Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Pamela Childers, a lifelong secondary, undergraduate and graduate school educator, writer, editor, and consultant. She enjoys collaborating with colleagues and students.   Student Teaching “Go wash your mouth out with soap!” And he did. The 8th grader returned to our grammar lesson in progress, raised his hand, and bubbled out the next answer. In Biology class, I distributed apples and asked, “Who can identify the internal parts you just dissected?” And they all did, delighted to eat their half apples. Rushing to my senior English class to discuss the Romantic poets, I passed a student at his open locker pulling out a knife. “May I have that, please?” And he handed it to me. Things were much different in 1965, I have learned.    Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines.   ... View more

It makes me cringe to admit this, but I didn't realize until recently that "cringe" had mutated from a verb to a noun, or more precisely, to a classification. It is even a culture now, whose history is succinctly documented in Kaitlyn Tiffany's "How Did We Get So ‘Cringe’?"—wherein we can discover that not only has an entire book been devoted to the subject (Melissa Dahl's Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness) but that cringe aficionados will engage in cringe-worthy online disputes "on what cringe even means." And no, I don't want to go there myself. From all appearances, cringe, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. What I do want to explore here, then, is not what is or is not cringe but what the whole cringe culture signifies, what it tells us about ourselves and the society we live in. To begin, then, with the history of cringe culture, Tiffany observes that it emerged in the early part of the new millennium, when "the majority of the cringe came from the fact that the people posting [on YouTube] didn’t seem to totally understand that anybody in the world could see them." What worked for Justin Bieber, in other words, did not work at all for the countless others who put up videos with their own high hopes only to get the red buzzer, so to speak, from cringing viewers who were simply embarrassed by what they were watching. For Tiffany, this sort of early cringe "was caused by empathy. You would be horrified if a video of you like that were made public. You could watch in privacy and feel grateful that yours was not a public life at all." But since then the ethos of cringe culture has decidedly hardened. Malice has replaced empathy as cringe spotting has become akin to savoring train wrecks, while the connotation of the term has shifted from "embarrassing" or "humiliating" to "lousy" or "awful," and, more profoundly, "worthy of a thorough Internet dog pileup."  Constance Grady's Vox article "Why so much Obama-era pop culture feels so cringe now" introduces another, one might say traditional, source of cringe that emerges from the way that the passage of time has a tendency to transform yesterday's flavor of the month into today's castor oil. Grady sums the process up nicely in her opening paragraph, which is worth quoting in its entirety: One of the oddities of getting old is bearing witness as the pop culture you used to think would always be beyond reproach slowly slides out of favor. As millennials age into the solid middle of the culture here at the end of 2021, they’re getting to experience that disorienting slip with some of the most beloved pop culture of their youths, and most particularly the pop culture that was celebrated during the presidency of Barack Obama. Um, yes. And I am sure glad that I never had anything to do with Disco, nor did I ever wear a Nehru jacket. But there is something deeper going on here than the time and tide of pop cultural fashion, for in Grady's subsequent description of the way that "Hamilton is [now] understood to use its color-conscious casting to 'whitewash' the slave-owning founding fathers .  .  . [while] Harry Potter, fans note to each other significantly, 'was a trust fund jock who became a cop and married his high school sweetheart,' and moreover his author is transphobic .  .  . [and] Parks and Recreation is a symbol of the failure of liberalism in the face of Donald Trump," we find cringe shifting to outright cancel—that net-fueled wave of digitized vigilantism that I explored in my last blog. Thus we can see that the evolution of cringe culture is part of a larger cultural turn towards intolerance, incivility, and a fundamental social divisiveness that transcends traditional political partisanship to include the kind of online behavior that, as Tiffany notes, forced the cringe-aggregating Reddit forum r/cringe to "ban people who were .  .  . going into the YouTube comments of a cringey video and telling the subject to kill themselves."   And that makes me cringe.   Image Credit: "Embarrassed Lion" by MrGuilt is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

I remember when I first read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a few years after it was published in 1949—I was 15 maybe, and so young that 1984 seemed a million years away. Unreachable. And to my teenage mind, the nightmare scenario the novel painted seemed far-fetched and outlandish. Unthinkable. When the year 1984 came around, I re-read the book, and of course experienced it completely anew. This time around it seemed prescient and predictive. It's time to re-read Orwell’s book again. I pulled it out this week when I read that the insurrection of January 6 was “legitimate political discourse.” Remember doublethink, the mind control that makes people accept contradictory things simultaneously? In Orwell’s—or his character Winston’s—words, doublethink is To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. (32) The mind control of doublethink works together with newspeak, the controlled language that rigorously restricts what people are allowed to say. The control of language leads to and is deeply implicated in the control of thought that characterizes the totalitarian superpower of Oceania. In 1974, the National Council of Teachers of English was inspired to combine the two terms to create the “Doublespeak Award,” to be given to “a glaring example of deceptive language by a public spokesperson.” The first award went to Colonel David H. E. Opfer, who, after a U.S. bombing raid in Cambodia complained to the press that "You always write it's bombing, bombing, bombing. It's not bombing! It's air support!” Over the decades, the NCTE has accepted nominations for the “award” and presented it to individuals, groups, corporations, and governments. But perhaps we are now so overwhelmed by efforts at mind and language control that the award seems . . . well, not so much outdated as just outdone. In any case, NCTE has announced a hiatus for the Doublespeak Award: At this time, NCTE is not accepting nominees for the 2022 Doublespeak Award. We are currently working to re-imagine the award in order to align it with our current mission, vision, values, and policies about the importance of public language and its positive impact on literacy education. They are, however, “accepting nominations for the Orwell Award, which honors an author, editor, or producer of a print or non-print work that contributes to honesty and clarity in public language.” Perhaps it is time to focus on positive contributions to public discourse, to call it out and honor it. After all, research has shown over