I live on the coast of California about 150 miles north of San Francisco in a community called The Sea Ranch. It has quite a history, of which I was completely unaware when—after love at first sight—I bought a lot here in 2000 and eventually saved enough money to build a home. Now I am a ‘full-timer” here and over the years have come to know a lot about this place. It was the home of the Pomo people before a “settler” received a Mexican land grant in 1846 for the property. In the early sixties, an architect surveyed the ten miles of coastal land before a group purchased the property and engaged a distinguished group of young architects to design a community whose watchword was to be “living lightly on the land.” Graphic designer Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, known for her supergraphics, designed the Sea Ranch logo, which you can see below, as well as large and very striking interior paintings for several of the original buildings.  And here’s where fonts come in. As they wrote materials about The Sea Ranch, the founders settled on the very modern, very “in” Helvetica font. As I got to know more about The Sea Ranch and became friends with one of the original architects—the fabulous Donlyn Lyndon—I got curiouser and curiouser about this favored and pervasive font and learned of its rise to prominence as “the most famous” Swiss Style typeface. Launched in 1957, the neutral sans serif design was meant to be versatile and unobtrusive—to go unnoticed. But noticed it certainly was, soon becoming the go-to font for many brands, from Target to Apple’s Macintosh, from Yankee Stadium to the side of NASA’s space shuttle. Wow. Learning a little bit about this history, about the rise and fall and rise of Helvetica, of the wars between those who loved and those who loathed it, made me think of asking students what they know about fonts and why they choose them. I have them work in pairs to choose a font they admire and then see what they can find out about its history, about who created it and why, and about where and by whom it is used. Then we use their findings to launch a discussion of different font “personalities” and to write up little bios of a couple of fonts, describing them, giving them nicknames and character traits. We have some fun along the way, and students become much more conscious of the design choices they are making, often without even thinking of them. So the next time you give an assignment, ask students to pay special attention to the font they choose—and to append a memo to you at the end of the assignment explaining their choice. I always find these explanations fascinating! Image Credit: "helvetica 50" by _Nec, used under a CC BY 2.0 license (top); Photo by Andrea Lunsford ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, David Starkey (@davidstarkey), author of upcoming first edition Hello Writer, reflects on teaching in small, 2-3 minute chunks and the necessity of focusing on the most important information to communicate to students, as well as the surprising opportunities offered by the pandemic for reflection, mindfulness, and equity mindsets. ... View more

On Tuesday March 10, 2020, after six and a half weeks together, my students and I met in person for the very last time. Lockdown appeared on the horizon, but uncertainty remained. In class, we stayed on schedule. We watched the first half of Ryan Coogler ‘s 2018 film, Black Panther and planned to watch the second half in class two days later. However, by Thursday March 12, the university system had canceled classes.  We were told to prepare for the transition to online instruction. Soon afterward, our state was on lockdown and our city became the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic. Contemplating this anniversary has not been easy. After a long and difficult year, the challenges of lockdown almost seemed to fade in the distance.  At the same time, commemoration feels necessary and significant. What we have learned might be of use to others. With that hope in mind, I found several artifacts (edited for clarity) to illustrate the labor of transition.  Remnants of My Last Commute Before Quarantine 10 March 2020  (Discovered in my bag several weeks later and reassembled on a yoga mat) Objects arranged on a purple yoga mat clockwise from the top: black gel pen; public transit pass; black dry erase marker; lip balm; six colored pencils; hair tie  Photo by Susan Bernstein   Introduction to Distance Learning (from the revised syllabus) My hope is that through distance learning we can create a space of mutual aid and support.  Please check in with questions and concerns-- about class or anything else.  I will be available online on google.docs and email during all of my scheduled class times and office hours. We can arrange group and individual video conferences with at least 24-hours notice. You can use the suggested schedule, or create your own schedule based on your own needs and responsibilities at this difficult time. Please email me with your questions and concerns.   Writing Project 2: Envisioning Beloved Community (from a reconceived assignment sheet) Many of our sources this semester have addressed the question of creating a Beloved Community.. That is, another more, sustainable world. In Black Panther, for example, the question arises about how to best use Wakanda's resources: Hide in plain sight?  