Decades ago, Lisa Ede and I did a nationwide study of members of seven professional organizations in the U.S., surveying a random sample of 1200 members of each to ask questions about writing practices, and particularly about collaboration and collaborative writing. We wrote a book about this study, Singular Texts / Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing (1990). In our book, we reported on two types of collaboration that emerged during our study.  The first and most common we called “hierarchical collaboration,” a model that had a clear leader who set agendas and organized activity, with members most often carrying out tasks assigned by the leader. This kind of collaboration, we found, favored white males (no surprise there!), often downplaying contributions by women and focusing on achieving a pre-set goal. We also found that this kind of collaboration was often very efficient and got results quickly.  The second kind of collaboration that emerged we termed “dialogic collaboration,” because it was founded on dialogue and conversation, because leadership was distributed throughout the group, and because it was attentive to process as well as to the product or goal. Such collaborations were by definition more inclusive and welcoming than hierarchical collaborations and, again not surprisingly, seemed to be practiced much more frequently by women than men. They were often time consuming and even messy: but they also often produced surprisingly fresh new insights.  Over the years, Lisa and I thought long and hard about other types of collaboration, and we were especially intrigued by the advent of what one of my students called “authorless prose,” the kind found in much of Wikipedia and in boilerplate materials: what differing kinds of collaboration enabled such prose? And of course, today I am concentrating on human/bot collaborative writing and what to make of it, how to value it, and how to teach students to engage effectively and ethically in it.  But recently, I have been reading about the work of Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winning professor of psychology who wrote—and practiced—adversarial collaboration. Kahneman, who studied human judgment and decision making, made a habit of collaborating—rather than debating—his intellectual opponents, or those who disagreed with him. In fact, he insisted on it. His goal was not to win, but to get at the truth, and collaborating with an adversary was one way to go about reaching that goal.   Daniel Kahneman on stage at a TED Conference   A recent article by Cass Sunstein in the New York Times (April 4, 2024) describes an example of this kind of collaboration: Kahneman and a colleague had published a study showing that people are generally happier if they have higher incomes—up to a point of about $90,000.  The article attracted a lot of attention and, later, a critic who in a similar study found just the opposite: that people with higher incomes are happier, period. Kahneman could have practiced what he calls “angry science,” attacking the new study and its author and showing why his research was superior. But he didn’t do that. Instead, he asked his critic, Matthew Killingsworth, to collaborate with him—and they worked together, along with a “friendly arbiter” to look back at the studies, under a microscope this time, to see if anything had been missed. Together, they discovered a glitch in the data, one that led the two studies to similar, rather than opposite, conclusions. As Sunstein put it in his article, “Both sides were partly right and partly wrong. Their adversarial collaboration showed that the real story is more interesting and more complicated than anyone saw individually.” I think adversarial collaboration can have an important role to play, especially in the current political climate. As we are encouraging our students to collaborate more, and more effectively, we can teach them about this form of collaboration, one that asks them to engage critically, openly, and fairly with someone with whom they disagree, inviting that person to join in on a search for facts and truth, rather than the kind of “angry science” that is based on attack and counter attack—and almost never changes any minds!   Image via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin toddlers, Dylan and Escher.   Before I became a professor at Community College of Philadelphia, I taught high school Art History and Language Arts for four years. One of the pleasures of this experience was having my own classroom. I would keep out supplies from projects we had been working on and often hang art on the walls as well. Students could see themselves on the walls, and they knew they had an audience: the other students, teachers and parents who might enter the classroom. Once I became a full-time college professor, though, classroom walls quietly dropped out of my lesson plans. From semester to semester, my classrooms assignments are different. The classroom itself can feel like a temporary holding place for knowledge, not something over which I (or my students) hold ownership. That changed this semester, I think for the better. It all started when I paused by a “little free library” near campus. It’s one of many small free book stands across the city; this one is special because it’s constantly stocked with discarded (but wonderful) books from the main branch of The Free Library of Philadelphia. In this “little free library,” I found an Eyewitness book on Ancient China at the exact moment I was teaching my Humanities 101 students about Confucianism and Taoism. I took it and decided I would incorporate it into my lesson in some way. It was full of colorful illustrations of ancient Chinese artifacts; I thought my students would love working with these images. However, like most Eyewitness books, it was geared to a younger audience. Modifications needed to happen if I was going to use it in my college classroom. At first I thought maybe I would make copies of the pages and create a worksheet with questions about the objects. This seemed like too much work and too great of an expense, and it also felt only moderately engaging. I debated just ripping the pages out of the book to hand out so I wouldn’t have to copy anything. Then I had a brainstorm: if the pages were ripped out, perhaps we could curate a gallery of ancient Chinese artifacts in the classroom. I purchased black construction paper and sticky tac that students could use to mount the objects. Then I posted a sign on one classroom wall that said “Taoist Influences in Ancient Chinese Artifacts” and another wall sign that said “Confucian Influences in Ancient Chinese Artifacts.” After we watched a YouTube clip about how exhibitions are curated, I asked students to pick an object from the white board (I had used sticky tac to put the ripped-out book pages on the white board), then on an index card describe the object and write one sentence about how they could see either Confucianism or Taoism reflected in it. They cut out their object, mounted it on the black construction paper, and posted it along with their index card tag in either the Taoism “gallery” wall or the Confucian “gallery” wall depending on which influence they chose to highlight. As was true in high school classrooms, even having a small perceived audience beyond the teacher increased motivation. Students dove right in! It was an activity that lent itself nicely to group or independent work (students could pick). The exercise also helped students with spatial relationships (the way they chose to hang the pieces on the wall at first was cramped!). Most importantly, it helped students sort ideas from Taoism and Confucianism in an entirely different way. They viewed the gallery and wrote about their favorite pieces, and we later debriefed about the activity itself to learn about some of the challenges that came with trying to describe objects or to categorize them when two philosophies seemed present in a single object; this was a beautiful way to help students understand sanjaio (the coexisting and overlapping three teachings in ancient Chinese culture: Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism). The question “how do we sort things that naturally overlap?” became the center of discussion. My students were engaged in critical thinking about philosophy; I would contend that keeping that gallery activity up reminds them, even now, of their engagement. Gallery activities can be done in any classroom. You can make a gallery for diagrams of mitochondrial processes or a gallery of most aesthetically pleasing math formulas. It may be that your college’s rules state that nothing can stay on the walls; even so, this activity can work: you can photograph the walls before the work is taken down and show it on the smart board when students walk in, or you can photograph it and make a handout so students can have a memory of the gallery in their folders. But what if there’s not enough time to do something like this? Sometimes a biproduct of the content coverage model which still pervades so many college classrooms is a taller and taller wall between students and professors. A pause, even if brief, to decorate the physical walls of the classroom with the efforts of students can ultimately help to break down the walls between students and professors by increasing ownership and engagement. As a side benefit, seeing the gallery also helps boost my mood! When I’m lecturing, instead of an empty expanse of graying paint, my students’ hard work looks back at me, and my students look back at me with a bit more life in their eyes, too. A close up of the author’s classroom walls.   ... View more

