I was finishing revisions of the most recent editions of Elements of Argument and The Structure of Argument as the presidential election of 2020 was nearing its end. As the books went to press, I could make no assumptions about how the election would turn out, but that was not a new struggle for me because throughout the process of writing about argument and selecting examples of argumentation for these and prior editions, I needed to try to not let my political biases show. (I have not always been successful.) On this platform, to a community of instructors in the classroom, I can say with candor that teaching argumentation during the era of former President Donald Trump was not easy. The lasting effects of his administration make it difficult still. We have long known about media bias. We have long talked to our students about how certain networks, certain newspapers, and certain magazines can have a conservative or a liberal bias. But beyond media bias, one thing that gave Trump his surprising power over his followers was his ability to convince them that only he was telling them the truth. He convinced them that everything else was fake news. The media could not be trusted to present balanced news; they could not even be trusted to present the facts accurately. How do you support an argument, or teach your students to, when no one is telling the truth? Only that kind of cult of personality could make it possible for millions of people to refuse to take a vaccine to protect themselves against a disease that has killed over half a million people in America alone. Some people have entered the hospital with COVID still arguing that it can’t be COVID because COVID is a hoax. Only on their deathbed have some accepted the truth and begged their families to be vaccinated. This level of refusal to accept scientific truth is new. What will people from the perspective of the future think about a generation of Americans who in large numbers chose to die rather than take a vaccine advocated by the government? We still have to teach our students the difference between fact and inference. We still have to teach them how to evaluate sources. Doing so remains difficult in today’s politicized environment. The same basic guidelines for evaluation still apply. We just have to get past the emotion, and for some, that is just not possible right now. Sometimes it may be a matter of doing the most we can do under the circumstances. I happen to be in one of the states where the legislature is eager to mirror Texas’s S. B. 8 in essentially taking away women’s right to control their own bodies by making abortion illegal after six weeks and making a woman’s neighbors bounty hunters to be rewarded for turning her in if she has an abortion. I wanted to write a letter to the editor opposing passing a similar law in Arkansas. But what would I have argued in this letter, and how? It would have been pointless to try to argue in favor of abortion in general. In fact, I don’t support abortion in general, but rather under specific circumstances. A letter is hardly enough to present the complexities of my views on abortion. Too often in such discussions, we tend to focus on the most sensational cases, such as when the girl or woman is the victim of rape or incest, but doing so suggests that abortion is acceptable only in the most extreme of cases, which is also not my view. I reflected on what exactly I was advocating. For now, specifically, it was that a similar law to Texas S. B. 8 should not be passed in my state. And it wasn’t even that I was arguing that never in the future should any abortion law be passed in my state. Rather, I was responding to the push from one of our state legislators to pass a law just like Texas’s right now, before the current legislative session ends. My case was strengthened by the fact that the state senator who is advocating the newest restrictive abortion law has sponsored two similar laws that have already been struck down in federal court. Even before the court’s decision on the more recent law, our Governor admitted publicly that he knew the law was unconstitutional. Two of the three dissenting justices who failed to block Texas’s S. B 8 stated bluntly that the law was unconstitutional, and Chief Justice Roberts said the constitutionality of the law could only be considered when a specific case comes before the Court. There are facts that support my contention that it would be unwise to force a law of unclear constitutionality through our state legislation at this time, when a specific case is due to be heard by the Supreme Court in a few weeks. Add to that the fact that some states and companies are already rethinking the wisdom of doing business in Texas, and there are reasons to stop and think and not simply let emotion rule the day. Our legislature, unfortunately, probably will not do that, but what I can do at this point is to know the facts and to know exactly what I want to argue should be done. Other battles will come later, but for now, that may be the most that can be done.   Image Credit: "Supreme Court of the United States" by Phil Roeder is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

It is with much sadness that I begin this inaugural blog of the 2021-2022 Bits blogging season, for this is the first of scores of such mini-essays that I have written here over the years that I have not been able to run past my late wife and fellow author, Sonia Maasik, whom I always relied on to make certain that I was not running off the rails in some way or another before hitting Send. I'm on my own now, and must serve as my own editor. Still, I know that Sonia would want me to continue. So here goes. As I have scrutinized American popular culture over this long summer, which began in post-pandemic hope and is ending in Deltaic disappointment and dismay, it has struck me that if there are any new television (or should I say "streamavision"?) series or movies that make the COVID-19 pandemic an explicit, or even metaphoric, theme or background, they haven't made much of a splash. Of course, the long lag time between creative concept and actual release may explain this (though it feels like forever, the pandemic is still less than two years old—probably insufficient time to conceive and produce a film or TV show), or perhaps the long run of The Walking Dead (which is, after all, centered on a pandemic), has exhausted the metaphoric possibilities. Then again, any day now there may be an announcement of a soon-to-be released COVID-19-related movie or TV series. We'll just have to wait and see. But if the pandemic hasn't stimulated (at least yet) any significant reflection in American popular culture over the past few months (its political manifestations are another matter entirely), America's culture wars most certainly have, and I find striking signifiers of this in HBO's Succession and The White Lotus, along with FX's just-released Y: The Last Man. At first sight, these programs would not seem to have enough in common to signify much of anything. The first premiered well before the pandemic hit, and is a rather obvious successor (pun intended) to such rich-families-with-business-empires-behaving-badly vehicles as Dallas, Knot's Landing, and Falcon Crest, while the second (which appeared just this summer) is a kind of Love Boat turned upside down, featuring the hapless hosts and patrons of a luxury resort in Hawaii. The third, for its part, brings an apocalyptic comic book series to television that featured a near-total extinction event of all Y-chromosome-bearing organisms. So what's the connection? The semiotic link lies in the way each series answers, in a different way, the question that, as Kathryn VanArendonk puts it in her essay "TV's White Guys Are in Crisis," "preoccupied" television all last summer: viz., "What should happen to men?". Not all men, mind you, but, rather, all the "white guys who used to be default protagonists on TV and in American life, all of the beleaguered dads, bad bosses, authoritative leaders, and wild-card mavericks, [who] are no longer the main characters." And Succession, The White Lotus, and Y: The Last Man offer three examples of just how the television industry has responded to this question. Coming first to TV, Succession's response relies on an old, tried-and-true Hollywood tradition of playing upon the fundamental ambivalence on the part of America's middle class towards wealth and privilege. At once fascinated by the rich (and hoping to join them one day), middle-class viewers have always been attracted to entertainments that cater to their desire to see how the really wealthy live (Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous), while being reassured of their moral superiority to upper-class shenanigans.  