We live in disheartening times when disinformation is disseminated as if it were truth. And millions of people accept it as truth because they want to believe it. Disinformation is fueled by pathos, building on negative emotions like anger, hatred and even fear. Although pathos is an instrumental tool in argumentation, solely relying on pathos in arguments can create a skewed perception and spark horrifying (and even deadly) events like the Capitol Attack of 2021.  Recent findings by the January 6th Committee prove that the disinformation spread by Russia allowed former President Trump to breed distrust in the validity of democracy and attempt to unlawfully deny his successor his presidency. While here in America we are dealing with that truth, we see in Russia an autocrat set on denying his people the truth. President Putin has stopped the publication of reports about what is really going on in Ukraine. Hitler used the same tactic to hide the truth of what he did in Germany. At that time, it was possible to hide the facts from the world in a way that is no longer possible. Now we have social media to fill in the gaps when all journalists except those sympathetic to the Kremlin have been silenced. We have reporters on the ground in Ukraine to report firsthand on what is happening as it happens. Putin is so afraid of the truth that he wants to control the language used to describe what Russian troops are doing in Ukraine. To do so, he has imposed a fifteen-year prison sentence on those who call the attack on Ukraine what it is: a war. One Russian journalist, Maria Ovsyannikova, an editor and producer at Russian state broadcaster Channel One, was brave enough to storm her own news network during broadcasting with a sign that read "Stop the war! Don't believe propaganda! They're lying to you here!" Ovsyannikova told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, "I have been feeling a cognitive dissonance, more and more, between my beliefs and what we say on air." In a statement prepared before her protest, Ovsyannikova said, “Unfortunately, I have been working at Channel One during recent years, working on Kremlin propaganda. And now I am very ashamed. I am ashamed that I’ve allowed the lies to be said on the TV screens. I am ashamed that I let the Russian people be zombified.” Ovsyannikova was released after fourteen hours of interrogation with a small fine but could still face harsher consequences. She argues that half of the Russian people disapprove of the war in Ukraine. Another term that Russians are using to distort reality is "Nazi.” They are trying to justify their attacks on Ukrainians by saying that they are Nazis. There is no explanation of why they think that is true, but it is a term that connects the Ukrainian people with a known evil, so the use of the term is another strategy to hide the truth of what they are doing—massacring civilians. There can be no validity to any argument that is not based in truth. No conclusion is valid if it is not based on facts or inferences grounded in reality. That is, unless acceptance is based on fear or unquestioning allegiance.   Photo: "Russian TV protester opens up about stunt"  by Just Click's With A Camera is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

If you are following developments in AI technology, you may have read a long essay in The New York Times Magazine called “A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?” by Steven Johnson. And if you missed this article, I recommend taking time to read it. It’s a page-turner, or at least it was for me, providing a brief history of AI along the way but concentrating primarily on Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3). GPT-3 is part of a “category of deep learning known as a large language model [LLM], a complex neural net that has been trained on a titanic set of text: in GPT-3’s case, roughly 700 gigabytes of data” that include Wikipedia, large collections of digitized texts, and so on. GPT-3 “learns” by essentially playing a “what’s the next word?” game trillions of times, using its database to hypothesize answers. (Johnson points out that most of us have encountered LLMs at work in apps like Gmail, with its autocomplete feature, which works on the same principle but at a much more basic level.) Most experts seem to agree that GPT-3 is not sentient—it is not (yet) thinking as a human would do. But it is demonstrating amazing abilities to generate unique answers to complex questions. For example, Johnson reports asking GPT-3 to “Write an essay discussing the role of metafiction in the work of Italo Calvino.” Here’s (the beginning of) what GPT-3 had to say: Italian author Italo Calvino is considered a master of metafiction, a genre of writing in which the author breaks the fourth wall to discuss the act of writing itself. For Calvino, metafiction is a way of exploring the nature of reality and the ways in which stories can shape our perceptions of the world. His novels often incorporate playful, labyrinthine structures that play with the boundaries between reality and fiction. In If on a winter’s night a traveler, for example, the reader is constantly interrupted by meta-level discussions of the act of reading and the nature of storytelling. . . . Johnson could give GPT-3 the same prompt over and over and get a different unique answer every time, some that may strike you as more accurate than others but “almost all. . . remarkably articulate.” As Johnson puts it, “GPT-3 is not just a digital-age book of quotations, stringing together sentences that it borrowed directly from the internet.” Rather, it has learned to generate fairly proficient arguments—ones that could seem to have been written by a fairly competent high school or first year college student—by endlessly playing that “predict the next word” game. LLMs are also gaining ground in reading comprehension, scoring about the same as an “average high school student” on exam questions similar to those on the reading section of the SAT. Johnson poses questions all writing teachers will have about LLMs: are deep learning systems capable of true human thinking and human intelligence? If so, what will that mean for teachers of writing and reading? NYU emeritus professor Gary Marcus argues, “There’s fundamentally no ‘there’ there,” noting the apparently stunning language skills of GPT-3 are just a