My twenty-something sons have a keen interest in—okay, an obsession with—the history of media. My older son teaches film and is currently teaching a course on the future of film. That requires, of course, looking back at the past and considering how digital media have changed how films are distributed. My younger son is intrigued by the idea that his even younger cousins have never lived in a world in which YouTube didn’t exist. Having been a child when VHS tapes still had to be protected from melting in a hot car, he feels like the “old man” of media who can educate the younger generation about a world they never knew. They both use their iPhones or laptops constantly to research movies. Is it obvious to note, though, that they don’t use Facebook to do research? Or that we don’t expect our students to cite Facebook as a source in a documented essay? My older son uses Facebook to disseminate his opinions about films, just like he uses a blog. Facebook is, after all, a social media or social networking service. How, then, have we reached the point of congressional hearings examining Facebook’s role in disseminating disinformation harmful to America’s youth? Facebook creates communities of users, some much larger than others, who exchange updates on their lives and information they think will be of interest to their online community. However, the information shared is only as reliable as the community member who shares it. Facebook was never meant to be a news source, except as far as personal news was concerned. Then came the Trump administration, telling its followers that the mainstream media were not to be trusted as sources of national and international news. Some people began to put more faith in what a “friend” shared on Facebook than what a major news network reported. All of us have probably been guilty of sharing information on Facebook without thinking too critically about where that information came from. Sometimes we are glad to see someone out there reinforcing what we believe and pass it along without thinking about whether it is even true. Publishers of print media have been, and continue to be aware of the danger of printing libelous content. Now those who allow disinformation in digital form to go unchecked are facing some of the same type of scrutiny. Those who run Facebook have tried to restrict what gets passed along as truth. Frances Haugen, the whistleblower who has released thousands of pages of Facebook documents, has testified about those efforts but argues that they fall far short of what it would take to eliminate the dissemination of misinformation. She points out that Facebook did tighten restrictions about what users could post in the days leading up to the 2020 Presidential election, for example, but relaxed those restrictions once the election was over—even in light of the events of January 6th—because it was profitable to do so. A portion of Haugen’s testimony has been about the lies and conspiracy theories being spread about COVID-19 via Facebook. What is posted on a social media site can seldom be considered a matter of life and death, but lives literally are at stake if readers of a post believe that Ivermectin is a cure for COVID or that vaccinations are a Democratic conspiracy. Mark Zuckerberg and the other higher-ups at Facebook can try to put in place a plan to block disinformation. In their daily lives, as they argue politics in the heated atmosphere that currently exists in our country, Facebook’s users still must bear the responsibility that any person who constructs an argument must bear for checking out the reliability of their sources. In arguments made in the context of their academic or professional lives, the rules of research and documentation haven’t changed. An argument in support of a claim is only as good as its sources and the warrants that build a bridge between claim and warrant, no matter how funny the meme or how convincing the post is on Facebook.   Image Credit: "facebook is dead" by Book Catalog is licensed under CC BY 2.0. ... View more

In my last blog I analyzed the cultural significance of the “The Crown,” this year's toast of the Emmy Awards and a major signifier of America's continuing fascination with upper-class life. So when I read L.A. Times theater critic Charles McNulty's evisceration of the Netflix soon-to-premiere-on-Broadway musical "Diana," I decided that this would be a good opportunity to explore a different angle of the topic. So, as I am prone to say at the start of many of my semiotic analyses on this blog, here goes. To begin with, any critical review that begins by calling its subject "a crassly commercial noise machine," is clearly not going to be a piece of puffery. In fact, McNulty simply loathes the thing, cutting it off at the knees with such pronouncements as "There were lyrics so deranged I felt compelled to jot them down, almost like a psychiatrist keeping a log of a patient’s more unhinged utterances," and "'Diana' clarified for me why some people not only hate musicals but also loathe those who unabashedly do." When reading such jabs one can't help but think, "C'mon Charles, don't hold back, tell us what you really think." I confess to a certain fondness for such directness, but there is a deeper cultural significance to McNulty's takedown of which the critic himself is completely aware, remarking how "During the long pandemic pause, Broadway has been forced to confront not only its dismal record on race but also its checkered history on the rights and dignity of its workers. Cluttering the space with commercial mediocrity sadly suggests a return to business as usual. For this reason, 'Diana' isn’t just bad but dangerous."  Such critical passion raises the more dispassionate question: "What do we expect from musicals, anyway? Are they art or mere entertainment?" And this is the question I wish to explore in the rest of this blog. For the musical is a genre which, from its origins in the "light" operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, occupies a liminal space between "popular" culture and "elite" culture, "low" culture and "high," commercial entertainment and art. "Higher" than the proletarian "music hall" and "lower" than, say, the royal opera, Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas defied easy cultural classification, as does the tradition that they inspired. Even the music defies easy classification, with modern composers from Andrew Lloyd Webber to Lin-Manuel Miranda digging deep into contemporary pop music as they cross over from Broadway to Billboard, and back again. McNulty's pronouncement that "Artistically, 'Diana' is soulless. The raison d'être seems to be to make money," reveals what is at stake for proponents of a Broadway tradition that, in their view, should aim high rather than low—a pop cultural standard that has been embraced ever since the Beatles and Bob Dylan raised expectations for rock music as well. So it isn't the fact that "Diana"'s score is rock-oriented that bothers McNulty (it was composed by Bon Jovi's David Bryan); the problem is that it is "composed in the cheesiest Broadway rock."  But the medium, as they say, is the message, and Netflix—a wholly commercial enterprise—is a medium that isn't designed to aim high. Its purpose is to cash in. So what we are seeing here is a repetition of what happened in the very early days of television itself, when hopes that the new medium would bring high culture into the homes of the masses collapsed into a lament that TV had instead devolved into what FCC Chair Newton Minnow famously called a "vast wasteland" in 1961. So as traditional TV comes to be overtaken by the new media, the message remains the same: cultural production within a system of corporate capitalism is guided by the imperatives of the profit motive, not the nebulous and shifting values of "high" art. The result, as I have noted so many times, is the creation of an "entertainment culture" that has transformed cultural capital into just plain capital.   Image Credit: "File:Curtain-939464.jpg" by tommybuddy is marked with CC0 1.0 ... View more