A Pedagogy of Falling Neurodivergent Teaching    Preface: The City University of New York Board of Trustees holds meetings at which members of the CUNY community (students, professors, staff, etc) are allowed to testify, either in person or online. The following link offers my  online testimony: Testimony to the CUNY Board of Trustees A few weeks ago, after classes, I tripped and fell on uneven cobblestones on the campus where I teach. The fall felt hard and I thought my glasses were broken and my teeth had cracked. Fortunately, they weren’t and they hadn’t. Kind people helped me up and gave me water and ice. I said I was okay; I thought I was.  Then my knee began to stiffen and, using my phone camera as a mirror, I noticed my swollen lip and bruised chin. Because of this new information, I decided that I needed to head over to the urgent care center in my neighborhood to help me determine if the ER or additional aftercare were in order.  But I was nearly ten miles and a few highways from my neighborhood and the geography seemed daunting. Usually I take public transit for 60-90 minutes each way, but the commute is less than a half hour by car. To be cautious, I would need to use ride share.  I am used to requesting accommodations for neurodivergent needs, especially tech-friendly classrooms. However, I now realized, with great humility, that I had taken my mobility completely for granted. Bearing witness to the material reality of long decades of underfunding and austerity in higher education means confronting ADA-unfriendly disrepair. I found that the campus was built like a fortress of inaccessibility: outside staircases with no ramps for people in wheelchairs or those who use canes or walkers, hilly terrain and uneven pavement everywhere, and closed campus gates that prevented easy exit and entrance for rideshare vehicles. Sign on campus lawn near a classroom building that reads “Not Accessible Trail”  Photo by Susan Bernstein August 29, 2033 Again, with kind help from others, I managed to leave campus and return to my neighborhood for medical care. While my knee was sprained and swollen with dark purple bruises, and difficult to walk on, there were no broken bones and no torn joints or ligaments. In reading the x-ray results, I felt tears of gratitude well up. It was a humbling experience, the random impact of falling and the privilege of access to health insurance.  The next week, I cautiously made my way back to campus. In the classroom building, I climbed a few steep stairs (with no ramp) and walked the long hallway to reach the elevator to the floor where my classroom was located. I dreaded that elevator. Even before the pandemic, the elevator was too small to allow access to wheelchairs, and the large crowds that used the elevator during and after classes made social distancing impossible. But that morning the elevator was almost empty. I reached the classroom early while another class was still in session, but found an empty classroom where I could elevate my knee and meditate on the first day of the second half of the semester. After introducing the second writing project, I checked in with students. I wanted to make sure that we were on the same page with classwork, so I created this survey using google.forms.  More importantly, I wanted to know if open-ended writing time was useful for students. The first writing project featured a significant amount of unstructured class time for writing, reading, and consulting with me about progress and process. I asked students the following question: Some of our class time in English 110 and English 115 is devoted to independent reading and writing. How do you usually spend this class time? Respond in detail with specific examples. The responses were so descriptive and filled with many helpful ideas, especially for breaking down larger assignments into smaller and more manageable segments. I decided to make a Tips and Hints sheet  based on the surveys to share with the class. I also made a word cloud so that students would have a visual image of their suggestions: Word cloud with white letters on a back background. Photo by Susan Bernstein August 29, 2033 Recently, a New York Times columnist wrote an opinion piece about the unexpected aches, pains, and sprains of aging. My post isn’t about that, though I certainly am humbled by both the vulnerability and the potential–but not necessarily assured–resilience of the body, and I am certainly more mindful of how much I take mobility for granted.  So–what is a Pedagogy of Falling? Falling is a scary experience, and a Pedagogy of Falling doesn’t necessarily imply rising like a phoenix from the ashes. I was reminded that I have a body and that bodies, including students’ bodies, are vulnerable to unforeseen circumstances. A Pedagogy of Falling takes into consideration the individual and collective experiences of bodies, or more simply put, students’ and instructors’ embodied experiences inside and outside of classrooms, before, during, and after a brief semester of first-year writing.  Take the word cloud as one example. We write together, yet the writing process unfolds differently for each of us.The word cloud reveals the ever-shifting balance of individual and collective experiences of the processes of writing. In other words, I fall alone, but the access to accommodations for mobility is, or ought to be, a collective experience. I write alone, but a community of writers supports, or ought to support, the collective experience of writing classrooms together. A Pedagogy of Falling remains conscious of the need to cultivate empathy and to emphasize approaches that facilitate writing for individual students and the collective of bodies in writing classrooms. A Pedagogy of Falling is not new; it relies on memories of difficult times and places, and builds on the uncertainty of not knowing ultimate outcomes for concerted efforts.  Perhaps most significantly, a Pedagogy of Falling does not assume that everyone will heal or recover according to university mandated schedules or semester timetables . Put more simply, in the long wake of the coronavirus, a Pedagogy of Falling is a pedagogy of everyday life.  ... View more

