audience. Demonstrates how to emphasize important information. Uses layout and formatting that makes information easy for readers to find and read, and that follows the standards you have set for your company. Is written in plain language, which communicates the ideas clearly. Follows all relevant ethical guidelines. Uses accurate/appropriate grammar, spelling, punctuation, mechanics, linking, and formatting. For Proposals Your project should meet the following criteria for effective proposals, based on the checklist at the end of Chapter 16 of Markel & Selber: Meets the guidelines established in the request for proposals (see The Scenario, above). Demonstrates professionalism and honesty. Includes an introduction that indicates the following: the problem or opportunity. the purpose of the proposal. the background of the problem or opportunity. your sources of information. the scope of the proposal. the organization of the proposal. the key terms that you will use in the proposal. Provides a clear, specific plan for research and justifies that methodology. Describes the qualifications and experience clearly outlining relevant skills and past work. relevant equipment, facilities, and experience. Includes full documentation for all ideas, words, and visuals that the work of others (see Part B, “Documenting Your Sources,” in Markel & Selber). This assignment has gone relatively well. The most frequent issue has been confusion about memo format. Students either didn't follow the instructions and used other formats, or they did not follow the format accurately. The most serious issue that has come up has been a failure to provide enough details and the development of the proposal. I wonder if the emphasis on a “short” proposal has misled some to think that general and underdeveloped ideas were adequate. When I use this activity again, I will work to address both of these issues. My next post will share the instructions for the white paper, which is the next project students worked on. Be sure to come back to read more about that activity, and in the meantime, if you have any feedback to share, please leave a comment below. Photo credit: Typing content by Search Engine People Blog on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license. ... View more

This summer I’ve had a chance to give presentations at the Rhetoric Society of America (in early June), at the Young Rhetoricians’ Conference (in late June), and at the Bread Loaf School of English’s Vermont campus (in early July). On each occasion, I spoke about a concept that’s been on my mind a lot during the last 18 to 24 months at least, and maybe a lot longer than that. In short, I’ve been concentrating on the power of narrative, of story. Why? In the simplest terms, because story is the universal genre, because stories lie at the basis of all cultures, because our lives are attempts to tell particular stories that guide us. Because, as in Anne Haas Dyson and Celia Genishi’s telling book title, we have A Need for Story. Walter Fisher, defining humans as “homo narrans,” argues that “In the beginning was the word or, more accurately, the logos. And in the beginning logos meant story.” In “Life as Narrative,” Jerome Bruner argues that “the culturally-shaped cognitive and linguistic processes that guide the self-telling of life narratives achieve the power to structure perceptual experience, to organize memory, to segment and purpose-build the very events of a life.” In the talks I’ve given recently, I’ve focused first on how teachers of writing and rhetoric, and our students, can understand, challenge, explore, and remake the stories we tell about rhetoric and its origins, principles, uses, and practices, aiming to create a history of rhetoric that is much more expansive and inclusionary than the traditional Greek and Roman origin story. But I’ve also focused on how we might also take on the responsibility for story, for narrative, and for the way stories shape our experience of the world. We know in our bones, I believe, what Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “The danger of a single story,” which happens when whole groups of richly complex people are reduced to a single narrative. In her remarkable TED talk of that title, Adichie tells about her life as a child in Nigeria, growing up reading stories and writing stories about characters that all had “fair hair and blue eyes.” That was a single story that shaped her way of reading and writing. In her talk, she says it’s fairly easy to create a single story: just “show people as one thing and one thing only, over and over again, and that’s what they will become.” Increasingly, I believe that it’s crucial for us to reject such single stories, along with master narratives of all kinds, and rather to pursue what I am calling narrative justice. Doing so is particularly important since I don’t see how we can achieve social justice if the narratives in which people are trapped and silenced simply will not allow for it. So we need just narratives, which can then lay the groundwork for and make possible social justice. “Narrative justice” is not a term I have coined. We can find the concept used and developed in global health initiatives that aim to allow indigenous people to claim and tell their