This blog series is written by Julia Domenicucci, an editor at Macmillan Learning, in conjunction with Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. Class discussion can be a great way to engage students with each other and with course materials. Using podcasts as the basis for a discussion in your composition course can also serve as a nice change from talking about the usual essays, stories, or instructional content. This blog post outlines some discussion ideas for using podcasts in two ways—talking about podcasts and talking about the content of podcasts. Podcasts are well-established, but their popularity seems to increase every day—and for good reason! They are engaging and creative, and they cover every topic imaginable. They are also great for the classroom: you can use them to encourage student engagement and introduce multimodality.  LaunchPad and Achieve products include assignable, ad-free Grammar Girl podcasts, which you can use to support your lessons. You can assign one (or more!) of these suggested podcasts for students to listen to before class. Each podcast also comes with a complete transcript, which is perfect for students who prefer to read the content. To learn more about digital products and purchasing options, please visit Macmillan's English catalog or speak with your sales representative.   If you are using LaunchPad, refer to the unit “Grammar Girl Podcasts” for instructions on assigning podcasts. You can also find the same information on the support page "Assign Grammar Girl Podcasts."  If you are using Achieve, you can find information on assigning Grammar Girl in Achieve on the support page “Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course.” If your English Achieve product is copyright year 2021 or later, you are able to use a folder of suggested Grammar Girl podcasts in your course; please see “Using Suggested Grammar Girl Podcasts in Achieve for English Products” for more information.   Using Grammar Girl Podcasts to Talk about Podcasts as a Medium Pre-Class Work: Assign two Grammar Girl podcasts of varying lengths for your students to listen to before your next class. Suggest they make notes about the podcasts like they would for other readings or content assigned in class. For a longer podcast, you might assign “The Proto-Indo-European Language” (15:45) or “Bare Infinitivals” (15:12) or “Affect versus Effect” (09:15) and for a shorter podcast you might assign “Hyphens in Ages” (02:28) or “Pronoun Order” (02:55) or “Momentarily or In a Moment?” (01:43). Tip: If you’re using Achieve, see “Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course” and “Create an Assessment” for help with making Grammar Girl podcasts available to students. Discussion: In class, assign your students to small groups of 3-4 students, either in person or virtually. Ask them to discuss the following points: How do we, as a group, define “podcast”? How do podcasts differ from lectures, videos, or audiobooks? How are they similar? What are examples of podcasts we have listened to? How are the two Grammar Girl podcasts we listened to similar? Different? What is the structure of each of the podcasts we listened to? Is there an introduction, middle, and/or conclusion?  What are the other defining elements of these podcasts? How did the content inform the length of each podcast? Did either podcast feel too long or too short? If too long, what information could have been removed? If too short, what could have been added? What questions do I still have after listening to this podcast, either about the content or about how it was created? Reflection: After discussing in their groups, ask each student to write a summary of the group’s thoughts. Come back to discuss the questions, and each group’s answers, as a class. Tip: If you are using an Achieve English course, consider creating a custom Writing Assignment that students can use to submit their reflections. Refer to the article “Guide to Writing assignments for instructors” for help with Writing Assignments.   Using Grammar Girl Podcasts to Generate Discussion around a Topic Pre-Class Work: Assign two Grammar Girl podcasts on a topic (or similar topics) you want your students to work with. As they listen, ask students to record the following for each podcast: 1 thing they learned 1 question they still have 1 personal connection (to an experience, piece of writing, class, etc.) Tip: If you’re using Achieve, consider assigning podcasts from the folder of suggested Grammar Girl podcasts in your course; please see “Using Suggested Grammar Girl Podcasts in Achieve for English Products” for more information. Or, you can assign podcasts from the categories that these podcasts are organized into, like “Academic Reading, Writing, and Speaking,” “Adjectives and Adverbs,” or “Word Usage.” See “Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course” for help with assigning podcasts other than those in the suggested podcasts folder. Discussion: In class, assign your students to small groups of 3-4 students. Ask them to discuss the following points: Summarize the topic(s) covered in the podcast. What were the differences between how the podcasts addressed the topic(s)? The lessons learned from each podcast. Were any of our takeaways the same? Similar? The questions we still have. How might we find the answers to these questions? Presentation: Students should then take their findings and create a short 3-4 minute presentation based on their discussions. The presentation should include a summary, their takeaways, and any remaining questions. Encourage students to use visuals (images, graphs) as well as text, and cite their sources (the podcasts, the image creators, etc.). Each group can then present to their classmates, or the presentations can be shared online.   This semester, be sure to check out our other Grammar Girl assignment ideas. You can access previous posts from the Bedford Bits home page or by visiting “30+ Grammar Girl Assignments for Your Next Class” on the Quick and Dirty Tips website (these assignments are based on some of the blog posts, and six of them include downloadable PDFs!).   Have you used Grammar Girl—or any other podcasts—in your classes? Let us know in the comments. We’d love to hear from you and learn about how you are using podcasts this semester—or in past semesters!   Credit: "Old phone" by nicolasnova is marked with CC BY 2.0. ... View more