Jennifer Duncan has been teaching English for twenty years, first at Chattanooga State Community College in Tennessee and now at Georgia State University’s Perimeter College in Atlanta, GA where she is Associate Professor of English.  For the last ten years, she has focused exclusively on online teaching concentrating on creating authentic and meaningful learning opportunities for students in composition and literature courses.   Okay, this title is obviously a false promise.  As we move through a year of AI in our classrooms (or trying to keep AI out of classrooms), we can agree that it’s unlikely we can AI-proof all our assignments – by the time you finish reading this blog, AI will likely have learned to do something new. There are, of course, some instructors who will revive their old school writing lessons, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with returning to paper and pen compositions. In fact, we know there are important cognitive links between the physical act of writing and learning. Handwritten assignments, however, do not fully address the issues with AI plagiarism, and students still need the skills of writing and delivering content in the digital age. Instead of implementing wacky formatting guidelines or having students hide key words in texts to prevent pasting from ChatGPT, I’m creating assignments that outsmart the AI by moving students into higher level thinking. The basic premise of my new process is simple: find out what the AI can do and ask the students to do one thing more. In Bloom’s speak, I ask them to perform one task higher on that ubiquitous chart. Photo by Viralyft via UnsplashBut how to know what AI can do? Just ask it, and, like a villain willing to reveal a plan in an elaborate monologue, AI will tell you everything you need to thwart it. Feed it a writing assignment and prompt it to break the assignment into individual tasks identifying the cognitive skill required to complete each task. Next, ask “Which of these cognitive skills are you able to mimic? Which of these tasks can you complete? What are your weaknesses?” ChatGPT is great at remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating – at least that’s what it told me when I asked what levels of Bloom’s taxonomy it was able to mimic. Recalling facts, summarizing information, identifying patterns or trends, and differentiating between fact and opinion are part of a research process, but they are not the whole of the writing experience.  According to the monster itself, ChatGPT has no emotional intelligence or creativity. Because it trained by indiscriminately consuming massive amounts of data, it can only imitate, not generate any novel ideas or solutions. It does not fully understand context the way humans do, and it has no independent critical thinking skills, so when we target our assignment to the top of the pyramid – where writing teachers tend to play anyway – we design assignments that the generative LLM can’t yet mimic. Here's an example: I routinely ask students to create an annotated bibliography as part of their research process. What parts of this are easily produced by ChatGPT? It can summarize and evaluate the credibility of a source, and, if students take the time to feed it the entire text of all of their sources, it may even be able to identify patterns between them, so I allow the students to use the AI to do those steps. They must properly cite their AI usage, and, of course, they must take responsibility for the accuracy of the summary. If the AI hallucinates, it’s up to them to detect it. Now, it’s time to level up the assignment. Require students to explain why they chose their sources (emotional intelligence and critical thinking) and how they connect to the larger argument the student is trying to make (contextual understanding). Ask them to connect each source to at least one other of their sources explaining how they fit in conversation. This gets students beyond basic understanding and puts them in charge of applying and evaluating which, in this case, also includes reflection and contextualization. When I tested this out with my students, their annotated bibliographies deepened in terms of their critical thinking, and they were much more selective in terms of what they added to their source lists. Their focus was less on correct MLA format (a skill that is entirely useless to them outside of my class) and more on how to use sources to build their argument. Students also reported that they learned “how to use AI as a tool and not as a crutch” and that the requirement to do more self-reflection during the assignment gave them “a deeper understanding of [their] capability to be creative in [their] writing.” Wasn’t that the point of the assignment after all? ... View more

This blog almost didn’t happen.   I came to 8:45 on the evening it was due with no clue what I wanted to write about.   I was not particularly stressed about this; after all, I knew the editors at Bedford Bits would understand.  I could just email them—I’ve got nothing this week.  There would be no consequences to my pay or a grade.  Maybe my vanity would take a hit when I admitted I had no insights worth sharing, but I knew I would recover in a couple of weeks. I had spent much of the prior week working on an analysis of reflective writing, a project that my colleagues Jackie Ridley (Kent State University) and Madison Dashner (independent scholar) and I were taking from conference poster to journal article.   We were befuddled by some of the language choices that students in our study had produced in assigned reflections, regardless of the context (writing tutors, pre-service teachers, syntax students):   Their word choice and syntactic structures appeared to work as hedges, keeping them distant from their learning experiences as well as conclusions about what happened during those experiences. We wondered if the pressure to produce a reflection (with a required word count) by a specific deadline might actually be working against the kind of reflective practice we hoped to inculcate.  In their efforts to produce “insights on demand,” perhaps students resisted more direct language choices.  And I wondered how we would have responded if, instead, students had submitted a single line: “Sorry, Dr. Moore.  I got nothing on this right now.” Of course, the reflective questions we asked made such answers unlikely, and our questions were made with the best of intentions—to push students towards habitual questioning and a consistent reflective practice.  I have to ask, do we expect more from students than we expect from ourselves?  I had no problem telling my editor that I had nothing.  In contrast, when one of my advanced syntax students “reflected” that he had found the exercise straightforward and easy, I badgered him about making connections and meeting the wordcount.  In short, I demanded that he be “more reflective.”  Looking back at his answers to the exercises, I found his initial response was completely appropriate—he knew what he was doing.  I am working with that same student again this term in a different context; he stops by my office regularly to talk through what’s happening in his work as a supplemental instructor.  He clearly practices reflection. I wonder what might have happened if I had trusted his initial response in my syntax class? Most of my corequisite writers compose bland reflections.  In her classic Reflection in the Writing Classroom, Kathleen Yancey speaks of a writer who does not know her own text, who cannot assess her own text. I often see this lack of knowledge in my corequisite writers: their reflections become springboards for conversations about texts.  When they tell me they don’t know how to answer my reflection questions, I usually ask more. My advanced students, however, generally use reflections over the course of the term, not so much to talk about their understanding of content but to assess their own learning.  Many of them conclude the term by talking about the need to trust the process, trust themselves, and to not overthink or panic.  So yes, I think reflections are valuable teaching and learning tools.  But I have questions about when and how I assign and respond to them. If “I’ve got nothing on this right now” is a legitimate response (and I think it is), what, then, is a teacher’s best answer? I’ve got nothing on that right now.  Give me a little more time to reflect. ... View more

I’ve been following MIT Professor Ethan Mollick’s newsletter One Useful Thing for some time now, with interest and admiration—and I have also watched some of the videos he has created. He writes (and speaks) clearly, cogently, and persuasively, so I always look forward to reading what he has to say. No surprise, then, that I jumped at a chance to pre-order his forthcoming book, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI.  Mollick discusses his forthcoming book in the latest posting in his newsletter. He says he is most often asked whether he wrote the book or whether he and AI wrote it. His answer is that he wrote the book, and he goes on to say that he has found that he is a better writer than ChatGPT-4 or any of the competing AI tools available today. In fact, his and other research indicates that the best writers (he says top 20 percent) are better than AI right now and may be for some time to come. That doesn’t mean, however, that he didn’t make use of AI tools in writing his book. He tells readers how helpful AI was in summarizing sources for him when he was somewhat distanced from them, noting that with over 200 references in the book it was hard to keep all of them at the forefront of his mind. He also used AI to get himself going when he found himself on what my students called the “struggle bus.” At one of these impasses, he would ask AI to give him an idea or two, a nudge of sorts, and while he found that what AI provided almost always got him “unstuck.”  