own stories. I believe we can learn from these efforts, from filmmaker Lisa Russell’s 2017 TED Talk titled “Promoting Responsible Storytelling in Global Health,” from Australia’s Dulwich Centre, which has pioneered a form of conversational storytelling they call “narrative therapy” and articulated a “Charter of Storytelling Rights,” and from activist Judithe Registre, who calls for “story equity” as she works on global poverty reduction. Teachers of writing are uniquely positioned, I believe, to invite students to examine the narratives/stories that have shaped their lives, for both good and ill, to begin to interrogate those stories as well as the dangerous “single narratives” they can see at work all around them. Most important, we can enable students to counter narratives that diminish or demean them by using their own agency to revise or rewrite these narratives. I used to begin every class I taught by drawing a thick stark line across the chalk board. At one end of the line I put “WRITING” and at the other end “BEING WRITTEN.” I still think it’s a pretty good way to begin a discussion that shows students just how much is at stake in their writing classes. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 9017 by Hans, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

In 1994, Anne Haas Dyson and Celia Genishi published a collection that made a big impression on me. The Need for Story: Cultural Diversity in Classroom and Community demonstrated how important stories are in helping us to understand the world and ourselves in it—a need that, they argued convincingly, is universal. At the time, I was very glad to see that the old traditional “modes of discourse” (argumentation, exposition, description, and narration) had been displaced in writing curricula, especially since they “bled” into each other constantly. Moreover, I thought then, and do even more so today, that narrative can play a part in all discourse, from memoirs to business reports. And I began tracking the use of narrative in discourses that had traditionally been thought of as outside the “academic” discourse taught in most writing classes, particularly those of African American, Latinx, and Native American traditions. So I’ve been thinking about narrative, and the power of narrative, for a long time. But in the last 18 months or so, I’ve grown more and more concerned about the use of stories to spread misinformation, distortions, and even lies. In a 2009 Ted Talk, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie pointed out “The Danger of a Single Story”—what happens when whole groups of rich, complex people are reduced to a single narrative. Adichie says that it’s fairly simple to create such a single story: just “show people as one thing and one thing only, over and over again, and that is what they will become.” Adichie notes that stories are enmeshed in structures of power, that how they are told, when they are told, how many are told are all dependent on power, and “the ultimate power is to tell the story of another person—but to make it THE definitive story of that person.” And I would add “of that people” or “of that culture.” Such stories surround us today: “immigrants are rapists and animals”; “guns don’t kill people”; “climate change is a hoax.” You can fill in the blanks with dozens of other stories that are repeated with stunning and mind-numbing regularity, even though they are demonstrably untrue. So when I had the amazing opportunity to address the Rhetoric Society of America on its 50 th anniversary last week in Minneapolis, I spoke of the need to examine and challenge narratives and stories that crush dreams, choke freedoms, and leave people voiceless and instead to pursue what I am calling narrative justice, because it occurs to me that our efforts to achieve social justice cannot advance when people are trapped, silenced, and demeaned by stories that simply will never allow for it. I believe that teachers of writing are in a perfect position to foster the work of narrative justice, first by guiding students in identifying and understanding dangerous “single stories,” then analyzing and critiquing them. And we can go the next step as well, guiding students in creating alternative narratives that do justice to the truths of lived experience and that reflect their deepest values, their best sense of self, their vision of a just society. That’s a tall order for sure, but it’s also one that writing teachers are already working to fill. In this time which some call “post-truth” and others “a tower of lies,” doing so is our privilege and our responsibility. I’m hoping to make my talk available on the web soon, for anyone interested. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 1245690 by Free-Photos, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