smokescreen that obscures the lack of generative, coherent human thought and that “it doesn’t really understand the underlying ideas.” In any case, this research is of tremendous importance to those of us devoted to writing instruction and writing development. The systems now developed, for instance, can use their vast database to answer questions like “how many ingredients are in paella?” faster and more accurately than any search engine now available—and this fact could change our ways of teaching research. But they will also challenge us in new ways to deal with plagiarism, if plagiarism even continues to exist as a viable concept in terms of machine-generated text. To refer again to the Italo Calvino essay: it was written by GPT-3 in half a second. And just take a look at what GPT-3 came up with when asked to “write a paper comparing the music of Brian Eno to a dolphin,” a nonsense prompt posed by Johnson that elicited a pretty amazing “essay.” Oh, brave new world indeed! I know that many of our colleagues in writing studies are paying very close attention to AI research and development, and for them I am grateful. As always, our technical abilities outstrip our ethical understanding of them by light years. That’s only one of the reasons that scholars of rhetoric and writing need to be part of this exciting, and concerning, conversation. Image Credit: "Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence" by mikemacmarketing, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

In his lecture “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity,” James Baldwin begins with a list of words that, for him, hold unclear meanings, words such as: artist, integrity, courage, nobility, democracy, peace, peace-loving, and warlike. He writes:  And yet one is compelled to recognize that all these imprecise words are attempts made by us all to get to something which is real and which lives behind the words. … The terrible thing is that the reality behind all these words depends on choices one has got to make, for ever and ever and ever, every day. (63)    Each time I teach Baldwin’s lecture, I try to create new lenses for reading, writing, and discussion. This process reminds me how students struggle with the long sentences, dense paragraphs, and often, as Baldwin suggests, “imprecise words” that help to make meaning for readers. Because the words are imprecise, new meaning can be derived from them each time, and so I struggle along with students to find new meaning.    In a recent semester, after listening to audio of Baldwin reading his lecture, my students found a connection that was new to many of us. In his lyrics for “Shattered Dreams,” the American rapper Earl Sweatshirt samples Baldwin’s phrase “imprecise words.” The imprecise words of the early 1960s brought immediate connection to the “terrible…reality of all these words” for the late 2010s.    Connections across generations are crucial for me in teaching and learning Baldwin’s work. Imprecise words cannot possibly encapsulate or pin down to the unspeakable realities of everyday life. “Artist’s Struggle” offers a means of connecting one’s own struggle to the suffering of others. In bearing witness to struggle and suffering, perhaps one comes to understand how imprecise words cannot possibly describe the “terrible…reality.” As Baldwin suggests, the artist’s struggle for integrity, truth, and honesty, imprecise as those words might be, “is almost our only hope” – and for Baldwin that hope is writing (67).   As our class has passed the midterm mark, I decided to try a thought experiment to learn which “imprecise words” stand out in Baldwin’s lecture, in my writing assignment about the lecture, and on students’ self-assessment of their own writing on Baldwin’s lecture. I used Data Basic.io Word Counter because, in addition to a word cloud similar to Wordle, Word Counter would give me quantitative data of how often specific words were used and the context in which the words were used. Following are the word clouds generated by Word Counter, as well as the word most often in each text. The website for quantitative data is linked after each word cloud.    “Artist’s Struggle” 3503 words Most common words: One and People, tied at 23 occurrences each  https://databasic.io/en/wordcounter/results/6257233ef83b9c09cb6ed389?submit=true    While People was used 23 times, the word does not show up in any of the phrases in the quantitative data. One occurs most often with the verbs “is” and “has.” My interpretation here is that these two words  are interchangeable. Baldwin wants to gain the support of his audience and to invest in their own struggles for integrity and truth. If the audience can bear witness to their own struggles and their own suffering, then perhaps they can also come to a stronger place of empathic action in the early 1960s struggles for Civil Rights.   Assignment for Writing Project 1, 981 words Most common word Baldwin, with 30 occurrences  https://databasic.io/en/wordcounter/results/62572437f83b9c00eab72202    Baldwin was used most frequently with “respond” and “response.” The purpose of the assignment was to offer students an opportunity to think through their interpretations of Baldwin’s work, and how Baldwin might respond to their interpretations.   A sampling of approximately 20 students’ self-assessments for Writing Project 1 7662 words The most common word is writing, with 124 occurrences https://databasic.io/en/wordcounter/results/62570d68f83b9c098ad24f9f    Writing  is used most often by students as both an adjective, as in “Writing Project,” and as a noun, “high school writing,” “college writing,” and composing writing. Students were responding to the following self-assessment prompt: Self-Assessment: At least 3 paragraphs that respond to these questions What did you learn from preparing for and composing this writing project?   What were your struggles with this writing project? What might you do similarly and differently moving forward? For example, how might journals be useful to free writing your ideas? What differences do you notice between high school and college writing?    