This explains the huge success of the Dallas franchise and all its imitators, and it continues to be effective right up to the present. Thus, what Succession does is to play the class card by presenting upper-class white male characters who are at once the series protagonists and its antagonists: still the center of attention (though, of course, there are upper-class women in the mix as well), but morally inferior to their largely middle-class audience. The White Lotus, for its part, borrows from the more recent (but very well established) television tradition of the "dysfunctional" family sit-com, whereby the fathers who once knew best became the Al Bundys and Homer Simpsons that would change the face of TV comedy. Accordingly, the (white) fathers of The White Lotus (the double entendre of the show's title is inescapable) are, as VanArendonk puts it, "ridiculous," with the emphasis being on their whiteness. Race, then, as well as class, shapes the show's answer to the dilemma of how to portray white guys in an era of woke TV. Finally, Y: The Last Man offers the most complicated response to VanArendonk's posited question, this time focusing on gender rather than race or class by inviting its viewers to imagine a world without men, a world where women are in complete charge because there is only one man left on earth (along with his Y-equipped monkey). What makes it complicated is that the situation is not presented as some sort of post-masculine utopia; rather, the characters recognize that without men the human species faces biological extinction, which turns the whole story line into a desperate quest to keep "the last man" alive until some sort of reproductive solution can be found. For her part, VanArendonk proposes an alternative solution to the problem of the white male protagonist. As she puts it, TV "could just forget the Main Guy altogether, at least for a while (and it’s worth noting that most recent shows led by creators of color do not frame white masculinity as the fundamental obstacle for their characters) .  .  .  It would be so much more pleasant to erase his history, to eliminate his assumed protagonicity and make him like everyone else, a guy whose moment comes and goes, a team player." Or, to offer yet another alternative, maybe television scriptwriters could work on creating fully-rounded characters rather than caricatures.   Image Credit: "stress" by bottled_void is licensed under CC BY 2.0   ... View more

In the midst of a wave of the COVID Delta variant, I took a fall and ended up in the emergency room of a hospital, where I spent the night waiting for a bed in what turned out to be a closet in the outpatient wing: there was not a single bed available elsewhere. In spite of being overwhelmed with patients, the staff were kind, caring, and attentive, managing x-rays and CT scans and other test with patience and skill and transferring me within three days to a skilled nursing facility nearby. Once settled in the new place, I had a chance to look at the written records that accompanied me, and to remark on the thoroughness and accuracy of the reports, including descriptions of the fractures and notes about my allergies to pain medication: some fine pieces of writing, I thought! I spent the next three weeks in a rehab center, and being the rhetorician that I am, I paid close attention to all the communicating I saw going on around me, both spoken and written. And in this time of almost unbelievable division and hostility in our country, of the avalanche of misinformation descending on us on social media, and of the increasingly bitter attacks and counterattacks regarding the recall of our governor here in California—I learned lessons in kindness, dignity, grace, and forbearance. I’ll share just two of these lessons here. The building I was in was a big rectangle, and once I was in a wheelchair, I could wheel from hall to hall, where I watched staff at work. Other patients did the same, including one woman with advanced dementia, whose soft smile and voice greeted me often. She would wheel slowly by, often talking about things that seemed to deal with numbers, or economics, and addressed, it seemed, primarily to herself. I later learned that she had been a long-time math teacher. She was hardly ever in her room, preferring to roam about the facility—and she had a penchant for going into any door that was open or that she could open: one night I woke to find she had wheeled into my room and was sitting inside the door, singing to herself. So the staff could have trouble keeping track of this patient, and when they located her she would often resist going back to her room. As I watched this pattern repeat, I was impressed (and more than a little humbled) by the staff members’ ability to talk with her quietly, kindly, and always respectfully, suggesting that she might want to share a cup of hot chocolate, to listen to music, or to roll around with one of the assistants as a companion—and eventually, ever so gently accompany her to her room and, at night, help her with washing and undressing and getting into bed. The way the staff spoke—as well as what they said—impressed me deeply: it was a kind of communication, a lot of it nonverbal, that I think characterizes the best teaching, and it has a persuasive power all its own. As I came to know the place better, I realized that some staff were more highly skilled at this kind of communication than others, but oh how I wished that all of us teachers could have a chance to learn from them and to pass on some of their expertise to our students. And then there was a nurses’ assistant that I will refer to as Maria. I met her my first night there, as she was cajoling a patient into eating just a bit more of her dinner, but I didn’t get to talk with her until a few days later, when she came into my room as she said “early, ahead of her schedule, to ask a question.” She had seen two books by my bed—The Everyday Writer, which I’m working on revising, and a book of poems by Rita Dove—and she wanted to ask about writing, specifically about her writing. As her story unfolded, I learned that she had come to this country with her mother and siblings to join her father, then working in the fields, when she was a child. In those days they had all managed to come legally, and they settled in to working in four areas of California, in order of crop rotation. Maria did not go to school until she was 14, and then she found herself in a public classroom, with little English and a lot of anxiety. But she also had a lot of curiosity, which her English teacher noticed. One day, the teacher asked her to stay behind at the end of class and offered a deal: if Maria would work hard, the teacher would stay after school 2 to 3 hours a day to teach her English. Maria did work hard—very, very hard. One day, her teacher said she wanted to take Maria somewhere on the weekend but Maria demurred, saying she didn’t think her father would allow it. He agreed, however, and Maria found herself at a high school graduation, something she had never heard of and could scarcely imagine. She set her sights on such a graduation, and with the ongoing support of her teacher, she graduated with fine grades and got a good job. Eventually, she completed the college work necessary to become a certified nurse’s assistant. But all the while, she told me, she was “telling stories,” writing them in both Spanish and English, and dreaming of doing more. How many Marias have you known in your career? How many times have you met someone who had a teacher like Maria’s? How many times have you been that teacher? Maria’s story has once again taught me that the work we do matters. That writing matters. That language shapes our lives even as we shape it, and that it connects us to one another. I gave Maria The Everyday Writer and another book I had with me, Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera, and I’ve sent a few more books since I got home. She has written that she hopes to visit soon, and that she will bring some of her stories with her. And that she continues to write, every single day. In the wake of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I have felt . . . discouraged. But even on a dark day filled with dark memories and darker grief, I remember the lessons I have learned from Maria, from the remarkable staff of the rehab center, and from so many students: the work we do has meaning, far beyond what we may ever know. Image Credit: "Posters of Muscular and skeletal systems anatomy chart in hospital" by shixart1985, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

