This is my fourth and final post focusing on the work being done by two-year college teacher-scholars who contributed to Teaching Accelerated and Corequisite Composition, a collection I edited for Utah State University Press that was published in November.   This month, I spoke with Melissa Long, an English professor at Porterville College in California’s Central Valley. Though her focus is in the classroom teaching college composition (both with and without a corequisite) and British literature, she also works as the campus outcomes coordinator, facilitates a community of practice for student-centered teaching, and oversees the college’s implementation of AB 705.   In her chapter, “Finding the ‘Right’ Amount of Rigor in the Research Paper,” Melissa argues that we should not burden our students with undue expectations. Instead, instructors of research-based writing should “assess the student’s ability to demonstrate research, critical thinking, and competent writing,” keeping “our focus on [those] threshold concepts” and not “letting other factors seep into our assessments.” Nevertheless, she writes from the perspective of an instructor who believes that students should work hard and be rewarded for their hard work.   For Melissa, the most important element of her chapter for those currently teaching corequisite/accelerated composition is reminding instructors “how they are holding themselves and their students accountable for achieving the outcomes of the course and at the same time, are not making a college education unattainable for some students.” Melissa wants to push her students to become better writers, but she doesn’t want to push them so hard that they leave the class: “Even if instructors are not currently using the research paper in their college composition courses, I hope they’ll take the time to consider how they are assessing to ensure learning. If they are using the research paper, I hope readers will consider where they can adapt and update the assignment and how they can add scaffolding to help underprepared students.”   Reflecting on her chapter about the research paper more than a year after it was written, Melissa acknowledges that “sometimes we get so focused on the writing portion that we don’t realize where there might be a breakdown in the other skills we are teaching, most often, reading and critical thinking. If students don’t know how to read a college-level text and don’t have experience thinking about complex, multi-faceted ideas, the breakdown is happening long before the first rough draft of an essay and yet we might not recognize the issues, or if we do, we find them in a final draft that is bare and anemic.” Melissa believes that “while the research paper might be the summative assessment at the end of the course and provide evidence that a student is able to put their reading, writing, and critical thinking skills together, I’ve found that if I include formative assessments throughout the semester, I can monitor how well students are demonstrating all of the necessary skills that go into the research paper and address them individually if one is not as developed as it needs to be.”   Teaching Accelerated and Corequisite was in the final stages of production when ChatGPT came on the scene, so its absence from the book, and its prevalence in current thinking about writing instruction, is not surprising. Like so many of her colleagues, Melissa is “really anxious about AI and how we teach our writing classes in a world where it exists and will only become more advanced over time. At Porterville College, we have instructors who are trying to strictly ban its use from their classes and others who are whole-heartedly embracing it as a tool that should be used to its fullest.” At the moment, she is “cautiously trying to figure out where the line is between a new method of cheating and a helpful resource to enhance student work (especially for those students who are learning English as a second language). I certainly don’t have the answers yet, but I’m seeking as much information as I can and enjoy learning how others are approaching the issue.”   ... View more

NOTE: I tell the following story with the intention of working to alleviate small frustrations in the contexts of times when writing, teaching, and learning might feel terribly fraught, if not irrelevant and impossible, even though acknowledging historic and contemporary atrocities and offering sympathy is not enough. Given the cataclysmic and too often unspoken dimensions of the Thanksgiving story, it remains critical to keep in mind the catastrophic and deeply distressing challenges of our current historical moment.  Autumn in New York: A One Way street sign is framed by blue sky and a tree with red leaves and bare branches. Not shown: two people lugging home a ten-pound frozen turkey on a 6-block walk home. Photo by Susan Bernstein November 2023   How is cooking a turkey like writing an essay? I never thought I would ask that question because I never planned to cook a turkey. Nevertheless, by the end of Thanksgiving weekend, I had revised my perspective. But first a story that helps to illustrate the processes of changing my mind. The week before Thanksgiving, my partner and I won a ten-pound frozen turkey in a raffle at the senior center. We bought the tickets to support the center, but we never expected to win a turkey. Our number was called and we were incredulous. My working memory immediately hit overload. My partner and I had a quiet holiday at home, just the two of us. What would we do with a ten-pound turkey? “We will eat it,”  said my partner.  “But who will cook it?” I asked.  “We will cook it,” my partner said. But I did not know how. Because my years in junior high school coincided with second wave feminism’s call for liberation from poorly compensated and unpaid housework, it was a point of pride that I had nearly failed home economics. At the time, home ec was required for girls only; we were taught how to sew and cook and furnish a home. All of these tasks required following very intricate instructions to the letter–something that, as an undiagnosed neurodivergent tween, I could not do. My working memory (although I would not have called it that at the time) often flooded with frustration, and defaulted to DIY (“Do It Yourself”) mode. DIY was not the preferred option in home ec, and all these years later, my working memory rebelled at the thought of all the intricate instructions involved cooking such an immense turkey.   First we had to carry the turkey six blocks home. Half-way there, I wondered if we should have called a cab. A ten-pound frozen turkey is not ten pounds when it is frozen solid. The turkey came in a plastic shopping bag, and the bag handles broke very quickly. Between the two of us,  we traded off holding the frozen bird in the broken-handled plastic bag on fairly deserted residential streets. Finally, I remembered that I had a cloth shopping bag in my backpack, and the turkey fit right in. Between the two of us, we eventually managed to lug our turkey home. More drama followed. Would the turkey fit in our small freezer (It did.)? Would we be able to find the right pans and utensils to cook the turkey? (We did, after several trips to grocery and big box stores.) How would we know when it was completely defrosted and ready to cook? (We didn’t. I used all my upper body strength to pull out a giblets package and turkey neck covered in frost and seemingly stuck inside the body cavity. We let the turkey sit in cold water afterward.) Should we brine it, or baste it, or rub it with olive oil? (We didn’t, for simplicity’s sake.) Did we really need a rack? (We didn’t. We covered the bottom of the pan with raw carrots and celery stalks.)  And so on.  The unexpected force needed to remove the turkey neck caused a revelation. Is this what students feel at the beginning of the semester when faced with writing their first college essay? That completing an essay now involved a significant, and often much longer, focus on process including discovery, drafts, missteps, and revisions? That the fixed set of rules students have shared with me over the years were now much more complicated? That writing no longer involved following intricate instructions (as students often explained) to yield a standard product? Over the years, students have recounted what this product was supposed to look like (approximately): Five hundred words, five separate paragraphs, 100 words for each paragraph, and five sentences per paragraph. Nice and precise, and be sure to not use “I” or to include your own opinion. DIY modifications would generally not yield finished products that students needed to achieve high scores on the many required high-stakes tests that seemed to determine a successful future.  But college writing isn’t usually like that, and, for many of my students, college writing is a giant step outside the comfort zone. Suddenly process matters just as much as product. Did this analogy hold? Was process as important as product?  While I did not expect our turkey to look like the ones I saw on the Food Network website, I also did not want us to contract salmonella poisoning. So I did what I imagine students do when they try to figure out how to write for college courses: checking the internet (looking up different recipes for cooking a turkey), watched YouTube (videos of chefs demonstrating various steps of turkey preparation) crowdsourced with more experienced friends (contacting folks who I knew liked to cook),and even a judicious use of AI for further assistance with directions (texting the turkey company’s chatbot when the built-in meat thermometer didn’t pop out after four hours of cooking in a properly preheated oven). There was drama, and there were missteps and steps revised. My partner and I made up the revised steps as we went along. We realized we had probably not cooked a whole frozen turkey in this millennium, or at least in many many years. But in the end we had dinner, and the next day I made turkey stock soup from the bones and the drippings, only loosely following the very helpful recipe a friend texted me the day before Thanksgiving. In the end, what I thought would be a disaster felt more like a sense of accomplishment in completing a task that seemed inconceivable in the beginning.  In working to stay focused in these last weeks of fall term, my aim is that students feel a sense of accomplishment. In taking on tasks that seem impossible at the start, no outcome is ever guaranteed. Yet learning to mitigate the trials and tribulations of the writing process remains key to undertaking the goals of first-year college writing. Through steps, missteps, and revisions, and hopefully with much less drama than my turkey story, students can begin to recognize what it means to learn and to continue to grow as writers. ... View more