I'm currently reading Plurilingual Pedagogies for Multilingual Writing Classrooms, edited by Kay M. Losey and Gail Shuck, and it includes Shawna Shapiro's "'Language and Social Justice': A (Surprisingly) Plurilingual First-Year Seminar." While this essay has not helped me make clear distinctions between plurilingualism and translingualism, it has reminded me of the critically important work Shapiro has been doing for years now, slowly and steadily and carefully building a case for putting critical language awareness at the heart of our writing classrooms and our writing curricula. I've been privileged in the last year or so to follow Shapiro's work closely and to be part of a group with whom she shared chapters of her new book, Cultivating Critical Language Awareness in the Writing Classroom. This book is thoroughly grounded in theory and research, but also in the daily practicalities of teaching writing. In fact, I'd say that is one significant hallmark of all Shapiro's work: the weaving of theory and practice, along with the insistence on collaboration and on attending with great care to the voices of students. This new book has been called a critical "toolkit for supporting and embracing linguistic diversity" in writing classes, and it certainly is that, though the "toolkit" is embedded in a rich historical and theoretical context. The same can be said for her recent essay on language and social justice: it walks the walk and talks the talk of "plurilingual pedagogy," always in the service of student writers/speakers, and always deeply collaborative. In this case, the students are key collaborators in creating the principles the course rests on as well as in shaping its curriculum. We hear their voices loud and clear throughout the essay, culminating in student writing for a "Writing beyond the Classroom" assignment that invited students to use their entire writing and linguistic repertoires. The two poems and the presentation of them described at the end of the essay demonstrate the power of mixing languages, of the human voice, and of the possibilities embodied in a plurilingual pedagogy. There are other terrific essays in Plurilingual Pedagogies for Multilingual Writing Classrooms, and I expect I will be writing about them in due time. But today, I want to recommend Shapiro's article in particular—and her book. When I think back on my early days of teaching, with only an MA in literature, I know I would have given just about anything to have had these resources at my disposal. But in addition to her book and many articles, Shapiro is building an amazing online resource for all of us. Called the CLA Collective, this is first a companion website to Shapiro's book, but as I know from many conversations with her, Shawna sees it as potentially so much more. Rather, she envisions it as a gathering space or hub for all teachers of writing, one where we can share and learn from one another. (You can join the Collective by going to the "Connect" page and simply signing up.) But even in its early stages, the site is full of information and resources, including syllabi, handouts, readings, "Shawna's 'Top 5' lists of other websites"—and more. If you are looking for ways to promote social justice in and through your pedagogy and to encourage and enable linguistic pluralism—while attending to everything else your university expects of you AND teaching multiple courses every single term—then this new book and website can be of enormous help. Maybe I'll see you at the CLA Collective! Image Credit: "Stack of thin flexicover books on reflective table" by Horia Varlan, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Commenting on student papers, for me, involves a lot of sipping tea and staring into space. So, my eyes often rest on this young tree growing across the street from my work table at home. Springtime floats on the breeze some days in March in Indiana, but buds are still tight, so I can see clearly the serpentine structure of this tree. I admire the way it has veered off course — due to wind, or kids hanging on low branches (there’s a school nearby) — and then found its way back to the vertical climb. How? Through continued growth. Yes, I’m dealing in metaphor here; it’s an occupational hazard of English majors. But now that we’re midway through the semester, it’s a good time to check in with students — and with ourselves as instructors — to see what’s going well, and what we might do differently as we all continue to grow. Andrea Lunsford’s recent post, “On Engaging Respectfully,” reminds us of the power of using our writing classrooms to help students practice (including failing and trying again) the skills we need now for deep, thorny, and necessary conversations in this divided world. Self-reflection and self-assessment are also skills our students take with them into other courses and far beyond. For many years, I’ve given over to students the power to assess their own participation. If you’d like to dip your toe into the practice of “Ungrading,” handing students the responsibility for this aspect of their evaluation is a low-stakes and high-impact place to begin, since “participation” grades are inherently subjective from the instructor’s perspective. As I wrote about here, students tend to handle this responsibility with seriousness and aplomb if they are offered some guidance and encouragement to reward themselves for growth. In my classes, we reflect in the first days of the semester on the power of taking risks and stretching ourselves as learners. Students set specific participation goals for themselves. Now that we’re midway through the semester, it’s helpful to carve out class time for self-reflection to see if they think they are veering off course, and how they would like to continue to grow. The assignment doesn’t take long: In a paragraph, please reflect on your own participation and attendance in this course up to this point in the semester. How are you challenging yourself? What are you pleased with? How would you like to progress or grow between now and the end of the semester? Remember that at the end of the semester, I will ask you to weigh in with a written self-assessment and numbers (out of a possible 200 points) about your attendance and participation over the whole semester. This is a time to pause and reflect and set some goals for the rest of our time together. I’m always illuminated by their self-assessments, which are often humble and frequently funny. They help me evaluate whether I’m doing enough to structure democratic discussions and activities that engage each individual. Like students, at this point in the semester, I, too, can fall back on tried and tired activities that don’t push any of us into new territory.  I see self-assessment as more than a “course correction,” though that might be part of what happens with this assignment. But that phrase doesn’t capture the value I see in that serpentine tree, more interesting for its serpentine journey. Nor does it capture the environment I try to cultivate in my classroom, where students can transform themselves by taking risks, often by failing for a bit while trying something new, rather than following the straight line of what they’ve always done to succeed in school.  Wisdom, strength, and even grace come from allowing ourselves to veer into new territory, reflecting on what we learn along the way.   Image Credit: Photograph taken by the post’s author, April Lidinsky ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Sonia Feder-Lewis, a Professor at Saint Mary's University of Minnesota's Graduate School of Education.   Awakening It was a dream course assignment: a small upper-level honors class in Women’s Literature. A reward near the end of graduate school. Eleven students: 10 women and one brave young man, newly separated from the Army for carefully undisclosed reasons. The women treated him gently as we read Woolf, Morrison, Erdrich, Chopin. “The Awakening is the greatest book I have ever read,” he said passionately. Two decades later, he recognizes me in a coffee shop. Without pause, he tells me the course had been his favorite. And his hardest. I do not ask why.     Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