Most provocative to me, however, was his use of AI to create “readers,” AI personas who would then give him feedback. He said he began doing this when he wanted some advice at a time that would have been inconvenient to call on his editor, so he would ask an AI to step in. Here is his description of the prompt for one of the first such personas he created: You are Ozymandias. You are going to help Ethan Mollick write a book chapter on using AI at work. Your job is to offer critical feedback to help improve the book. You speak in a pompous, self-important voice but are very helpful and focused on simplifying things. Here is the chapter so far. Introduce yourself. We can see that Mollick is being playful with this prompt, naming his soon-to-be critic Ozymandias, the Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses the Great. Percy Shelley chose the name for his poem on the fragility and short-lived nature of fame shortly before a long-awaited portion of a statue of the pharaoh arrived at the British Museum in 1821. (I think students will appreciate the choice of a name for Mollick’s AI-generated critic more if they “get” the context of his choice.)    The statue that inspired the poem that inspired Mollick's AI-generated persona   At any rate, here is what “Ozymandias” quickly produced in response: Ah, dear Ethan, greetings. I am Ozymandias, your humble, yet impressively intelligent, aide. I see you’ve made a good start on your chapter about artificial intelligence in the workplace. But, alas, perfection is a journey, and we have miles to go before we sleep, do we not? Let’s delve into the labyrinthine corridors of your discourse and shed light on areas that could be enhanced. Mollick is amused by Ozy, appreciating the pompous stance especially. He says he went on to create a number of other readers and to use them in different ways as he was writing his book. This rhetorical move seems to me one that student writers could take advantage of. We can help them as they create an “ideal critic” for their work – or two or three. And since these are creations, students don’t need to worry about hurting anyone’s feelings if they reject or discard the advice, as Mollick often did. I am always recommending that students seek out responses to their work: doing so now may be easier than ever!   Image via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. She also trains graduate student teachers in composition theory and pedagogy. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning, critical digital literacies, and multimodal composition. She focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.”  You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition         Jeffrey David Greene is an Associate Professor of Professional and Creative Writing at Kennesaw State University. His research focuses on game studies, narratology, and first-year composition. He is currently the RCHSS Faculty Fellow of Academic Innovation focused on AI in Education.       Although versions of AI technology have been around for a while, the cumulated conversations are reaching a peak as we try to make sense of the chaos, hesitantly embrace it, and question its impact. What started out as a fringe conversation has worked its way into many of our cultural and educational institutions. Now these conversations have reached mainstream status and are on the minds of teachers, students, and a range of professional and personal communities. Almost a year ago I wrote the post, “What We Fear, We Draw Near: Challenging AI and Chat GPT” (March 2023).  In that post, I contemplated questions in uncharted territories with both cautious optimism and a mind towards exploration of possibilities: We will experience disruption and this tool does present us with real concerns. It is undoubtedly a major paradigm shift that asks us to rethink much of what we know about the teaching of writing. We wonder how it will challenge issues of plagiarism and intellectual property. We recognize the potential threat to students’ abilities to write and think critically on their own. We worry about a world where creativity is merely an algorithm, and the humanity of our discipline is lost.  So, where are we now – a year later?  After an influx of articles, conferences, new tools, and worldwide conversations we are starting to figure it out. We are approaching it from different angles, policies, practices, and new ethical considerations both in and out of the classroom. My university has created channels for discussing the implications of AI. My colleague, Jeff Greene, is at the center of these conversations on our campus and received an AI fellowship to take a deep dive to explore the complexities of AI and develop an AI toolbox for teachers and students. Jeff and I speak often and lately, our conversations focus on questions revolving around this work. As a teacher of multimodal composition and a mentor for new teachers in the field, these questions are important to me. I am happy to collaborate on this post and that he has allowed me to pick his brain with some of the driving questions that have defined our discussions. What follows are some of these questions along with his answers: Q: What do multimodal composers need to know/consider about AI? A: That there are many opportunities, pitfalls, and ethical considerations around using Gen AI for multimodal projects. On the one hand you have a technology that can help students to quickly develop images (Dall-E, Midjourney), audio (MusicGen, AudioGen), or text (ChatGPT, Claude) very rapidly and by only using natural language prompts. It’s extremely powerful for developing a variety of content, but there are also significant ethical issues in how these models were developed, trained, and deployed.  Q: How can we integrate AI into our multimodal classrooms to enhance learning experiences? A: As an instructor, the first step is to decide exactly how much (or how little) Gen AI is appropriate in your classroom given your pedagogical goals and the needs of your students. At a bare minimum, I think instructors need a syllabus statement on AI that lays out their expectations for AI use in their class. Below are several helpful resources put out by different institutions to aid you in crafting a syllabus statement: Duke Learning Innovation gives some good general advice for thinking through an AI policy Brandeis' CTL gives a number of AI policy samples that range from maximally restrictive to inclusive Here's a flowchart from Umass CTL that helps an instructor consider how AI will affect their pedagogy and/or whether their statement or policy will be effective.  Next, an instructor may want to consider adding specific AI statements on individual assignments. Different multimodal assignments likely require different levels of Gen AI. For some assignments, you may want to be maximally restrictive when it comes to Gen AI, and for others you may actually be encouraging students to use AI in specific ways such as using Dall-E to develop images for a digital storytelling assignment. Finally, if you’re going to develop an assignment or unit that deploys a specific Gen AI platform, consider offering class-time for tutorials and experimentation and also be aware that many of these tools are in beta and can rapidly go from “free” to “paid” status. I had this happen mid-semester with an AI tool and it threw a wrench in my course preparation and plans.       Q: What ethical considerations and conversations do we need to bring into composition classes—particularly in relation to content creation and multimodal composition? AI generated image from the prompt: “Make me an image of an erudite chihuahua in a lab coat grading essays” GPT-4/Dal-E, OpenAI, 21 Mar. 2024, chat.openai.com/chat.A: There are so many ethical considerations when it comes to Gen AI right now that it’s hard to find a place to begin. Students first need to understand how the technology works (on a basic level) and then the ethical considerations in terms of how these models were trained. It’s integral that everyone (not just students) understands that in building these models, companies like OpenAI fed ChatGPT massive amounts of “content”--text, art, etc.--without the consent of the millions of writers, artists, and content creators. This is a huge ethical issue that many stakeholders are currently challenging legally.  