From this prompt, it seems clear that students were using the words I provided to respond to the questions. This past academic year, I have noticed that students are asking for more explicit directions for each assignment, and are taking care to follow the directions exactly as written. My hope in teaching Baldwin is to present another view of writing, that the tools at writers’  disposal are “imprecise words.” From those “imprecise words,” Baldwin suggests, writers must attempt to struggle with integrity, to imagine themselves as artists.    In his conclusion, Baldwin asserts to the audience, “It is time to ask very hard questions and to take very rude positions. And no matter at what price” (69). Hard questions and rude positions remind me that, as a teacher, I want to do more assigning students to follow explicit directions. In fact, my hope is that students will come to question the purpose of the directions, and if the directions might not be revised to create a more inclusive atmosphere for students to grow as writers. Directions themselves are imprecise words, which is why the outcome often differs from the initial expectation. In this way, one might learn to bear witness to difference, and to  “get to something which is real and which lives behind the words.” In this way, perhaps, one can grow as a writer.     Baldwin, James. "The Artist's Struggle for Integrity." The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, edited by Randall Kenan, Pantheon Books, 2010, pp. 63-70.    ... View more

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

Chris Rock's calamitous misfire at the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony wasn't the only joke to run off the rails during that now epic evening—though it was, of course, the most consequential. But there was another gag, performed by Oscars co-host Amy Schumer, that also raised a bit of a ruckus when Schumer stepped out into the front row seats (well, tables) and pretended to mistake Best Supporting Actress nominee Kirsten Dunst for a "seat filler" while bantering with her partner Jesse Plemons, who was also present as a Best Supporting Actor nominee. Dunst fans erupted in such fury over this "insult" that Schumer felt obliged to explain that it was all a kind of skit that had been "choreographed" in advance with both Plemons's and Dunst's knowledge and cooperation, which settled the matter amicably.  But from a cultural-semiotic perspective, there is a lot more to the story than the uproar it briefly inaugurated, a significance that goes to the heart of one of America's most cherished cultural mythologies. This mythology is reflected in the belief that America, due to a history of social mobility as enshrined most powerfully in the American dream, is effectively a classless society. Of course, Americans know perfectly well that America is structured along class lines, but they tend to believe that class identity is not fixed at birth and that anyone can move up the social ladder—which is one reason why many middle and working-class Americans oppose increasing taxes on the very rich: they hope to "arrive" there themselves some day. And this takes us to the Schumer/Dunst/Plemons skit, because the whole point of the joke was entirely at the expense of those plebian "seat fillers" who are hired to keep the chairs of Academy members filled when those honored few go off to take a bathroom break. So when Plemons told Schumer that Dunst was his "wife," Schumer's punch line—"You’re married to that seat filler?"—expressed disbelief that a member of Hollywood royalty could possibly be married to a commoner. This was expected to be funny, but the uproar that followed was motivated not by the actual insult to commoners but by the perceived insult to an upper-class actress who failed to be recognized for who she was. Thus, while the incident itself was trivial, what it reveals is not, because if Americans are ever going to understand just what is tearing their country apart at the seams these days, their inattention to, even denial of, America's social class divisions will deprive them of an essential insight into what is going so badly wrong.   Image Credit: "Red carpet at 81st Academy Awards in Kodak Theatre" by Greg in Hollywood (Greg Hernandez) is marked with CC BY 2.0. ... View more

Twenty years ago, I was up to my academic ears in The Stanford Study of Writing, a longitudinal study that followed a large cohort of students through their college years and one year beyond. I was reminded of this study and of how much it meant to me and my teaching when I sat in on a discussion with Karen Lunsford, Carl Whithaus, Jonathan Alexander, and other colleagues about their Wayfinding Project, now well under way. This team of researchers has written widely about their meticulous planning, their extensive piloting, and the initial phases of the project, as well as about preliminary findings. This longitudinal study seeks to track the ways writing is used by college alums, with a focus on everyday writing and social media, and on what writing means to the participants involved. In this discussion I attended, they described asking participants to describe a “most meaningful” piece of writing and they got a wide array of responses, such as one from “Benjamin,” who told them about a social media message he had posted to a small group, one that was then forwarded to a much larger Facebook group—and then turned up on the front page of Reddit, garnering some 10,000 views. To Benjamin, reaching this very large audience, albeit unintentionally, was deeply meaningful because of the sheer reach and scope. He seemed not so much interested in the content of the post—indeed, he didn’t want to talk about that—but in the number of readers he contacted. AWESOME, he thought. The researchers reported that talk of such social media writing often emerged at or near the end of interviews, after participants had told the team what they thought they wanted to hear about “official” writing—when, in this instance, it was the “unofficial,” social media writing the research team was vitally interested in! Again, this story took me back to the Stanford Study of Writing. In interviews, I often had a hard time getting students to talk about their in-class writing at all. With one student in particular, I remember asking about writing in her humanities course, which she said she “adored.” Adored, maybe, but she didn’t want to talk about it. Every time I asked a question, she would begin to answer but then quickly veer to out of class writing, especially for a campus activist group she was working with. Writing