One of the most memorable sessions I attended at this year’s CCCC happened on Sunday, when the “Rhetoric’s Histories: Traditions, Theories, Pedagogies, Practices” SIG (“special interest group”) met. This session featured five speakers who spoke for about five minutes each, reminding me once again of how much can be said in that short span of time. (My favorite Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition meeting ever was one where speakers each had 8 minutes. I can still remember how electrifying the atmosphere was as one after another scholar spoke right to the point!) In this session, Tamika Carey from University of Virginia explained to us why rhetoricians must study impatience—and argued that rhetorical impatience is always a “necessary source.” Lisa King from University of Tennessee spoke compellingly about dominant narratives about Indigenous peoples: that they are gone, simply disappeared, or that they are “niche,” a kind of “add-on” to the history of the U.S. (One telling example: while the oldest structure on her home campus is the Indian Mound, it is never mentioned in the official narrative the university tells about itself.) Aja Martinez from University of North Texas described the “rhetorical gymnastics” being used to brand Critical Race Theory as toxic and showed how she is mounting counter narratives, one step at a time. And Kathleen Welch from University of Oklahoma continued her critical analysis of Aristotle and Neo-Aristotelian rhetoric and alerted us to forthcoming work on World Rhetorical Traditions, edited by Hui Wu and Tarez Graban. That’s a book I will be trying to pre-order! Perhaps Haivan Hoang from University of Massachusetts Amherst most captivated my imagination, though, with a searing report on “racial melancholia” in writing classes. Building on Freud’s definition of the term as “unresolved loss,” Haivan told us about her research with Asian American students and their many, many unresolved losses—losses that often come up in assigned readings for their courses. She quoted students who spoke movingly about being in classes where the readings seemed intended to educate or teach white students, ignoring those in the class whose families had lived the traumas being described. I couldn’t write fast enough to capture the quotations, but the point they made really struck home and I have thought long and hard about how I choose readings and how I prepare students for reading and discussing them. One student in particular commented on how there never seemed to be time to absorb and really discuss; the class instead just rushed on to the next reading. That made me think of the “slow reading” movement and of the utter inadequacy of the “coverage model” in our classes. Less is usually more, as this student noted. So much to learn. And attending this virtual conference reminded me of that fact—and made me long even more for an in-person meeting next year. While I could see all of these amazing speakers on my computer screen, their impact would have been even greater in person. So I will hope for that next year. In the meantime, I am grateful to all these scholars for their wisdom and advice. Image Credit: "13' MacBook Air (2010)" by brendanlim, 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.  Jay Dolmage Professor of English, University of Waterloo I am committed to disability rights in my scholarship, service, and teaching. My work brings together rhetoric, writing, disability studies, and critical pedagogy. My first book, entitled Disability Rhetoric, was published with Syracuse University Press in 2014. Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education was published with Michigan University Press in 2017 and is available in an open-access version online. Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability was published in 2018 with Ohio State University Press. I am the Founding Editor of the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies. I am also the co-author of the Bedford/St. Martin's books How to Write Anything and Disability and the Teaching of Writing.   Last October, as part of Bedford’s Fall 2021 WPA Workshop, I developed a presentation designed to address the ableist attitudes, policies, and practices that are built into higher education, focusing on our composition classrooms specifically. This workshop was recorded, and we are sharing it now to make it more accessible for the broader community. The talk was divided into three timeframes.  First, I explored some of the ways disability has been historically constructed at our Universities asking: how has ableism come to inflect what we do as teachers, in particular in the writing classroom?  Then, we interrogated the minimal and temporary means we have been given to address inequities, and the cost such an approach has for disabled students and faculty. This was the “during the pandemic” part of the talk, and we examined some of the ways we have – actually quite quickly – “pivoted” or adapted to an emergency teaching scenario. In some ways we have advanced access in this pivot, and in other ways we have not. Finally,  we explored how we can move forward, planning, from the beginning, to make our teaching as accessible as possible, so that we don’t have to make temporary or unsatisfactory modifications later. The hope is that we can think about what we want to change permanently about higher education, now that we have been offered a chance to reevaluate our priorities and revisit policies, procedures, patterns and pedagogies. Please have a look at the video and share widely!  I think we all agree that before this pandemic, our schools had too many unnecessary barriers in place for students. During the last twenty months, we have all viewed and experienced new barriers, or saw the old ones from new perspectives. Now we have a chance to build something different. Watch the Webinar: ... View more

In the early years of my teaching, I expected students to do most of their writing outside of class. Class time meant practice in close reading, discussion, peer review, and grammar work, along with explanations of assignments and conferencing.  While I was teaching at a community college in Virginia, I had one colleague who did not allow students to do any writing outside of class—everything was “in-class writing.”  Part of his reasoning related to keeping tabs on plagiarism, and at the time, that logic seemed cynical to me. And it spiked my own anxiety: as a student, I felt constrained and coerced when forced to write in class; I wanted to spread my materials (notes, articles, legal pad, laptop, coffee) across a wide space. I cringed when surrounded by cinder block walls and stark, industrial clocks whose ticking hands drummed towards my time limit. I associated classroom writing with testing—with worry and panic, with images of others typing or scribbling when my own words would not come.  So I resisted in-class writing as much as I could, despite a frequent reality in my developmental (and later corequisite) classrooms: the students were not writing outside of class, and whatever I had planned to do in class would not work.  These days, my in-person composition and corequisite classes may spend 75% or more of time in class working on writing—or a curious blend of writing, paired collaboration, small group conferences, and individual sessions between students and the two senior writing fellows who are working with me. All of this happens at once: we are writing, doing peer review, revising, and conferencing together, all in a sort of fluid dance supported by a quiet hum as students talk, re-watch short videos, slip out for an iced caramel latte from the shop upstairs, slide chairs, move closer to plugs for their devices, or find ways to share a screen.   