For those of us who were new to online teaching when the pandemic began, the learning curve was steep. I am grateful to the Bedford Bits community for the insights and straight-up “how-tos” that helped so many of us navigate disembodied teaching.  Now, many of us are back in the classroom, remembering how good it can feel to teach and learn with our whole unmuted bodies. We worry about keeping this good feeling going if Delta, Lambda, or Mu drive us back online. My university has a mask mandate, so I have been luckier than many of my colleagues about safety in the classroom. While I’ve heard some grumbles, my first-semester students seem positively giddy to be back in person, and masks seem a small price to pay. I’ve been overwhelmed by the kindness students are showing one another, despite the polarizing behavior that keeps making the news. Students remind me, constantly, why classrooms can be a space of optimism and compassion. Eric D. Brown describes this well in his recent post about empathy and collaboration in the writing classroom.  ​​ I’ve realized it’s the extraverbal murmur of the classroom that I’d missed in Zoom’s “mute-yourself” environment. For example, on the first day of discussing a challenging excerpt of Mary Wollstonecraft’s 18th century writing on education and gender equity, the first student who shot up a hand to respond to “What did you think?” said, with operatic drama, “Two words: ‘Yas, Queen!’” After a beat, the room exploded in laughter and nods, and I energetically scrawled the comment in huge letters on the chalkboard, dust flying, while other students shouted out in agreement: “Oh, yeah -- Per. I. Od! You know?” “YES! Mic drop!” What joy to feel again that noisy buzz, the snap of electricity through the room, the gasps and hum of embodied learning. I’d love to hear how others are making the most of being back in in the classroom, even as we navigate masking, COVID testing, and classrooms that are often poorly ventilated and too crowded. Every day we can stay in person feels precious, and I’m embracing the unique tools of the physical environment. I invite students up to write on the board, empowering them to call on their peers and steer the conversation, watching them enjoy the power of holding the chalk and the figurative mic. I sent them on a scavenger hunt for academic resources around our campus, which is why I’m alone in the photo above. I guarded their backpacks while they took goofy group selfies with a librarian, visited the Writing Center, and located the Counseling Center, taking note of their services. When they returned to our classroom, gasping with the effort of running around campus, one group showed off by proving they knew everyone’s first, middle, and last names, and other funny personal details, cracking each other up with a friendly rapport denied them over the past year and a half. Despite all our social skills having atrophied over the last year, we are remembering the feelings of belonging and comfort that can come from talking with people we don’t yet know, as Joe Keohane describes in this recent article in The Atlantic.  What are you trying in your classrooms -- in person or online -- to help students stay motivated and connected to one another during the marathon of this pandemic?   Image Credit: Photograph of the author in her classroom, taken by the author.     ... View more

Greetings to teachers of writing everywhere. I am back from a summer hiatus and looking forward—albeit with a cautious lump in my throat—to a new school year. Stanford faculty, staff, and students will be back in person, with some substantial exceptions, but vaccinated and masked. The university has all kinds of contingency and backup plans, and I will not be surprised if they have to use them. So we begin another year of unknowns! I’d so love to hear from you about what your teaching is like throughout this fall semester and about how you and your students are doing. I’m wishing you all a safe, rewarding year of teaching! Image Credit: "Counting down the days" by hjl, used under a CC BY-NC 2.0 license ... View more

Emerging's fifth edition is here, and it contains some great new readings to help you encourage students to grow as citizen-actors in the world, who will deal with - and maybe even solve - many of the issues facing the world today. See this video blog about a reading that challenges our conception of the human vs. natural world divide, questioning our notions of human uniqueness and notions of the political sphere.  ... View more

Hyoung Min LeeHyoung Min Lee (recommended by Dr. Claire Carly-Miles), Bedford New Scholar 2021, is pursuing her PhD in English at Texas A&M University. She teaches Writing About Literature as a graduate teaching assistant. She has also taught Rhetoric and Composition and worked as a grader for Technical and Business Writing. She is interested in teaching 20th- and 21st-century American literature with a focus on diversity and social justice. Her research interests include theories of race and biopolitics and 20th- and 21st-century American literature, especially African American literature.   How do you engage students in your course, whether face-to-face, online, or hybrid? A method that has worked especially well for me since the global pandemic changed the way classes are conducted is to assign students discussion posts as well as response posts to their peers’ discussion posts prior to each class meeting. I make sure to directly reflect students’ discussion posts when I design my class materials. What I find to be an effective approach I take here is to cite students’ discussion posts in my course materials and give recognition to students by putting students’ names before introducing their questions. I would often highlight especially helpful parts within a discussion post and ask the student whose post I cited to elaborate further on their discussion question or begin to respond to their own question for the class. I found this to be an effective way to increase participation without the recourse to random cold calling, which can make some students feel uncomfortable, especially in online settings. I can confidently say that this method worked well for including even the less vocal students to become important contributors to class discussion.  What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students? I try to equip students with revision skills and the habit to keep revisiting one’s own writing. I try to provide students ways to approach writing as a (collaborative) process rather than a product to be quickly written and be done with. As a teacher who has acquired English language skills as a second language, I understand what it means to approach writing as a process; I continue to strive to be a better writer of English prose by revising, editing, and asking for my peers’ suggestions and advice because I cannot take my written communication skills (in English) for granted. To show that writing is a process for anyone who tries to write well, I ask students to write rough drafts for major assignments and provide them with a chance to revise their paper after receiving comments from me, their peers, and themselves. I aim to provide students an understanding that patience, resilience, and collaboration are significant for writing well. My goal is to see students’ increased awareness of their writing and decreased fear of writing by embracing writing as a process.  What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? Having majored in literature, it has been a new and challenging experience for me to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program with many scholars whose expertise firmly lies in rhetoric and composition. Although there were moments I was worried about my lack of expertise in the field of rhetoric and composition, my experiences of having taught first year composition and writing about literature courses have allowed me to join in the rich conversations that took place in the program. Among many things, this program surely deepened my interest in anti-racist pedagogy. For instance, Dr. Uzzie Cannon’s lecture offered during the Summit week was an amazing opportunity to learn more about DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in teaching composition as well as other Scholars’ insights into social justice pedagogy. These opportunities to learn also greatly benefited me when I received an offer to review a textbook from a DEI perspective as a Bedford New Scholar. I learned so much by being a part of this wonderful program. It has been an honor for me to be a part of it. What have you learned from other Bedford New Scholars? I have learned so many valuable lessons from other Bedford New Scholars, especially during the Summit week. Having the chance to learn about other Scholars’ “assignments that work” was an amazing opportunity to grow as a scholar and teacher. I was especially impressed by the ways these creative assignments incorporated multimodality by, for instance, making students approach writing not just through traditional writing on a paper but through creating video and audio responses. As someone who is not tech-savvy but wants to move out of her comfort zone to become a better teacher, many helpful suggestions other Bedford Scholars provided for me on incorporating multimodality more in my classroom gave me confidence that I could improve my own assignment and make it more interesting. I also learned so many helpful assignment building ideas with a focus on DEI and ways to make writing fun through incorporating gaming and photography in a composition classroom.   