Share with others in deep need? Combat colonizers and other oppressors?  Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, and other activists and sources we have encountered this semester addressed similar questions. Dr. King, for example, identifies this situation as "the fierce urgency of now."  Writing Project 2 asks you to imagine a proposal for creating a Beloved Community for a specific audience and purpose. In your proposal, you can engage deeply with one of our sources. For example: How would you enact the ideas put forth by Dr. King, Malcolm X or Baldwin?  What would you say in a conversation with Okoye, Nakia, Shuri, or Raymonda or another character from Black Panther?   As you grow your ideas, consider your concerns and the concerns of your audience. What agreements or disagreements might you have? How would you envision and enact a Beloved Community for a more sustainable world?   Spoiler Alerts: Black Panther Interrupted (from my spring 2020 teaching journal) I don’t know how much we accomplished in 6 ½ weeks. We were ½way through Black Panther, and then we had to stop. I had taken more time this semester setting it up, showing cultural connections, talking more about the Black Panthers, including watching excerpts from Stanley Nelson’s film Black Panther: Vanguard of the Revolution. When class ended, the story felt suspended in air, plot lines left unfinished. N’Jadaka/Erik/Killmonger was dragging Klaue’s body out of his airplane at the border of Wakanda.  N’Jadaka had not yet beaten T’Challa in ritual combat, but we did already know his identity as T’Challa’s first cousin. T’Challa had already confronted Zuri in the Garden of the Heart-Shaped Herb And then our world turned as upside down as Wakanda after N’Jadaka became King, seasick upside down.  I want to resist becoming a bot, a disembodied head on the screen. Online instruction does not ease the seasickness, does not remove  bodies, minds, and affects. I still want to imagine that another world is possible. Real life slips through the cracks of rigidity. Those cracks are Sisyphean moments of joy. That joy is the hope I want to remember.   The one-year anniversary of this pandemic might be difficult for us to contemplate, and for our students as well. We have lost family and friends. We have lost celebrations of rights of passage that students might have anticipated for years, such as high school graduation, and other face-to-face events shared with loved ones. The emotional labor of reflection might bring unimaginable challenges for many of us. For this reason, I would offer students an ungraded space for writing and multimedia, and as well as options to keep their work private. At the same time, for those who choose, it might be helpful to reflect on how to commemorate this anniversary. How would you commemorate the one-year mark of the pandemic? What would be important to remember? How might students reflect on significant memories of this past year?  What would you want future generations to know about this time in our lives? ... View more

So Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the Beat world's true renaissance man—best-selling poet, publishing entrepreneur, and literary impresario supreme—is gone, having shown the world that you can sail the drunken boat without destroying yourself on the journey and have a whale of a good time besides. And while posterity seems to prefer the poet maudits—the Rimbauds and Kerouacs and Morrisons—who crash upon the shoals of Romantic excess, I can't help but think that it is the Ferlinghettis who have really mastered the game of life—not to mention the Gary Snyders, who are still around to show the way. But what has any of this to do with popular cultural semiotics? Actually, quite a lot, because it was Ferlinghetti, along with Allen Ginsberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, and a good many others from the world of mid-twentieth-century art whose names I don't have room for here, who led the way in the deconstruction of the traditional boundary between high and popular culture that is so easily taken for granted today. Before there were poetry slams, there was Ginsberg, dragging poetry out of the seminar rooms and turning it into performance art. Before there were graphic novels, there were Lichtenstein's cartoon canvases and Warhol's Pop posters; and when Dylan plugged it in, rock met poetic rhyme, even as the Beatles were importing string quartets into teenaged love tracks. So when we consider how Stan Lee's comic books have come to attain the cultural stature once commanded by high lit (how Lee must have enjoyed seeing his Black Panther become a kind of Prince Harry to Killmonger's Hotspur!), it is to artists like Ferlinghetti that we must turn to understand how it all happened. There is a flip side to this history the mid-twentieth-century art rebels did not intend, however, for they wanted to open up high culture, not abolish it, to extend its boundaries, not erase it. But when the line between the fine arts and the commercial ones got blurred, it was commerce that eventually won out. Driven by the capitalist imperative to entertain, artistic creativity today is dominated by those productions that can command the largest audiences. With high art driven back into the museums (where it subsists on a kind of life support provided by a dwindling number of rich patrons and private foundations), there effectively is no high culture/pop culture divide any more. What we have now is an all-encompassing entertainment culture driven by the mandates of the market. As I say, this isn't what Lawrence Ferlinghetti envisioned when his Coney Island of the Mind became that rarest of poetic fauna: a full-fledged best-seller. But as another poet who once brought "high" culture and "low" together has put it, “The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley."   "Lawrence Ferlinghetti" by Christopher.Michel is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