Like many other writing teachers, I have spent much of the last pandemic year reading and learning about how to be more inclusive and equitable in our schools and universities and about how to practice antiracist pedagogy. It’s been a year of the most intensive learning I can remember. As an old(er!) white woman who grew up in the segregated South and came of age in the 60s, that’s saying something: in those early days I confronted my own racist background, my own racism. Or I thought I did. What I’ve learned in the last couple of years is that I have much more work to do and much more to learn about what being inclusive in thinking and teaching really means. Thanks to the outpouring of brilliant scholarship from so many Black scholars, Indigenous scholars, and other scholars of color, teachers of writing (and especially white teachers of writing) have a chance to adopt new practices of inclusion. One of the many scholars I’ve learned from this last year is University of Central Florida professor Esther Milu, whose advice as a member of our Advisory Board for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the 8th edition of EasyWriter was so invaluable that I asked if she would have a follow up conversation with me. She graciously agreed, and I remain indebted to her for her perceptive advice and insights. (To learn more about the advisory board, visit the EasyWriter catalog page and select “DEI Advisory Board” under the “Preview” tab.) So when I picked up the July issue of College English, I was excited to see an essay by Esther Milu as the lead article, and one that provides another example of the kind of groundbreaking scholarship I mentioned earlier. In “Diversity of Raciolinguistic Experiences in the Writing Classroom: An Argument for a Transnational Black Language Pedagogy,” she calls our attention to what should be obvious: that Black students are part of a very diverse group. Yet too often, teachers seem unaware of this diversity, assuming that if students are Black, they must speak Black Vernacular English. Milu offers multiple examples of African students who have no experience with BVE: Because US raciolinguistic ideologies are based on US-centric racial and linguistic formations, writing and literacy instructors tend to subsume all linguistic practices of Black students in one racial category—Black. (416) In Milu’s experience, this tendency to lump all students who are Black into one language category leads to unfortunate results, particularly for Black students who come from a very wide range of other cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Furthermore, as Samy Alim points out, the “sociolinguistic order of things” in the US works to maintain the status quo, with white middle-class English “at the top of the language hierarchy.” But this focus on English, Milu notes, “fails to account for how other imperial languages of Europe . . . have historically contributed to a racist and oppressive ‘sociolinguistic order’ globally” (417). Ironically, raising student awareness about the hegemonic forces at work in (white) US English may fail to alert transnational and immigrant African students’ to the way that their indigenous languages have been erased or suppressed by European languages. Milu then introduces us to five African students who “are not descendants of enslaved Black people,” and specifically to writing they have done about their experiences in a white US institution, writing that theorizes their language histories and identities and reflects on how those histories relate to their language development in general. Here is Osa, a second-generation Nigerian born in the US: Americans view me as a foreigner. As soon as the see or hear my name, they assume that I am not an American. They assume that I am from out of the country and that I cannot speak English. They always ask, “Where are you REALLY from,” like I did not just tell them I was born in New Jersey. Also as a black girl that speaks African American Language (Ebonics) people marginalize me to be the stereotypical black girl. People from the black community assume that when I speak Sandard English I am trying to be something that I am not. They think that I am trying to be white. (433-34) Osa’s writings point out the real complexity of her linguistic and cultural identity and underscore Milu’s call on teachers to recognize this complexity, with all its implications for our teaching. Texts like Osa’s are the heart of Milu’s essay, and I hope everyone will read the gripping stories these students tell.   Their stories, of course, are a large part of what leads Milu to recommend a move to a “transnational Black language pedagogy” (436), which she locates theoretically in the early research of Geneva Smitherman, with references to Smitherman’s own grounding in the work of Black scholars such as Beryl Bailey, Lorenzo Turner, and W. E. B. Du Bois. This pedagogy calls for “teaching slavery, colonialism, and racism together to better reveal how they contributed to raciolinguistic ideologies, racialization practices, and racist sociolinguistic order in US and various Afro-Diasporic contexts” (436-37). To do so, Milu says, writing teachers will have to “familiarize themselves with various approaches to language decolonization in Africa and other Afro-Diasporic contexts” and adopt translingualism as an “option to language decolonization in Africa . . . because languaging practices in post-colonial Africa, especially among the youth, are translingual” (437). In Milu’s view, a translingual approach to writing makes room for and values linguistic heterogeneity and “gives agency to users to draw language resources from their linguistic repertoire to achieve various writing and communicative ends” (438). Some will push back against Milu’s advocacy of a translingual approach, arguing that it does not focus strongly enough on race (Milu mentions April Baker-Bell as one who might make this criticism). Milu acknowledges the conversation in progress among those who theorize and advocate for translingualism, critical language awareness, and various forms of antiracist pedagogy. More importantly, her perspective—and her presentation of a transnational Black language pedagogy—add a great deal of substance to the ongoing discussion. Image Credit: "Black Student Leadership Conference..." by COD Newsroom, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn, a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy, and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition   Overview There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived. ~ Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849) In my classes, I challenge students to practice strong critical reading strategies and to learn to locate themselves in a range of voices as they read and interact with texts. Many times, students stop at only interpreting the text at hand, but I encourage my students to also seriously consider the ways the texts integrate with their own thinking and lives. Strong critical reading and writing asks students to move back and forth between the text, context, and their own ideas. Critical thinking happens when we become aware of and engage with important cultural conversations and become engaged citizens on our own terms. Please click on the slide above to see an example of a completed "What Do We Stand For?" slideshow.For this assignment I use Henry David Thoreau’s On the Duty of Civil Disobedience to frame our discussion and ask students, “What do you stand for?” Thoreau has inspired generations to consciously resist injustice and develop personal frameworks for action through peaceful protest, passive resistance, and