Thirty-four years ago, Lisa Ede and I published a brief essay in Rhetoric Review called “Why Write . . . Together.” In response to that question, we offered a number of strong reasons for writing collaboratively, including the ability to mount larger research projects and answer more complex questions. And we embarked on a research study of collaborative writing across seven fields, which we reported on in a number of articles and a book, Singular Texts / Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing (1990, SIUP).   Our persistent calls for collaborative writing and our insistence that most work in the academy is done collaboratively, whether we recognize it or not, fell on many deaf ears—until the digital revolution made it abundantly clear that collaboration is the new normal, with Wikipedia being one prime example. In addition, the research I did for the longitudinal Stanford Study of Writing showed that our students are happily collaborating on everything imaginable outside of class—and that they are increasingly collaborating on course assignments as well. And of course, scholars in STEM disciplines have been collaborating on their work, almost by definition. Perhaps, we thought, the tide has turned.   But maybe not, as evidenced by a recent report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which asks “Is Collaboration Worth It?” in regard to a panel at the 131 st meeting of the American Historical Association. This report suggests that the tide has not yet turned in the Humanities, where the single-authored monograph is still the gold standard and the sine qua non for tenure and promotion.       A panel here Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association explored the pros and cons of co-authorship in what some argued should be a particularly collaborative field (uncovering and interpreting the past is not a one-person job), but isn’t. Asked to answer the session’s titular question – “Is Collaboration Worth It?” – panelists offered a lukewarm but hopeful consensus: it may not count, but it is, in some sense, worthwhile.    By “crass” accounting, collaboration is “absolutely not” worth it, said Ben Wright, an assistant professor of historical studies at the University of Texas at Dallas who helps lead a free, online, collaboratively built American history textbook effort called American Yawp. Though the project takes up much of Wright’s time, it will nevertheless be an ancillary piece of his tenure file, he said. “I’m not going to hinge my career on this project.”   The encouraging note in this article is that the young scholars quoted all recognize the importance of collaboration for their own intellectual and personal and professional growth, even when it is not recognized by their departments. So I continue to hope that as these scholars mature they will begin to change the tenure and promotion policies in their department. But such change is amazingly slow: 35 years is a long time to have made so little progress!   In the meantime, I see a special opportunity, and an obligation, for writing teachers not only to provide assignments that call for meaningful collaboration and collaborative writing but also to introduce students to the very large body of research that supports the efficacy of such practices. It is a commonplace now for employers, from Main Street to Wall Street to Silicon Valley, to hire those who are good collaborators, good members of teams. And writing teachers know that good members of teams are not “yes” people, but rather those who look at problems from every angle, arguing out all possibilities and listening to varying viewpoints, and who know when and how to compromise without forgoing sound principles. These are abilities that teachers of writing know how to develop in students, just as we know how to create assignments that call for these abilities and that engage students in co-authorship.   So I’m encouraged that we teach students who will become history majors—and many other majors as well. We have an opportunity to send then into their majors with a strong understanding of the need for collaboration—and the knowledge of how to work and write collaboratively. Those are gifts that I hope will keep on giving and that will eventually lead to the kind of change that will make the question “Is collaboration worth it?” not even worth asking.   Image from PIXELS with CC0 License ... View more

Recently, I’ve been leading a month-long discussion on Stanford’s Book Salon, an online group started by the late great Diane Middlebrook. Diane was the noted biographer of Anne Sexton and Ted Hughes as well as of Billy Tipton (The Double Life of Billy Tipton chronicles the life of the jazz pianist who, for over 50 years, “passed” as a man—check it out!).   Diane was also a brilliant and supportive colleague and teacher; students literally lined up to get into her seminars. And she was a big fan of memoir. I’ve now hosted two of these salons, and each one has given me a chance to remember Diane and also to engage participants in reading and exploring graphic memoirs. The one we are currently working on is Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?   That’s Chast on the right, facing her parents, George and Elizabeth, to whom the book is dedicated, as they insist that they will talk only about “pleasant” things, among which are not death and plans for their very late years.   I find that graphic narratives work extremely well for memoir: the combination of words and images allow Chast to speak in her own voice and, through speech bubbles, allow her parents to speak for themselves; her drawings of them etch them firmly in readers’ minds. Especially haunting is the series of sketches of her mother that Chast drew during the last day of her mother’s life. No words needed there.   