Actress, playwright, and author Anna Deavere Smith speaks eloquently about listening as the basis of her craft. Describing the intensive interviewing she did to prepare for her one-woman show Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, in which she appears and speaks as a series of people involved in the riots that sparked after Rodney King was beaten almost to death, she refers to “the difficult, heart-filled, ethical work of listening” —that very empathetic and deep listening she had to do in order to inhabit the experiences of the people she portrayed. She had to interrogate her own biases and assumptions and set them aside in order to listen in this way, to listen so that she could experience what her interviewers had experienced. Smith’s concept of listening underscores something we know—that listening can bring people together. Think again of Anna Deavere Smith’s extraordinary one-woman play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 as well as another of her one-woman “verbatim theatre”-style plays, Fires in the Mirror: each deals with explosively dangerous situations (the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the 1991 Crown Heights riots) and both of them involve racial conflict (between the Korean-American and African American communities in LA, between the Jewish and African American communities in Brooklyn). As audiences across the country watched Smith “become” these characters—turning herself into a small Korean shopkeeper one moment, the Reverend Al Sharpton the next—and speak their truths, and as audiences listened to these truths, their views on the riots and those involved in them often changed. Such changes were partly in response to Smith’s amazingly powerful depiction of the people involved, and to her giving voice to their feelings and thoughts in ways that first got people to listen and second got them to understand the situations as being much more complex than they had thought beforehand. So listening can lead to change. But such changes were also, I believe, partly due to the power of storytelling. As Anna Deavere Smith’s work demonstrates and as novelist Richard Powers says, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” I agree with Powers, which is one reason I encourage student writers to consider using stories/narratives in much of their college writing, from analyses to proposals to reports, and why I have urged that we work toward establishing narrative justice wherever and whenever possible—that we create narratives that can counter what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the danger of the single story” that has labeled and categorized and oppressed so many groups of people throughout history. (See past posts I’ve written on narrative justice here and here.) We need to create and promulgate such just counternarratives, and then we need to work to make sure that others hear them, and not just hear them but listen to them. This is one reason why some advocate public listening “as a way to open up the possibility for new outcomes, new opinions, and new understandings of [others] —even as it also recognizes the nervousness, fear, and hesitation that can also inform our listening practices,” as Nicole Brittingham Furlonge describes her work in Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature. In fact, researchers working on listening in Uri Hasson’s Princeton lab make a strong case for the power of stories as well as for the importance of listening to them—based on an intense series of experiments involving brain scans of people telling and listening to stories. These researchers studied the brain scans of speakers and listeners over time and in different configurations, and discovered that as the speaker tells a story, the soundwaves of the story begin to “couple” the listener’s brain responses to that of the speaker’s. In these experiments, sometimes the speaker tells the story as written; other times the speaker might read it backwards or in random order of sentences or in other scrambled ways. While some more minor coupling occurred even in these scrambled sequences, it did so only cursorily. So it seemed to be important that the narrative structure hold in order for strong coupling to take place. In Hasson’s words, “the better the listener’s understanding of the speaker’s story, the stronger the similarity between the listener’s brain and the speaker’s brain.” As a commentator remarked after studying this neuroscientific research, “a great storyteller literally causes the neurons of an audience to closely synch with the storyteller’s brain.” Hasson’s research seems especially important in this moment, when so many people are locked into their own echo chambers, hearing the same stories over and over