taking a stand. Many have taken up the call to stand up for injustice, or what civil rights icon John Lewis calls “good trouble.” We use the text as a starting place to discuss historical examples of civil disobedience such as the Boston Tea Party, Underground Railroad, civil rights sit-ins, women’s suffrage, the Stonewall riots, and other acts of courageous individuals who took a stand despite personal risk. Students work in teams to talk about their ideas and consider what is important to them at this time. They create a collaborative slideshow: What Do We Stand For: A Contemporary Response to Civil Disobedience. The goal is not to reach consensus but to work to create a list of issues and ideas for which they stand along with examples to support their ideas. There is always a risk when we open our classrooms up to potentially controversial issues and multiple perspectives on hot-button cultural conversations. As teachers, we can choose to avoid or downplay these issues or to create safe spaces where we can engage in productive, civil discourse and heightened cultural awareness in which students explore their conscience. The purpose of this assignment is not to persuade others to change their minds or even to engage in the conversations themselves. Instead, it is about identifying the larger issues that are important to students and to begin to situate themselves within these conversations.   Resources The St. Martin’s Handbook – Ch. 9, Reading Critically The Everyday Writer (also available with Exercises) – Ch. 7, Critical Reading EasyWriter (also available with Exercises) – Ch. 8, Reading and Listening Analytically, Critically, and Respectfully   Steps to the Assignment Have students read Thoreau’s On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (full text from Project Gutenberg). Ask them to compose 3 thought-provoking questions and pick one passage from the text to include on a team Google Doc. Teams discuss questions and passages and work to interpret the text. Move to full class discussion in which students share passages and ideas. Present and discuss historical and personal examples of civil disobedience. Instruct students to gather in teams and discuss what they currently stand for as a group. Explain that the purpose of the assignment is not to persuade but to identify these cultural conversations and decide what is important to them. Create a Google slideshow, titled “What Do We Stand For?” Each team posts a bulleted list to a Google slideshow template (one slide for each team). Click here to see an example. Ask students to include a representative, copyright free image on their slide. (This is also a good time to teach students about searching and identifying copyright free images and using Creative Commons.) Each team then presents their slide and ideas to the class as students build upon each other’s ideas.   Reflections on the Activity This activity is quite simple in structure but impactful in its depth. It gives all students an opportunity to have their voices heard and to consider what is important to them as individuals and as a group. It engages them in the cultural conversations and asks them to consciously explore their relationships to these ideas. Many people identify this generation of students as apathetic and unaware. This assignment demonstrates that this notion could not be further from the truth. It also helps students realize how to be morally responsible citizens and consider ways to stand up for what they believe. By engaging in these conversations, students find the courage to speak their minds and engage in civil public discourse in productive ways. Through critical reading and thinking, they understand that change begins with the individual and that it is important to stand up, not just stand by. ... View more

This morning, I set a travel mug of coffee on top of my car while I grabbed the rest of my belongings for class. It happened to be raining, and the umbrella I had so carefully balanced over myself and the open car door caught the edge of the mug just as I picked up my book bag. I got a hot coffee bath down my shoulder and back—followed by quick cooling relief: having dropped the umbrella, I was drenched by rain. All in all, not a great start to the morning (and the odor of coffee lingering on my blouse constantly reminds me of my folly). I chided myself, of course, as any teacher and parent would: what was I thinking? Why didn’t I leave that travel mug safely in the cup holder?  My typical routine (mug on car) generally works effectively, but not so much in a downpour. So, the obvious lesson is to be cautious when dealing with bookbags, umbrellas, and coffee mugs. Perhaps this should even be a rule: never put a travel mug on top of the car when it’s raining. But of course, that rule might not protect me from all possible mishaps. Maybe I should revise my rule: never put a travel mug on top of the car, period. Or maybe I should just give up coffee. This is ridiculous, of course. In certain contexts, a travel mug waiting on top of my Chevy Blazer makes perfect sense. And there’s no reason to abandon my morning caffeine altogether. Why would I create and enforce a quick-fix rule, when a context-bound principle is needed? In my FYC course (a section combined with corequisite support), we have been discussing citations and the process of building a works cited list. When I asked my students what they already knew about these research practices, they articulated two rules: never cite Wikipedia (in fact, don’t even look at it!), and always put a parenthetical citation after a quote—or at the end of a paragraph. I probed a bit: why not cite Wikipedia? “Because it’s not reliable and usually wrong… and my last teacher said not to.” Why do you need a parenthetical citation after every quote, or every sentence, or every paragraph? “Because. . . that’s the way they said we have to do it.” The students confused principles (check for the reliability of the information, practice ethical attribution of sources) with specific rules (Thou shalt not consult Wikipedia; thou shalt always put something in parentheses after sentences in research papers).  The problem, of course, is that neither rule adequately captures the purpose of the principle—at least not in all situations. In fact, each might inhibit potentially productive research or documentation strategies. Wikipedia, for example, can be effective for what I call topical “toe-dipping”: just as we stick our toes in the water to assess temperature and depth, we can get a sense of a topic from Wikipedia. So, for instance, when I encounter something new to me, perhaps an esoteric school of linguistic analysis, a Wikipedia entry can give me key names, dates, associated institutions, or seminal works.  It can be a point of entry to further investigations.    