and over again that negativity and misinformation is read and forwarded and retweeted at a much higher rate than language that would garner the Orwell Award. As Jonathan Swift pointed out, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” I have found students ready to rise to the occasion of this award, bringing in their nominations for a piece of writing that “contributes to honesty and clarity in public language.” I think this makes a great activity for students, whether done individually or in groups. On one occasion, our entire class submitted a nomination; I wonder now if an entire writing program might do so. How I would love to see the 2022 Orwell Award presented to first-year writing students! Nominations can be sent to publiclangaward@ncte.org, and the very minimal guidelines for nominations can be found here. Part of me, however, thinks the Doublespeak Award for deceptive language is still needed, to say the very least. So I am looking forward to when NCTE’s Public Language Awareness Committee will complete its reimagining. In the meantime, what would your students’ nominate for a Doublespeak Award? I’d say “legitimate public discourse” as a description of an event that left five dead and hundreds wounded and beaten is a pretty strong contender. Image Credit: "1984 Book Covers" by colindunn, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Photo by Rick Mason @egnaro Published on January 26, 2018 Panasonic, DMC-TS2 Free to use under the Unsplash License   In his essay “Remediation at the Crossroads,” republished in 2012 in Teaching Developmental Writing 4e, Mike Rose considered the “national attention–public and philanthropic” paid to what was once widely called “remedial” education. “To make significant changes,” Rose writes, “we’ll need to understand all the interlocking pieces of the remediation puzzle, something we’re not oriented to do” (29).    In the decade since, the pejorative term “remedial,” with its connotations of damage needing to be fixed, has fallen out of favor. Instead, the focus is on building on students strengths. BIPOC educators emphasize and enact pedagogies such as Counterstory, which “provides opportunities for marginalized voices to contribute to conversations about dominant ideology” (Aja Martinez), Anti-Racist Black Language Pedagogy, which “centers the linguistic, cultural, racial, intellectual, and self-confidence needs of Black students” (April Baker-Bell), “abolitionist strategies” that “love and affirm Black and Brown children” and “seek new possibilities for educational justice” (Bettina Love), and “culturally sustaining pedagogies” that “sustain the languages, literacies, and cultural practices of students and communities of color” (Django Paris and H. Samy Alim ). These pedagogies hold in common affirmation, reparation, and the elimination of harm.   Remedial and deficit models always cause harm for students, and Rose recognized this. Throughout his long career, Rose contemplated the impact of social class in postsecondary education, and he feared that the coming changes would concentrate on “profiles of remedial students” as “profiles of failure” (29)  He hoped that the reforms would take into account students’ demonstrated potential for success at the postsecondary level (29), and he worried that “for all the hope and opportunity”  promised by the reforms, “our initiatives lack the kind of creativity and heartbeat that transform institutions” (30). In other words, Rose believed that the reforms would perpetuate harm to students rather than eliminate it, something that would eventually harm postsecondary institutions themselves. A decade later, throughout the duration of the coronavirus pandemic, postsecondary enrollment has decreased by over 10 percent in public and for-profit postsecondary institutions, and “public two-year colleges have been hit the hardest: enrollment in the sector has fallen by 13.2 percent since fall 2019” (Whitford). While correlation is not causation, and the economic consequences of the pandemic preclude a universal return to normalcy, it is hard not to wonder if one aspect of these declines (exacerbated and increased by the pandemic) relates to a lack of institutional transformation.   In practical terms, I want to return to Mike Rose’s opening metaphor, “the interlocking pieces of the remediation puzzle, something we’re not oriented to do” (29).  For me, a puzzle suggests a final product, as if the interlocking pieces offer a perfect fit that solves the enigma. I agree with Rose that postsecondary education is “not oriented” to either understanding how the pieces interlock, or how “to make significant changes” that serve the greater good of the community.    For this reason, the photo at the beginning of this post is not a completed puzzle, but a chaotic arrangement of lego pieces seemingly impossible to imagine as a completed project. This photo also appears as the first image in a slide show that I created for my online classes to explain the processes of working toward completion of their first writing project for the semester. While metaphors might not immediately solve seemingly insurmountable problems, perhaps, visual metaphors can help with thinking outside the box—even as teaching continues inside the boxes of Zoom rooms and powerpoint slides.    Four additional slides from the Writing Project 1 powerpoint conclude this post. The first slide offers two photos of my orange tabby cat Destiny as he descends a staircase. The staircase metaphor invites students to imagine writing step by step, as opposed to solving the impossible puzzle represented by the lego pieces. The next three slides, taken in Arizona and New York City, depict trees in different stages of thriving and precarity. These slides ask students to reflect on the care and attention needed for writing to flourish and to grow.    My hope is to reconceptualize writing, and perhaps even everyday life, as opportunities “to make significant changes” – in other words, as necessary, to practice revision.   Instead - think of writing as a process - step by step             Consider the trees - a metaphors for the processes of writing Without careful attention, trees are in danger of falling Well-tended trees have space to flourish and grow   Rose, Mike. “Remediation at the Crossroads.” Teaching Developmental Writing, edited by Susan Naomi Bernstein, 4th ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013, pp. 27-30.   ... View more