again, to the exclusion of any others. All those brains coupling and synching around one narrative, reinforcing it at every turn and making it harder and harder to build common ground and to comprehend any alternative or counternarratives. People in such echo chambers build common ground with one another, all right, but that very fact keeps them from establishing common ground with anyone outside that echo chamber. They turn away from stories representing different points of view and thus effectively prevent communication. Hasson’s research convinces me more than ever that if we don’t listen openly and carefully to one another and one another’s stories, we can’t hope to gain understanding or insight into their motivations, hopes, and goals. So let’s tell stories to each other, but more important even, let’s LISTEN to those stories. Image Credit: "Dad's Radio" by cogdogblog, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Elizabeth Kleinfeld, one of the authors of The Bedford Book of Genres, talks about engaging students by offering them control of their assignments and outcomes, as well as reflecting on the changes in student-proposed assignments since the move to online instruction.   ... View more

Oh, the things we can learn from our students, if we listen. I have been teaching synchronously by Zoom again this semester. Unlike last fall, when students seemed beaten down by virtual life and toxic politics, they now seem hungry for interaction, and comfortable with the tech. Cameras are mostly on, unless there’s a reason private-chatted to me, and interactions are popping, with a whole additional layer of insights and props for fellow students offered up in Chat. (^^YEAH!^^ etc.) Despite all this good feeling, I’ve been reluctant to send students into breakout rooms. Last semester, students reported “dreading” breakout rooms in some of their classes, saying people sometimes stayed entirely muted, cameras off, and just waited out the enforced small group time. Having experienced some stilted breakout rooms myself, I empathized. A couple weeks ago, I ran into an unexpected scheduling snag that meant I’d likely be a little late to my own class. I let students know they could post ideas about the day’s reading on a discussion thread, and told them to hang in there until I arrive. Things went sideways, and I ended up racing to my computer, coat still on, and logging into my own class 38 minutes late, mortified. I assumed few students, if any, would still be on the Zoom. Instead, 21 of the 25 students were logged on, in lively conversation when my face appeared. They welcomed me cheerfully, like a late but not-unwelcome guest: “We were having a great discussion!” And they kept going. I saw smiling faces, laughter, and warmth. “We were discussing the reading, really!” someone said, but I wouldn’t have cared. It was such a joy to see their conviviality. It was instructive to remember that so much meaningful connection can happen in those “free-play” moments in the classroom even if they are harder to conjure remotely. But because of my tardiness, the students conjured it for themselves. I was reminded of this recent article on the loss of “social serendipity” during the pandemic —the conversations that happen without deliberate scheduling. Certainly, the Zoom room was scheduled, but my absence was … serendipitous. Without me, the students roamed through their own conversational patterns. A few students stayed late on the Zoom to assure me both that “we did really talk about the text!” and “it was raw, but really real” since I wasn’t present. I listened. Turning my listening into action, I praised students, again, this week, and pushed past my hesitance, providing more loosely structured time in breakout rooms. After they read an essay about workplace discrimination, I broke them out into randomized groups of five to discuss their own experiences of discrimination and privilege in work environments. I kept checking in to see if they were losing steam, but every room was bubbling with conversation. Everyone had a story to share. They seemed relieved to have compassionate listeners, and an environment that felt free and safe enough so they could be heard. My presence in those breakout rooms was fine but not necessary. I backed off, let them own their spaces. When they reported back, they had riches to share. Shall I say again that I am still learning from students? Perhaps the most important thing we can offer them at this stage of the pandemic is the structure and safety for some “social serendipity,” with the pleasure that comes from being able to own one’s successes.   "DiscussionImageFinal" by spwam1 is marked with CC0 1.0 ... View more