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the role of speaking, and especially talking, in contemporary society, and that has led me to think back over the rise of writing and its relationship to orality. For the next couple of weeks, I’m going to do some reviewing of that relationship here, in installments. Here’s the first: Now that writing’s primacy has been waning for some time, I wanted to remember--just how did writing become so dominant, the seeming be-all and end-all of communication? This nagging question took me back to the ancient world, in which the spoken word was king (and queen). It took me to Plato’s dialogue between Socrates and his student, Phaedrus, written in the 4th century BCE. During their conversation, Socrates tells Phaedrus a myth that features Theuth, Egyptian god and inventor of many arts, including geometry and astronomy--and writing. Theuth brings these newly-invented arts to the god Thamus, who was especially impressed with letters, which Theuth assured him would make Egyptian people wise and improve their memories.  In Socrates’s telling, Thamus contradicts Theuth, saying that as the “parent” of the art of writing, he is not the best judge of his offspring’s usefulness. In fact, Thamus continues, writing “will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls; they will trust the external written characters and not remember themselves. [Writing] is an aid not to memory but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth.” As he always does, Phaedrus obsequiously parrots what Socrates says as “most true,” and then Socrates continues, saying that writing is, unfortunately, “like painting” which imitates life but is not alive: like writing it just sits there mute if you try to ask it a question. This deeply flawed art Socrates then compares to speech, “the living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of which the written word is no more than an image.”    Jacques-Louis David's, The Death of Socrates (1787)   This passage is no doubt familiar, and it’s one that draws me back over and over, especially in light of recent work in AI and what has been called “the voice revolution,” when we can ask whether digital assistants like Alexa or Siri or bots like ChatGPT whisper to us is “the living word of knowledge which has a soul.” But first, I’m returning to a time before writing achieved hegemonic status, a time when orality—in the western world at least--was the primary means of creating and sharing knowledge. In doing so, I want to avoid any distinct binary between writing and speaking: alphabetic writing, after all, arose around 3500 BCE, and written codes can be traced back to the 8th century BCE—not to mention the “writings” in caves that were drawn many thousands of years before. So writing and speaking co-existed for millennia, as indeed they do today. Yet during the golden age of Greece, speaking was powerful; speech had “a soul.”  And speech continued to be highly valued from that time through the medieval period (I remember learning hat Augustine is startled, almost alarmed, when he sees St. Jerome reading biblical texts silently: how, he wonders, can we know what Jerome is doing—he could be “saying” anything, and his refusal to give voice to the words is a cause for suspicion.) Indeed, oral communication held great value well into the 18th century. We should also remember that before the printing press made written text increasingly accessible, and for some time after, people who were not themselves “literate” could participate in literacy by way of listening to those trained to read texts aloud, thus bringing “the word” to the people and making them a part of those words. It’s sometimes hard, given the ubiquity of print culture today, to take ourselves back to these earlier times and earlier ways of communicating, to remember how central the spoken, embodied word was to all parts of society. As recently as the first half of the 18th century, orality (and rhetoric) held great cultural capital. To be educated meant—in addition to being white and male—being steeped in oral communicative practices, in the law, in government, or in the church. In colleges of the time, students strove to master the oral exercises characteristic of the Progymnasmata (exercises that began with storytelling, progressed through forms like maxims and encomium and invective (!) and ended with extended argument),; they performed in debate and speaking clubs, presented declamations, orations, soliloquies: in U.S. colleges of the time, students advanced from year to year on the basis of oral performances of knowledge, not written tests (a practice we may return to given the rise and rapid development of generative AI).  Women’s roles were, of course, limited in the seventeen hundreds, though as the century progressed, they increasingly made their way into the schools: Catherine Brewer became the first woman to graduate from college – at Wellesley in Georgia; Mary Jane Patterson was the first African American woman to secure a degree from Oberlin (in 1862) and Augusta Stowe Gullen the first woman to receive a medical degree from U Toronto (1883). In college, women sought to join the oratorical culture but faced many obstacles. While male students made oral presentations on graduation, women were discouraged from doing so: in one instance, Bob Connors reported that when a woman earned the highest honors, the college dropped the tradition of having that person deliver a special address altogether—rather than having a woman do so.    