Twitter is a mystery to me. I cannot manage the flow of information; I feel inundated and overwhelmed by the threads that appear (despite the fact that I have carefully limited the number of people I follow). Nonetheless, I am delighted at times by snippets of wisdom or encouragement, as well as by trends that prod my own thinking about pedagogy. One recent trend involves a photo or concept accompanied by a question—and then the phrase “wrong answers only.” This thread, for example, interrogated the notion of Gricean maxims, a standard in the pragmatics section of any introductory linguistics textbook. While most answers were just fun (the Gricean Maxims are an indie band or perhaps a type of hair coloring), others challenged the maxims with a healthy dose of sarcasm for their so-called “neutrality” as a framework for analyzing discourse. The “wrong answers only” thread starter invites participants to have some fun, yes, but also to define via the negative or to confront assumptions and points of confusion. Such an activity, to me, seems ideally suited to a college classroom: I am wondering if others have used that as a discussion starter or writing assignment in their classes.  I plan to try a couple of “wrong answers only” activities in the next couple of weeks. As a mid-term exercise in a course I’m teaching on second language/multilingual (L2/Lx) writing, I am going to have students revisit some of the key questions we asked at the beginning of the term: who is an L2/Lx writer? What does L2/Lx writing look like? Where does L2/Lx writing occur? What sorts of pedagogies promote L2/Lx writing development? I am going to ask the students to consider these—and some of the assumptions we’ve already uncovered—by having them give me “wrong-answers” only. We’ll start that discussion in a synchronous Zoom session, and we’ll shift it to the asynchronous discussion board after that.  I will also try this as a class-closing exercise in my first-year/corequisite writing course: we’ll take a concept—thesis, introduction, paragraph, sentence, organization, source, etc.—and I’ll ask students to post a definition or example, anonymously, “wrong answers only.” Their responses can serve as a basis for reflection or discussion in subsequent classes—and a way to see how their perception of key concepts can evolve over the course of the semester. Have you used “wrong answers only” (or a variation thereof) in your composition courses? What happened? I’d love to hear from you.   ... View more

In a recent conversation with Kendra Bryant, a professor at North Carolina A&T State University and an amazing scholar and teacher, she reminded me of an essay Lisa Ede and I wrote long ago, one of many pieces that advocated for collaboration in general and collaborative writing in particular. When Lisa and I first began writing together, our colleagues in the humanities considered this practice bizarre at best and absolutely wrongheaded and certainly detrimental to our careers (or “impossible” as one person said) at worst. These negative reactions only made us more determined to write together and, in addition, to do the research to demonstrate that most of the writing that goes on in the world is done collaboratively—even “creative” writing, since our definition of collaboration is broad and expansive. So in one of our essays, we described this practice as “subversive.” Subversive, that is, of the paradigm of the single, solitary, totally autonomous, and almost always white, male author, of course, but also of the whole intellectual regime that went along with that paradigm. We understood the irony of subverting this paradigm just at a moment when women, and especially women of color, were seizing power associated with this stance. But we wanted to subvert it any way, making room for other models of composing that could have just as much power and influence, not to mention integrity. I’ve thought a lot about the twenty or more years that Lisa and I worked on this project together since her untimely death on September 29 of last year, of our failures as well as some successes and especially of the great fun we had pursuing this goal. For decades, we collected examples of collaboration in every field imaginable, filling such a big box of materials that we had to invent “intertexts” in our book on collaboration just to include some of them. And so Lisa and collaboration were much on my mind last week when I heard a terrific interview with Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva—the Kitchen Sisters. I have long been a fan of their deeply collaborative work, especially Hidden Kitchens, The Hidden World of Girls, and most recently, their The Kitchen Sisters Present, a Radiotopia podcast. I agree with Ira Glass, who says Nelson and Silva have “some of the best radio stories ever broadcast.” But what interests me most about their work is its collaborative nature. Once when they were visiting the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking at Stanford, they spoke about this aspect of their work, emphasizing not only their own collaboration with each other but also their collaboration with the astonishing array of people they have interviewed. In this regard, they pointed out that they keep their own voices out of their programs as much as possible, leaving the floor and the microphone to those they are featuring. They said sometimes they have had to work for months or even years to come up with programs which focus never on them but always on the person or people being interviewed, the true stars of the show. Nelson and Silva are amazing storytellers—of other people’s stories, in the other people’s own words. But they are also very serious and talented archivists, who for four decades have kept meticulous records of all their work, including the ephemera that surrounds and enriches it. To my delight, this archive is going to be housed in the Library of Congress—all 7,000 hours of audio, photos, handwritten journals, podcasts, and story books. Talk about a resource for student writers and speakers! This archive will provide a treasure trove of stories: Have you ever wondered about how George Foreman came up with the idea for his grill? Ever heard of the Pack Horse Librarians, who carried knapsacks full of books on horseback (or muleback) into the most inaccessible areas of rural Kentucky—thanks to the inspiration of Eleanor Roosevelt? Did you know about the “Homobiles,” a 24/7 all-volunteer queer car service Lynnee Breedlove thought up to provide safe rides for the LGBTQ+ community in San Francisco? Well, students can learn all about these and so many other profoundly intriguing and hopeful stories. But they can also learn about, and study, the deeply layered collaborations that are going on in and around these stories that come to us from the rich soundscape of radio. Davia Nelson captures the sense of collaboration in her description of the Kitchen Sisters’ work: Archival artifacts merging with stories from people whose voices don’t often make the airwaves merging with music. Ricky Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, The Maysles all have a place in the inspirational pantheon. . . . Sounds stacked and stretched, individual stories building into a bigger story, human stories so minute, so detailed and particular, that when layered they become the universal story. Studying the work of the Kitchen Sisters reveals the subversive nature of their collaboration, still going strong after almost half a century. And now their archives are protected, and will be available to inspire others to collaborate in equally significant ways. I’ll be listening in, and I hope you and your students will too. Image Credit: "Kitchen Sisters" by spicemix.pro, used under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license ... View more