All complex activities require some rules and boundaries: football cannot be played without clear borders to the field and some ground rules, nor can we drive safely without an agreement to adhere to road signs and traffic signals. But as a teacher, particularly at the threshold between high-school and college, I need to resist the urge to replace complicated considerations (constructing and managing an ethos, engaging a variety of readers, assessing contexts, deciding parameters for success and completion) with a rule that may later be applied without the exigence of the original context. Such rules ultimately make choices for writers; principles, in contrast, give writers a basis for making those choices for themselves. I’ve encountered a steady flow of social media posts purporting to offer “Ten Rules for ________” (saving money on groceries, writing stronger introductions, giving more inclusive feedback, losing baby weight or menopause pounds, simplifying daily routines, engaging neurodiverse learners, detoxing, eating locally, boosting metabolism, managing difficult colleagues, etc.). I suspect my students see the same thing. All of these activities are valuable. All are worth our consideration. And all are complicated, nuanced, contextualized endeavors that cannot be reduced to a set of quick and easy rules. Writing, teaching, living a healthy life, building relationships, doing research—there is no formula for these which, once mastered, allows us to check off a completion box. We can’t say, “I follow these ten rules; I’m a good teacher now.” Today I’m pushing myself to think about where I’ve shortchanged myself or my students by offering pseudo-rules as a shortcut for the tough work of applying principles to contexts in order to make decisions (as a teacher or a writer). Where have I said, “Just don’t….” instead of asking students about the choices before them and talking through their options with them? Granted, students don’t always make the decisions that I would, nor are the decisions always successful. Sometimes, we get covered in coffee. But that’s ok. So, I’ll brew another cup in the morning, fill my travel mug, let it rest on my blazer while I get my bags together, and head into the classroom. We’ve got writing to do. ... View more

On September 29, 2021, twenty days after her 74th birthday, Lisa Ede shuffled off this mortal coil, the field of rhetoric and writing studies lost one of its bright lights, and I… well, I lost the friend of a lifetime. In the few days since her death, I have been heartened by the outpouring of tributes and testimonies from friends and colleagues across the country and beyond, by all those who spoke of what Lisa and her work meant to them and of the many acts of kindness, mentorship, and unflagging support she was so well known for. And I’ve smiled through tears as I remember Marvin Diogenes saying “Lisa gives the best hugs.” She did indeed. And so much more. Lisa and I met in the fall of 1972 when I arrived at Ohio State to begin my Ph.D. Though I was five years older, Lisa was ahead of me by two years (and in more ways than one!) and like everyone else there at the time, she was focusing on literature. Back then, she was a Victorianist, and went on to write her dissertation on Lewis Carroll and the “nonsense” poets. But change was in the air, and when a few grad students started agitating for courses on rhetoric and writing, Lisa got more and more interested. She went on to study with Edward P. J. Corbett and with Richard Young in an NEH Seminar devoted to invention, and then landed a position in writing studies at SUNY Brockport before moving west to join the faculty at Oregon State and develop the writing program and the legendary Center for Writing and Learning there. Along the way, she published seminal essays on authorship, on collaboration, on audience, and on writing center theory and practice, as well as important textbooks. Also along the way, she was honored with the CCCC Braddock Award, with the MLA Mina Shaughnessy Award, with an Oregon State symposium on her work, and with the Lisa Ede Mentoring Award given by the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. These are the bare outlines of a rich and full career. As I grieve for her now, I think of that career, to be sure, but I think of so many other small, everyday moments of her life. Of the evening, probably forty+ years ago, when Lisa and I and several others were gathered at her and Greg’s house and we found ourselves pulling out the print version of the Oxford English Dictionary to settle an argument over the definition of wetlands: fens, bogs, mires, swamps, whatever—when the doorbell rang. We all went to open it, dictionary in hand, and Lisa greeted two students who were turning in late essays. They took us in in one sweep and the look on their faces said it all: “So this is what English professors do on Friday nights—read aloud from a gigantic dictionary.” And Lisa, smiling sweetly, shaking their hands, thanking them—and then collapsing with laughter as we shut the door. English professors on Friday nights. Of the summer we celebrated finishing “Audience Addressed / Audience Invoked” by making FORTY-THREE jars of pesto with basil harvested from Greg’s garden, taking a photo of ourselves sitting proudly behind the fruits of our labor. Of the weekend we celebrated sending off the revised manuscript of Singular Texts/Plural Authors with a trip to Canned Foods (!), one of Lisa’s favorite haunts in Corvallis. Talk about the big time…. Of the time we spent preparing refreshments to serve at Jon Olson and Cheryl Glenn’s wedding, arguing over ingredients and recipes and especially over how many of this or that we should make—and loving every single second of it. And of the darkest time of my life, when Lisa was there, with compassion, wisdom, and the steadiness that pulled me through. Thank you, Lisa. In the days since her death, I have been drawn to a poem Lisa loved, one we often recited together, called the “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry. You can click here to read the poem in its entirety, but I will include a short excerpt here: “When despair for the world grows in me // I come into the peace of wild things  // I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” What I wish tonight, for all teachers of writing everywhere, is that you have a friend like Lisa—and that you can, as often as possible, rest in the grace of the world. Image Credit: Andrea Lunsford ... View more

Emerging's fifth edition is here, and it contains some great new readings - including Gavin Haynes's discussion of purity spirals. See this video blog for ideas about teaching with this reading, the portability of the purity spiral idea to other readings and contexts, and how to develop student insight into what holds communities together or tears them apart. ... View more

Whether you are teaching in person or online, we are all witnessing the social-emotional cost of students trudging through the 18th month of the pandemic. In one-on-one meetings with all my first-semester students, I was struck by how many described themselves as feeling “socially anxious,” having “anxiety,” or just feeling overwhelmed and “awkward” about being around so many other humans every day. It takes a lot of energy, for sure. As an introvert who works hard to turn on extrovert energy for the class period (I am sure I am not alone), I empathize. Even students who seem fluent in the classroom have confessed to being maxed out by the human tasks of getting dressed, showing up to class, and turning in assignments, over and over.  My small data set of anxious students jibes with larger studies that show high levels of social anxiety in our student populations. For incoming students who have limped through their final semesters of high school online, the leap to college-level expectations might be especially anxiety-producing. Rather than feeling we must push students to “get up to speed” for college learning, we might honor students’ rawness—and our own (after all, we’re also 18 months into this pandemic slog)—by refocusing on how we learn, and the time and risks it can take to stretch as writers. For these reasons, I have lingered over Miriam Moore’s description of respecting the necessary slowness of the writing process, and sharing the experience with her students of being “stuck.” I also appreciate Andrea Lunsford’s recommendation for slowing down to set affirmations about our writing intentions. Rather than pretending we are back to “before times,” we might do well to question our previous expectations of student “performance,” and reexamine what learning means in our newly challenging context. I have written before about the “Ungrading” movement and the social-justice shift it requires of instructors to value learning over grading in our classrooms. The “game” of schooling (meeting deadlines or being punished, following rules exactly or being