Photo of painting 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 and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She is a regular contributor to this Multimodal Monday academic blog since 2014. 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 Content curation is a “systematic process that involves discerning, selecting, interpreting, and delivering the most relevant and high-quality original content that already exists on a given subject . . . (15 Great Content Curation Examples, Chieruzzi, 2021).” As digital writers, we can curate content in various ways through researched articles, images, and shared content – among others.  For the purpose of this multimodal assignment, I view curation as the art of collecting, selecting, interpreting, creating, sharing. Everyone loves a good playlist. This digital technology has replaced the old “mixtape” and makes it super easy to categorize our favorite songs. A family member recently sent me a themed playlist (Thanks, Melissa) and I was intrigued by the amount of thought and creativity that defines the playlist genre. In order to be effective, you have to consider the rhetorical situation – purpose, audience, subject, and context – lenses that define our ideas about engaging writing. We create playlists to reflect moods, express themes, and to shape particular subjects, keywords, or concepts. Playlists can inform, tell stories, and communicate ideas.  We tend to think about playlists existing outside of the classroom, but they can engage students in a range of important curation and interpretive skills. Types of Playlists:  I have my favorite songs playlist, a beach playlist, genre playlists, throwback playlist, among others. I started to think about some of the categories that define the genre. Here are a few categories that can be shaped into a range of curation assignments: Moods and emotions – chill, high energy, get pumped, lift you up, sad, celebrate Place based – songs about (or that mention) a particular place or location. Subject/Theme Time periods – childhood tunes, decades   Activities and events – road trip, wedding, summer vacation, Stories or ballads Cultural critique   Collaborative – participants come together to contribute to an aggregated, shared playlist.     The Soundtrack of Your Life Photo by Mohammad Metri on UnsplashThere are endless possibilities for assignments using playlists. This assignment, The Soundtrack of Your Life challenges students to reflect on meaningful events and influences that might be cued, defined, or contextualized through music. I am certainly not the first to share this type of work and found that there are other communities and educators who promote this idea as well. Music allows us to remember potent events from our lives.  An assemblage of songs - a so-called "soundtrack to your life" - is like a roadmap looking backward on the major milestone that got you to where you are today.  By looking backward, they can serve to help you see the path you are on going forward. (What is the Soundtrack to Your Life?, Wilms 2013) Through using music as a lens, we can come to understand our connections to events, emotions, ideas, and cultural influences.  Steps to the Assignment Note: I encourage students to choose their own technology based on what they like rather than prescribing particular platforms. I stand by my pedagogical philosophy that rather than “teaching tools,” it is important for students to develop digital intuition. When students choose their own platforms, the assignment has the potential to move out of the classroom and into their lives. Furthermore, when students embed their curated playlist into their own libraries, they can share it with their communities and listen to it on their own long after the class is over. Collect - Collection starts with exploring and brainstorming.  Ask students to reflect on and list times in their lives that they associate with particular music. They can also do this in reverse and conduct background research on specific time periods and music that cues their memories. They can also frame their collection through defining moments, chronological time, tone, or mood, to name a few. Select - Next, students thoughtfully select songs to include on their playlists. You can determine how many songs you want them to curate. I usually go with between 10-20.  They will go through the processes of sorting, arranging, and organization. Here is where they pull together their selected songs and create a collection that they will then give context through interpreting their meaning and expanding their resources.  Interpret - Students create annotations for each song where they cite the artist, song title, release date, and link to videos or lyrics. They create an interpretative description where they discuss their connections to and meaning of the song -- how it is autobiographical and what they learned. I have them include a cited passage from the lyrics as part of this interpretative annotation. This Annotated Playlist is captured on a blog post* or Google doc so they can link it in their final description. Include a reflective overview that acts as a draft for their online description. This is an adjacent document that supports their curation choices. *The playlist can be extended to include an inspired essay or blog post where students narrate the impact of the songs or tell a story from a particular time in their lives and embed links from the songs into an interactive essay. Create - This step has students moving from the annotated version to uploading it to a supported playlist provider such as Spotify or Apple Music.  