Hyoung Min Lee’s Assignment that Works During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Hyoung Min’s assignment. For the full activity, see Creative Literature Response. I have designed a small writing assignment, a creative literary response assignment, to increase diversity and help students engage with literary texts more freely (without suppressing too much of their creative writing voice) before they submit more formally structured essays in my course on writing about literature. While assigning a creative response is a common method that many teachers have used to increase student engagement with a text, I have designed this assignment to function as a bridge between students’ creative interpretation of a text and formal analysis of the text. In preparing four prompts for the assignment, I tried to encourage diverse ways of student engagement with the texts. For instance, students who feel comfortable writing a response structured closely to a conventional literary analysis essay can choose to respond to a prompt that asks them to write from the reader’s perspective about interesting literary aspects while other students who want to approach the assignment more as a creative writing task can choose the prompts that ask them to imagine themselves as a character and write from the character’s perspective. From my teaching experience, after asking students to read each other’s posts and comment on them via Google Docs, students expressed how the practice of reading their peers’ creative literature responses offered them “new perspectives” on the texts we read in class.  ... View more

Eric D. BrownEric D. Brown (recommended by Kyle Jensen), Bedford New Scholar 2021, is pursuing his PhD in Arizona State University’s Writing, Rhetorics and Literacies PhD program, where he studies writing technologies, writing pedagogy, and writing program administration. He has taught First-Year Composition, Persuasive Writing and Public Issues, Writing for the Professions, and Business Writing. Eric is also Assistant Director (AD) of Writing Programs, where he aids the director in growing the scope of Writing Programs and creating professional development for faculty. As Assistant Director, he also co-runs the National Day on Writing, ASU’s annual Composition Conference, and is an editor of Writing Programs’ bi-annual newsletter, Writing Notes.   How do you engage students in your course? I’ve found that one of the best ways to engage students in my courses is to show them that the writing process doesn’t have to be a lonely endeavor and that writing is hard, even for those of us who are “good” at it. I enact this approach by positioning myself as an expert on writing (what it is and how it works) but one that fails and stumbles through the writing process, just like they do. And I’ve found that students are particularly engaged with this idea when I write “live” for/with them. For example, I’ll write an email or an assignment sheet with them, talking through my thinking/rhetorical strategies and asking for advice and ideas from them. Regardless of what writing task I take on for/with them, they see me struggle to get started, stumble with wording, sidestep through typos/spelling mistakes, and go back and rework the text. In sum, they can see that “the struggle is real” when it comes to writing, showing students (who are often fearful of college writing) that even experts struggle with writing, that writing is collaborative, and that revision is essential to any writing situation.  What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? In sum, it’s pretty awesome. As a Bedford New Scholar, I get opportunities to work with Bedford/St. Martin’s on a variety of projects: feedback on textbooks, input about developing technologies, and opinions on readings for students, to name a few. It’s really great to not only get some insight into the higher ed publishing world but to contribute to that world. Meeting and interacting with the other Bedford New Scholars is also a notable highlight of the program. The virtual summit this summer gave me the chance to not only meet and interact with other new scholars, but I was able to work on projects with them and talk about what is most important to me with them: teaching. Sharing my work and sitting in on presentations for the Assignments that Work part of the summer summit was generative, as well as fun. I got a ton of great ideas for assignments to try out, and I was able to see my fellow New Scholars’ unique approaches to teaching and writing. What do you think instructors don’t know about higher ed publishing but should? I don’t think instructors know how willing and excited publishers like Bedford/St. Martin’s are to work with them, and I think this “not knowing” can lead to a view of higher ed publishing as “The Man.” While this was certainly a perception I  held in my early days as a graduate student (and before that as an adjunct), I have become persuaded otherwise. I have found higher ed publishers like Bedford/St.Martin’s to be highly invested in instructor input, experience, and in the workings/makeup of the writing programs instructors teach in. Before working with Bedford/St. Martin’s, I would not have imagined that my ideas, feedback, and support would be important to higher ed publishers, but I’ve found the opposite to be true. Furthermore, I have found that higher ed publishers like Bedford/St. Martin’s are more often than not pedagogically focused--they want to know what research is influencing our teaching, what we are doing in the classroom, why we are doing things the way we are, and how they can support that work.  What projects or course materials from Bedford/St. Martin's most pique your interest, and why? My writing program just shifted to using a common textbook (which we created with Bedford/St. Martin’s), and Achieve is offered with the textbook. I’m excited to learn more about Achieve and use it with my students. I was able to use some of Achieve’s peer review functions this summer during the virtual summit, and I really liked many of its affordances. My institution’s current LMS has a very clunky peer review system, and I’m particularly looking forward to switching to one that allows me to shape and tweak peer review goals and that has an interface I think will be intuitive for my students. I also know that Achieve has some annotation functions, and I’m excited to use them with my students, as well.   Eric's Assignment that Works During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Eric’s assignment. For the full activity, see Remediation. One of the goals of my 101 courses is to expand for students what writing is and how it works. My “Remediation” assignment works toward this goal, as it asks students to reshape their writing for new audiences and to funnel their ideas through a new medium or genre. In sum, students are asked to take an already completed written project (usually the first major project, which asks them to explore a literacy) and funnel its ideas through another medium/“translate” it into another genre. For example, students might take their project and (re)shape it into a podcast or blog post. Remediation gets students thinking about the ever-shifting relationship among writer, audience, and text (i.e., the rhetorical situation), but also asks them to focus on how the mediums/genres in which we communicate our ideas to others consist of different kinds of media that very much are “writing.” Students are excited to expand their notions of what “counts” as writing, and one of the assignment’s selling points is in how it asks students to not only consider how certain mediums/genres appeal to certain audiences, and not others, but to consider how their writing does so as well. ... View more