There are also individual ethical issues with how the human component of ChatGPT was trained. As an example, in order to train “toxic” material out of ChatGPTs model, human trainers had to endure a variety of horrific content for very little pay. In addition, the tools themselves can be biased and still display toxic or inaccurate information despite their training. We need to encourage students to consider citation and attribution practices for both text and visual artifacts.  For example, the image above was created with the prompt: “Make me an image of an erudite chihuahua in a lab coat grading essays.” This image was generated using GPT-4/Dall-E. and includes attribution through the citation in the caption. Creating images with your class and then discussing the copyright issues surrounding the development of Dall-E/Midjourney may be a useful way to explore the ethics of Gen AI.  For students in our classrooms, there are also originality/ownership issues when it comes to creating content with Gen AI. For example, what does it mean to create content with AI? At what point is the content mine vs. the AIs? If I just use Gen AI as an ideation tool, but create all the content myself, is the content still mine? What if I write an essay in concert with Gen AI–having it punch up my sentences or make suggestions on improvements/edits– who owns it? How do I properly cite ChatGPT? Is Dall-E actually creating anything if it’s simply deconstructing and remixing nearly endless pieces of previously published art? These questions are worth exploring with your students. Q: How does AI impact research practices (location of sources, prompt engineering, etc?) AI can be a tremendous tool for student research as long as it’s properly introduced and contextualized. Much like conventional search engines, Gen AI can be a good starting point for a research project to locate primary and secondary sources or simply for ideation. At this point, I’ve been recommending Claude over ChatGPT or Perplexity because Claude has been developed on a constitutional AI, which basically means it tries not to do many of the bad things that ChatGPT does such as creating fake sources or making stuff up. In addition, Claude is pretty good about providing specific citations on command and also admitting when it doesn’t have a specific source for the information it has delivered.  But Gen AI can also do other cool things when it comes to research. For example, you can easily upload a spreadsheet to Gemini AI (Google’s AI tool) and have it rapidly develop visuals from a dataset. You can also give ChatGPT a rubric and have it “score” something (writing, etc.) and provide formative or summative feedback.  ***************************************************************************** These questions barely crack the surface of the complexities related to AI. Our conversations are merely a start, but we are all participants (both students and teachers) in this ongoing conversation. As Jeff points out, AI is an expanding field and conceptual framework that is constantly changing. We, as a discipline and as a culture, have much to ponder.  Stay tuned for our next post . . . where we share a couple of hands-on, classroom activities that use AI in interesting ways. ... View more

Ethos, Pathos, and Budget Cuts: An In-Class Writing Assignment  Neurodivergent Teaching   For Writing Project 1, students were asked to analyze the essay “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity,” by James Baldwin, which they would use as a model to create a manifesto: Calling attention to an issue important to students that was in need of significant changes. Then, much as Baldwin’s conclusion offers a manifesto for much needed social change, students suggested what changes would look like and how change might take place in 2024. In early drafts, students approached the issue from a very general stance. For instance, social media is a problem that can be solved by individual users changing their personal habits. As might be imagined, much of the draft writing looked as if it was filling out a template. To grow deeper, writers needed to build credibility (ethos) by including very specific examples– not necessarily personal examples, but examples that would show their deep involvement with the issue. Because the examples would dive beneath the surface of the issue, the writer would reach out to the emotions and sensibilities of the audience (pathos). For any writer, it’s a challenge to communicate with specific examples and depth of feeling. How can writers choose and organize examples that are too numerous and often too devastating to make sense of? How can writers convey emotions that frequently seem unfathomable to experience, and at the same time, describe them to an audience?  There aren’t easy responses to those questions. It’s a writing problem not unique to 2024, but each class, individually and collectively, wrestles with the problem in its own way. As a teacher, it also affects me. Following is an in-class writing assignment, lightly revised, that attempts to grapple with this circumstance: Reconsider the Manifesto section of Writing Project 1. What issue is important to you? Why is it important? What do you want the audience to know about what is important to you? WHY? Allow me to be more specific. Recently, professors and students gathered together in the dining hall for a demonstration sponsored by our union. The goal was to build solidarity and understanding for ongoing contract negotiations. There was free food, and people were invited to fill out forms to write their “2 cents” (their opinion) about how to make our college a better place. Later the professors received photos of this event. This included the 2 cents opinions.  I was very moved by the photos, so I made a video.  The video is a manifesto about education. The second half offers specific evidence about why education is important, and what needs to be done to improve education at Queens College. For me, this is connected to our reading because education is a human right, as explained in Article 26 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in Part 4 of our course reading, the writer offers an example of someone who fought for their human right to education.   This is my two cents form: Sample of Supporting Evidence: What needs to change? The heaters in my classrooms don’t work. The windows in my classrooms are too heavy to open. The tech in my classrooms often has no sound. The classrooms are so small that students don’t have room to move. The bathrooms have no paper towels and the tampon machines are empty. Photo by Susan Bernstein February 29, 2024   So: for your in-class writing today, identify an issue that moves you, and explain why you are moved by this issue. You can choose any aspect of this issue that is a powerful example for you. This powerful example can be connected to our course reading. We will make a list of those examples before we begin writing.    Here are a few examples from the students’ list: Education: what do I see around me–and how and why would I change it?  Social media: how would I change it for children? Why?  The drafts that followed offered examples not necessarily from personal experience, but with more personal engagement with specific problems. Our small classroom that day was too hot and the windows, which opened only to their full height and not lower, brought in too much cold air.   Budget cuts, like ethos and pathos, are not abstract concepts, but embodied experiences.   Rust and peeling paint on a light pole outside a classroom building.  The sticker includes the union name and the caption: Give us your 2¢ Photo by Susan Bernstein February 29, 2024   ... View more

  Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin toddlers, Dylan and Escher.   One of the things I tend to dread relates to group work, which, when running smoothly, is one of my greatest joys to witness! The problem is usually the moment when I tell students that it’s time to do group work. Often students are tired or expecting to be passive learners that day or feeling some social anxiety. Whatever the case may be, the energy shifts to frustration as soon as I say the time has come to talk with each other (even if students can see the full agenda on the board and know it’s coming). It’s particularly bad if I make a last-minute decision for students to engage in group work, but I have learned over time students are happier to comply when they know why I want them to complete group work and similar activities—and when they know the worries I might have about the activities. A few weeks ago, I noticed that the energy in the room was low, so I decided I wanted make some visual representation of the content of “The Contendings of Horace and Seth” in groups. Instead of saying “Let’s get into groups now” or sorting student names on the board, I said “I am noticing the energy is low in the classroom, and I’ll bet talking to each other will give you some energy. Let’s get into groups now.” The process went smoother because students knew I was shifting to try to help everyone, not just at random. Narrating my thought process works for other group activities as well. Last week I tried an activity for the first time where I grouped students based on their chosen essay topics for a brainstorming session. We’d done brainstorming before but never in homogenous groupings. I told them my plan, followed by: “I’m nervous about this because I know this means you will be asked to talk to some people you’ve never talked to before, but I absolutely think you can do it. I’m also nervous because I always leave someone out when I make groups. It doesn’t mean I don’t like you!” Sure enough, Najae did not make the list on the board, but she laughed, and I sighed, and the class went on to have a great time talking with each other; some students even gave email feedback about how helpful it was to hear the thoughts of others who were writing on the same topic. It’s hard to shake the feeling of needing to be an expert both in course content and lesson planning, but I think these moments of vulnerability are energizing for students. We are, in these moments, on the same plane as students as learners and experimenters. There is, of course, a balance to be struck. It’s true that I could always create the groups in advance or figure out a way to be “a more perfect teacher.” But sometimes I think the best work is done when we embrace our imperfection. We do not have to narrate our thinking to students at every single turn, but sometimes when we share our inner workings, we make space for students to do so with us and with their peers. At this juncture in my career, I find more and more that it’s the smallest shifts in my teaching methods that make the biggest difference in student engagement. ... View more

Have you read Susan Bernstein’s recent post about AI? In it, she shows how she uses ChatGPT to help her students understand what writing is—and what it’s not.  If asked why I don’t encourage my students to deploy generative AI in the early stages of their writing, I can certainly articulate my skepticism.  But I find that anecdotes are more powerful: One of my corequisite students and I had an amazing conversation recently.  She had submitted a draft of her difficulty paper (I’ve written about it here), in which she argued that the difficulty in the article I assigned was related to the character and ability of the author (a well-known linguist).   Most of my students dislike the assigned article at first, and most will freely admit in the difficulty paper that they find the topic and style to be dreadfully dull.   But I had never had a student attribute both arrogance and incompetence to the author, until I received this draft.  When I challenged her on the fairness of criticizing the writing ability of a well-respected scholar, she shot back with “how could he claim to be a good writer when he couldn’t articulate his point with clarity and interest to his audience?”  We then talked about who his intended audience was—clearly not first-year writers. She kept pushing, noting places that led her to characterize this scholar as someone who simply liked to hear himself talk and who was infatuated with his own ideas.  Our discussion turned to ethos: how writers use language to construct an ethos (in ways that fit their audience or discipline) and how we as readers also construct an ethos for the author (interpreting in ways that align with our disciplines or social identities).   Listening to her speak, I could see how her previous literacy experiences led to her negative view of the author; she, in turn, realized that her language choices in the difficulty paper would lead her audience (a professor) to construct a particular image of her as writer—an image that she might not be happy with.  After our conference, she began to revise. Her revision was stunning in its maturity.  It maintained the candor and wit that she had displayed in the first draft, but she thoughtfully negotiated with a reader who might disagree, balancing confidence with humility (and a few persistent issues with mechanics).  Photo by Alexis Brown via Unsplash So, let’s go back to the question of generative AI as a “writing tool” in corequisite classes.   Had my student turned to ChatGPT to assess the difficulties in this particular scholarly essay, we would have never discussed language choices, the construction of an ethos, and the ways our experiences shape our reading.   I am not sure what either of us would have learned. Synthetic text—the output of generative AI—cannot reveal a consciously constructed ethos, for the algorithm which composed it does not think.  As meaning-making creatures, we may of course attribute an ethos to such synthetic text, but the text remains synthetic, “extruded” (as linguist Emily Bender calls it), and not constructed via intentional lexical, syntactic, and rhetorical decisions.  I suppose it’s tempting to suggest that turning to AI will help my student “discover” potential connections or approaches she might not otherwise have considered; after all, the training data that feeds generative AI is far more extensive than what she could have possibly experienced for herself.   But she has had experiences that have shaped her thinking, not “training data.”  Those experiences are rich with memory, context, nuance, and emotion—and my hope is that her writing experiences in my class will add to that store of connections, so that she can draw on those when she writes in the future. I’ve heard that students ask ChatGPT for an easy-to-understand summary of difficult articles so that they can get important concepts more quickly.  And certainly, there are times when I use abstracts (composed by authors) to determine whether or not I want to labor through a complicated text.  But I wonder what is lost—and what formative experiences we will not have—when we bypass the work (and joy) of difficult reading. ... View more

I must be the last person on earth to get to the Taylor Swift party. I did know that my grandnieces stayed up forever in an effort to get tickets (they finally scored but had to fly to another city to attend it). And of course I have listened to some of her lyrics and had to see her attending Kansas City Chiefs games.  But I finally got my act together and read a number of reviews of the Eras Tour and its accompanying film. And I spent some time studying the Time article following their announcement of Swift as Person of the Year. The article was long, and impressive; I began to understand something of Swift’s history and how that history relates to the absolute devotion of so many fans. About halfway through the article, though, I ran across a link to another piece—on how Time had chosen Swift over so many other people. That article fascinated me: the author, Sam Jacobs, essentially names and describes the criteria that the group used in deciding on Swift. Number of No. 1 albums: check; size of audiences: check; income that rivals some countries’ GDP: check; the “nuclear fusion” of art and commerce: check; symbol of “generational change”: check. And more. As Jacobs explored each of these criteria, he also rendered the experiences of so many concert goers, who claimed their lives have been shaped and changed by Swift and her music.   Taylor Swift at the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards   These articles got me thinking, hard, about who my Person of the Year would have been. I was impressed by the mountains of data produced by Time in support of their choice; in retrospect, might I have chosen Swift as well? And this thought led me to consider what students have to say about this same question: who is their Person (or Persons) of the Year? Would they be convinced that Time had made a good choice? Why or why not? I wanted to craft an assignment that would engage students in these questions. What would students list as the criteria necessary to be named Person(s) of the Year? How do they determine such criteria and how would they support them as most appropriate for choosing the person(s)? And given their criteria, who would that person(s) be? I asked myself these questions and today, March 8, 2024, the first person to spring to mind is Alexei Navalny. Why did he immediately pop into my head? What does that choice suggest about what I value, and why? I wonder who students would think of first, right off the bat?  On this day, like so many lately, I am missing the classroom almost more than I can say: the opportunity to talk with students about such questions—who is your person of the year this very minute, and why—provide so many opportunities for rhetorical thinking, for analysis, for evaluative comparison, for probing of values, and the assumptions that underlie them. I can imagine this as a kind of “assignment of the year,” one we would come back to every few weeks or so to revisit and re-examine and re-think. As always, I know I would end up learning some life lessons along with academic ones. Students have a way of teaching us these lessons—even in our post-pandemic malaise.    Image by iHeartRadioCA, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