They design the list through adding context, imagery, and description: Title: Name the playlist with a title that speaks to its nature and engages listeners.  Go beyond generic titles such as “My Playlist” or “Songs from the 90’s” and encourage students to make it an individual reflection of the intention of the curation. Image - Include a representative image – original or copyright free – that will accompany and introduce the playlist – a lesson in visual rhetoric. There are many forums and instructional videos to help students learn how to create and upload images to their playlist platforms. Description - Add a description to the overall playlist. This usually shows up on the opening page and can include clickable links to videos or other related content. The description should talk about the purpose, mood, and meaning of the playlist.  Here is where they can link to the Google doc or blog post to include their expanded insights. Share - Time to share.  I encourage students to share their playlists with their families, friends, and communities. I also curate a full class playlist where students submit their finished versions towards an aggregated selection so they can enjoy their classmates' work and upload to their own libraries. Reflections on the Activity This project emphasizes multiple skills of digital and multimodal composers. Writers generate ideas towards invention, substantiate ideas, draft strong descriptions, and learn citation practices. Like any rhetorical task, we need to define the purpose, subject, audience, and context. It also reinforces citation practices, visual rhetoric, and interpretive skills. Music is an important multimodal form that offers opportunities for insight and critical thinking. I invite you to like, respond, and share in the comments!  😊 ... View more

On December 15, 1791, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was adopted as part of the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution).  Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. As with many other passages of the Constitution, the authors did not provide specific definitions of what “freedom of speech” meant to them, and so U.S. courts have been called on to help in providing guidelines for when speech is protected and when it is not, though even these issues are often far from clear.  In general, though, the U.S. has guaranteed its people the right to express their opinions (in all forms, from words to images and other media) without governmental interference or regulation, within reasonable limits. (The writers of the first amendment were surely influenced by the ancient Greek concept of parrhesia, or “open speaking,” the practice of speaking the truth, often to power; see, for instance, Foucault’s series of 1983 lectures at UC Berkeley on “truth-telling as a role.”) These limits, as defined over the years by courts, generally do not protect speech that is characterized by threats of serious harm, libel or slander, obscenities, and plagiarism. How the first amendment affects students in public schools was tested in 1965 when students at an Iowa high school wore black armbands in protest of the Vietnam War. They were suspended by the school for providing a harmful “distraction,” but the case was decided in favor of the students and their freedom of expression was upheld. The last few years have seen serious issues of freedom of speech on many college campuses across the country: should students’ right to freedom of speech allow them to shout down or chase out or disinvite controversial speakers whose views they disagree with? Should that right protect online speech for or against Israelis and/or Hamas as the battle in Gaza rages? Should a governor be able to ban the presence of certain groups on school grounds because their speech will offend others? I’m fairly certain that questions like these have been a focus on your own campus, and may be so even as I write this.   I recently read an op-ed piece in the New York Times that spoke to our current situation and provided another gloss on “free” speech. In “What ‘Snowflakes’ Get Right about Free Speech,” Ulrich Baer argues that attempts to deny the right to speak to some “should be understood as an attempt to ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater group of people, rather than censorship.” In Baer’s analysis, limiting the free speech of some can be acceptable if it will allow other marginalized members of a community a chance to take part in public discourse. Baer’s argument is surely subject to question, especially since it would often be very hard to tell which groups are more marginalized than others, or which groups might be more or less harmed by the “free” speech in question. Reading about the history of freedom of speech, about the most significant court cases regarding the issue, and about the turmoil that the right to speak (or not) is causing on our campuses today makes me think that this is surely a “teacherly moment” in which we can engage students in thinking—thinking rhetorically—about what the first amendment means today and, moreover, what they think it potentially should mean for the future. This kind of rhetorical approach would help students step back, at least for a time, from the us vs. them, right vs. wrong stances that are so emotionally appealing and consider the current controversy in light of history, of court rulings, and of other precedents. It might help them to look at alternative perspectives, to consider them carefully, and to try to figure out just where they stand on who has the right to “free” speech. An analysis like this calls for small group work, and for very careful preparation. But the possibility for greater understanding—at the very least of the deep complexity of the issue of free speech—seems to me worth the effort.     Image from Wikimedia Commons ... View more