Strangely enough, it was the pandemic that gave me the freedom to make some of these adjustments: with a very liberal absence policy, I began using a screen capture for all of our in-class sessions, dividing them into short videos of 4 to 8 minutes on key topics.  Students who missed class could watch at home—but I found that even students who were in class might benefit from watching these videos at home—or at the moment they needed the information, not necessarily on a particular class day. I began shifting a lot of content to those short videos, housed on our LMS, and letting the students write (and talk about their writing) in class.  And I am watching my students get a lot more writing done. Our campus is a commuter campus, and many of my students come to class between jobs—where they can’t write, not even on breaks. Going home may entail caring for a child, a sibling, or an older family member. They may have to share a computer at home, or they may not be able to rely on their internet connections—and it can be difficult to type on a phone. Students may be in search of housing, of food, of safety. We have 150 minutes of composition class and 60 minutes of corequisite support each week—and no amount of training in “time management” will produce for them a better chunk of time for focused attention on writing.  Does doing most of our writing in class solve all the issues? Not at all. I have students who—for a number of reasons—do not watch videos or read outside of class. They still aren’t prepared. But it’s quite easy to show them where to find the information they need and let them watch or read in class. Do all of them stay on task? No. They watch TikTok videos, shop, text, and do homework for other courses. But most will do some writing work—and talk to me about it. Do they finish everything in the time we are given? No. But they have drafts to show me. I have spent far too many class sessions with first-year writers, frustrated because what I planned to do wouldn’t work:  they weren’t prepared, or group members were absent.  But when the plan is to write, talk about writing, and then write some more, the plan generally works.  And effective teaching often occurs, whether I planned specifically for a given “lesson” or not, because the lesson is what the students need, at that moment, for their writing. ... View more

4Cs, the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication (4c22), takes place online March 9-March 12, 2022. In a 2013 Bits blog post, I offered an unconventional guide to the convention. Examining the guide years later, I find that the most relevant section remains a series of questions that invite the audience to reflect on students (lightly revised): In moments when I feel most overwhelmed by my surroundings, I try to remember students and what I can bring home to share with them. I continually ask myself: How can I make time to learn new skill sets or to attend to new theories and ideas that will allow me to grow as a teacher/scholar— and for students to have access to the wider world of scholarship in rhetoric and composition and writing studies?    In this context, I want to offer a bit of history. By 2013, I understood the challenges posed by the convention, especially trying to absorb and process so many sessions, exhibits, and workshops all in a span of four days. However, 2013 felt different to prior years. That year, the convention was held at the Riviera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, which offered inexpensive hotel rooms– and a casino. With all that in mind, Las Vegas felt like a refuge. When needed, I could escape the feeling of overwhelm in convention crowds, despite o not playing casino games. I found solace in the casino at the Riviera, The casino, as I recall, had a room with only slot machines, and those slot machines made the room pop with colorful lights and the sounds of canned music. In that cacophony of light and sound, I somehow found an immense sense of comfort, a welcome relief for my overloaded working memory, and a chance to refocus.    Photo by Susan Bernstein, Las Vegas, Nevada. March 14, 2013.   Additionally, and significantly in 2022, 4Cs offers expanded attention to access. This expansion grows out of concerns about accessibility at the 2019 convention in Pittsburgh, the last time before the pandemic that 4Cs met in person. The next year,  in September 2020, Adam Hubrig and Ruth Osorio hosted a symposium, Enacting a Culture of Access in Our Conference Spaces, in College Composition and Communication, one of the major journals in writing studies. Anchored by many voices and experiences, the symposium presents an activist space for reimagining accessibility at 4Cs.  This year, 4Cs will once again meet online and there will be enhanced opportunities for refocusing. The changes in technology mean that  the convention need not be absorbed in four short days. Anyone who registers for 4Cs will have access to the online archive until Friday June 10th. With this extension , my working memory will have more time to process the convention slowly and in manageable chunks.   One manifestation of that activist space is a comprehensive accessibility guide and a visual miniguide written by Sean Kamperman (committee chair), Morgan Blair, Andrea Olinger, and Jeanne Popowits. Contrast that to 2013, when the  Hospitality Guide contained a single page with a link to an Accessibility Guide offered by the CDICC (Committee on Disability Issues). The guide, composed by local accessibility coordinator, Michael Intinarelli, local arrangements chair Robyn Rohde, and the 2013 CDICC chair Jay Dolmage, could be downloaded as a Word document, and offered a detailed description of the floorplan, as well as the sights and sounds of the Riviera.  Rereading that description in 2022, I find a poignant sense of history in a place that no longer exists. In 2015, the casino and hotel were closed down, and in 2016, three years after 4c13, the Riviera was imploded.   However, I would prefer not to end this post with an implosion. Instead, as I revisit the blog post from 2013, I notice another guideline: “Remember the global context.” The example I used was a memory from ten years earlier. In 2003, 4Cs convened in Manhattan and coincided with the beginning of George W. Bush’s declaration of war against Iraq, and subsequent street protests in Times Square and Washington Square. I remember walking into the convention hotel after attending one of the protests, my hair dripping with rain. In 2022, I feel no nostalgia. As I revise this post in early March, Ukraine is at war, and the situation changes with each passing hour. For me, that global context remains inseparable from remembering my students. How can I keep students’ concerns at the center in a constantly evolving world? Attending 4Cs will not answer this question. Nevertheless, with extended access, I hope to find–and to pass along–opportunities to learn and grow. ... View more