for her classes, she said (with emphasis!) was JUST writing. Writing for causes she cared deeply about, well—that was REAL writing. Such experiences helped us focus on extracurricular writing, and indeed the students’ attachment to and identification with such writing was one of the major findings of our study. So the Wayfinding team’s focus on “most meaningful” writing seems spot on and one reason I am following this fascinating project so closely. We need to know more about what students find meaningful in writing—and in what modes of delivery they choose to deliver such writing—and why. And we need to know much more about the relationship students have with their audiences (up close and personal to completely distant and disembodied, like Benjamin’s) and to their subject or content (again, up close and personal, like the obituary for a dog that one student described to the Wayfinding team, to the almost-beside-the-point content of Benjamin’s original message). What ratios could be drawn among these elements in the age of digital platforms and social media posts? What are the gradations of distance between writer and audiences, between writer and topic or content? And how do these ratios relate to writing satisfaction, to writing that is meaningful to students? Alexander, Whithaus, and Lunsford are helping to ask and answer these questions, and I am all ears to hear more about their findings. Image Credit: "Social Media" by magicatwork, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

I tried a new assignment this spring, inspired by the electrifying writer, Rebecca Solnit. I can’t stop thinking about it, and my students can’t stop talking about the way it has changed the way they see — and map — their environments. In particular, it has led them to appreciate the power of language, and sparked a desire to research and revise place names all around them. Solnit, as you may know, is a lover of maps. She captures the ways they make meaning in her wonderful collection, Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, co-produced with a geographer. In her "City of Women" map, for example, she provocatively reimagines the New York City subway system, with women’s names marking places we mostly know from historical men: Washington, Hudson, Frick, Rockefeller. Solnit says of her map that it "was made to sing the praises of the extraordinary women who have, since the beginning, been shapers and heroes of this city that has always been, secretly, a City of Women"— think Woodhull, Sanger, Chisolm. After reading Solnit’s essay, I invited students to apply her method to a location that means something to them, and to investigate place names and propose alternatives that would make hidden histories visible. I have rarely seen students so energized to revise existing texts, nor so inspired to propose alternatives. Some students discovered the place names in their hometowns only celebrated the white men responsible for the genocide of indigenous peoples. Some found street names in their neighborhood ignored the Black residents who profoundly shaped the community. Hardly any found women’s names on street signs, stadiums, or parks. Armed with scholarly research on the power of naming, and their own passions and perspectives, students re-wrote area maps and designed keys with biographies that explained their newly proposed place names. We all learned a lot as they celebrated local suffragists, ballplayers in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, Black reformers, women schoolteachers, Indigenous peoples, and grandmothers who they believe deserve to be celebrated as community-builders. I have never seen a group of students so jazzed about sharing their work, nor an assignment that students were still talking about months after they turned them in. My students’ projects have reminded me of the unexpectedly emotional response I had to visiting the Women's Rights Pioneers Monument last summer. Meredith Bergman’s sculpture was installed in Central Park on August 26, 2020, to commemorate the passing of the 19th Amendment and is one of the few monuments of historical women in the city. As I lingered over the details in the strong, bronze faces of Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, other passers-by stopped to marvel at the significance of seeing women honored this way, to name them, and recognize their work. A mother with tears in her eyes patted her young daughter’s back, and a pair of white-haired women clutched one another’s hands, saying, “This matters. This matters so much.”   Image Credit: Photo of the author at the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in Central Park, New York City, provided by the author. ... View more

Spring in North Georgia is lovely—the azaleas and ornamental pear trees are blooming, and the green of new leaves creates contrast against the deeper hues of magnolia leaves and our ubiquitous pines. Those pines are also a primary source of the layer of yellow pollen now coating porches, cars, benches, and sidewalks (no need for sidewalk chalk these days—we can just inscribe a quick note in the pollen).   This spring has also marked my return to in-person conferences. On March 18 and 19, I was in Atlanta for the NOSS conference—the National Organization for Student Success; I left from there for Pittsburgh and the American Association of Applied Linguistics annual event. I had hopes of attending the CCCC virtual event and TESOL—but I found myself on information overload. I returned from Pittsburgh to the final third of our spring semester, and I realized I could not divert any further time away from my classes. I did make space for a plenary and a couple of sessions this past weekend from the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL) virtual event, but even then, I found my head spinning as I processed a wealth of information.    I am acutely aware of limited resources at my university; no one faculty member can expect to receive funding for more than one or (at most) two conference presentations. Making the most of those limited funds means we need to target proposals to attend just the conferences most relevant to our research and pedagogy interests.    