punished), which fell apart for many students during the pandemic, is perhaps one we should stop playing forever. After all, so many of those rules are out of step with how scholars actually work. Consider how many manuscripts are submitted late, or articles are given feedback for a “revise and resubmit.” What might our courses look like if we offered students the grace we receive as scholars? On my campus, our “Ungrading” faculty discussion group is about to start back up. I encourage you to start one on your campus, too. You might begin by reading Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards for some provocative theoretical grounding. Or, you might dive right into an anthology like Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum. Even a small step, such as allowing students to re-submit assignments after receiving feedback, can help your students focus on their own learning and growth, and might assuage some of their anxiety about this semester. What is working for you as you acknowledge your students’ pandemic anxiety and help them focus on their learning? If the rich discussion on our campus and in Bits posts is any indication, we can be one another’s best allies as we turn another challenging semester into an opportunity for pedagogical innovation.   Image Credit: Photograph of a laptop and textbook on an outdoor table taken by the author, April Lidinsky ... View more

If you have used Elements of Argument or Structure of Argument through multiple editions, you have seen us change our use of the basic Toulmin term warrant. It is a difficult term for students to understand, compared to the other two elements of the triad, claim and support. Although we still acknowledge Toulmin’s use of warrant, we have shifted to the more common term assumption. Whether we talk about warrants or underlying assumptions, however, today’s headlines make clear just how critical an understanding of those underlying beliefs is to argumentation and why, at this point in our political history, common ground is almost impossible to achieve. A shared worldview makes agreement easy. If you are “preaching to the choir,” or communicating with people who share your views, you don’t really have to do any convincing. If a reader or listener does not already share your views but is open to considering what you have to say, you may be able to persuade them by elaborating upon your opinion. It can be as basic as advocating one product over another. A more expensive dishwashing detergent may not seem like a good buy until you point out that it is more concentrated and actually does more dishes for less money. Since you and your audience probably both like to save money, bringing someone around to your point of view is usually not too difficult. The battle raging in America over vaccines will surely go down in history as one of the most significant clashes over values in our history. Humans have died for their values before. Martyrs throughout history have died for their religious or political beliefs. People who have fought in our many wars have died for various values they believed were worth their own sacrifice. In my state, the number of deaths from COVID-19 just surpassed the total number of soldiers who have died in all wars since World War I. Think about that. More people have died of COVID here than died in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation Enduring Freedom combined. Many died before there was a vaccine. A tragically large number continue to die. What is it in their belief system—what assumptions underlie their reasoning—that make it impossible for some, even on their deathbed, to admit they are dying of COVID, a terrible disease, but one for which there has been a safe and effective vaccine for months? We know from our study of logic that a conclusion is only as valid as its premises. If the major premise is that a vaccine should not be taken if it is dangerous, and the conclusion is that they should not take the vaccine, there are a range of statements that serve as the minor premise of their syllogistic reasoning: It’s toxic. Hundreds of thousands of people have died from the vaccine. It was developed too fast. It’s experimental. It will make me magnetic. None of those statements is true, and thus the conclusion cannot be true, based on those minor premises. People continue to deny facts about the vaccine because they have been told not to trust the mainstream media, where those facts are readily available. Others argue that the government does not have the right to mandate vaccination, in spite of the fact that vaccinations have been required for decades for public school attendance. Other requirements designed for public safety, such as mandatory seat belts and motorcycle helmets, have also been around for years. Refusal to comply in the case of the COVID vaccine is especially adamant because the issue has been politicized beyond all reason. It boils down to the belief that the government does not have the right to force American citizens to be vaccinated, or even to wear a mask. Will anything change the minds of those opposed to the vaccine? Some have changed their minds after recovering from COVID; more seem to change their minds when it is too late for them to be saved but may not be too late for their loved ones. Short of that, the concern for others around them that might be infected, including children too young to be vaccinated, has not been enough to outweigh the concern that their rights are being taken away. Workers have been attacked for trying to enforce mask mandates or a vaccination requirement. Airplanes have had to return to the terminal because passengers refuse to wear a mask. A popular meme reads, “I was asked, ‘You’re willing to lose friends over politics?!!’ I said, ‘I am willing to lose friends over morals. HUGE difference.’” The warrants that underlie our arguments about such issues as abortion, racism, gender identity, immigration, and COVID are deeply embedded in our moral code. Thus, the strong feelings and, yes, the anger continue to engulf our country. As bad as the pandemic is, the rift in our country will unfortunately still be here when COVID is gone.   Image Credit: “Anti-Vaccine Activists Spread Fear About COVID Vaccines" by Francisco Antunes is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

American television was born and came of age during a mid-twentieth century economic expansion that—assisted by strong unions, a progressive income tax, and the G. I. Bill—vaulted an unprecedented number of people out of working-class poverty into (relative) middle-class prosperity. Reflecting, and in many ways, ideologically shaping this transformation, the situation comedy (sitcom) emerged as the preeminent TV genre of the era with its comfortable, but never economically extravagant, households idealizing a peculiarly American institution: the suburban middle-class nuclear family. Other prominent genres of the period included variety and game shows, along with the highly mythologized (and now almost entirely extinct) Western, but it is the family sitcom that sticks in our collective memories as most representative of that time, bringing to America's living rooms images of a middle-class idyll in which a man's suburban ranch house might be his castle—but not literally. That is why I was so struck by this year's Emmy Awards, in which The Crown—a Netflix series that dramatizes the post-war history (well, quasi-history as a number of critics have hastened to point out) of the British Royal Family—walked off with most of the top honors. A glance at the Netflix website to find out more about the show further piqued my attention when I saw displayed there old world upper-class soap operas such as Versailles, Reign, Bridgerton, The Cook of Castamar, and The English Game (with its Upstairs, Downstairs-like casting). "Something is definitely going on here," I