When Harper & Row, way back in 1990 when it was still called Harper & Row, picked up my book The Signs of Our Time: Semiotics: The Hidden Messages of Environments, Objects, and Cultural Images (1988) for republication in their Perennial Library series, they made a subtle change in the subtitle of the book, changing it to The Secret Meanings of Everyday Life. I had no say in the matter, but I knew why they made the change: clearly the idea was to make the title more intriguing for potential readers who, in this conspiracy-obsessed society of ours, believe that a lot is being hidden from them and they want to find out what it is because they think that it is doing them harm. (It bears noting that I didn't have anything to do with the original subtitle either, which also attempts to pique reader interest with a promise of revelation, of a lifting of the veil on something that has been concealed, something dangerous.) In reality, however, the practice of cultural semiotics has nothing at all to do with concealment or secrecy. If there is any element of occultation at all in the matter it is simply that of what is hidden in plain sight, of what appears to us right there in the open inviting us to ask questions about it, questions that can be answered by looking at other perfectly visible cultural phenomena that both contextualize and explain what we are seeing through what I call "systems of association and difference" in every edition of Signs of Life the USA, the book that grew out of The Signs of Our Time way back in 1994. Take, for example, the recent headline from the Los Angeles news source KTLA: "Super Bowl commercials: Heavy on celebrities and nostalgia".  Now, over the years I have performed a lot of semiotic analyses of Super Bowl commercials, both of individual advertisements and of the way that the ads have become almost as important as the game itself. I have analyzed puppies and vampires, office workers and blue jeans, attack dogs and pink bunnies .  .  .  the list goes on and on. But this time I want to look not at any particular Super Bowl LVI ads per se, but what has been said about them generally in the mass media. Here are some more headlines to give you some idea of their drift: "Touchdown or fumble? Check out the celebrities who star in the 2022 Super Bowl ads"; "Here are the top celebrity 2022 Super Bowl commercials"; "The Super Bowl ads showed celebrities rule the world. We’re just buying stuff in it"; and so on and so forth. So it isn't just KTLA that noticed how celebrity performers dominated this year's Super Bowl advert extravaganza. As I say, it's all in plain sight. But what does it tell us? We can begin our analysis with a simple question: to wit, why were there so many celebrity adverts at this year's Super Bowl?; to which KTLA offers a succinct answer: Off the field, Super Bowl advertisers were in a tough competition of their own. Advertisers shelled out up to $7 million for 30 seconds of airtime during the Super Bowl, so they pulled out all the stops to win over the estimated 100 million people that tune into the game. Big stars, humor and a heavy dose of nostalgia were prevalent throughout the night. So far so good, but now we are faced with another question: how does such star power translate into effective advertising? The answer to this question is practically self-evident: Americans are not only entertained by celebrities—and thus associate their pleasure in watching celebrity ads with the products being advertised, enhancing the possibility that they will purchase them—they also tend to identify with, and, accordingly, to trust them. Advertisers have known this for a very long time, so the system to which the Super Bowl LVI ads belong is a large and historically well-grounded one. In one sense, then, the ads this year were nothing new. But the fact that so many mass media reports highlighted the sheer volume of celebrity ads this time around marks a difference, a difference not in kind but in degree. There just seem to have been a lot more celebrities featured in this year's Super Bowl ads than there have been in past years, and this difference raises further cultural-semiotic questions. One such question could be, what is it with celebrities anyway these days?, and George Packer's essay "Celebrating Inequality" (which you can find on pages 86-88 in the 10th edition of Signs of Life in the USA) provides a trenchant answer. As my head note to Packer's analysis puts it: "Our age is lousy with celebrities," George Packer quips .  .  .  and it’s only getting worse. Indeed, in tough times like today’s, when the gap between the rich and the poor yawns ever wider, celebrities loom larger on the social horizon than they have in more equitable times, overshadowing the rest of us. And we’re not just talking about entertainers. Indeed, as Packer notes, they include entrepreneurs, bankers, computer engineers, real estate developers, media executives, journalists, politicians, scientists, and even chefs. And as the new celebrity deities gobble up whatever opportunities are left in America, Packer believes, America itself is turning backward to the days of the Jazz Age and Jay Gatsby. So, meet the new celebrity gods; same as the old celebrity gods — or "something far more perverse." Packer's essay was written in 2013, and since then the situation has only intensified, with Super Bowl LVI being just one signifier of this intensification. In the intervening years the power of the Internet "influencer" has also grown, along with that of the traditional celebrity, within a social environment in which fewer and fewer people are taking up more and more space. The Super Bowl ads are a case in point. Advert roles that once went to non-celebrity performers are increasingly going to the already successful. This is not trivial if you are a budding actor yourself, because television advertising has long been a gateway to an economically sustainable career for non-celebrity performers. When we expand the system further, we can see, for example, how the career path of journalism has been similarly affected, with only a handful of celebrity journalists raking in most of the money while the rest flounder as freelancers or simply give their writing away for nothing. And I hardly need to explain how the adjunctification of higher education is affecting many of the members of the Macmillan Learning community, as a shrinking number of TED-talk-level celebrity professors enjoy a growing proportion of the financial rewards. The list of examples could go on and on. As I say, all of this is in plain sight. There is no conspiracy. One only needs to look at what is going on all around us, and our own participation in it. Thus, in what constitutes nothing less than a betrayal of the American dream, the victims of a society that is producing fewer and fewer "winners" and more and more "losers" are looking in the wrong places for the sources of their distress, laughing at funny Super Bowl commercials starring A-list performers when the joke, in the end, is on them.   Image Credit: "365 x36 Guinea Pig Conspiracy" by David Masters is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