What has struck a chord with the people participating in the book salon is Chast’s unblinking honesty in describing her parents’ long decline and the part she played in their lives. An only child, Chast got more support/empathy from her father than her mother, who was the one IN CHARGE of the family in just about every way. Chast seems a lonely child, one left alone every day after school and often ignored, especially by her mother. When she married and moved away, Chast didn’t visit her “deep” Brooklyn home much, but that changed when her parents reached their late 80s and 90s and obviously needed help – though they would never admit it. As Chast describes it, they were “a unit,” timeless and everlasting, without a need for any other person at all.   Chast perseveres, however, though she hates doing it and hates not doing it: and that is the dilemma readers react very powerfully to. Many have found themselves in similar situations with aging parents: it’s not easy and it’s not pretty, yet children want and need to do what they can, while loathing many aspects of the work. Chast brilliantly captures the tensions, contradictions, and ambivalences in her own encounter with her parents’ last years.   She also manages to capture the absurdness of aging often in hilarious ways. Her father, moving slowly into dementia, moves in with Chast while his wife is in the hospital—and he becomes obsessed with a bunch of bankbooks back in his apartment (most of them acquired on a special “deal” that, for depositing $100, gets George and Elizabeth a “prize” of some kind—a toaster, blender, etc.). Convinced that evildoers are trying to break in and steal the bankbooks, he talks endlessly of them as if they are themselves survivors of some dreadful ordeal.   I have taught graphic memoirs since shortly after Art Spiegelman’s Maus won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and I realized that I should be paying a lot more attention to comix, as he termed it. I’ve never had a student who was not moved by Maus: in the early days, when they had never heard of the book, some were dismayed that the Holocaust was the subject of a comic book. As soon as they entered the world of the narrative, however, they were captivated: over the years, a number of students told me they had disliked history until they read that book. I also loved teaching Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!, a coming of age memoir, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are You My Mother? And of course there are so many others: Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese; Belle Yang’s Forget Sorrow; GB Tran’s Vietnamerica—I could truly go on and on.   But I do not teach these works in literature classes—but in writing classes. I have found that college-age students are drawn to memoir and that the image/word combination resonates especially strongly with them. So we analyze the panels and gutters, studying how they carry the story forward silently, and we look at the structure of the entire work and imagine “translating” it into a research-based essay or another genre, looking at the rhetorical strategies at work in each version. Inevitably, we do some drawing too (I am the worst in the room at this!), and several students have gone on to create graphic memoirs of their own and to publish them online.   What I absolutely love about all the possibilities open to writers today is the freedom it offers students as they literally write/draw themselves into being. College is a time of self-representation, of identity-creation, of learning about who you are. To me, graphic narratives in general and graphic memoirs in particular make a perfect vehicle for exploring these questions. ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn (see end of post for bio).   With all of my multimodal teaching, I do admit that I still hold on to the idea of paper assessment for multimodal projects.  Part of this is due to the fear that when it comes time for grading I will not be able to access students’ work on their blogs. The other is the affirming experience (for students and teachers) of collecting tangible evidence that they have completed their work.  I have come to feel comfort in the ritual of collecting student folders at the end of the term and looking them in the eye and asking, “Is everything here... to the best of your knowledge?  They answer with an accomplished, “yes.” I even ritualistically break out my rolling suitcase for the occasion to drag them all home.   In one of my earlier blog posts I discussed the use of academic blogs, and I have come to use them in almost all of my classes.  Students’ shape multimodal compositions for multiple audiences and purposes and include deep links, detailed context and connections that don’t often come across on the printed page.  In the past I had students print out screen captures of their home page and media content and make document copies of their blog posts.   Lately students vocally resist printing (many of them don’t even own printers anymore).   I have plenty of theories regarding their resistance to printing but I realized that in their world, as digital natives, this is the norm and that they were perfectly comfortable with electronic submission and online evaluation.   