thought; "the semiotic question is 'what'?" It isn't that soapy costume dramas set in Europe (especially England) are anything new. Indeed, the aforementioned Upstairs, Downstairs headlined a constant stream of such programs on PBS's Masterpiece Theater in the 1970s, and the franchise continues (under the new name Masterpiece) to this day. There has even been a brief effort to bring back Upstairs, Downstairs. But fifty years ago, this was something new, a departure into television fare that was at once popular and somewhat exclusive, with WGBH (the Boston PBS station that introduced Masterpiece Theater to America) enjoying a highbrow reputation as the go-to network for America's cultural elite. And this is the kind of difference upon which semiotic analyses can be built. It is highly significant in this regard, then, that even as PBS was turning towards British imports featuring English high society in the seventies, ABC, NBC, and CBS were producing working-class comedies like All in the Family and Laverne & Shirley, while at the same time American popular culture as a whole was going "country," with truck drivers (Convoy) and country music stars (Coal Miner's Daughter) enjoying a kind of populist moment in the sun. This, after all, was also the era of Hee Haw. But something else was also going on, for the 1970s marks the era during which the American middle class began to fracture, with an emergent upper middle class (spearheaded by the notorious yuppies) drawing further and further away from what can best be called the struggling middle class. The current success of The Crown, and other closely related series like Downton Abbey (am I the only one who wanted the Crawleys to lose their precious estate?) is a plangent signifier of this divide, for here is elite television in more ways than one, a real-life fantasy of the ultimate in power and privilege for an ever-more-prosperous upper-middle-class audience. And what is everyone else watching? According to Variety, the three most viewed television programs (by a wide margin) in 2020-21 were 1. NFL Sunday Night Football, 2. NFL Thursday Night Football, and 3. NFL Monday Night Football—all traditional bastions of middle (and working) class viewership. Interestingly, and perhaps significantly, a show called The Equalizer is tied for number 6.   Image Credit: "Windsor Castle" by Francisco Antunes is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

I’ve just read Asao Inoue’s new book, Above the Well: An Antiracist Literacy Argument from a Boy of Color—and I think you would like to read it too. I’ve known Inoue since he was a graduate student at Oregon State—that is to say, a long time—and I have followed him and his career with great interest. Listening to him over the years hasn’t always been easy: what seems to me to be the strident and combative style often on display in his presentations can rub my feminist collaborative leanings the wrong way, and I haven’t always felt that the policies he argues for, such as those regarding grading, hold up under close scrutiny. But I have always listened, always wanted to hear and to understand—as best as a privileged, white, cisgender, aging woman can. And I am very glad I have because now comes this new book that, to me, sets forth Inoue’s antiracist project in the most powerful terms possible. From the first sentence (“Our language participates in racial violence”) to the closing discussion of deep attentive reading as a way to “make deeper sense of things, perhaps more compassionate sense of things,” I felt I was in conversation with a passionate, insightful guide helping me to see and to hear not only what racist language hath wrought but also what doing antiracism can mean. Inoue’s opening line about language and racial violence took me instantly back to Elspeth Stuckey’s The Violence of Literacy, which was published in 1990, the same year I coauthored a report on a 1988 MLA-sponsored conference on The Right to Literacy. That conference focused on literacy as a fundamental right of all people—and featured panels, like one presented by health care workers in Georgia who spoke about the struggle for literacy when powerful forces were bent on denying it—so I was keenly aware of the vast discrepancies at work in who had access to literacy. Nevertheless, Stuckey’s book was stunning in its revelations of the relationship between language and violence, and especially race-based violence. As a young white teacher, I had viewed language and literacy in a wholly positive light, as ways to gain power and come to voice. From the mid to late 80s on, I had to question those naïve views more and more. Thanks to Stuckey and others (primarily Geneva Smitherman), I grasped the double-edged nature of literacy—as potentially oppressor and liberator. What other scholars of color since then and Asao Inoue most recently have pointed out is the need to look deeper into literacy, to ask what kind of literacy, whose literacy, oppresses—and whose potentially liberates. The kind of literacy that has oppressed so many is American Standard English/literacy, or Edited Written English/literacy or Standardized English/literacy—or just White English/literacy. Whatever we call it—and the terminology is being debated right now—this form of literacy has worked persistently and all too often silently to confuse and silence and oppress huge numbers of people, often in the name of trying to “help” or “advance” them. This is received wisdom today. But its message comes alive again, and brilliantly, in Inoue’s book, in his experiences as a “boy of color” with big dreams who has the wit and the grit to sense when he is being bamboozled or given one of the blank checks described so eloquently by Martin Luther King. It’s hard for me to point to my favorite part of Inoue’s book, with its rich mix of autobiography and memoir, historical analysis, argument, and mythic imagining. But at the top of my list is Inoue’s engagement with Strunk and White’s classic The Elements of Style (first written by Strunk in 1920 and elaborated by White in 1959—and still a bestseller on Amazon today). I can remember ranting against this book as a graduate student, saying that it made sense only to those who already knew what everything in it meant: that is, advice to “be brief” is meaningless unless you already know how to do so. So reading Inoue’s definitive put-down of this book was particularly gratifying to me. But that personal reaction is insignificant given the portrait Inoue paints of a young student writer caught in the web of confusing, often contradictory, arbitrary, and even nonsensical nostrums: The text says, “Do not use periods for commas.” Okay, so when I can use commas? Now I’m not sure if I’m using periods right, either. I’m feeling more confused. How this explanation help anyone? This tells me the rule, but not in a way I understan. I tell myself to think like a White kid. Things start to get shakier fo me. When the hell I use commas and periods? I can feel the anxiety rise in me. This school-shit feels so arcane, I think. Yeah, arcane, that’s the word, like in D&D.” (76) Yep, it tells the rule, all right, but in a way that only privileged White students who already know what it means can follow. Here Inoue’s evocation of the feelings associated with the violence of literacy is pitch-perfect powerful. In this and so many other places in his book, Inoue demonstrates why this kind of (White) language use and policy is simply unsustainable, not to mention undesirable. The case he makes seems to me invincible. And sprinkled throughout are suggestions of what can and must replace it, the kind of language use and policy that can and should be sustainable. As a teacher, I would have liked to hear more (and more) about these suggestions, more about what must come next. I look, with hope, to Inoue and others who are leading the way in arguing for and demonstrating what must come next. In the meantime, I hope you will go to the WAC Clearinghouse to read this book and learn more about how to support Inoue’s antiracist work. Image Credit: "Two stacks of books next to each other" by Horia Varlan, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Tiny Teaching Stories: Launch  Share Your Inspirational, Motivational or Funny Teaching Anecdotes With Us! Hello! I am excited to announce the launch of a new series on Bedford Bits: Tiny Teaching Stories, and to invite your participation.  