Michael A. ReyesMichael A. Reyes (recommended by Danielle Dyckhoff), Bedford New Scholar 2021, earned his MA in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition at Cal State LA. He teaches in the First-Year Writing program at Cal State LA and Cal Lutheran, and leads creative writing workshops in LA public schools and organizations. His research interests are in critical affect theory, decolonial rhetorics and pedagogy, contemporary poetry and poetics, and anti-racist and formative assessments.   Is there an instructor or scholar that helped shape your career in rhet/comp? How? On the first day of class, I review a document titled “Mr. Reyes’s Metaphors, Myths, and Muses,” which is a bullet point summary of what has shaped me and my teaching. I save the syllabus for later in the week, and instead introduce the class and myself in such a way.  Students quickly notice that I draw from non-academic sources: the art of ordering at an In-N-Out drive-thru, Tik Tok trends, Bruce Lee, the art of spilling the “tea,” basketball, Simone Biles, Jerry Seinfeld, poetry, and so forth. I make the argument that we can benefit from pluriversal knowledge production. However, I first arrived at this through my foundations in decolonial studies and critical affect studies: Walter D. Mignolo and Sara Ahmed. I’ve learned a lot from their scholarship. To see lessons in reading and writing in our most intimate and natural lives is more fascinating and long-lasting to me. So, I detached a bit from scholars as the only knowledge-holders. I invite students to hopefully find, feel, and think against hierarchies and essentialisms.   What is your greatest teaching challenge? My challenges in teaching are what I value most. I’m in this profession because each semester I love to recalibrate everything I know to be true and working in my classes. I think this serves me and my students. I don’t want to be static, ever. This is my biggest challenge right now during this moment of chaos: to sustain a strategy of mindfulness and intrinsic motivation. I like myself best when I’m in this mindset. In other words, to live by what the poet Maya Angelou says, “Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”    What is it like to co-design or work with the editorial team at Bedford/St. Martin's? Being part of the Bedford New Scholars Program, I’ve had the opportunity so far to review two critical reading and writing textbooks, and have a say in the direction of subsequent editions. Both were different processes, and I loved my role in each one. I was given an e-book and a survey. I was asked to note areas that could align more closely with diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as areas that are most useful for my classes. Aside from reviewing, I loved that I was introduced to texts and praxis that I wouldn’t have considered if I weren’t in the program.   What projects or course materials from Bedford/St. Martin's most pique your interest, and why? Achieve’s peer-feedback platform is fascinating to me. I was introduced to it during the Bedford New Scholars summer institute, and it answered some questions I’ve always had about peer-feedback. How can I visually represent the writing and revision process workflow? What peer-review platforms exist for the visual learner?  The peer-feedback platform provides a real useful diagram that students work through. Along each checkpoint, students accomplish tasks that work towards completing the entire diagram. Students can visualize their growth and goals. I struggle with making peer-review dynamic and organized. This platform is on to something.     Michael's Assignment that Works: During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Michael’s assignment. For the full activity, see Photo Essay. As I developed my version of the Photo Essay, I had the following goals: To segue into traditional academic discourse. To use students’ more natural media reading experiences and visual rhetoric expertise. To use the image/non-discursive to represent abstract concepts in traditional academic discourse. To make the rhetoric of style a more prominent feature in the writing process. With this in mind, I asked students to compose an essay that contained only photos. Students shot and arranged a minimum of 10 photos, using the photojournalism techniques of Rule of Thirds, Leading Lines, Symmetry and Pattern, POV, Depth, and Framing. Each photo needed to represent a specific part of a college essay (i.e., introduction paragraph; thesis statement; body paragraph topic sentence, context, quote, analysis, transition; or conclusion paragraph). The order of the photos was up to the student. Some considered that their argument was better served with a linear, delayed thesis statement structure to build suspense, and some with a more nonlinear structure that clarified the thesis statement in the first few photos to build deep reflective thought. I would ask students to later provide a rationale for their respective argumentative structure during a follow-up assignment.   ... View more

This post is part of the Campfire Session series from Corequisite Composition Summer Camp 2021. You can find all recorded sessions and resources from Camp here. By Tracie Grimes, M.A. Professor of English, Bakersfield College As educators, we go miles out of the way to feed the need for help when students struggle to find their academic writing voices. However, many times the words we so carefully craft, words that we just know will add college/university-level skills to their writing toolbelts, seem to fall on deaf ears.  It is a delicate dance finding that “sweet spot” of constructive criticism; one that gives them the suggestions/corrections they will see as helpful and want to use rather than critiques that send them cringing into the corner of our classrooms.  In today’s arena of teaching spaces filled with underprepared composition students, it is difficult to give students usable, non-threatening feedback that provides them with a clear idea of what they need to do and how they can do it to be successful. Susan M. Brookhart, in her book How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students, tells us a good start is one that takes into consideration the following: The topic in general and your learning target of targets in particular Typical developmental learning progressions for those topics or targets Your individual students (12)  “Try to see things from the student’s-eye view…Which aspects of the learning target would the student benefit from improving next?” (Brookhart 12). Putting ourselves in the shoes of our students not only helps us empathize with someone who is on the receiving end of constructive criticism, it helps us understand more about the importance of the relationship between feedback and how it is used by students (Pitt and Norton 499).  Studies from 2010 conducted by Richard Bailey, Mark Garner, and D. R. Sadler tell us what most of us already know: Students are not using our feedback. “Part of the difficulty arises from changes in thinking … about what the exact purpose of feedback is, how students engage with feedback and how they use it to improve their future assessed work” (Pitt and Norton 499). Given the fact that we are spending so much time giving feedback largely ignored by students, finding ways to connect our commentary to learning goals becomes an important consideration; it  gives students concrete rationale for why they are being asked to complete the assignments. When students see the connection between a task and a learning goal, a “shared understanding between teachers and learners” is established, which can motivate students to take their learning to the next level (Bailey and Garner 188). For example, a dialogue journal in which students and professors create short entries on a Google Doc in which student entries focus on something specified in an SLO, such as integrating evidence from a credible source into a paragraph, and citing the source using MLA style. Every week, the professor then responds to what students write, providing comments on what the student is doing correctly, and what the student could do to make his/her writing stronger. This type of formative assessment provides student-centered feedback using a constructivist paradigm of teaching and learning (Brown and Glover), and, when returned to students within a timeframe that allows them to make corrections before the final draft is due, can be seen as more useful by the students. Getting students to actually use our feedback is another challenge. Their choice to use feedback depends largely upon their reaction to what we say, and that reaction appears to involve a number of contributory factors. First and foremost is their understanding of the feedback they receive. Many times, students report that they do not understand the feedback