I am listening . . . and examined my own resistance to this shift (as a digital immigrant) and decided to try to restructure my evaluation models to be more multimodal.     I still believe that it is important for students to be held accountable in a physical world for some things.  This also keeps the agency where it belongs – with the students—to check, articulate and organize their work over a semester.  I use a couple of tools and assignments that help me maintain this agency and provide structure and overview when reviewing multimodal student work.    1. Revising the blogs Near the end of the semester, I ask students to return to the work they have completed over the term.  This assignment asks students to move from a series of isolated blog posts to a larger collection with patterns and connections.  It helps them understand the blurred line between classroom and public spaces for writing and teaches them deep revising practices beyond textual editing.  I ask them to return their posts and revise them for engaging writing, audience awareness embedded links, proper citation and a rhetorical awareness of their digital identity go back and examine and craft the online identity for their blog and incorporate ideas and images from their work in the class revise their About page they created in the beginning of the term and re-see their purposes and authorial personae through the eyes of their purposes and journey through the course.  When students composed their original posts, their classmates were their primary audience.  This revision should take into account the shift towards a more public audience in which the blog stands on its own in a digital space.  This includes reshaping titles, adding captions to images, embedding links, and perhaps defining terms that are specific to the classroom discourse community.  See my assignment,  Revising Your Blog Guidelines (Kim Haimes-Korn) for guidelines and criteria.   2. Reflective Narrative I modified a reflective narrative assignment to act as both a final reflection on their work for the class and as a final post in their course blogs. Students read back through their posts from the semester and create a closure (or continuation) piece for their blogs for a public audience. I ask them to closely examine the subject matter and the connections they made in the class and explore how they are reading across the texts in their blog and connecting the concepts of the class in their writing and thinking.    I instruct them to draw upon and quote from their own writings and ideas and write a detailed account of the ways they have explored their ideas in the class through textual referencing. In this post, they must intentionally cross link to their earlier blog posts.   They can think of this reflection as an overview of what is included in their blogand write it as an extended introduction to the entries that follow or as a closure post in which they look back on what they have done.    3. Annotated Bibliography and Abstract This part of the assignment is very helpful when evaluating student work on their blogs.  Since I encourage students to give their blog posts engaging titles, this list identifies the assignment number, title and give a short abstract/summary of the work.  Not only does it help me in grading but it teaches them the form of the Annotated Bibliography and online citation practices and prepares them to create short abstracts of their work for metadata and other academic purposes.   4. Statement of Self-Evaluation This statement should NOT appear on students’ blogs. I am the only audience – teacher as evaluator – for this writing.  Students write an evaluation of their work and performance and in the class. They create a detailed portrait of themselves as  working writers and evaluate their progress with justification from their writings (by citing particular movements in their texts, style, etc.).   Students also need to complete the student evaluation (SE) portions of the rubric for a "Portfolio Evaluation" Sheet by returning to the criteria introduced in the class.. These holistic marks should be reflected in this Statement of Self Evaluation.   5. Rubric of Blog Contents and Description When students complete the course, they must go through the checksheet on Rubric for Multimodal Assessment (Kim Haimes-Korn) and confirm submission on all of their blog posts and assignments. I also include evaluation criteria to help them define what constitutes strong work in this digital environment.     Reflections on the Activities: Although I don’t collect all of their work, I ask students to complete the rubric checksheet, print the reflective narrative, Annotated Bibliography and Abstracts, and their Statement of Self-Evaluation.  I refer to their online documents and respond, in writing (either on the text or through electronic commentary for online submission) to the documents and fill out the teacher evaluation portion of the rubric while holistically marking it for assignment criteria to justify the grade. This gives students a way to remain accountable for their work and  teachers  a space to interact with their multimodal projects.   