My students and I are slowly making our way through Absalom, Absalom! this semester, contending every class meeting with another blast of Faulkner’s tidal waves of prose. Three weeks and three chapters in, we took a break to write together about word choice. The novel challenges even those with the most robust vocabularies and I’ve used this challenge to introduce the students to the value of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). In doing so, I don’t mean to have my students see the OED as the final word on any given word’s meaning; rather, I’ve been at pains to help them see that the meaning of any given word evolves over time and that we can track the changes in meaning by attending to the context within which a given word is used. So, for our week of writing about Faulkner’s language in the first three chapters of Absalom, Absalom!, the students are tasked with producing what I call an “interpretive footnote.” Any of us can type an unfamiliar word into Google and pull up the word’s definition; and anyone in the class can go the extra step and do the same in the OED. That’s a start, but it doesn’t get us any closer to understanding whether the word is being used in a new or divergent way in the context of Faulkner’s chronicle of the South in its time of “undefeat” post-Civil War. Accordingly, the students are to choose a word or phrase that seems important and then provide an interpretation of that word or phrase in context. To help get the students started, I do the assignment myself and post the response along with the assignment. And then, during the week while we are writing together, when I’m not conferring in a breakout room with individual students seeking on-the-spot guidance, I work on a second entry for our collective lexicon. (I’ve done with using websites I administer; this time I used “Piazza,” a wiki app in the Canvas LMS.) When the students are satisfied with their responses, they share what they’ve written with the rest of the class and everyone reads along. Every time I do this assignment (and this is the first time I’ve ever done it with a work of fiction!) I’m amazed at the results. Freed of the idea that the footnote is for facts or for documenting erudition or for stockpiling support, the students use their time to explore nuance and ambiguity; they write about possible meanings and shades of gray. And, with no word limit provided, they keep writing, instead of preemptively tying things off because some outside indicator has signaled that the assignment is “done.” The range of words covered goes from the familiar (“ogre,” “swagger”) to the less certain (“doubtless,” “sardonic”) to the unfamiliar (“chatelaine,” “grim virago fury”). I wish I could share the responses here, but they’re still current students. (We do include examples of student responses in Habits of the Creative Mind from when I was using Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts in my slow reading class.) I can share a slimmed down version of one of my modelled responses, though, . You can show them how to be curious on the page and that, in turn, gives them permission to engage their own imaginative powers as they write.     The Stage Manager: "Yes, he had corrupted Ellen to more than renegadery, though, like her, unaware that his flowering was a forced blooming too and that while he was still playing the scene to the audience behind him fate, destiny, retribution, irony--the stage manager, call him what you will--was already striking the set and dragging on the synthetic and spurious shadows and shape of the next one" (57). As you know, I'm interested in thinking how the participants in Absalom, Absalom! make sense of what is happening to them and why the South lost the war. In my last entry (cf. "vouchsafed instinct"), I looked at how Miss Rosa's way of talking about herself places her at the mercy of the Old Testament God--a god of vengeance and punishment. She also uses words that are more readily associated with Greek tragedy: she speaks of her relatives having committed a "crime" (14) that has left her "family cursed;" and, too, she sees herself and others see her as Cassandra-like. In the passage above, the speaker is Mr. Compson and the topic is Sutpen's influence on Ellen. Compson refers back to his earlier claim that the aunt "would have" described the years after Sutpen left for the war as Ellen's period of "renegadery." In that earlier passage, he elaborates on the form that this "betrayal" took: Ellen comes to take "pride" in her life at Sutpen's Hundred and her marriage to Sutpen. She has cast off the aunt's influence and has "bloomed" into having a bearing that is "a little regal." (This is when she starts going to town with Judith and having all the shopkeepers bring out their wares.) Compson continues that Ellen’s renegadery allows her to disavow reality itself and to see herself as "chatelaine to the largest, wife to the wealthiest, mother of the most fortunate" (all quotes in this paragraph from p. 54). THREE pages after these observations, Compson returns to Ellen's renegadery, as the flourishing conclusion to how fully and completely Sutpen has corrupted her. First he tells Quentin that, after ten years of marriage, Sutpen now “acted his role too--a role of arrogant ease and leisure . . . " (57). Then Compson's analogy catches up with him: if Sutpen and Ellen are acting their parts, who's in charge? Sutpen thinks his "flowering" is of his own volition and so misses that what has occurred is a "forced blooming" set in motion by . . . ? None of the options Compson provides can be construed as being divine or sacred. Indeed, none of the nouns rise to the level of requiring capitalization: "fate, destiny, retribution, irony--the stage manager, call him what you will." The first two options ("fate" and "destiny") deprive Sutpen of free will. There's a reason for what happens to Sutpen but invoking "fate" or "destiny" places that reason beyond human perception or interference. The second two choices ("retribution" and "irony") also deprive