What a one-two punch to lose both bell hooks and Thich Nhat Hanh in successive months. I wrote about bell hooks’ influence on my teaching in my last post, and recently returned to her beautiful essay, “Engaged Pedagogy,” in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. In that essay, hooks introduced me to Thich Nhat Hanh’s insights about pedagogy, which focus on ways instructors can engage with students on the project of “self-actualization.” Ah, no pressure there! But of course, writing instructors understand that serious engagement with personal growth is exactly what we do when we offer students tools, intellectual context, questions, and lots of practice in articulating what they believe and why they believe it.  Not all of Thich Nhat Hanh’s message speaks easily to me, such as his vision of teachers as healers. (Who am I to claim such powers?) But I appreciate that, as hooks puts it, he “offered a way of thinking about pedagogy which emphasized wholeness, a union of mind, body, and spirit” (Teaching to Transgress 14). This evergreen reminder that we have the privilege of accompanying whole people who share with us the ongoing embodied experience of living through a long pandemic reminds me that I am among friends who see teaching and learning as one way to heal ourselves. Lest that sound impossibly aspirational, hooks translates this into terms that ring true to me: “[Thich Nhat Hanh’s] focus on a holistic approach to learning and spiritual practice enabled me to overcome years of socialization that had taught me to believe a classroom was diminished if students and professors regarded one another as ‘whole’ human beings, striving not just for knowledge in books, but knowledge about how to live in the world” (15). Yes, indeed: Isn’t that  — learning how to live in the world — the charge for those of us who teach the liberal arts? Along those lines, the title of history professor Catherine Denial’s essay, “The Pedagogy of Kindness,” caught my eye in a colleague’s social media post. I devoured Denial’s description of shifting away from her training in pedagogical “rigor” posited as “toughness,” to an approach of “kindness.” Like Susan Bernstein’s recent post on hooks, which draws on the Teaching to Transgress chapter “Embracing Change,” Denial focuses on hooks’ point that “there can be, and usually is, some degree of pain involved in giving up old ways of thinking and knowing and learning new approaches” (43). Consider the heavy thinking we ask of our students, and the implications for changing the ways they — and we — understand the world. Consider further that we are all doing this labor in a marathon of a global health crisis. The circumstances are so urgent, and kindness may be the only attitude that can bear us up and through. For all that calm guidance, bell hooks was unafraid to admit the messiness of her human experience, too. Her description of revealing to Thich Nhat Hanh that she was often filled with rage at the racism and injustice in the world is so, well, kind. hooks said, “he met that rage with loving kindness. And I would just always remember the sweetness with which he told me ‘Oh, hold on to your anger and use it as compost for your garden’”  — as if, even in corrosive circumstances, kindness can make learning, and learning how to live in the world, imaginable. As I write this post in South Bend, Indiana, on Groundhog Day, a blizzard has closed our campus. Springtime and growth feel impossibly far away, but I’m hanging onto this idea of compost, remembering that the kindness we try to summon for students is good for us, too.   Image Credit: Photograph taken by the author of this post, April Lidinsky ... View more

  Over  numerous editions of Elements of Argument, we have debated where to place the Definition chapter. Sometimes defining a term is a matter of finetuning to be sure every detail of the content is clear, which might come in at the revising or editing stage. At other times, definition is at the heart of the argument and must be stipulated from the beginning. Sometimes, the way a key term is defined can be used for deceptive purposes. Even if deception is not intended, it can hamper communication because the term is defined differently by the writer/ speaker and audience.. Changing the definition of a term can also cause confusion.  For example, there is debate now over how the term “fully vaccinated” is defined. There was a time not all that long ago that to be fully vaccinated meant to have two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine or one dose of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. Although each company had different standards for what “fully vaccinated” meant, the definition was widely explained and widely accepted. Now booster shots have complicated the picture. Does fully vaccinated mean that a person has had a booster shot in addition to the initial one or two shots? Some countries are already rethinking what “fully vaccinated” means in making the decision whether or not to allow someone into the country. As of January 16, 2022, the CDC made a useful distinction between up-to-date and fully vaccinated: “Up to date means a person has received all recommended COVID-19 vaccines, including any booster dose(s) when eligible. Fully vaccinated means a person has received their primary series of COVID-19 vaccines.” According to a recent Cnet.com article entitled “Why doesn't 'fully vaccinated' for COVID-19 mean booster shots?”, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, was asked by CNN at a White House press briefing, “‘Can you explain why the CDC is not changing the definition of “fully vaccinated,” given that could potentially encourage more people to get a third shot?”’  The US has currently boosted 85.5 million people, or about 40% of people considered fully vaccinated. Walensky responded: “In public health, for all vaccines, we've talked about being up to date for your vaccines. Every year, you need a flu shot; you're not up to date with your flu shot until you've gotten your flu shot for that year. ... What we really are working to do is pivot the language to make sure that everybody is as up to date with their COVID-19 vaccines as they personally could be.’ Despite the CDC's reticence to change the definition, many organizations and governments who use the term ‘fully vaccinated’ are adding booster requirements to their COVID-19 rules.” The CDC is wise not to change the definition because of the confusion the change would cause but also because of the criticism it would draw. Those who are vaccine hesitant and do not agree with vaccine mandates would question scientists for changing the rules. Each new variant requires new thinking, and the best advice scientists can offer is based on what they learn with each new day of studying the virus. They must be clear in stipulating to the public what they mean by the terms that they use and cautious about changing the meaning of key terms. Photo: “Definition of Blog” by Doug B is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and William Golding's Lord of the Flies are among those relatively rare literary classics that enjoy both popular and high cultural acclaim (F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is another). I find myself thinking of them now as I contemplate the current success of Showtime's "Yellowjackets" and the growing prominence of "cancel culture" in our popular and political discourse. Let me explain. Beginning with "Yellowjackets," I hardly need to note how the newly continued series is an amalgamation of Golding's novel (with a gender change) and "Lost," complete with proliferating mysteries that identify it as belonging to the "mystery-box" genre of television programming. Whether or not Yellowjackets eventually evolves into full-bore supernaturalism (as "Twin Peaks"—the founding father, as it were, of mystery-box television programming—did), will be a question for future episodes to reveal. But what is now clear is the way in which the series, like Lord of the Flies (and, one might add, Heart of Darkness) serves as a parable of the fragility of what we call "civilization" when