I wonder how many teachers of writing are beginning to think it’s time to take a linguistic time out and think through a number of terms that are coming at us from all sides. Here are just a few of them: bilingual (and in particular “dominant bilingual,” “balanced bilingual,” ”incipient bilingual,” etc.), multilingual, metrolingual, polylingual, plurilingual, translingual, languaging. . . I could go on and on. And I’ve been reading as fast as I can, trying to keep track of all the permutations of these terms, the controversies swirling around them, and the ideological freight that each term carries. Not to mention the choices hard-working teachers have to make, often on the fly. In Marshall and Moore’s 2018 study “Plurilingualism Amid the Panoply of Lingualisms: Addressing Critiques and Misconceptions in Education,” published in the International Journal of Multilingualism, they distinguish plurilingualism (which comes from European theorists) by saying that it moves away “from the view of languages as separate, parallel, autonomous systems based on discourses of complete competencies to a view that recognizes hybridity and varying degrees of competence between and within languages” (3)—except that such a distinction also seems to apply to translingualism, and perhaps other terms as well. One very recent book that is helping me think about these terms is Kay M. Losey and Gail Shuck’s edited volume Plurilingual Pedagogies for Multilingual Writing Classrooms, though its title demonstrates terministic slippage at work. From what I’ve read of this book so far, the authors seem to be making a very strong case for moving swiftly away from the heretofore dominant English-only approach in writing classes (a good start) to what they present as a plurilingual approach that would recognize and value “the many proficiencies students bring with them to the classroom” and thus create “a classroom climate of mutual respect and admiration, fostering self-efficacy and self-confidence in learners” in which “students’ full identities and backgrounds. . . would become an essential, honored part of the classroom community” (2). I applaud this approach—but it seems to me characteristic of translingual and even multilingual approaches as well. I feel like I am swimming in alphabet soup. I clearly need to stop complaining, dig deeper, and do much more reading. And then perhaps I can write something that will clarify these terms—if only for myself. Words—and definitions—matter. So if you can clarify distinctions among these terms, I am all ears and would appreciate the help! Image Credit: "Hostelling International 19" by orijinal, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

The weather in Northern Indiana has been shifting daily between swirling snow, then sunshine, then sleet and slush, then sunshine again. Everything feels unsettled, but it’s clear we’re tipping toward springtime. In my classrooms, too, I can feel a shift in the quality of the conversation. Now, more often than not, students speak to one another rather than pinging back to me, collaborating textual discussion – one they can own, with pride. It brings to mind Andrea Lunsford’s recent post on the subversive joys of collaboration. Any instructor knows the thrill of witnessing a class “take off, or “jell,” or … pick your metaphor. Don’t we live for those moments? The tipping point for one class was discussing a text that I’m teaching for the first time, Robin DiAngelo’s “Nothing to Add: A Challenge to White Silence in Racial Discussions.” While 10 years old, the essay is still timely. DiAngelo unpacks in startlingly useful ways the “rationales for white silence” that we commonly hear during discussions about race. Among the list of rationales: “It’s just my personality – I rarely talk in groups”; “Everyone has already said what I was thinking”; “I don’t know much about race, so I will just listen”; “I don’t feel safe / don’t want to be attacked, so I am staying quiet”; “I am trying to be careful not to dominate the discussion”; “I don’t want to be misunderstood / say the wrong thing / offend anybody”; and “I don’t have anything to add.” (2-3) DiAngelo challenges readers to see how these claims, which may seem reasonable at first, often are ways of maintaining white privilege. These excuses for silence allow whites to remain comfortable and removed from conversations that could – and should – destabilize the norms that hold white supremacy in place. In our discussion, students honed in on “Everyone has already said what I was thinking” and “I don’t have anything to add,” as reasons they could identify with, especially. The conversation took off from there, with many students admitting that they often remained silent in discussions, letting others carry the weight, even if – or especially if – they agreed with what others had said. But as DiAngelo says, “If we are moved or gained insight from what someone shared, we should say so, even if others have said it” (8).  She adds: Positioning ourselves as having less of value to contribute than others in the group may be rooted in dominant culture’s expectation that knowledge should be a form of “correct” information. Yet sharing what we are thinking, whether “right” or “wrong,” articulate or clumsy, is important in terms of building trust, conveying empathy, or validating a story or perspective. (8) Wow, what a tipping point these insights provoked. Now, students frequently respond to one another to endorse ideas (“Yes - I was thinking the same thing!”) or feel freer to praise one another, even briefly (“That is such a good way to put that!”). Our classroom is filled every day, now, with more voices, more ideas amplified, and more perspectives visible and audible to all. Students feel more supported by one another, and are getting to know and trust one another much faster. Just as sap is rising outside, the energy in our discussions is surging in a way that feels perfectly in sync with the season. Explicitly talking together about fruitful and often low-risk alternatives to silence has given members of the class new confidence and freedom to speak up. Even if you don’t teach DiAngelo’s piece, I’d encourage you to raise these common reasons students stay quiet in class, and listen to your students’ responses. What might happen if you help them reframe silence in this way, and invite them to raise their voices in support of one another? Let’s share additional ideas, too, for methods you’ve found for shifting the ground of classroom discussion. I’m ready to listen and respond; as my students will tell you, it sure feels good.   Image Credit: Photograph taken by the blog post’s author, April Lidinsky ... View more

This blog series is written by Julia Domenicucci, an editor at Macmillan Learning, in conjunction with Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.   Punctuation is often, literally, the smallest portion of a piece of writing—but it can have incredible impact. Assign Grammar Girl podcasts about punctuation to your students; then, use the activities in this blog post to explore punctuation choices in both professional and student writing. Podcasts are well-established, but their popularity seems to increase every day—and for good reason! They are engaging and creative, and they cover every topic imaginable. They are also great for the classroom: you can use them to encourage student engagement and introduce multimodality.  LaunchPad and Achieve products include assignable, ad-free Grammar Girl podcasts, which you can use to support your lessons. You can assign one (or all!) of these suggested podcasts for students to listen to before class. Each podcast also comes with a complete transcript, which is perfect for students who aren’t audio learners or otherwise prefer to read the content. To learn more about digital products and purchasing options, please visit Macmillan's English catalog or speak with your sales representative.  