These are dark times. Frightening, horrifying, in so many ways. Yet teachers of writing continue to teach, which is itself an act of hope. In these times, we could do worse than take a tip from poet Mary Oliver’s poem “Gratitude.” It begins with the following stanza: What did you notice? The dew-snail; the low-flying sparrow; the bat, on the wind, in the dark Oliver’s poem goes on to pose a series of additional questions:  What did you hear? When did you admire? What astonished you? What would you like to see again? What was most tender? What was most wonderful? What did you think was happening? Asking our students to answer these questions, taking time to do so with thoughtfulness, grace, and humility may bring them to feel some of the gratitude Mary Oliver’s poem embodies and evokes. Doing so certainly led me to observe, listen, and think most carefully, yielding a series of memories and images that left me full of thanks, often for such small, everyday occurrences that turn out to be full of meaning to me. I hope you and your students may have the same experience. You can find Oliver’s poem here. I hope you all have had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Andrea ... View more

This is a post about considering histories of spaces and places where teaching and learning unfold, and how work with students might more fully engage those spaces. The post ends with a video of a field trip and a brief photo essay that includes the photos highlighted in the video. I am thinking about the impact and interactions in the many histories that have occupied a single space. How much does space impact teaching and learning? Put another way, how can space be used in teaching and learning to gain knowledge from the surrounding world. This semester, I have tried to offer more opportunities for students to take part in research as an embodied experience. Ideas percolated in my head about how we might do a second on-campus field trip after our initial trip to the college art museum. I had asked the students in anonymous exit slips if they wanted another field trip before the end of the term, and they were unequivocally in agreement.  I considered what spaces on our campus might best support the third and final writing project of the course. The point of Writing Project 3, the research/revision essay, was to find connection to a major concept in James Baldwin’s “The Artist’’s Struggle for Integrity,” a source we had been reading and returning to all semester. Then I remembered the on-campus memorials to Freedom Summer, and I watched documentaries and news reports documenting Freedom Summer’s significance to the Civil Rights Movement. The information that follows is from the two sources that we viewed before the field trip, Freedom Summer: Chapter 1 by Stanley Nelson (2014 PBS American Experience) and Remembering the “Mississippi Burning” Murders (2014 CBS News). In the summer of 1964, college students from across the country took part in Freedom Summer, a voter registration drive in Mississippi, where Jim Crow laws, white citizens councils, and the Klan fought a continuous battle with full force against registering Black voters. 3 of the young civil rights workers were murdered at the start of Freedom Summer, but it took 6 more weeks to find their bodies.   James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were their names. Chaney was Black and Goodman and Schwerner were white. It had been remarked that the catastrophe was made worse by the national hyper focus on the two young white men at the expense of the countless number of unsolved murders and disappearances of Black Mississippians. Indeed, when the bodies of the 3 civil rights workers were found in a dam, at the same time 8 Black bodies were recovered.  One of the white civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, had just finished his junior year at the college where I teach. 25 years after the fact, in 1989, the clock tower at the library was named after the 3 young people, and a memorial plaque with a brief history of Freedom Summer was placed at the inside foyer of the library. The clock tower can be seen all across campus and is one of the campus’s most noticeable features.  Nevertheless, with the passage of time and the presence of other catastrophes involving people from this campus, Freedom Summer was not as well known by my students. There are newer memorials for 9/11/2001 and for Covid-19. I found all of these memorials on early morning walks through campus, and felt overwhelmed by the enormity of what Walter Benjamin in Theses of the Philosophy of History calls “the wreckage upon wreckage of history … Where we perceive a chain of events, he [the Angel of History] sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”  Any of the memorial markers bearing witness to “the wreckage upon wreckage of history “ would connect to one of Baldwin’s major concepts in “Artist’s Struggle”: all safety is an illusion.  