given, which is why they do not use the comments to make revisions. For example, when a student sees a comment such as “awkward phrasing,” he/she may not completely understand what is meant by “awkward,” or how to correct it. A clear comment, such as “The writing here is a bit awkward and difficult to read because the phrase ‘for example’ is repeated several times. Try rearranging your sentence to get rid of the repeated phrase or keep the sentence the same and try plugging in different words in its place. If you’re at a loss, do a quick search for ‘other words, for example’.” This explicitly states what the problem was, why it was a problem, and what steps could be taken to improve. Another example comes from a writing tutor, “Right now, your thesis can be improved by addressing the prompt directly with the same keywords. It is tough to see that you are answering what it is asking. A strong thesis would likely mention some ways that cyberbullying affects bystanders to act positively and negatively. Yours mentions some positive reactions, but it does not clearly mention negative bystander reactions, only that it does not occur in social media.” Critiques about something as personal as writing can be hard pills to swallow, but administering the dose is no walk in the park either. Researchers are seeing more and more comments such as, “They may read it and not understand it. The challenge for us is trying to make it as easy as possible to understand. People outside education don’t use words the way we do” -Nursing (Bailey and Garner 193), or “Some [students] are motivated and conscientious and make changes. Others don’t really care and are satisfied with less” -Social Sciences (192). The stakes are high as we search for ways to engage our students with accessible, usable feedback. However, by offering clear direction about what our students need to do and how they need to do it in the form of information that “takes them … to the next level” (Brookhart 12), we may also find that our words become the catalyst for change in the way students respond to feedback. Works Cited Bailey, Richard, and Mark Garner. “Is the Feedback in Higher Education Assessment Worth the Paper It Is Written on? Teachers’ Reflections on Their Practices.” Teaching in Higher Education, vol. 15, no. 2, Apr. 2010, pp. 187–198. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/13562511003620019. Brookhart, Susan M. How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students. Assoc. for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2008. Brown, E., and C. Glover. “Evaluating written feedback on students’ assignments.” Innovative assessment in higher education, ed. C. Bryan and K. Clegg, Taylor, and Francis, 2005. Reinholz, Daniel L., and Dimitri R. Dounas-Frazer. Personalized Instructor Responses to Guided Student Reflections: Analysis of Two Instructors’ Perspectives and Practices. 2017, doi:10.1119/1.5002683. Sadler, D. Royce. “Beyond Feedback: Developing Student Capability in Complex Appraisal.” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, vol. 35, no. 5, Aug. 2010, pp. 535–550. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/02602930903541015. ... View more

This post is part of the Campfire Session series from Corequisite Composition Summer Camp 2021. You can find all recorded sessions and resources from Camp here. How Story Forms the Foundation for Teaching Composition and How Visual Images Can Shape Our Students as Writers By Linda Maria Steele, Dean College I remember my very first teaching gig straight out of graduate school at University of Texas, Dallas. I received a fellowship and worked as a Teaching Assistant, which led to my teaching job at Richland College in Dallas. I was hired as an adjunct the semester after I received my Master’s degree from UT. I was offered three sections of Composition. I was full of hope, energy, and enthusiasm. But early on, I wasn’t always clear on how to get students to actually apply the tools I was teaching them and help them become better writers. Developing effective skills as a writer is such a personal task and one tool doesn’t work the same way for each student. Tools are great, but they have to be explored and practiced in practical terms if they are going to be useful and help students grow as writers. It has been close to 20 years since that first teaching gig. Looking back after all of those semesters teaching Composition, I now have a deeper understanding of how important story is as the foundation for our students as writers. Students who grasp how to effectively incorporate story in their essays have a much easier time later on when the types of papers they write become more layered and complex. Story teaches them how to connect with their ideas and what they value, connect with their readers, and gain an understanding of how to structure an essay. I have also come to appreciate the benefits of incorporating visual images into our courses and how both story and visual images can further shape our students as writers. For years, I’ve asked students to read essays with a strong focus on story with a message, introduced them to the dramatic arc, and told them how important it is to write their story with a strong beginning, middle, and end. It wasn’t until I met with a student about a first draft that the need to apply these tools really hit home. The student—I will call her Jessica—chose to write about a dramatic event that had a large impact on her life. She wrote about how the previous year, her house caught fire and burned to the ground. An event with the potential for a compelling story with a point. As dramatic of an event as this was, Jessica was not quite understanding how to tell or write the story in a dramatic way. Jessica’s first draft left out important details and had no clear organization. The essay was difficult to follow. When I gave her feedback and asked her to tell me the story in her own words, she mentioned that she ran back in the house at the very last minute to try to rescue her beloved pet guinea pig named George. I pointed out that one of the problems I saw in her draft was that she didn’t create any tension in the story. And that it seemed to me the guinea pig was an important and interesting detail to include. I reminded her of the dramatic arc we talked about in class and how it is the tension that makes story so interesting and allows us as readers to find meaning—elements that make for a good story. I suggested that she might want to try to highlight, for dramatic effect, whether or not her beloved pet, George, made it out alive. And how that detail was something that would spark interest and curiosity in her reader. I also suggested that she look for any visual images she had of her pet or the house she lost. I suggested by focusing on the images, she might get clearer on what she really wanted to communicate on the topic as she rewrote her draft. The tools we share with our students are valuable. But we also have to seek new ways to get them to understand how to use and apply them in their writing. A tool is only effective to the degree that we find practical ways to put them in practice. When it comes to teaching composition, the task for our students is less about memorizing new material and more about practicing and engaging with themselves as thinkers and writers. Jessica’s final draft was really well written. The final draft began with an introductory paragraph that hinted at the possible loss of her beloved pet. We didn’t learn until the last line that her guinea pig did, in fact, get out in time. The guinea pig served as the tension the story needed. Not only did she write an interesting essay with a strong story arc—she witnessed for herself just how important using the tool of story is to her progress as a writer. Through her willingness to revise, she found a way to tell the story in a way that was interesting and made a meaningful impact. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the way story forms the foundation for developing as writers and how visual images can shape and support our writing skills. ... View more