If you are using LaunchPad, refer to the unit “Grammar Girl Podcasts” for instructions on assigning podcasts. You can also find the same information on the support page "Assign Grammar Girl Podcasts." If you are using Achieve, you can find information on assigning Grammar Girl in Achieve on the support page “Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course.” If your English Achieve product is copyright year 2021 or later, you are able to use a folder of suggested Grammar Girl podcasts in your course; please see “Using Suggested Grammar Girl Podcasts in Achieve for English Products” for more information.   Using Grammar Girl Podcasts to Explore Punctuation Choices Pre-Class Work: Ask students to come to class with three items: 1) a recent news article, 2) a recent opinion piece or editorial, 3) a recent essay or piece of writing from this course. These should all be digital versions, as students will be working with the text. Assign 2-3 podcasts about punctuation for students to listen to before class. You can choose any podcasts you wish, but you may wish to use some of the following: Commas: Oxford, Appositive, Nonrestrictive Punctuating Questions Quotation Marks and Punctuation How to Use Semicolons Dashes, Parentheses, and Commas Parentheses, Brackets, and Braces The Ampersand Tip: If you’re using Achieve, see “Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course” and “Create an Assessment” for help with making Grammar Girl podcasts available to students. Tip: If you want the class to work with the same piece of text, consider choosing an article for this activity. Or, use this blog post! Assignment Part 1: In class, ask students to take their news article or editorial and choose a paragraph that is at least five sentences long. They should copy the paragraph into a file so they can work with the text. Then, based on what podcasts you have assigned for pre-class work, ask students to do one of the following: Delete all commas in the paragraph. Replace all semicolons with periods and all periods with semicolons. Replace all question marks with exclamation marks. Replace dashes with parentheses and parentheses with dashes. Replace all instances of “and” with an ampersand (&). Ask students to write a brief reflection answering the following questions: How does this change affect the clarity or my understanding of the passage? How does the tone change—or not change—due to these edits? If I were writing this passage, what punctuation choices would I have made? When might unexpected or nontraditional punctuation like this be appropriate? For what audiences? What type of writing? Then, ask students to revisit the original passage and make an additional edit based on the podcasts you assigned (and what you have not already requested they try): Delete all commas in the paragraph. Replace all semicolons with periods. Replace all question marks with exclamation marks. Replace dashes with parentheses and parentheses with dashes. Replace all instances of “and” with an ampersand (&). Again, ask students to write a brief reflection answering the following questions: How does this change affect the clarity or my understanding of the passage? How does the tone change—or not change—due to these edits? If I were writing this passage, what punctuation choices would I have made? When might unexpected or nontraditional punctuation like this be appropriate? For what audiences? What type of writing? Reconvene as a class and discuss the students’ findings and thoughts. Tip: If you are using an Achieve English course, consider creating a custom Writing Assignment that students can use to submit their reflections. Refer to the article “Guide to Writing assignments for instructors” for help with Writing Assignments. Assignment Part 2: Place students in small groups and ask them to share the first paragraph of their essay with their peers. Students should then discuss the following: What punctuation is effective? What is not? Does the punctuation support the tone the writer is aiming for? What edits to punctuation might the writer consider? If students get stuck, suggest they revisit the podcast transcripts for ideas.   Advanced Assignment: Complete the activity using a piece of literature. Consider assigning a short story to the class, or ask students to bring in a novel they’ve recently read. Students should choose two or three paragraphs and should copy the paragraph into a file so they can work with the text. Then, based on what podcasts you have assigned for pre-class work, ask students to do one of the following: Delete all commas. Delete all periods. Replace all semicolons with periods and all periods with semicolons. Replace all question marks with exclamation marks. Replace dashes with parentheses and parentheses with dashes. Replace all instances of “and” with an ampersand (&). Delete all quotation marks. Ask students to write a brief reflection answering the following questions: How does this change affect the clarity or my understanding of the passage? How does the tone change—or not change—due to these edits? If I were writing this passage, what punctuation choices would I have made? What literature have I read that uses unexpected or nontraditional punctuation?   This semester, be sure to check out our other Grammar Girl assignment ideas. You can access previous posts from the Bedford Bits home page or by visiting “30+ Grammar Girl Assignments for Your Next Class” on the Quick and Dirty Tips website (these assignments are based on some of the blog posts, and six of them include downloadable PDFs!).   Have you used Grammar Girl—or any other podcasts—in your classes? Let us know in the comments. We’d love to hear from you and learn about how you are using podcasts this semester—or in past semesters!   Credit: "Punctuation marks made of puzzle pieces" by Horia Varlan is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

“Engaging respectfully with others” is a theme in all my textbooks, as is the need to learn how to engage with people you don’t agree with. I’ve been brought back to this topic lately close to home. I live in a small, managed community on the northern California coast dedicated to “living lightly with the land” and one another. The pandemic has brought hardships here, as everywhere, and tempers have frayed—lately over issues such as carbon sequestration, expansion of our homeowner association facilities, and—most acutely—over astronomical legal fees few seem to understand and steep increases in dues. While I have seen far more vitriol on social media, some rancor has been evident on our local list serv, though people disagree even on that: some say there’s been no rancor or vitriol, just “the truth and tough facts,” while others disagree strenuously. Lately some members have made pleas for better and more open listening, and especially for “more respect, kindness, and humility in our discourse.” One person recommended that we remember, and carefully consider, the Rotary International Four-Way Test­—"Is it the TRUTH? Is it FAIR to all concerned? Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS? Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?”