But then I considered another major concept presented by Baldwin in “Artist’s Struggle”: how artists create light from darkness. I remembered that another classroom building on campus, one of the older ones, displayed a number of inspirational quotes by prominent writers/educators on its inside and outside walls, which had been constructed as part of a building renovation two decades ago.  One of the quotes was from James Baldwin‘s essay “In Search of a Majority” reads, “The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in” (Collected Essays, p. 221). This quote captures a major concept from Artist’s Struggle and Freedom Summer: of not accepting things as they are, of working to make the world a better place, of creating light from the darkness of the wreckage of history.  Perhaps in the 2020s this concept remains hopelessly problematic, or perhaps even impossibly idealistic. After all, what unearned privileges might one possess to have the peace of mind to consider the question of making the world a better place? How can anyone processing ongoing trauma begin to consider a better world?   When I arrived on campus the day of the field trip I was greeted by a chalk art installation in front of the classroom building. One chalking posed a question that seemed related to the project of engaging with space and place: “History repeats…What follows?” This inquiry reminded me of the in-class writing prompt I had prepared as an introduction to the field trip: When we visit these sites, write down everything you notice. What does each memorial/marker look like? What is the scenery around it? What are your responses to what you see around you? What connections do you find to Baldwin’s “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity”? There are no easy answers to these questions, or answers for which words are sufficient. Instead, I offer my short video of the field trip, and the various photos of sites that comprise the video.   All photos taken by Susan Bernstein in October and November 2023.    A view from the edge of campus under a blue sky with clouds. Autumn trees in the foreground, Manhattan skyline in the background.   Chalk art on a campus sidewalk. Blue chalk on pavement: reads History Repeats…What follows?   In the summer of 1964, Queens College student Andrew Goodman joined the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. He was assigned to work on voter registration with James Earl Chaney and Michael Schwerner. Returning from a visit to a rural church, they were kidnapped and murdered. Their deaths inspired countless others to continue the struggle for equality and justice for all Americans. Dedicated on May 10, 1989.   Cheney-Goodman-Schwerner Clock Tower under a bright blue autumn sky with trees and college buildings in the background.   James Baldwin quote from “In Search of a Majority” in steel letters placed on the outside wall of a campus building: “The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.”     ... 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.   For me, and many of my students, this is a hard part of the semester. There is a kind of liminality to it, a neither here nor there. Midterms are over, but finals are not quite in view. It’s almost Thanksgiving, but not quite. Assignments are in full force and fall viruses are too. To keep it real, at this moment, some students may not be seeing much of a distinction between an assignment and a virus. At this time more than ever, I am thinking about how to keep students engaged in the classroom, which means it’s the time of year for some fully in-class, credit-bearing activities that take the place of take-home assignments. This semester, I stumbled upon an assignment that fits this bill: A fun activity to help students apply the concepts in Lao Tsu’s The Tao Te Ching and The Analects of Confucius. I printed out a Dear Abby advice column (later students told me that no one reads Dear Abby and I should go to Reddit instead…noted!) and we read through a letter that a woman had sent in about her new husband taking his adult child off of his insurance and asking him to pay his own way. I picked this particular advice column topic based on content from a previous class conversation about the role of parents in adult children’s lives. In groups, I had students write advice for this woman using a quotation from The Tao or The Analects. They then read the advice that was actually given to her by the advice columnist. The class discussed if their advice was different or similar to the “professional” advice and analyzed whether her response seemed to come from a more collectivist or individualist model. Students gained many insights about The Analects and The Tao and also about the information missing in the column and how we may shape our stories to try to get the advice we want. I wasn’t anticipating these additional insights, and I will say that it’s the additional insights that keep me going as a professor! I believe that the advice column assignment could be applied to a variety of content and skills-based courses. Students can be asked to give advice as characters from stories, nurses-in-training, even as numbers (would a fraction want a different outcome than a negative number?); don’t be afraid to get creative. I’ve found this to be an activity that is quite equalizing. A student may have very little knowledge of the texts we are studying, but they may have had an experience similar to one being written in the advice column—their skills and energy pair nicely with those who have deeper insights into the course texts. This particular assignment also has a quality to it that is helpful right now—it takes very little energy on the part of the professor. Students can even be the ones to search for the advice columns in class on their smart phones if pre-selecting them is too challenging given other demands this time of year. One of the mantras that keeps me going at the end of November is “Keep it simple. Keep it interesting. Make space.” Write some of the in-class activities you have used to enliven your November classrooms in the comments below! ... 