And therein lies the challenge: My primary area of interest is metalinguistic development and writing pedagogy with multilingual and corequisite writers. That area—and the questions it raises—crosses several disciplinary boundaries, including basic writing, composition/rhetoric, applied linguistics, educational linguistics, translingual studies, and L2/Lx writing. Conferences in these disciplines abound—along with journals and edited collections and webinars—at the international, national, regional, and state levels. This year, I chose NOSS (close to home) and AAAL (a good fit for a current project analyzing student work in online discussions); within those two events, I could only visit a fraction of the sessions offered: research on embodied and multimodal representations of grammatical concepts, discourse analysis of online misinformation, a thematic corpus analysis related to mental health, research into speaking aloud to process feedback on writing, tough questions about corequisite success data, a program to jump-start corequisite success with a boot camp, multimodality and standard concepts of academic writing for ESL students, virtual reality to teach pragmatics, a personal ethnography of code-switching choices. I collected as many resources as I could, and I began to build a reading list for the summer.    Another challenge: Each conference session represents both theoretical and empirical research traditions that I may not be familiar with. Some terms (stance, metalinguistic, agency, translingual) are used across disciplines, but not always with the same definitions or foundational texts. At times differences between the disciplines can be contentious (see Hall and Atkins et al.) As much as I can, I want to appreciate and understand the disciplinary histories informing the work I do, even if I cannot be as fully immersed in those histories as others are.   Over the past month, the return to conferences—and the resulting flood of new reading—has felt both energizing and  overwhelming.  How do I process all the concepts, the data, the possibilities presented at these conferences? Where do I begin? And that takes me back to pollen. For right now, those of who live in Georgia know we are just going to have to sit in the pollen for a while; it cannot be tamed. But in a few weeks, the pollen will dissipate, and we’ll be left with the blossoms, the greens of summer, fresh vegetables, and vaulting shade.    And maybe that’s what I will do with my return to conferences—just sit in the information this while—and see what grows this summer.   Have you been back to conferences this year? How do you process what you are learning?  ... View more

In 1987 the United States celebrated the 200th birthday of the Constitution. In a famous speech included in Elements of Argument, Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court, explained why his celebration of the anniversary was reserved. He wrote, “I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever ‘fixed’ at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite ‘The Constitution,’ they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct two centuries ago.” He concludes, “Thus, in this bicentennial year, we may not all participate in the festivities with flag-waving fervor. Some may more quietly commemorate the suffering, struggle, and sacrifice that has triumphed over much of what was wrong with the original document, and observe the anniversary with hopes not realized and promises not fulfilled. I plan to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution as a living document, including the Bill of Rights and the other amendments protecting individual freedoms and human rights.” Thirty-five years later, we sometimes hear the term “constitutional crisis.” The term refers to a problem that arises within the government that the Constitution is not able to resolve. The inability of the Constitution to handle every situation that arises is exactly why Marshall celebrated it as a “living” document, one that has been revised as necessary to keep up with the changes that over 200 years of national history have brought. Some of these changes were the inevitable result of positive societal change. The Civil War was fought to prove that we were no longer a nation that defined some of its citizens as only three-fifths of a person. Marshall writes: Along the way, new constitutional principles have emerged to meet the challenges of a changing society. The progress has been dramatic, and it will continue. The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 could not have envisioned these changes. They could not have imagined, nor would they have accepted, that the document they were drafting would one day be construed by a Supreme Court to which had been appointed a woman and the descendent of an African slave. ‘We the People’ no longer enslave, but the credit does not belong to the Framers. It belongs to those who refused to acquiesce in outdated notions of ‘liberty,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘equality,’ and who strived to better them. Nothing has revealed more clearly “outdated notions of ‘liberty,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘equality,’” and the political split that exists in our country, than the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.  There was a time not all that long ago that a well-qualified candidate could be approved by a large majority in Congress across party lines. The Framers did not intend for an individual to be elevated to our highest court and to serve there for life on the basis of his or her position on a single issue nor did they intend for a nominee to be approved or not by a vote along party lines. Short of a constitutional change, legislation that would change the makeup of the Court would allow the party in power to “pack” it—in this case, to increase the number of justices from nine to thirteen to allow Democrats to balance the conservative justices appointed under former president Donald Trump. However, in April of 2021, President Biden put in place a commission made up of law professors to study how to make constitutional changes in the Supreme Court. Perhaps the Framers did not foresee the power of partisanship as it has evolved over the intervening years. The policy change that our nation seems headed toward is a major constitutional change in our country’s highest court, the type of change that Marshall celebrated as evidence that our Constitution is a living document. Photo: “Constitution"”  by EpicTop10.com. is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