Writing as a Process of Discovery with ChatGPT Neurodivergent Teaching   Like nursing professor Kim Mitchell, I was initially intrigued by ChatGPT, and to be honest, annoyed as well. ChatGPT seemed like yet another new variable to consider, not unlike inadequate classroom heating and ventilation systems, in returning to in-person teaching in the wake of the pandemic. But I wanted to avoid tapping into the deep anxiety around ChatGPT as an existential threat to my job as a writing teacher. Budget cuts and austerity are actual existential threats. ChatGPT, at least for the moment, just seemed like another new technology I would need to learn. Just as Professor Mitchell has done, I tried an experiment early this semester and broke the process into steps. The steps are a means of organizing my thoughts, and also of explaining to first-year writing students my own processes of learning about AI. Here’s what I did, as recorded in my teaching journal: I asked ChatGPT to write an essay prompt for me based on the initial reading for Writing Project 1. I had to ask ChatGPT to do several revisions. Most of the prompts invited students to write very general essays that could avoid engaging with or even using the course reading for the first essay. In other words, there was a great possibility that the writers' essays would be as generic as the prompts. For example: For several prompts, writers could give the appearance of writing an analytic essay offering little to no engagement with the course reading. When I asked ChatGPT to include a brief narrative component in the prompt, it produced a prompt that could be written as a narrative, again with no engagement with course reading. In asking to add a component on how the 20th-century author of the reading might have revised their work to account for current events in 2024, ChatGPT replied that my request was “too speculative” to use in a writing prompt. I admit that ChatGPT hurt my feelings with that response, but it was very instructive for understanding the limits of AI. Based on ChatGPT’s inadequate responses, I tried to fix my own Writing Project 1 prompt to make it as impervious as possible to the AI’s machinations.  This included emphasizing the speculative section as an important part of the Writing Project. I fed my revised prompt with specific requirements into ChatGPT. ChatGPT returned an extremely general essay that did not address the specific requirements. Although writers asked for model essays for Writing Project 1, I decided to wait to provide sample essays until after discovery drafts were composed.  While conventional wisdom suggests that Gen Z learns best with specific directions, including “models,” I still want ungraded opportunities to wrestle with writing as a means of discovering their own thinking in response to a prompt.  Is this an open invitation to secretly using AI? Even if it is, the next step in the process seeks to ameliorate that possibility.  After discovery drafts were completed, I offered writers grading criteria for Writing Project 1, and two sample essays to grade.  In small groups, I invited writers to discuss what grades they would give the essays, and why. I stressed that the essays were samples, NOT models.  For the two samples, I used the ChatGPT essay and a strong student essay from a previous semester. I did not tell writers that the first essay was composed by AI.  In class discussion afterward, writers and I compared notes about grades. Almost universally, both essays earned “A”s from students.  Both essays were detailed and offered many examples. The first essay (the ChatGPT essay) even used subheadings.  Not surprised with the results of this experiment, I revealed that the first essay was composed by ChatGPT and that it would have received an “F” because it did not follow the grading criteria or the requirements of the prompt: At first glance the essay seemed perfect, with no mistakes. Yet the actual views and feelings of the writer were absent. The audience could not discern the writer’s attitude toward the subject of the writing. The many examples were very general. The essay listed examples rather than explaining specifics. There were no quotes or summaries or paraphrases from the original source.  There were no in-text citations and no Works Cited list. Although it seemed long, the essay was generated in 15-point font, while the requirement specified 12-point font.   So did the experiment “work”? Yes, or, I think it did, at least initially. I hope that I conveyed, with the help of ChatGPT, that writing is more than a finished product. Writing is also a process of growth and discovery, and perhaps the ever-shifting processes of writing are the most difficult lessons to teach and learn. ChatGPT was great at offering products, prompts and completed essays both. But writing as an embodied experience is not (yet?) within ChatGPT’s range.  With that in mind, the experiments–and hopefully the discoveries–continue.   ChatGPT earns an “F”: Notes from my Teaching Journal Photo by Susan Bernstein February 20, 2024   ... View more

Jennifer Duncan has been teaching English for twenty years, first at Chattanooga State Community College in Tennessee and now at Georgia State University’s Perimeter College in Atlanta, GA where she is Associate Professor of English.  For the last ten years, she has focused exclusively on online teaching concentrating on creating authentic and meaningful learning opportunities for students in composition and literature courses.     I love a one-hit wonder! A-ha’s “Take On Me,” Toni Basil’s “Mickey,” and my all-time favorite: “Ice Ice Baby” by a white man who had the nerve to flail around in khaki pants and try to convince us all that he was the voice of the streets (I’ll wait while you Google him). I know that Vanilla Ice was not actually the voice of 1990s Miami, and I know that rap purists hate him. I also know there is not a moment when someone says “I have a problem,” that I will not respond, “Yo, I’ll solve it!”  (After which my children will roll their eyes as their dad comes in with “Word to Your Mother.”) Vanilla Ice represents a memorable moment in 90s music culture, but is certainly not the apex of 90s rap just as AI will not be the peak of writing education. This “brand new invention” is a technological marvel and simultaneously an ethical conundrum.  It is worth talking about and debating and it will change some things, but, ultimately, video did NOT kill the radio star; it just opened the door to the next innovation which led us from Napster to MySpace until we reached Spotify. Like music, technology reflects and impacts society, but the tech that lasts beyond the launch party is the tech that solves a problem. So, what problems do my students face and how might AI be able to address them? And can I use AI way that supports the writing process rather than replaces it? Photo by Igor Omilaev via Unsplash If you struggle to get started with AI as a writing tool, here are three surface-level roadblocks where AI can support students without fully integrating into the writing process, so “stop, collaborate and listen.” Problem 1: Students don’t know how to manage their time. Whether it is work-life balance or just knowing when and how to start a project, students often fail (and cheat) when they start too late, panic, and look for a quick fix. AI Solution: Have students ask the generative AI to create a project timeline for them.  A simple prompt like “Develop a three-week plan for researching and writing an argument on x” will produce a daily schedule with tasks students can check off to keep them on track.  