under stress, dramatizing not only the savagery that lurks just under the surface but the turn to despotic leaders (like Golding's choirboy Jack Merridew and "Yellowjackets"' Antler Queen) that desperate societies all too often make. It is in such contexts that we can begin to understand the notorious antics of the QAnon Shaman and his ilk. As for "The Lottery," I am struck by a recent Vox article by Rebecca Jennings entitled "Stop canceling normal people who go viral," and sub-headed, "It’s making the world a sh***ier place. West Elm Caleb is only the most recent example". In her essay, Jennings deplores the way that Internet cancel mobs have moved from politicians and celebrities to ordinary people who happen to (often inadvertently) displease the folks on social media sites like TikTok. Jennings focuses on what she calls "the Case of Couch Guy," a college student whose girlfriend orchestrated an elaborately choreographed surprise visit that she duly recorded and posted to TikTok. But instead of the mushy "aw gee" response she expected, TikTok exploded with, in the exact words of "Couch Guy" (the boyfriend in the case), "frame-by-frame body language analyses, armchair diagnoses of psychopathy, comparisons to convicted murderers, and general discussions about my ‘bad vibes.’” In short, he was cancelled. And so, as "The Lottery" erupts into reality in the digital age with social media mobs casting stones at their hapless victims, and "Yellowjackets" updates Lord of the Flies to hold a disquieting mirror up to America's growing social and political desperation, we find once again how popular culture mediates and illuminates the realities of everyday life, and why it behooves us not only to be entertained by what it reveals but to take it very seriously as well.   Image Credit: "finger mobile 8" by jetheriot is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

As I’ve been working on revising some of the textbooks I’ve written, I’ve been thinking hard about how to present research to students in ways that will speak to them where they live and where they are in life, and that will take them beyond Western paradigms of what research is, who can do it, and what counts as objects of and sources for research. Looking back at my own training in research, I see that I got very little in the way of formal instruction. My PhD program in English asked me to take advanced courses in bibliography, of course, to learn my way around an array of bibliographical sources. We also studied various theories (textual criticism, deconstruction, new historicism, etc.) and their methods, which were, however, assumed rather than taught. And all of these courses were firmly grounded in Western ways of conceiving and carrying out research. As I entered the field of rhetoric and composition, I studied quantitative and qualitative methods of research—and used both to inform the largest research projects of my career—all again informed by Western concepts. Only when I began seriously studying the art and culture of Indigenous Peoples (and particularly of the Haida of the Queen Charlotte Islands in Canada and of the Navajo Nation) did I begin to question how I had defined and conducted—and taught—research. And when I began studying and writing about “narrative justice”—people’s rights to their own stories—I learned even more about varying research definitions, traditions, and methods. (Click here and here for previous posts I’ve written on narrative justice.) What I’ve learned has made “research” more and more exciting and engaging to me—and I hope to students as well. I’m thinking particularly right now of a first year student who came to my office to talk about “research” by which—I slowly realized—she meant MLA documentation style.  Research, I suggested, was so much more than a citation style: research begins with questions that deeply puzzle you, and the search to explore those questions may lead you to . . . well, wherever it takes you. As Candace Epps-Robertson puts it in her contribution to “Octalog IV: The Politics of Rhetorical Studies in 2021,” her research involves sources that may not be in historical societies or university libraries. Some [sources] will be revealed perhaps as a fragment online, or others buried in a backyard shed. Perhaps others still are told in a language not my own. . . . Others won’t be shared at all because they’re too painful or too delicate to be revealed. Epps-Robertson sees research as messy, sometimes haphazard, and potentially richly rhizomatic. Drawing on the insights of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—who conceived of research as nonlinear, calling for multiple and anti-hierarchical ins and outs, a kind of deeply networked activity of collecting, exploring, and interpreting—Epps-Robertson describes research she did on racism in relation to school closures as invoking “conversations in diners, back porches, and family reunions,” a kind of community-based inquiry that led her, often haphazardly, to voices that “may not always make it into an archive or text.” Epps-Robertson goes on to describe an example of a community archiving its history and presence through a process that does not utilize a traditional Western approach but rather a rhizomatic one: the Korean band BTS and their global fandom ARMY. “This community,” she argues, “is creating and maintaining a type of decentralized rhizomatic archival network, resisting the notion that one database, one physical location, or one person can document a holistic history that crosses borders, languages, and cultures.” Such a broader, more inclusive and extensive notion of research can help us understand the complex relationships between communities and archives—as well as new ideas about who counts as an “expert” and what counts as a “source.” Most important, it can take us and our students out into communities of practice where we can hear and learn from their work and the stories they tell about it. Such a broader concept of research will, I believe, engage students more fully in research—and potentially in their own communities. If you have examples of rhizomatic research assignments and/or projects, I would love to hear about them! Image Credit: "BTS-01539" by mduangdara, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

  As a new year and a new school term begin, it’s time to look back at the key terms around which Elements of Argument is organized and which can be used to analyze whatever controversial issues appear in today’s headlines: claims, warrants, and support. The claim part is easy. When we react to something we read or hear in the news, unless we phrase our reaction as a question, we are most likely making a statement in the form of a claim, no matter how ill- or well-conceived it is. “He’s an idiot!” and “It’s about time!” are claims, though the type of claims that, in those exact forms, seldom make it into formal written arguments. They happen to be claims of value. Not everyone will agree with all of these statements, but in form, they are claims of value: Joe Manchin is a disgrace to his party. Stewart Rhodes is an American hero. The verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial was unfair. Joe Biden is a man of compassion. The advice offered about COVID by the CDC is confusing. If you move in one direction from claims of value, you have claims of fact. These are different from statements of fact because at least some readers or hearers would have to be convinced of their validity – while a statement of fact is always true, a claim of fact may not be: Unemployment is the lowest it has been in fifty years. The Omicron variant in general causes fewer severe symptoms than earlier variants of COVID-19. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill will have massive impacts on small towns across America. In the last year, a number of states have passed new legislation restricting voting rights. The 2020 Presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. Move in the other direction, and you have claims of policy, the “should” or “should not” statements of argument: The Democrats should end the filibuster to pass the Voting Rights Bill. Mail-in ballots should be allowed in presidential elections. Everyone should be fully vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19. No one should have to be vaccinated against his or her wishes. Current gun laws should be enforced more stringently. The validity of any claim in argumentation depends on the ability to offer support for it. Students studying argumentation will learn a range of different types of support to use, depending on the subject. They will also learn to analyze the evidence offered in defense of any claim they are being asked to accept. A couple of general observations: Reputable media sources will not present information that they do not have sources for. There are both legal and ethical reasons for not doing so. One of the major reasons for the political split in our country is the willingness of Americans to accept what they hear from any news source or any social media source without demanding support. Too often they are willing to accept statements that they already agree with without demanding evidence of their validity. The element of argument that is most problematic for students—and others—is what Toulmin called the warrant, which we now call the assumption. Recognizing warrants or assumptions in the arguments that surround us takes practice. As students start thinking of the arguments they see or hear in terms of the elements of argument, it helps if they think of the assumption as the bridge linking claim and support. We are willing to accept a claim based on the support offered because of a broader belief that we hold. Why should the filibuster be done away with in order for the Voting Rights Bill to pass? Because of the broader belief that some pieces of legislation are too important to be held to the sixty-vote requirement rather than a simple majority. Why should mail-in ballots be allowed? Because of the broader belief that voting should be as easy as possible. Why should no one be required to be vaccinated against his or her wishes? Because of a broader belief that individuals have the right to make decisions about what is done to their bodies. What about the other side of the issue, the belief that everyone should be vaccinated? Because of the broader belief that the safety of the many outweighs the wishes of the individual.  Headlines are a course in argumentation in and of themselves. In teaching argumentation, we have to stay on top of the demanding task of analyzing them in terms of the elements of argument. We are forced to analyze why we hold the opinions that we do and to present the reasoning behind even opinions that we do not agree with.   Photo: “Newspapers B&W (4)” by Jon S is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... 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. Podcasts, like all forms of writing, are defined by specific elements and include a great variety of them. Use this assignment to explore the idea of what a podcast is with your students, and introduce the idea that all forms of writing have their own criteria. 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 Learn about Evaluation Criteria Pre-Class Work: Ask students to look up the definition of “podcast” in at least two different dictionaries and record the definitions. In addition, choose two episodes of different podcasts for students to listen to. One of the podcasts should be a Grammar Girl podcast; the other can be from any other podcast series (for example: The Daily from the New York Times or Consider This from NPR). Assign these for students to listen to before class, and ask students to take notes on notable elements of the podcasts. Students might consider: How is the podcast titled? Does the podcast have an introduction and conclusion? What information is included in each podcast? Does the podcast episode have a theme or topics? 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. To add a link to a podcast from another website, see “Add a link (URL) to another website to your course.” Assignment Part 1: In class, place students into groups and ask them to complete the following steps. Compare the definitions they have written down. Together, they should compile all the definitions into one. Compare their notes about the podcasts they listened to and make a list of all the elements they identified. Then, they should make a list of criteria: What makes a podcast a podcast? This should be a combination of the definition and their own notes about the podcasts they have listened to. Assignment Part 2: As a class, listen to one or more Grammar Girl podcasts that are different from the ones chosen for pre-class work. (You might consider choosing podcasts about a topic that will be discussed later in the semester, or topics that you feel your students may need a refresher on.) Each group should then evaluate the podcast(s) based on their chosen criteria. Rank the podcast against each criteria using a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is “this podcast does not exhibit this criteria” and 5 is “this podcast completely exhibits this criteria.” To wrap up, each group should present their list of criteria and outline how well the new podcasts fit their list. As a class, discuss the findings. Were there any criteria that all groups had? Were there any that only one group had? After listening to the new podcasts, what criteria would they add or how might they revise their list to better encompass the idea of a podcast? Reflection: Ask each group to revise their list of podcast criteria based on the class discussion. Then, each student should write an individual reflection. If they’re stuck, they might consider one or more of the following questions: What changes did we make based on the class discussion? Were there any entirely new criteria that came out of the conversation? Were there any criteria I thought would apply to all the podcasts but did not? Are there any podcasts I listen to that do—or don’t—meet these criteria? If I were to create a podcast, what criteria would I use? Tip: If you are using an Achieve English course, consider creating a custom Writing Assignment that students can use to submit their lists and reflections. Refer to the article “Guide to Writing assignments for instructors” for help with Writing Assignments. Advanced Assignment: Ask each student to research a form of writing they enjoy that usually has specific criteria. For example, they may often listen to a type of music, read a specific genre in fiction, or be taking classes in a discipline with particular expectations. After researching, students should write 2-3 paragraphs outlining the criteria for this particular type of writing. They can also include examples where those criteria are ignored, twisted, or changed. As you begin to think about 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 the blog posts, and six of them include downloadable PDFs!).   Did you plan to use 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 your plans for podcasts this semester—or in past semesters!   Credit: "Turntable Top View Audio Equipment Edited 2019" by chocolatedazzles is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