The Stanford Study of Writing—a five-year longitudinal study of writing development throughout college—is almost twenty years old now, and it’s interesting and gratifying to note that I am still in touch with some of the participants. They are now well into adulthood, with families and into their (sometimes second!) careers. When I occasionally speak with one of them, what I can say is that being a part of this five-year study is something they remember well, something they still say had an impact on their lives. This makes me wish that all student writers could be part of carefully designed longitudinal studies: simply being in the study, I think, has a strong effect. Because of that experience, I’ve been following research based on longitudinal studies ever since, most recently in Dana Lynn Driscoll and Wenqi Cui’s “Visible and Invisible Transfer: A Longitudinal Investigation of Learning to Write and Transfer across Five Years,” published in the December 2021 issue of College Composition and Communication. In this study, the authors “tracked students’ writing knowledge, skills, and strategies as they engaged in undergraduate writing experiences over five years.” They considered their findings to be surprising: While students do transfer a considerable amount of knowledge, 78% of transfer that occurs is often “invisible” to them, or they may re-attribute where knowledge comes from over time. Further, higher rates of transfer are correlated with learning that is expanded or reinforced at multiple points in students’ education, including in FYW and disciplinary writing. Our range of findings suggest wide-ranging implications for writing instruction and assessment, including articulating the importance of reinforcing and expanding prior knowledge both in FYW and disciplinary writing, the complexity that genre forms and genre knowledge play in learning transfer, the unseen nature of transfer of different writing skills, and the issue of invisibility . . . . (230-31) This study is well worth reading in its entirety, especially for the rich case study of one particular student. And the findings are certainly important and deserving of additional research, though to me they were not at all surprising. In fact, they corroborate some of what I saw in the Stanford study and, moreover, my own experience in almost fifty years of working with undergraduate college writers. Much of what any of us learns remains “invisible,” below the level of consciousness, but operative, nevertheless, in important ways for further learning and for everyday life. That is not to say we shouldn’t follow the advice of Driscoll and Cui and work hard to make the invisible visible—to focus on opportunities for ongoing student reflection and to focus on reinforcing and expanding writing knowledge, skills, and strategies well beyond FYW and indeed throughout the undergrad curricula. We should do all we can to advance these goals. But we should also recognize, as these authors do, that learning will always be messy and difficult to track and that invisible, sometimes increasingly tacit, knowledge will always mark processes of learning. So thanks to researchers like Driscoll and Cui, we have new questions to ask and new goals to pursue. Here’s to more and more good, solid longitudinal research on writing. Image Credit: "Lake Street Transfer (early 1940s)" by Chicago Transit Authority, used under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license ... View more

The following webinar was presented as part of Bedford’s 5th Annual WPA/Writing Director Workshop.  This year’s theme was Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in First-Year Composition.  The workshops focused on best practices for incorporating diverse, equitable, and inclusive practices into your course.  Learn more about the overall event.  Steve Schessler English Department Chair and Instructor, Cabrillo College Dr. Steve Schessler received his Ph.D in English from Emory University and then an M.A. in Education: Instructional Technology from San Francisco State University. He is an experienced English Composition instructor and current department chair with more than fourteen years teaching English, nine of those at Cabrillo College. He uses Achieve to teach a college composition class contextualized for STEM majors. Dr. Schessler divides his time between duties as chair, instructor, and faculty co-lead for Guided Pathways, a statewide initiative focused on equity and access.     As part of Bedford’s equity-focused Fall 2021 WPA / Writing Director Workshop, I discussed challenges for equity and access in intro composition classes from my perspective as an instructor at a federally-designated Hispanic Serving Institute and a researcher of improving equity in the online classroom - with lessons applicable to the face-to-face classroom, too. In this workshop, we looked at some of the current challenges for advancing equitable outcomes in my classroom as well as those of participants. You can review your own program policies and classroom practices through an equity lens and join in our conversation about ways to improve the student experience - and results. Watch the Webinar: ... View more

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

Day after day, the words and images of a war being waged by an absolute autocrat against an unoffending nation simply because he can fill the airwaves, confronting us with a burgeoning catastrophe that, among so many other feelings, can overwhelm us with a sense of sheer helplessness. Why can't we declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine, as President Zelensky implores us? Why have we impeded Poland's efforts to provide the Ukrainian air force with fighter jets? Anyone paying close attention to the war knows the answers to these questions: because the author of this war controls the world's largest nuclear arsenal and has announced his intention to use it as he sees fit. And this (I believe) unprecedented declaration not only prompts many of us to wonder about the sanity of such a man but also reveals the somber limitations of power in a nuclear-armed world. Not even during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 was any such threat openly declared; the danger of nuclear annihilation was simply assumed. As the war