This post is part of the Campfire Session series from Corequisite Composition Summer Camp 2021. You can find all recorded sessions and resources from Camp here. By Christina Di Gangi, Dawson Community College The Problem: Bridging the Gap between Informative and Analytic Writing In teaching terms, I am a career literature generalist with almost sole responsibility for my college's co-requisite writing model. From my vantage point, I understand that my students struggle to bridge the gap between informative and analytic writing. Close reading is ‘back’ in part due to the CCSS (Common Core State Standards)—but while students may know how to find extensive information on a given topic, they do not always start college fully equipped to write a more analytic research paper using peer-reviewed research writing. This gap becomes especially pressing if the research paper is taught in the first-semester writing class, with students going on to write papers in their major immediately thereafter. My job is to get students up to speed. For this reason among others, reading research articles is a major focus in our co-requisite model writing labs. One Potential Solution: Inquiry Charts or I-Charts (Hoffman, 1992)  In completing ancillary graduate coursework on reading to facilitate my teaching of our co-requisite-model courses, I learned about James V. Hoffman’s 1992 Language Arts article, “Critical reading/thinking across the curriculum: Using I-charts to support learning.” Inquiry charts, or I-Charts, are graphic or cognitive organizers that K-12 students can use to map information from prior knowledge—“activating prior knowledge”—along with their reading from informative sources: This lets students build connections in ways that simply restating information from pre-selected readings does not. Hoffman proposes a model where students work together in class before moving to individual practice, but the graphic organizer concept is flexible and adaptable. Before and during reading, students have space to enter information they already know about a topic, and then space to combine this prior knowledge with additional detail and meaning from other sources that they read. The I-Chart struck me as a flexible tool. Since my first-year writing students face the challenging task of improving their facility with peer-reviewed research articles while at the same time learning how to put together a college-level research paper, I wanted to design a cognitive organizer for them that would help them both to read the research articles that they had selected and then to place those articles in level-appropriate research papers of their own.  I note that instructors can prepare students to use a cognitive organizer like the I-Chart within the natural flow of class, as they teach students to search, organize, analyze, and write about research topics. Within our co-requisite model, I find that students benefit from preparatory instruction both on isolating the content of research articles and on writing about individual research articles before moving to a longer paper. Two preparatory techniques that I would highlight are quizzes and short reviews: For quizzes, I have students practice isolating the methods and findings of abstracts, then of whole short research articles. I pick level-appropriate articles and have them annotate their copies as well as practice writing analytic clusters and paragraphs using page numbers and quotations from the articles.  Writing short reviews of single research articles helps students improve in that genre but also prepares them to write a summative research paper in my class, basically a review of research. Using the I-Chart to Plan and Draft Beginning College Research Papers Preparatory work on isolating the features and key points of peer-reviewed research articles prepares students to complete an I-Chart or similar cognitive organizer, which they can then use to structure and complete shorter and longer research assignments. Students can practice using multiple articles to complete an I-Chart in groups before moving to individual practice; they can then apply the technique to the topic of their own paper, whether that topic be pre-assigned or self-selected. Once the table has been completed, students have a visual that should suggest to most how writing about their chosen articles can be organized in a longer framework such as a research paper. In my first-semester writing class, students are specifically asked to organize their final research papers as a survey of current research using six or more research articles. Again, this is a very flexible technique. I have students write a three-source midterm, more of a ‘sandbox’ for the final paper than a full-length research paper, and then write a final paper using six or more peer-reviewed sources—but the I-Chart can easily be adapted to the needs of your particular class. For example, students could use the I-Chart to organize thoughts about a set of theme-based readings before they get into research writing; if they were more advanced, they could write about six articles for a draft around midterm and expand the number of sources for their final project. Some students may even want to change the organizing categories to suit their thought process a little better, which has certainly worked for students of mine in the past. As I emphasize to students, the goal is to track their personal analysis of the peer-reviewed research sources that they are using, then to place them in the context of their future thinking and writing—rather than to have a beautifully completed chart. An added bonus is that students can learn to detach their analytic process from trying to produce beautiful writing—they can focus on organizing and showing their thought process before they turn to redraft and polish their work.  Given all of these benefits, it is my hope that this use of a graphic organizer to facilitate analytic reading and writing for beginning college students is an honest use of a technique from the teaching of reading, a field from which—in terms of my own teaching, certainly—I still feel that I have much to learn. ... View more

In my last post I wrote about my deepening sense of grading as a social justice issue, inspired by an early summer faculty book group discussing Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), a collection edited by linguistic anthropologist Susan D. Blum. I’m persuaded that the uneasiness so many of us feel about grading is justified. As law professor Anna Lund puts it: “What's ungrading, you ask? It means moving away from ranking students.” Building on a body of research demonstrating that grades curb student learning, “ungrading” approaches instead focus on student metacognition and guided self-assessment.   Our book group on Ungrading included instructors from humanities, social sciences, and science and health sciences backgrounds, all thinking through how “ungrading" might work in our disciplines. We speculated what this shift could mean for students in their first college semester all the way through their graduate courses. If you hatch these conversations with colleagues, you might hear some resistance. After all, there is utility, of a kind, in the sorting and ranking we have been taught to reproduce. However, Blum and the writers in this volume offer persuasive evidence that could counter any of the “buts” you might hear, including ways to incorporate ungrading principles in STEM and general education classes, as well as multi-section and larger classes. (See her final chapter titled “Not Simple but Essential” for some inspiration.)   Here are some ungrading-inspired strategies I have been using, which I plan to develop into broader approaches for my fall courses. I hope to learn from you, too, what you are trying in the spirit of this pedagogical movement.   Ungrading and class participation I plan to continue to give my students (from first semester undergrads to grad students) control over their participation scores, devoting time in our early class meetings for them to develop together what it will mean to show up, to prepare carefully, to take risks and try new skills, and to articulate their own goals for growth. Frequent check-ins throughout the semester help students foster the metacognition about learning that is a central tenet of ungrading. I offer time during a penultimate class day for students to write up these self-assessments. They are often quite moving to read. Rationale: As a feminist, I encourage students to assess and value their growth and abilities, a self-advocating skill that is particularly important for marginalized people in every field of work.   Ungrading and cover letters for drafts, polished drafts, and end-of-semester reflections on writing I have written about cover letters in another post, but here’s the brief and adaptable assignment, intended to be completed on due dates during class time, so that it doesn't become one more assignment. Write a reflective 1-page(ish) cover letter to me about:      * Your research and drafting process. What are you continuing from your last assignment, and what are you trying that is new? Why?     * What are you most pleased with in this draft/final draft? Be specific, and explain why.     * What are you struggling with, and what kind of feedback would help you?     * Is there anything else you'd like to comment on or ask me about?     * For the end of the semester: Consider your growth over the semester as a researcher and writer, and tell me what you're proud of, what you plan to take into other classes, and what you plan to keep working on. Rationale: Fostering metacognition about the research and writing process is essential to our ongoing growth as thinkers and writers. I use variations on this assignment for all my courses, from first-year seminars to graduate courses.   Ungrading and assignments done in groups, or which require high risks For any assignment that requires students to take especially high risks, creatively or collaboratively, I have begun offering class time for students to develop goals for the assignment at the start. Students can then use those goals as a touchstone after the assignment for reflecting on the ways they stretched themselves, surprised themselves, and what they learned about themselves and the skills they are developing. I use this for “Reacting to the Past” assignments, group projects, and attempts at new genres (most recently, collectively written feminist manifestos, inspired by Penny A. Weiss’s Feminist Manifestos: A Global Documentary Reader). Rationale: Students have appreciated the freedom to experiment and challenge themselves, knowing they will be able to assess their own growth, rather than waiting for outside judgment. I learn a lot about them, and about the effectiveness of the assignments.   Of course, this move toward ungrading is as much about us as instructors as it is about our students. In the closing pages of Ungrading, a quotation has stuck with me from Therese Huston’s Teaching What You Don’t Know: “What could our classrooms look like if we modeled learning rather than modeling already knowing?” (Ungrading 224). I’ll hold that challenge in mind as I hatch plans for my next classes. What ideas are you incubating over the summer?   Image Credit: Photograph of an egg taken by the author ... View more

At Stanford, May has always been my second favorite month of the year. First is always September, when fall term opens and we welcome a new class of students: nothing can match the excitement and anticipation I feel then. But May comes very close because that is the month we celebrate writing, with awards presented to first-year writing students, second-year writing students, and students in writing in the majors courses. Over the decades, I have been consistently elated by the depth of research, the quality of thought, and the unique voices that these awards honor. Traditionally, these awards—like similar ones all over the country—were presented at receptions on campus, with friends and family and instructors there to congratulate and celebrate the writers. But then came the pandemic, the shutdown of the entire area, and the shift online. Like teachers everywhere, the Program in Writing and Rhetoric instructors at Stanford, under the always brilliant leadership of Adam Banks, Marvin Diogenes, and Christine Alfano, worked ceaselessly to adapt to the new learning and teaching environment and to meet students—and student needs—wherever they were. And like students everywhere, our students worked to meet the challenges of online writing seminars, learning to work together in online teams, to deal with the glitches and intricacies of Zoom and other virtual meeting spaces, and to try to stay connected, to build and maintain a virtual classroom ethos. It hasn’t always been pretty: I’ve talked with teachers across the country who were exhausted, frustrated, and stretched beyond the limit, and more than once I’ve wondered whether I shouldn’t be thankful to be retired (I taught a small online grad class in summer 2020 but nothing more). Yet here we are, over a year after the lockdown and shift, and I’m wondering how best to recognize and celebrate the student research and writing and speaking that occurred during this pandemic, online year. Thinking through this issue led our writing program to make this announcement: Since Spring 2020, all PWR 2 courses have been taught online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Typically, Lunsford award [the award for second-year writing students] honorees would present in front of a live audience and two winners would be selected. Giving and recording an oral presentation in an online environment provides both new challenges but also new possibilities and we saw a range of creative and powerful responses to oral presentation research. We've created a gallery of Spring/Summer 2020 honorees, Fall 2020 honorees, and Winter 2021 honorees, featuring the exemplary work that students produced in their fully online environments. So this year, the program decided to honor every student nominated by an instructor—and to create a gallery of the work of these students for all to enjoy. I’ve been dipping into these galleries for the past week and I have been impressed, over and over again, by both the research these students have conducted during this very strange and very trying year and their presentation of that research. So once again, May is bringing me great happiness in the form of these remarkable presentations. Please dip in too! I’ll be taking a summer break from blog postings as I anticipate a new fall term and some form of returning to campus. I will be catching up on reading, doing some writing and research, and working in my community organic garden. And I will be thinking of teachers of writing everywhere, and of our students, wishing for a healthy, productive, and restorative summer for all. Image Credit: "MacBook Minimal Setup" by MattsMacintosh, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... 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. Somehow, the end of the year—and the start of summer—is here again! This blog post asks students to evaluate their writing from the past few months, using podcasts to consider their areas of success and skills that need improvement. 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 Reflect on the Semester Pre-Class Work: Ask your students to think back over their assignments from this semester. You might ask them to consider assignments from just your course, or you may open it up to all courses from this semester. Each student should brainstorm for a few minutes, listing at least 3 writing areas or skills they feel they have used successfully, and at least 3 areas that they still feel they need to improve. 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 A: Ask each student to choose and listen to a Grammar Girl podcast that relates to one of the the items on their “needs improvement” list. If there is time, they might listen to more than one! Or, ask students to share their lists with you, allowing you to assign podcasts to the whole class based on what students had the most trouble with. (Tip: If you are using LaunchPad, direct your students to the “Menu of Grammar Girl Podcasts”; if you are using Achieve you will need to make the podcasts available using the instructions at “Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course.”) Then, ask students to list out 3 things they learned from the podcast(s) about their topic, 2 ways they will work to improve their writing in the following semesters, and 1 question they still have about their writing or about a particular skill. Reflection for Assignment A: Ask students to write 1-3 paragraphs about what writing skills they hope to learn in the future. This could be as simple as improving grammar or usage (such as use of commas) or as complex as learning a specific type of writing (such as lab reports). Assignment B: Ask students to choose one of the skills they identified as successful. Then, either assign a short Grammar Girl podcast or listen to one together in class. Any topic will work, although you might suggest a podcast focused on something you would like your students to learn more about.  Using the Grammar Girl podcast as a model, students should then draft a short podcast script outlining their best tips for success in their chosen area. If time allows, students might record a rough draft of their podcast as well. Students should aim for 1-2 minute podcasts. If you are in person, put students in small groups and have them share their podcast scripts. Or, match students together online and ask them to share digitally. Reflection for Assignment B: Ask students to list one thing they learned from each peer’s podcast script. Then, ask them to write a paragraph about the writing skill they would most like to improve, and a potential plan for improving it.   Credit: "Reflection" by Anderson Mancini is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more