As a kid in the 1950s, I read the “funny papers” and occasional comic books like everyone else I knew, but I didn’t get seriously interested in the genre until I studied rhetoric, until I began to understand the range of communicative tools available to a rhetor/writer, and until I understood “languaging,” as many colleagues are now calling it, to reach far beyond words on a page (or, nowadays, a screen). Given the autonomous view of literacy prevalent at the time, I had a very script-centric view of writing, but one that slowly gave way to what Brian Street called the “ideological model of literacy” as a social practice. And so I immersed myself in reading studies of orality and of the spoken, embodied word—learning especially from Geneva Smitherman—and relished all that these studies brought to writing. I began, to “hear” writing, though not nearly as well as the kind of “listening in print” described in Nicole Furlonge’s Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature. And as my grandmother used to say, “slowly . . . but slowly,” I turned my attention to other graphic forms of communication, realizing that, as Leslie Marmon Silko says, “after all, words are images,” and that words not only invoke but also attract other images and summon them into collaboration. For years before I retired, I taught writing courses themed on graphic narratives, courses that every term drew students from all majors on campus, perhaps attracted first just by the idea of comics but soon enough as intrigued as I was by the rhetorical combination of word, image, and invoked sound. I still remember those courses as among my favorites of all time. (Just a few days ago, a student in one of those courses well over a decade ago now wrote to say that he was, at last, creating his own graphic narrative!). I still read graphic narratives as often as I can, though the veritable renaissance of the genre we are experiencing makes it impossible to keep up with the outpouring of remarkable new works (check out, for example, Harmony Becker’s Himawari House, which features young Japanese American, Korean, and Singaporean women’s adventures in Tokyo and which mixes languages and dialects in delightful and insightful ways—or two dozen other works I could name!). As I do so, I realize more and more the synesthesia that is reading/listening/writing/speaking/drawing. A week or so ago I re-read Gene Luen Yang’s Dragon Hoops: From Small Steps to Great Leaps, a story anchored in his real-life experiences teaching at Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland. Yang tells the story of basketball coach Lou Richie and his O’Dowd Dragons, from Yang’s admission that he “hated sports” and “especially basketball;” to his introduction to Coach Lou and the team; to his growing fascination with the complex, deeply meaningful, and often fraught relationships among coach and players and opponents; and to the dazzling heights and depths the team experiences. But it is also so much more than that story, as Yang detours to explore the origins of the sport, its eventual expansion to allow the women’s sport to grow and flourish, and a glorious chapter on the Harlem Globetrotters and the entrance of African Americans and other people of color into the professional game. And all drawn and lettered in Yang’s simple, clean style—so friendly, accessible, and warm. In teaching graphic narratives, I found that students inevitably came away from them with passionate inquiries of their own and research projects that led them to discoveries—and to often astonishing analytic pieces of writing. These pieces were richly illustrated and also presented orally in our class, having students make their own multimodal compositions that appeal to and mix all our senses. “Ah,” I think, “now that’s writing!” Teaching graphic narratives—and reconsidering them today—has led me to contemplate just how to define writing for today’s world and beyond. I know that many other writing teachers are thinking about this same question. How do you define writing today? Image Credit: "Graphic Novels" by morebyless, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

bell hooks, by Cmongirl, is available to use in the public domain.    In the fall of 1994, at the beginning of my second year of teaching at a two-year college in a large mid-Atlantic city, I found bell hooks Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom at a local bookstore. I flipped through the book, eventually landing on the essay “Embracing Change: Teaching in a Multicultural World.” In 2022, we would reframe “multiculturalism” as diversity, equity, and inclusion, and nearly thirty years later hooks’ words feel as moving and as relevant to me as that afternoon in the bookstore.    “Embracing Change” begins:  Despite the contemporary focus on multiculturalism in our society, particularly in education, there is not nearly enough practical discussion of ways classroom settings can be transformed so that the learning experience if inclusive. If the effort to respect and honor the social reality and experiences of groups in this society who are nonwhite is to be reflected inn a pedagogical process, then as teachers– on all levels, from elementary to university settings– we must acknowledge that our style  of teaching may need to change (p. 35).   These opening sentences were thrilling to me, and gave insight into my own teaching and learning about multiculturalism in graduate school in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At that time, “multiculturalism,” in practice, often meant changing the syllabus to include writers of color, women, and working class folks. While these changes, in theory, seemed significant to me at the time, changing the sources alone did not lead, in practice, to antiracist classrooms.     For example, as a TA and instructor of record for first-year-writing courses, I taught texts by James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr. to demonstrate how they used rhetorical appeals to structure their arguments. However, in the pedagogical approach introduced in our teaching practicum, teaching the rhetorical situation of audience, purpose, and occasion did not include  historical conditions of racism and white supremacy faced by Baldwin and King as writers and rhetors, and that necessitated antiracist arguments in the first place.     The attention to racism and white supremacy was the gap that bell hooks’ work filled in my education as a teacher. Rather than presenting a generic one-size-fits-all pedagogy, Teaching to Transgress included both theory and practice through a Black feminist intersectional lens.  In other words, hooks suggests why “we must acknowledge that our style of teaching may need to change” ( and offers concrete suggestions for how teachers might approach changing our style.    