—while another sent in a “think before you speak” poster from her elementary child’s classroom that asks of what you are going to say: “Is it true? Is it helpful? Is it important? Is it necessary? Is it kind?” And yet another person recommended that as we communicate with one another, we will be wise to focus on “Inquiry over Advocacy, Learning over Blame, and Impact over Intent.” All good advice—in fact, words to live and act by. But these guidelines rest on an enthymeme—or unstated assumption—that all people are worthy of and deserve respect. Articulating this assumption has provoked big-time response from my students, so much so that I have to allow plenty of time in class for discussion and debate, and we have to agree on some rules of the road, such as how long any one person can speak, how we will take turns and respond to one another, etc. I find students pretty evenly divided right now, with many insisting that respect is a human right that applies to everyone and with many others disagreeing. Both sides can offer multiple examples in support of their conviction, and a few insist that “it all depends.” Almost all students I’ve explored this question with draw the line at personal safety, saying that engaging respectfully demands that you be safe from attack, violence, and harm. Of course, this principle raises other thorny questions, such as what constitute “harm.” The best we can usually do is work through a few hypothetical case studies together, trying to decide whether the people involved can and should engage respectfully or, if not, what they should do, just how they should disengage, or how they might de-escalate the situation. These are scenarios and questions I would not have thought to ask my students 20 years ago, but today they seem important and necessary. Now I’m thinking hard about how to answer them in my textbooks that want to help all college students. It’s a tall order, and I’ll write more when I have a better handle on practical, helpful guidelines and suggestions. In the meantime, I would be grateful for some help from my wise and generous colleagues. Image Credit: "Speech bubbles at Erg" by Marc Wathieu, 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.  Melvin Beavers Assistant Professor and First-Year Writing Director, University of Arkansas at Little Rock Melvin Beavers is an Assistant Professor and the First-Year Writing Director in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His research interests involve writing program administration, composition pedagogy, online writing instruction, rhetorical theory, and popular culture studies. He teaches first-year writing and a variety of upper-level writing courses. His work has been published in Academic Labor: Research and Artistry, the WPA Symposium on Black Lives Matter, and an edited collection entitled, Pedagogical Perspectives on Cognition and Writing. He serves as president of the Executive Board of the Southern Regional Composition Conference. Additionally, he has presented research at several national conferences, including conferences for the Council of Writing Program Administrators, Conference on College Composition and Communication, and the Association of Rhetoric and Writing Studies.     This presentation focuses on ways writing program administrators can begin to examine their programs and make moves to reflect a more antiracist orientation. In order to align a program's values with those of antiracist scholarship, WPAs should determine what forms of antiracism they can build into their program curriculum and programmatic assessment efforts.  Part of rethinking or reimaging the values and mission of a writing program involve questioning what Marcus Croom (2021) posits “what if our courses ‘programs’ were designed in a manner that did not perpetuate the neutrality and universality of whiteness, any aspiration to whiteness, or the false notion of it”. His remarks speak to the larger issue of systemic forms of oppression and racism that reverberate within writing programs. In this presentation, Dr. Beavers attempts to build a framework for WPAs to explore their writing programs and look for ways to make them more equitable, diverse, and inclusive. Watch the Webinar:  ... View more

    The Beijing Olympics has, of course, been in the headlines for much of February. With an event so large, there are inevitably many controversies to consider as examples of argumentation. Many claims about the Olympics will take the form of claims of value about individual athletes or teams because as we watch them, we are making value judgments just as surely as the judges are although theirs are judgments based on years of experience and training. When politics enters in, we move largely into the realm of claims of policy. After the 2014 Sochi Olympics, Russia was technically banned from competing in the next three Olympics because of doping. Russian athletes are still allowed to compete, however, under the “Russian Olympic Committee” instead of competing for their country. That in itself, of course, is controversial. It seems to be a distinction without a difference. Then the world of Olympic figure skating was rocked by the revelation that one of the skaters who led the ROC to team gold had tested positive for a banned substance: trimetazidine, a drug used primarily for heart patients but one that increases blood flow and stamina and thus can enhance athletic performance. The name of the athlete should not have been released because she is a minor, but the fact that there was only one minor on the gold-medal team made it obvious that the guilty party was Kamila Valieva, favored to win the women’s individual gold as well. One reason for her high scores is her ability to complete the quadruple jump--the first woman to ever land one in Olympic competition--and she landed two! The logical conclusion that many drew was that Valieva should be suspended and that her team should not receive the team gold. In fact, the medal ceremony for the team competition was suddenly scrapped when the drug test results were revealed. To complicate matters, though, the drug test was administered on December 25th, and the results were not reported until February 8th. Negative drug tests indicated that Valieva did not have trimetazidine in her system at the Olympics, but she did when she qualified. Technically she is classified as a “protected person” because of her age, and many, including former winners of Olympic figure skating medals, like Katarina Witt, blame Valieva’s coaches, not Valieva herself. Witt claims, “What they knowingly did to her, if true, cannot be surpassed in inhumanity.”  What seemed like a fairly clear case that Valieva should be suspended from competition is thus complicated by the time lag since the positive test and her age—complicated enough, in fact, that the Court of Arbitration for Sport made the decision not to suspend her, stating that to do so would cause Valieva “irreparable harm.” Juliet Macur and Andrew Keh of the New York Times report, “The panel ruled on a narrow question: Did Russia act improperly when it lifted a suspension of Valieva last week only one day after imposing it? That decision effectively cleared the path for Valieva to compete in the singles event, but three organizations—the International Olympic Committee, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and skating’s global governing body—immediately challenged it in appeals to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the highest legal authority in global sports.” The court of public opinion may not be as forgiving. And the gold-medal podium may be a very lonely place for a fifteen-year-old. Photo: “Olympic Rings”  by Paul R. is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more