Sutpen of free will, but they place Sutpen in a context where whatever happens to him can be cast either as punishment doled out by the [lower case u]niverse or as the [lower case u]niverse getting a kick out of crushing reversals in human fortunes. It is in this context that Mr. Compson adds an additional possible name for the cause of what lies ahead for Sutpen: the stage manager. As soon as Mr. Compson invokes this evanescent figure, he makes clear that nothing significant hangs on which term one prefers: "call him what you will," he says. What matters is that Sutpen thinks he is charge of his life, as he settles into the comforts of his enormous estate, his outsized cotton profits, his progeny, but "the stage manager" has already struck that set and is preparing the next one, which will also be composed of "synthetic and spurious shadows." All of which drives me to note that Miss Rosa is the one to invoke God in the opening of the novel; Mr. Compson, covering much of the same ground and covering it more exhaustively, doesn't look to God or a god to explain why the South lost the war. He gives us, instead, the stage manager, who is a puny figure indeed.       ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Amy Braziller, one of the authors of The Bedford Book of Genres, discusses the awkwardness of randomly dropping into breakout rooms during groupwork in online courses - an action that feels much more intrusive than moving from group to group in in-person classes, and proposes a potential solution: shared Google Docs, to allow the instructor to look in on the notes from student discussions.   ... View more

Today's "What We've Learned" video, features Amy Braziller, one of the authors of The Bedford Book of Genres, on the difficulty of connecting to students through the computer screen, and on when and how to ask students to help by turning on their cameras.  ... 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. Use one of the ideas below to add Grammar Girl podcasts to a public speaking assignment! National Grammar Day is coming up on March 4! Check out the 2020 National Grammar Day post on Bedford Bits and explore the resources on the Grammar Girl website! 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 collections of 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 in Presentations Pre-Class Work: Before you assign the presentation prompt to your class, introduce the concepts of writing a speech using the Grammar Girl podcast “Writing Scripts and Speeches.”  Assign this to your students as pre-class work or take some time in class to listen together. Discuss the lessons, tips, and tricks from the podcast as a class, recording the takeaways in a document that can either be shared or distributed to everyone. Then, choose one of the prompts for your assignment. Prompt A - Summary: Ask students to choose a topic on which there is a Grammar Girl podcast, or assign a topic to each student. Students should listen to one or more relevant podcasts (if you are using Achieve, we suggest you use the folder “Grammar Girl: 25 Suggested Podcasts” and direct students to choose from there.)  Some podcast ideas include: Parallel Structure: Patterns Are Pleasing What Is a Straw Man Argument? Only: The Most Troublesome Misplaced Modifier Top Ten Grammar Myths Serial Comma Students will create a short presentation, using a slide deck, to summarize and explain what they have learned from the podcast about their topic. Students may wish to research the topic further, include examples from something they have read or their own writing, include any questions they still have, etc. All sources should be properly cited. Presentations can be turned over as a slide deck, presented live in class or over a video call, or recorded and shared--whatever works best for your class situation! Prompt B - Argument: Ask students to choose a topic that affects the community. Some ideas include: The available resources of the school’s mental health department The number of hours the library is open Whether asynchronous or synchronous online courses are preferable Students should take a stance on their topic, and then create a short presentation, using a slide deck, to make their argument. Students will want to do further research to support their position. All sources should be properly cited. Presentations can be turned over as a slide deck, presented live in class or over a video call, or recorded and shared--whatever works best for your class situation! Post-Class Work: Using the document created as part of  the pre-class work, ask each student to evaluate their own presentation for effectiveness. Ask them to identify at least one area to improve for their next presentation.    Credit: "Exchange Students Present" by Carol (vanhookc) is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0   ... View more