Years later, in revising Teaching Developmental Writing 4e, my editor and I agreed that “Embracing Change: Teaching in a Multicultural World.” seemed as pertinent as ever. The revision took shape in the aftermath of Occupy Wall Street, and the killing of Trayvon Martin, a young seventeen-year-old Black man, shot to death by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, In 2013, George Zimmerman’s acquittal of all charges in Trayvon Martin’s killing was the catalyst for the beginning of #BlackLivesMatter  as conceived by Alicia Garza, Patrisee Cullors, and Opal Tometi.    For 2022 readers, hooks’ work in “Embracing Change” presents a means of activating diversity, equity, and inclusion beyond adding a few more sources to the class reading list. hooks’  description of the major tenets of a multicultural classroom include:   “To recognize the value of each individual voice” through keeping journals and writing paragraphs in class to one another (p. 40) To learn from our students, and in order to gain an openness toward “different ways of knowing” (p. 41) To study, understand, and discuss whiteness (p.  43). This does not mean recentering whiteness, but instead gaining a deeper sense of historical and cultural perspectives on coming to be seen as white, and such perspectives inform racism and antiracism    While these pedagogical tenents might be seen as commonplaces in 2022, in 1994, hooks’ work felt revelatory.  When I finished graduate school in a decidedly rural setting, I moved from a well-funded Research 1 flagship institution to an urban two-year college that was one of the most poorly funded post-secondary institutions in the same state. The contrast in institutional resource was a deeply troubling introduction to the material and economic realities of neoliberalism.    In light of these stark inequities, Teaching to Transgress opened my mind to reframing  teaching, as hooks suggests, as the practice of freedom, and to comprehending the work of this work teaching beyond the surface level. In other words, given the economic disparities so prevalent in funding for public higher education, it would not be enough to merely restate that all students are capable of learning and growing. Instead, as a teacher,  if the world was ever going to change for the better, I would also need to remain capable of  learning and growing from and alongside my students. Nearly thirty years later, I am grateful to bell hooks for sharing this wisdom, and for the opportunity to recommend her work to a new generation of readers.     Keywords: bell hooks; diversity, equity, and inclusion; first-year writing; professional development ... View more

While searching for signs of America's increasing division into politically and ideologically hostile camps in the kinds of television programs that "red state" and "blue state" audiences prefer, I have been quite surprised to find how little current data and analysis of the question are available, with most of what I have located so far being three to four years out of date. For example, Melanie McFarland's Salon piece, "Red state TV: Networks are reportedly seeking pilots appealing to Trump voters"—which is just the sort of thing I am looking for—dates back to 2017, and I have yet to find anything equivalent to it. I have no trouble finding all sorts of current television commentary (and viewing recommendations) in such sources as Salon, Slate, Vox, and the Los Angeles Times, but not audience breakdowns. So, crossing over the great divide, I turned to see what National Review and Breitbart have to say about the politics of current TV viewership and found a lot of coverage of various high profile popular cultural controversies clearly intended to provoke outrage, along with a strong dose of nostalgia for the good old days of such conservative mainstays as Dirty Harry and It's a Wonderful Life, but again no data on audience preferences. Variety, for its part, does provide some raw data, offering lists of "THE 100 TOP-RATED SERIES OF 2020-2021 (ADULTS 18-49)" and "THE TOP 100 SHOWS OF 2020-2021, TOTAL VIEWERS," but no breakdown of who these viewers are. Still, a look at these lists does provide some clues as to who is watching what in America these days, so I'll begin with that. One of the more striking revelations to be found in the Variety rankings is the total absence of any programming from Netflix or any other of the high-buzz streaming services, nor even from HBO. Significantly, for reasons that will become clear in a moment, TLC stands out among the subscription networks for the number of shows that appear in the top 100, while the traditional networks otherwise dominate the lists, which reveal that the top 20 programs in overall viewers are, in this order: 1. NFL Sunday Night Football (NBC)          2. NFL Thursday Night Football (Fox/NFL Network) 3. NCIS (CBS) 4. The Equalizer (CBS)       5. NFL Monday Night Football (ESPN)  6. FBI (CBS) 7. 60 Minutes (CBS)    8. Chicago Fire (NBC) 9. Blue Bloods (CBS) 10. Chicago Med (NBC) 11. 9-1-1 (Fox)       Chicago PD (NBC) 13. This Is Us (NBC) 14. Young Sheldon (CBS) 15. 9-1-1: Lone Star (Fox) 16. FBI: Most Wanted (CBS) 17. The Voice-Tuesday (NBC) 18. Bull (CBS)     19. The Voice-Monday (NBC)  20. Law & Order: Organized Crime (NBC) The trend here is obvious: football and crime/medical/firefighting-themed shows dominate the top 20—a pattern that can be interpreted both in the light of middle America's traditional appetite for televised team sports, and by what McFarland describes as Republican voters' predilections for “crime-time” programming. Briefly put, in spite of the high media profile of such award-winning series as "The Handmaid's Tale" and "black-ish," America's overall television viewership appears to slant towards a red state predominance. It is worth noting in this regard that NBC's "This is Us" not only appears as number 13 on Variety's total viewership rankings, it also ranks as number 4 on its Adults 18-49 Top-Rated Series list for 2020-2021, just behind (you guessed it) NFL Sunday Night Football (NBC), NFL Thursday Night Football (Fox/NFL), and NFL Monday Night Football (ESPN). How it got there can also be explained by McFarland, who reports that "NBC’s 'This Is Us' .  .  .  appears to be more popular among Republicans 'by a significant amount,'" as a spokesman for the polling firm E-Poll observes, adding that Republicans "'prefer programs that are family-friendly'"—or, it might be added, family themed. And this, in turn, can explain why TLC, the nexus for reality series involving families, does so well, especially when compared with channels like HBO, in the Top-Rated Series rankings. What this all comes down to is the fact that while readers of such publications as the New York Times, Salon, The Atlantic, Slate, Vox, the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and the Los Angeles Times (which happen to be among my go-to media choices for television and other popular cultural commentary) may get the impression that progressive, and even transgressive, TV is where America's heart lies, the data seem to indicate otherwise. Here, then, is one of the many ways in which a lot of what is going on in American consciousness flies under the radar of cultural analysts and political strategists whose television and journalistic preferences trend left rather than right, and helps explain how Democratic pollsters got things so wrong in 2016 and 2020. For no matter which side of the cultural divide one identifies with, popular culture remains a medium with a message, and to understand who we as a nation are today, we need to look in both directions.   Image Credit: "Set it off" by Scouse Smurf is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0 ... View more