We are still in the process of understanding what it means to teach in multimodal classrooms.  As teachers, we need to consider the ways this changes our pedagogical approaches and student-teacher relationships.  It is important that we consider new approaches to assessment and evaluation that honor this shift and allow us to expand our definitions and practices. . . and to leave the rolling suitcases at home.   Guest blogger Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor in the Digital Writing and Media Arts (DWMA) Department at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning, critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy and think deeply about way too many things.  She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity.  You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website Acts of Compositio ... View more

As I grade multimodal projects, I’m always frustrated when I find errors that demonstrate that a concept didn’t stick with students. I ultimately spend about half my grading time wondering if the errors I find are my fault. Even though everything is explained repeatedly in assignments, course blog posts, and in the classroom, I fail to communicate some ideas to every student.   As an example, consider the multimodal course that I teach, Writing and Digital Media. Most of the students in course are English majors or minors. They enjoy writing and are usually fairly good at it, as the screenshot on the right from one student's final project shows. When I begin talking about multimodal composing however, they can struggle to follow the concepts, even though they are well explained in the textbook that we use, Writer/Designer, and we go over them repeatedly in class.   As I am planning the course for the fall term, I am thinking of directly addressing these ten issues that I hear students ask questions about most often:   Multimodal does not mean digital technology. Multimodal texts engage multiple modes of communication. You don’t need digital technology to do that. An illuminated medieval manuscript is just as much a multimodal text as a YouTube video is. It doesn’t mean multimedia either. A multimodal text may use multimedia (multiple media, like photos, animation, words, sounds), but it doesn’t have to. Everything in the composition classroom is multimodal composing. It’s impossible to write a text that engages only one mode. Take a traditional essay, printed out and stapled in the upper left corner. That text includes the linguistic, spatial, and visual modes of communication at a minimum. People have been learning about multimodal composition for centuries. Since everything in the writing classroom is multimodal composing, it’s not surprising that teachers have always taught about more than one mode of communication. When you learn how to use layout and design to make the words stand out on a page, for example, you’re learning multimodal composing techniques. What’s important isn’t how, but when and why. How to use multiple modes of communication when you compose is the easy part. What’s important is learning when to engage the different modes of communication and why they bring meaning to the text. Using every mode doesn’t necessarily make a text better. Use all five modes if they help you communicate your message, but don’t add modes just because you can. Make sure that they add to the meaning of the text. Communicating with the visual mode isn’t limited to using photos. Sure photos can be part of it, but you’re also using the visual mode when you add bold text or change the size and color of a font. The gestural mode includes both body language and movement. The word gestural does make you think of gesture, but gestural mode isn’t limited to things that people can do, like smile or wave their arms about. Any kind of movement that communicates with a reader uses the gestural mode. It’s easy to compose a multimodal text. It’s actually impossible not to create a multimodal text. When we add words to a word processing document, for example, we may not think about the multimodal communication we are using. We add visual elements when we choose specific fonts, when we add emphasis by changing a font to bold or increasing its size, and when we indent the words to signal the start of a paragraph or a blocked quotation. It can be challenging, however, to compose a rhetorically effective multimodal text. It is easy to compose a text that uses multiple modes of communication, but it takes work to make sure that the different modes contribute the intended meaning to the text. As you compose multimodal texts, think constantly about your intentions and make sure that the different elements that you add to the text help you say what you intend to.   I am thinking of sharing the list itself, creating an accompanying infographic, or maybe making some memes and posters. If I can convince students of those ten concepts during the first weeks of class, I think they will have an easier time as they work on their projects. I hope so anyway.   What are the ten things that you most wish students knew about the topics you teach? How do you communicate those issues to the class? Share a strategy with me by commenting below or connect with me on Facebook and share your experience. ... View more