What are Tiny Teaching Stories, you ask? See our introductory video or view our hub here:   To get us started, I'd like to share my own Tiny Teaching Story with you. We were small zoom squares, remote, distant, across 4 continents. In our online writing class, I talked about the need to create a classroom community; they filled the chatbox talk with fears about the pandemic, who had died, and who was in the hospital. Isabelle, in Vietnam, sprawled on her pink ruffled bedspread; Zara, in Pakistan, turned off her video to leave class for morning prayers. We understood that we would never see each other in person; we would always be at a distance, always in gallery view. And yet, when I missed class on the day my mother died, from across 4 continents they sent me poems of consolation and a bouquet of sunflowers.   Now, we want to hear from you. Send us your Tiny Teaching Story! Submit your Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com. Guidelines for submission: Stories should be no more than 100 words. Include with your submission the attached release form. Tiny Teaching Stories can be published anonymously or with attribution; please indicate your preference in your submission and include a brief one to two-sentence biography for non-anonymous publication. If you would like to, we encourage you to also submit your social media handles and a headshot (optional). Please change identifying names and details of students to protect their privacy.     ... 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. The start of a new school year is the perfect time for students to think about what their goals are for the next few months--including in their writing! Use one of the activities from this blog post to help your students prepare for their coming writing assignments. 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 maintain student engagement, accommodate different learning styles, 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 Prepare for This Semester’s Writing Assignments   Assignment A  Pre-Class Work for Assignment A: Ask your students to bring in a graded paper they completed for another class--no one will see it but them! Alternatively, you can ask your students to consider writing they’ve done for previous courses, and think about the feedback they received on that writing. Each student should list one writing area or skill they used successfully and one writing area or skill they could improve. If your students are using a graded paper for this exercise, they can use the feedback written on that assignment to guide their responses. If your students are struggling to come up with topics, ask them to reflect on the following and categorize them as either “successful” or “needs improvement”:  use of active/passive voice comma usage use of citations audience awareness subject-verb agreement metaphors and similes Assignment: Collect all of the answers, either in person or virtually. You may want to do this anonymously. As a class, group the answers together into similar categories. Consider if students had different terms for similar successes and problems, and note if everyone seems to struggle in the same areas or if the answers are more varied.  Then, assign a Grammar Girl podcast (or two!) based on the most common successes and most common areas needing improvement. Ask students to listen to these and then complete the reflection. Reflection for Assignment A: Ask students to write 1-3 paragraphs reflecting on what they learned from the podcasts. Also ask them to consider: Were the successes they found in their writing the same or similar to the successes most of the class identified? What about the areas they need improvement in? Finally, ask them to consider how the podcast topic is or is not reflected in their previous assignments.   Assignment B Pre-Class Work for Assignment B: Ask your students to vote on which of the following topics they feel they need help with right now. You can also turn this into a short class discussion about why students feel they need help with a particular category. Academic Reading, Writing, and Speaking Adjectives and Adverbs Apostrophes Capitalization Commas Grammar for Multilingual Writers Grammar, Clarity, and Style Other Punctuation Parts of Speech and Parts of Sentences Pronouns Quotation Marks Spelling Subject-Verb Agreement and Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement If you’re using Achieve and have included the folder “Grammar Girl: 25 Suggested Podcasts” in your course, you could ask students to vote on the suggested podcasts instead of categories. Assignment: Once everyone has voted, assign at least one Grammar Girl podcast from the top two or three categories. Ask your students to listen to the assigned podcasts. Reflection for Assignment B: Ask each student to write 2-3 paragraphs reflecting on the podcasts they’ve listened to. They might consider the following questions:  In your own writing, do you consider the topic of the podcast something you succeed with or something you need more practice with? For those topics in which you think you need work, what are some strategies for improving your skills in that area? What other topics do you struggle with that were not addressed in the podcasts?   For more start-of-semester ideas, see Using Grammar Girl Podcasts to Start the Semester.   Credit: "Start" by jakeandlindsay is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

I have written before about DBLAC—Digital Black Lit and Composition—the organization founded by Khirsten L. Scott and Lou Maraj in 2016 as a digital network devoted to the support of Black graduate students and emerging scholars in the fields of literacy, composition, literature, rhetoric, and related areas. In the five years since then, this group has held transformative in-person retreats and sponsored highly successful virtual reading and writing groups. They’ve also sponsored panels at a number of national conferences. Professor Scott wrote recently alerting members and readers to the opening of the Fall 2021 writing sessions, the first of which was held just last week on September 15. DBLAC writing group sessions follow a similar format: participants register in advance and then are invited to join in on any or all of the slated activities, beginning with Pre-Writing Affirmations and Writing Goals, followed by a three-hour writing period (with a break roughly half way through) and then an hour of time for reflection. While I have not been lucky enough to be part of any of these groups yet, I continue to follow report of them and to think of them (and the equally interesting reading group sessions) as one of gifts that kept giving during the pandemic, since they were designed to be virtual. And I am especially interested in the pre-writing affirmations that participants do—a kind of activity I used to use in abbreviated fashion at the beginning of my first-year writing classes to settle us all down and get us focused. Here’s what DBLAC posted on September 15: Before setting our goals and beginning our writing activities, let's share positive affirmations about our writing intentions. Statements can vary in length and quantity. The goal here is to promote positive energy within the group. Pre-Writing Affirmations: Transformation of Silence into Action In the spirit of this theme, I turn to Audre