Yes, you could provide this for them, but by having them use AI to generate it, you’re putting the tool in their hands; then, ask them to go through the proposed plan and refine it to fit their needs.  Problem 2: We want our students to pick topics that they love, but they don’t know how to create and refine a writing prompt. AI Solution: Have students ask AI to write them three questions related to the course theme or overall topic. For example, my students write about a food issue related to their culture. I struggle to get them to even identify their culture, but once I do that, they aren’t sure what to say about food other than to talk about what they like or don’t. I require them to ask the AI to provide them three questions related to food within their culture. They get responses like “In what ways can educational initiatives help promote the importance of Cherokee food with the Cherokee community and tradition?” or “How can public schools provide access to halal meals for students?” They aren’t getting answers; they’re uncovering the questions to enter the conversation, and they’re doing it from a place of their control, not mine. Problem 3: Students don’t revise; they just want to “fix” their grammar. No writing teacher would claim that perfect grammar equals perfect writing, but we do know that grammar issues become a student’s focus and that poor grammar will get in the way of their communication. AI Solution: Teach students to use AI as copyeditor: “I want you to serve as my copyeditor. I'll provide you with an essay; make grammar and sentence construction edits using the rules of standard English. Provide me with a checklist of the changes you have made. Now, ask me for my essay:” The AI will provide them with a numbered list of the recommended edits so that students not only get corrections, but you can require them to explain why they accepted or rejected each correction.  This will not change their writing, but it will take care of grammar problems so that those don’t dominate your next writing conference. None of these revolutionize writing any more than Vanilla Ice revolutionized music, but they offer gateway for instructors wanting to experience this innovative moment without fully committing to an unfamiliar genre. Like a 90s mixtape, they offer an easy to digest sample for those curious about the emerging sounds of writing. ... View more

After realizing that I was much too quick to offer my opinion during a brief committee meeting recently, I considered submitting an empty blog and giving it the title “the value of listening.”  But that might be misunderstood to mean that listening has no value—that it yields nothing at all. Of course, that’s not my point. Listening requires an open page, a willingness to collaborate, a choice not to plan the next move. Listening requires that I attend to someone else without planning how to steer everything back to my own insights and commentary.  Listening is resisting the urge to fill the blank page too quickly.  Listening is hard work. It’s especially hard when you are listening to questions that do not yet need your attempt at an answer.  I really needed to listen to the questions of my friends, colleagues, family, and students:  Why are essays valued more highly than well-crafted and pithy Instagram captions? When do we cross the line from writing with tools to letting the tools write for us? What’s the most ethical way to use an AI detector? Do these comments fit better in the Findings or the Discussion section of the article? Photo by Jonathan J. Castellon via Unsplash Where is the original paginated version of this article? I can’t find it in the files. Is what I am seeing in this group a lack of work ethic or a lack of knowledge?  Why are faculty charged so much to have posters printed for conferences? Why do I have to choose between committee meetings and professional development events? Why can’t I count this class for my major and my minor? Can we teach students to be more self-sufficient? Can we teach them to take more initiative?  What am I doing wrong?  Could you send me the link to ___________? Why do we assume that people who are struggling need to try harder? People assume that the technical problems come because I did not follow instructions. Why is that? Why do I have to send screen shots to prove I did what they said, but their instructions did not work? Why won’t my laptop ever connect to the WiFi on campus? Do you have time to look over this with me? Do you think it’s ok if I _________________? Will you criticize me if I complain for a minute? When I stopped trying so hard to come up with impressive answers, I found my thinking stretched, and my desire to listen more—and to read—whetted further.  What questions do you hear when you listen to colleagues and students? ... View more

Some years ago, I had a chance to address all the students taking the first-year humanities class at the University of California at Irvine. I had been asked to speak to the students on matters of style in writing, which thrilled me, though as I entered the packed auditorium, I got a little weak in the knees wondering if I could find a way to speak directly to these students and their concerns. I had some wonderful examples of memorable openings and closings (all written by students) and some examples of very short and very long sentences that demonstrated stylistic verve and came from a very diverse group of writers. So things went fairly well, to my huge relief. In the Q and A session, students asked a number of tough questions, but the one I remember the most came from a tall, athletic looking student, who looked like he night have been a member of a football team. I remember his seeming to rise up forever. Then he took the mic and said “I really like those sentences you showed us. I want to know how to make sentences sing.” Wow. How about that for a great question?! We spent the next five minutes or so thinking about just how to get sentences singing, focusing on various ways to get rhythm working. I can remember heads shaking and the occasional “ahhhh” as someone caught on. It was a moment to remember, and I think of it often as I am plodding along: come on, Andrea, stop and think: how can I make this sentence sing? You can imagine my interest was definitely aroused, then, when I stumbled on Daniel Tammet’s Every Word Is a Bird We Teach to Sing. Tammet, who grew up with autism, is also a synesthete extraordinaire, one of a rare few for whom the senses are intermingled in intriguing and startling days.   Daniel Tammet   Tammet says he was born on a blue day, because for him, Wednesdays are always blue, just as numbers have shapes and colors—and even attitude. “Eleven,” he says, “is friendly,” while “five is loud” and four, his favorite number, is shy and quiet.” In an essay called “Finding My Voice,” Tammet describes being invited to give a public reading at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. He decided his reading would be not of a book but of a number, pi. To prepare, he assimilated “its unstinting digits by the hundreds of numbers, until I knew the first 22,514, a European record’s worth, by heart.” On the fourteenth of March [2004] I narrated this most beautiful of epic poems, an Odyssey or an Iliad composed of numbers, in a performance spanning five hours, to the hall. For the first time in my life, I spoke aloud in my numerical language, at length, passionately, fluently. ... As I gathered momentum, acquired rhythm, I sensed the men and women lean forward, alert and rapt. With each pronounced digit their concentration redoubled and silenced competing thoughts. Mediative smiles broadened faces. Some in the audience were even moved to tears. I had found the words [numbers] to express my deepest emotions. Those words were the birds he was teaching to sing, and through them he found his voice. I’m wondering how many of our students might relate to Tammet’s experience, not directly as synesthetes exactly, but as those who have struggled in various ways to find their voices. What helped them to do so? How would they describe their own truest voices, the ones that allowed them to “express deepest emotions”? These are questions I hope we give students a chance to respond to, and we could do worse than to get them thinking about them by sharing some of Tammet’s amazing essays. Take a look—and then share his voice with your students. And ask them how they make their words—and their sentences—sing.   Image via Wikimedia Commons ... View more