“Listen and silent are spelled with the same letters. Think about it.”  —Anonymous Browsing the Internet recently, I came across a site called Oatmail, where a young woman posted this sentence: “Listening is a practice in humility. It closes your mouth while opening your mind.” For most of my career, I wanted to focus on writing and speaking rather than on listening: I wanted my students to find their voices and to get their messages out to others; I wanted them to be heard. Not until I read Krista Ratcliffe’s work did I think hard about the crucial reciprocal relationship between speaking and listening and understand that listening is as important—perhaps more important—than any other of the communicative arts. I saw that the binary between the production of discourse (speaking, writing) and the consumption of discourse (listening) was false, to say the very least, and that it depended on an impoverished concept of listening rather than the kind of listening the Oatmail writer spoke of, the kind that is a “lesson in humility” and that “emerges out of wonder.” As you no doubt know, Ratcliffe calls this kind of listening “rhetorical listening”—that is, opening ourselves to the thoughts of others and making the effort not only to hear their words but to take those words in and fully understand them. To truly LISTEN to them. This is the kind of listening some refer to as “deep,” but there are other kinds of listening as well. Based on works like The Coaching Manual by Julie Starr and others by business consultants like Andy Hagerman or Natalie Harvey, I have come up with the following list and descriptions of kinds of listening: Cosmetic listening: I am trying to look like I’m listening but I’m really attending to something else. Download listening: I am listening very selectively, just listening to confirm what I already know or think. Turn-taking: I am ostensibly listening but more likely thinking about what I will say next in the conversation or discussion. Active listening: I am purposefully giving you my attention and am focusing on what you are saying. I am present in the moment and will not be distracted—and I will try to say back to you what I am hearing in order to see if I am really understanding you. Deep/empathetic/rhetorical listening: I am listening actively and without judgment or preconceived ideas. I am listening to your words and also to what lies beyond those words. I am trying to put myself in your shoes and to feel what you are experiencing. I am listening to learn and I will affirm what you have said. I expect that these kinds of listening are familiar to you, though you may not have thought about them in these terms, and I’m fairly sure students have not done so either. What this brief list suggests to me is that listening is very complex—complex enough to spend some time on in class. In fact, I like to ask students to do an inventory of their own listening—to monitor their listening for at least one day to see what kinds of listening they are doing and to write up what they learn about how and why they usually listen: What tends to get their attention? What and who do they like to listen to—and what or who do they NOT like to listen to—and why? Where do they do most of their listening? How would they describe themselves as listeners? Especially when we are all doing so much listening online these days, it seems important to try to better understand our ways of listening and to learn to adjust those ways according to our purposes and situations. I tried monitoring my listening a few days ago—and I was surprised by what I learned. More on listening next week. In the meantime, I would love to hear how you are approaching listening with your own students. Image Credit: "Headphones" by Valentin.Ottone, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Elizabeth Kleinfeld, one of the authors of The Bedford Book of Genres, discusses taking advantage of the chat feature during online synchronous classes. With so much focus on adapting teaching techniques from in-person to online, she additionally reflects on how to bring this online feature into in-person instruction.   ... 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 We have learned much from the pandemic, including flexibility, resiliency, and adaptation. Like many teachers out there, I had to look back on previously successful assignments and rethink them for this new context. I have learned that it is important that we see these modifications as value added rather than simply revisions made based on situational limitations.  Terence Thomas' virtual review of Yellowstone One of these assignments is the Experiential Reviews and Immersive Experiences assignment which I wrote in 2019. been working for years now with the ideas of experiential reviews and immersive experiences—I am fascinated with the ways we can translate real, live experiences into virtual experiences that give readers a sense of being there. Digital and multimodal composition allow students to create these types of non-linear texts that represent reality and allow for interaction and broad exploration for readers. In this assignment, students immerse themselves into a physical environment and try to recreate that for their readers through embedded links, exploratory paths, visual images, and other microcontent. I ask students to go beyond description and provide a triangulated picture while also reviewing the location from their own perspectives. The review is a common digital genre and gives students opportunities to create engaging, non-linear content for public audiences.   