drags on and the threat of ever-more-devastating assaults on Ukraine's civilian population looms (not to mention further military "adventures" along Russia's western borders), I find myself wondering about the potential popular cultural response to it all. Saturday Night Live has already weighed in, but I am thinking more along the lines here of the war movie rather than satirical comedy, and that response, if it is to come at all, will take some time. So for the moment two quite different existing popular cultural depictions of war come to mind as I contemplate the war in Ukraine, movies that include the cinematic double-header Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, and the climax of television's "Game of Thrones." I'll begin with the Avengers films. The parallels with the war in Ukraine are unsettling, for Avengers: Infinity War tells the story of an absolute ruler who annihilates half the population of the universe because he can, and no one can stop him. However, the parallels stop there because that's not the end of the story, for in the sequel a successful counterattack not only defeats the genocidal tyrant, it also resurrects his victims. Such a fictive outcome reveals the limits of popular culture, for while such movies can indeed explore, if only in metaphoric terms, the threats and challenges of dangerous times, they are constrained by the profit motive to provide cathartic, feel-good (or, at least, feel-better) conclusions. Absolute bummers just aren't as popular as happy endings, and the commercial pressures of the culture industry ensures that happy endings are going to be the norm. And then there is Daenerys and her dragon Drogon—George R. R. Martin's equivalent of the Bomb. Since Daenerys deploys this weapon of mass destruction to destroy the Lannisters' evil empire, audiences are inclined to applaud its one-sided use against a dragonless population, but the show's creators complicate the matter by having Daenerys run amok (absolute power corrupts absolutely), thus bringing a disturbing new angle into the story line. But not for long: to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, popular culture can only tolerate so much reality, and so in the end Daenerys is eliminated as Westeros chooses constitutional monarchy, as it were, over absolutism—a reassuring conclusion to a violently anarchical fantasy take on the wildly anarchical contours of actual history. It would be nice if such reassuring endings could be provided for the war in Ukraine. But the unentertaining reality is that there is no easy path to a happy ending here, only the dismal and unglamorous imposition of economic sanctions, cautiously ratcheted up step by step in the hope of stopping the invader without destroying the global economy in the process. Stay tuned.   Image Credit: "IMG_6030" by snamess is marked with CC BY 2.0. ... View more

I recently had the great pleasure of visiting Sarah Ruffing Robbins’s Authorship Seminar at TCU, where the students were not only reading about theories of authorship, and about collaborative authorship in particular, but also taking the opportunity to collaborate themselves and to view collaboration as an act rather than simply an object of study. The inimitable Carrie Leverenz joined in as well for one of the most lively and informative discussions I’ve had in a long time. Attending this seminar gave me a chance to relive my own long history with what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar call the “anxiety of authorship” that is particular to women, beginning with Lisa Ede’s and my decision to co-author an essay in honor of our mutual mentor, Edward P.J. Corbett, early in our careers—and the push-back and outright resistance we got to this idea from colleagues and department administrators as well as from Corbett himself. That response led us to theorize collaboration as a form of resistance and as a feminist undertaking, and led to a series of articles and two books on these issues. Today, questions of authorship and collaboration are more fraught, and more exciting, than ever as new technologies allow not only for larger and larger collaborations—for the kind of “authorless prose” characteristic of, say, Wikipedia—but also for questions about machine authorship. Such questions also resonate with works such as Clint Smith’s award-winning How the Word is Passed, which students in the seminar I attended are reading. The oral history project that Smith details in this absolutely compelling story represents another form of collaboration, one that brings forth voices and stories long ignored or forgotten.     Professor Robbins also shared their Cultural Stewardship Authoring Project, an assignment that invites students in the class to gather several current “covid era” artifacts (from March 2020 to March 2022) and develop labeling, description, and commentary on them for possible inclusion in the TCU archives. Professor Robbins calls it a multilayered aesthetic/historical collaboration.  This is a multi-part project that includes, in addition to the writing up of the artifacts and their historical context, reflections on the students’ own authorial processes, on what they have learned about the complex concept of “authorship,” and on what implications this learning has for highlighting cultural diversity in the archives. During class, they talked about the ways in which “covid culture” was so often intersectional, noting that for women the pandemic cut across so many aspects of their lives in ways that called for enormous reserves of energy. The class spent some time talking through these intersections in their own lives and about the artifacts they were thinking of choosing—everything from a vaccination card to a poem discovered during the pandemic to the page of a diary or a photo of a “quarantine room.”  Students will present artifacts in a future class, along with their interpretation of and reflections on them, a session I am very much hoping to attend so that I can thank these students and Professors Robbins and Leverenz for this deeply engaging experience. The project students are working on is, of course, deeply collaborative, and one that also raises issues of authorship, co- or multiple-authorship, and intellectual property or ownership issues. I can imagine a similar assignment in a first-year writing classroom, and I expect that if students curated such an archival project, their university library might be very interested in displaying it or in adding it to their own archives. All food for thought—and an encouragement to keep creating assignments that call for creative collaboration. Image Credit: Photo 824 by CreateHERStock, used under a Public Domain license ... View more