Lorde's words in this chapter of Sister Outsider: “The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.” Lorde’s words seem to me to provide a good starting point for many of our writing classes, especially very early in the term. Reading that first sentence aloud in class, I can imagine looking directly and closely at my students, making eye contact with as many as possible, asking them to think about what it means to say “the fact that we are here” in this mid-pandemic time, and asking about what some of the silences and differences that stand between us are. And about how we might begin not just to recognize and name them but to bridge them. While I and my students wouldn’t have several hours to write, we would have 20 to 30 minutes at our disposal—along with some time for group discussion that could serve as a primer for later reflections written at leisure and brought to class the following day. I am not in the classroom (virtual or in person) this term, to my regret. But if I were, this is a prompt I would want to use—thanks to Audre Lorde and DBLAC. I believe it could well set the reflective, contemplative, interrogative tone I hope would guide our classroom deliberations throughout. If you should use this in your classroom, I’d love to hear about it and its results. And in the meantime, I recommend checking out the DBLAC website and signing up for their highly informational newsletter. Image Credit: "Pen and Paper" by kdinuraj, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Rhiannon ScharnhorstRhiannon Scharnhorst (recommended by Samantha NeCamp), Bedford New Scholar 2021, is pursuing her hybrid PhD in Writing Studies and Victorian Literature at the University of Cincinnati, where she expects to defend her dissertation Willful Objects and Feminist Writing Practices in May 2022. She teaches a variety of courses in writing, from first-year composition to advanced topics classes, including Writing with Style and Food in Literature. She has also served as the Assistant to the Composition Program, writing and designing the department's handbook, overseeing graduate student education, and hosting the annual graduate conference. Her research draws on feminist rhetorics to make sense of objects in writing studies, including typewriters, cookbooks, and other tools. She also writes about materiality, embodiment and writing practices of nineteenth-century women writers in Great Britain.   What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students? How to communicate effectively in writing, which starts with helping students unlearn limiting beliefs about writing. So often students enter the classroom believing they are “bad” writers because a previous teacher told them they were. They see writing as a performative act, done only as a test of grammatical intelligence or syntactical prowess in the classroom. Yet they are some of the most prolific writers I’ve ever seen.  In my classroom we spend a lot of time unpacking what makes writing “good” or “bad” (hint: it’s always contextual). A well-crafted text message can be just as “good” as a brilliant essay. Both require an awareness of the rhetorical situation, the affordances of the genre, and a lot of practice. I want students to leave with an understanding of writing as a recursive process, a tool for thinking and not just a record of intelligence logged onto a page. I want them to have the confidence to try things in writing that might not work out. Writing is a skill we cultivate through practice, not something that’s given to us by a muse or higher being.  How does the next generation of students inspire you?  They refuse to live by the status quo. If they see injustice, they work to correct it. They are willing to call out bad behavior, refuse to back down when something’s not right, and are actively trying to address some of the most pressing issues in our world today. I am constantly in awe of their resilience: what they’ve lived through with the pandemic, climate crisis, racial injustices, mass shootings just in the last year is astounding. Yet they continue to fight, continue to seek out opportunities for growth and change, and are all around some of the most resilient individuals I’ve had the chance to learn from. Their vulnerability and openness about their personal struggles with issues like mental health—struggles that I myself also experienced—are also inspirational. What with all those platitudes, I can’t forget to add they are also hilarious: rhetorically adept, unabashed, irreverent. I spend a lot of time laughing with them.   What do you think instructors don't know about higher ed publishing but should? Publishers like Bedford/St. Martin’s use their power to create texts that are inclusive and equitable by recruiting and publishing diverse voices and perspectives and by asking for feedback throughout that process through programs like BNS. I mistakenly assumed higher ed publishing was more of a top-down process than a real reciprocal relationship between publishers and teachers. Instead, the editors are just as invested in creating tools and texts that challenge the status quo. The texts are continually revised, updated, diversified. They seek out students and teachers who will give them honest feedback. They commit to doing better, being better, and invest their time in figuring out how to provide material that responds to in-the-moment concerns. Most importantly, they listen!  What have you learned from other Bedford New Scholars? The struggle is real, y’all! Hearing from other dedicated teacher-scholars across the country about their teaching practices gives me hope for the future of higher education. The diversity of approaches (labor contracts, trauma-informed teaching), the variety of modalities (visual essays, memes), the shared anxieties and concerns (extremism in the classroom, pandemic issues): all helped me appreciate and reassess my own standpoint as an imperfect teacher. In particular, we revised our diversity philosophies together after a week spent thinking and discussing how to bring antiracist practices into the composition classroom.  Out of those conversations was born my commitment to “failure”: that doing important work like creating equitable and culturally relevant curriculum requires a commitment to listening, changing, apologizing, improving. There is no perfection in teaching, only the continual recommitment to this necessary work. Thank you to everyone who read, shared, or listened as we co-created this space for change.      Rhiannon’s Assignment that Works: Autoethnography  During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Rhiannon’s assignment. For the full activity, see Autoethnography. Students don’t know how they write; by that I mean they don’t know what their writing process looks like on the page as it happens. In most cases, the students I teach in introductory composition courses have never considered writing as a labored, material process. This assignment asks them to record their screens while writing, as well as the environment they work in, the people they talk to, the objects they use, and ultimately their thought process as they write. They use this primary data to write an autoethnography, detailing what they witness in the screencasts as well as any conclusions they draw after coding their compiled data.  Usually, the material realities of their lives show up on the page, from what they use to write (computers, cell phones, pen and paper) to the spaces in which they write (kitchen tables, coffee shops, beds, buses). The writing process expands, spreading from time spent typing on a screen to conversations about the assignment with roommates. They begin to reassess their own practices, interrogating what works and what doesn’t. My hope is that the assignment sets them up for future writing success by bringing their awareness to the labor behind it. ... View more