Our current “shelter-in-place” status had me return to this assignment and revise it to fit this new reality as a virtual review. At first, I was disappointed that I couldn’t do the assignment as it was originally designed as a physical experience, but I decided to modify it by adding virtual options for students to review. And in fact, our current at-home status created a stronger need and desire for these kinds of experiences in ways we have never before considered. I noticed in my media feeds that so many places and organizations were meeting this need through new virtual tours of their museums, parks, events, and other public spaces. With so many emerging options, it made sense for students to review these virtual tours, compare them and provide feedback on the quality of the experience, and recommend them to others. Again, something that started out as a compromise from the original assignment now felt more meaningful due to our current situation.     Background Resources The St. Martin’s Handbook - Ch. 24, Communicating in Other Media; Ch. 32, Writing to Make Something Happen in the World The Everyday Writer (also available with Exercises) - Ch. 20, Communicating in Other Media; Ch. 21, Writing to Make Something Happen in the World EasyWriter (also available with Exercises) - Ch. 19, Writing across Cultures and Communities   Some Resources for Virtual Tours: Take a Virtual Visit to a National Park 12 Famous Museums Offer Virtual Tours You Can Take From Your Couch How to Virtually Explore the Smithsonian From Your Living Room Google Arts & Culture Virtual Experiences   Steps of the Assignment: First, research – Students can search out their own locations for virtual visits, but I had fun researching options to give them ideas. There are many aggregate articles that list virtual experiences and can give ideas about categories for exploration. I included a couple in the resources section above but I like to have students brainstorm on their own and consider the range of possibilities before choosing their site. Once they have reviewed many options (and perhaps shared ideas with others), students choose a virtual experience to review. I encourage them to choose something that fits with their interests. Sometimes students choose something they have always wanted to see (“I was in Paris but didn’t get a chance to see the Louvre” or “I am curious about Yellowstone National Park” or “I wanted to see Washington, DC, and my grandfather’s grave in Arlington Cemetery”) or sometimes they choose a location that they never heard of before and discovered through their brainstorming. It is important that they choose a location that is immersive and allows for a true virtual experience rather than a static website brochure.  Meghan Cobler's screenshot from the New England Aquarium’s livestream Students then go to the virtual location, “walk” around, and note specific perspectives and artifacts they see on their journeys. They should take notes and screenshots along the way to gather evidence that will help them represent this virtual space. I also encourage them to try out Google Street View, which enables them to explore the surrounding area of their locations to get a better sense of context.  Once students collect “field” data, they pull it together as a written review. I have students add these reviews to their course blogs, but they can also create them as documents that allow for links and images and some interactivity. We share resources on how to write a review, emphasizing that it is both a description of their location and recommendation, based on their individual perspectives. We look at samples of different kinds of professional and student reviews to get a sense of the genre. I require that they include purposeful embedded links, images with captions, an embedded Google Map, and references and related resources. We then share them with class members for peer review and live feedback aimed towards revision.   James Daniel’s virtual review of The LouvreReflections on the Activity Students took on the challenge and visited a variety of places both locally and all around the world. They analyzed and produced interesting multimodal texts that speak to the quality of the experience and provide authentic reviews to an audience with a real need. I had students visit world class museums (The Louvre in Paris, The Smithsonian), zoos and wildlife spaces (the San Diego Zoo and Boston Aquarium), historic buildings, town squares, National parks, concerts, music venues, and other local and national events and spaces. Also, of particular interest, I worked with a visually impaired student who chose to visit several of these sites and review them for issues of accessibility and enjoyment for others with visual impairment. It is fun for students to share these experiences with others and realize the potential impact of this kind of writing that represents a live experience and helps us step out without leaving our homes. I have included some links below if you want to see live versions of some sample virtual reviews: The New England Aquarium – Meghan Cobler Yellowstone National Park – Terence Thomas The Louvre – James Daniel Patterson Great Falls – T.J. Wetmore Note: These links may expire, so please refer to the images throughout the post if you encounter a broken link. ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Nancy Sommers (@nancy_sommers), author of Writer's Reference, Rules for Writers with 2020 APA Update, Pocket Style Manual, and Bedford Handbook with 2020 APA Update, discusses how handbooks provide a shared language for instructors and students to discuss student writing and writing concepts.  ... View more