In memory of poet-teacher Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)   Photo by Olga Tsai “The wreck in 33m deep in Bohol Island, Philippines.” November 12, 2019 Free to use under the Unsplash license   I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. -Adrienne Rich,  “Diving into the Wreck” From Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1973 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright 1973 by Adrienne Rich.     1. 2 Years Online This month, March 2022, marks the tenth anniversary of the death of poet-teacher Adrienne Rich, and the second anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown and the beginning of remote learning in New York City.  Two years later, I am still teaching online, and I still believe that online instruction is not a temporary solution to an intractable problem. Indeed, a problem as intractable as Covid-19 leaves its afterimage everywhere, even as the virus still hovers in the background, seemingly invisible, but not yet disappeared.    2. Diving into the Wreck: Affect and Asynchronous Teaching and Learning After two years, I more fully understand the challenges of creating and fostering online community, and especially affective involvement with asynchronous work– the work of feeling and experiencing writing beyond the minimal fulfillment of course requirements. Offline and away from immediate real-time classroom communication, I want to recreate a sense of purpose that was more easily conveyed in face-to-face classrooms before March 2020. Most of all, I want to reinvent movement and flow of lessons and interactions among students and among students and teachers. My hope is that we have taken time to work in community (synchronously on Zoom) and as satellites orbiting the community, but with a sense of connectedness (asynchronously).    In other words, asynchronous learning, for me, is more than following directions to complete the assignment, more than the number of pages, paragraphs, words, quotes, and citations that students often ask about. Of course the baseline requirements need to be clear, but asynchronous learning can involve more than merely satisfying the quantitative aspects of the assignment. The pandemic taught me that qualitative attributes of learning also matter. I had to think through how my students might be experiencing language in the wreck of lockdown and the suffering of too many communities.    This learning took place in the midst of lockdown, my father’s death from Covid concurrent with the beginning of the Capital riot (three weeks before his first vaccine was scheduled), then deep grief, and aggravated generalized anxiety, then Delta, and then Omicron. I learned again the multimodality of language, that the words cannot stay flat on the screen or in the inflection of my voice in a video recorded lesson. In asynchronous learning, in the long slow-motion and ongoing wreck of the pandemic,  I remembered “Diving into the Wreck”: “The words are purposes/The words are maps.”     3. National Emergency Adrienne Rich, the poet-teacher , whose memory is honored in this post, taught writing in the early years of the SEEK program (Seeking Education, Elevation and Knowledge)  and open admissions at the City College of New York.  In those years, Rich was present for the nationwide student strikes of Spring 1970.    The strikes, at hundreds of colleges and universities across the United States, took place in the midst of national catastrophe. At the end of April, in conjunction with the Vietnam War, President Nixon announced that US troops had begun a ground invasion of Cambodia, and that the US had been bombing Cambodia for eighteen months. Student protests rose up, in the midst of civil unrest, students died by state violence . On May 15th, two students were killed and twelve injured at Jackson State by local and state police in Mississippi and, on May 4th, four students were killed and nine students injured at Kent State by the Ohio National Guard.     In the aftermath of the killings and the subsequent strikes, colleges and universities closed and classes were canceled. Remote learning in the spring of 1970, as in the winter of 2020, provoked a sense of national emergency. Longstanding systemic violence no longer was invisible. My partner who was ending his first year at Kent State and was an eyewitness to the killings, had not yet completed spring quarter courses or  taken final exams.Then, as now, bearing witness to national emergency brought trauma and disruption.     4. Conclusion: Adrienne Rich and Analog Forms In 1970, as in 2020, educators struggled with what came next– what teaching and learning could mean in the face of confrontation with longstanding structural violence. The problems of violence and interrupted schooling were not new, as many people were already bearing witness to the violence and school closings precipitated by Southern resistance to Brown v. Board of Education.  In 1970, with no Zoom and no internet, remote schooling evolved to fit analog forms.    My partner settled his spring quarter grades in a tentative return to Kent State over the summer. Adrienne Rich grappled with teaching and learning catastrophic conditions in real time. With deep concern for her students (see Kynard pages 216-217), Rich offered culturally relevant writing assignments, and invited students to phone her and to mail their writing to her home address. Not long afterward, Rich published her poem “Diving into the Wreck.”     A decade after her passing, Adrienne Rich’s work in and out of classrooms remains deeply relevant . In “Diving into the Wreck,” Rich offers what feel like guidelines for the spring of 2022: “To see the damage done/ and the treasures that prevail.” These lines remind me not  to look away from either the damage or the treasures, to learn from what is found, what is reclaimed, and from what is irretrievably lost–  no matter the inconvenience  and the pain, to grow from that learning, however necessary and for however long. ... View more