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 preschoolers, Dylan and Escher.   For me, and many of my students, this is a hard part of the semester. There is a kind of liminality to it, a neither here nor there. Midterms are over, but finals are not quite in view. It’s almost Thanksgiving, but not quite. Assignments are in full force and fall viruses are too. To keep it real, at this moment, some students may not be seeing much of a distinction between an assignment and a virus. At this time more than ever, I am thinking about how to keep students engaged in the classroom, which means it’s the time of year for some fully in-class, credit-bearing activities that take the place of take-home assignments. This semester, I stumbled upon an assignment that fits this bill: A fun activity to help students apply the concepts in Lao Tsu’s The Tao Te Ching and The Analects of Confucius. I printed out a Dear Abby advice column (later students told me that no one reads Dear Abby and I should go to Reddit instead…noted!) and we read through a letter that a woman had sent in about her new husband taking his adult child off of his insurance and asking him to pay his own way. I picked this particular advice column topic based on content from a previous class conversation about the role of parents in adult children’s lives. In groups, I had students write advice for this woman using a quotation from The Tao or The Analects. They then read the advice that was actually given to her by the advice columnist. The class discussed if their advice was different or similar to the “professional” advice and analyzed whether her response seemed to come from a more collectivist or individualist model. Students gained many insights about The Analects and The Tao and also about the information missing in the column and how we may shape our stories to try to get the advice we want. I wasn’t anticipating these additional insights, and I will say that it’s the additional insights that keep me going as a professor! I believe that the advice column assignment could be applied to a variety of content and skills-based courses. Students can be asked to give advice as characters from stories, nurses-in-training, even as numbers (would a fraction want a different outcome than a negative number?); don’t be afraid to get creative. I’ve found this to be an activity that is quite equalizing. A student may have very little knowledge of the texts we are studying, but they may have had an experience similar to one being written in the advice column—their skills and energy pair nicely with those who have deeper insights into the course texts. This particular assignment also has a quality to it that is helpful right now—it takes very little energy on the part of the professor. Students can even be the ones to search for the advice columns in class on their smart phones if pre-selecting them is too challenging given other demands this time of year. One of the mantras that keeps me going at the end of November is “Keep it simple. Keep it interesting. Make space.” Write some of the in-class activities you have used to enliven your November classrooms in the comments below! ... View more

I recently asked my students a simple, open-ended question about the writer’s tone.  I had made print copies of the text, and I had projected it onto the board at the front of the room.  After a few seconds of silence, I pointed towards the first few lines of Wardle’s essay, which I read aloud: There is no such thing as writing in general. Do you doubt this claim? Test it out. Go to your desk right now and attempt to write something in general. Then I asked again,  “What sort of voice is speaking?  Can you see the boosters that we just talked about?  What do you think?” Silence.  After about ten seconds, I prodded again.  “Any thoughts?  No right or wrong here.” Still nothing.  I scanned the room.   Eight of the nine students in this corequisite section of FYC were spread across three rows of seminar tables.    They glanced from papers to laptops—and occasionally made eye contact with me.  But they did not offer any responses.   Two students were checking their phones.  I know about wait-time—I teach the concept in pedagogy and tutoring courses.   But as the seconds ticked by, the silence felt increasingly suffocating, as if the space for discussion were actually contracting, not expanding.   As the pace of the class slowed to a complete stop and the energy plummeted, my frustration rose. Photo by Nathan Dumlao via UnsplashIn fact, I was already irritated by the fact that only two of the students had participated in an online peer review the prior week, when I canceled a class session because of a conference.  I considered just ending the class with some snark:  “Since you all clearly don’t want to be here or learn anything, you can just go home.”  “I guess I can’t compete with whatever is on your phones.”  “This is a simple question, people.  Get off your phones and at least pretend to pay attention.” “If you want to get out of here on time, I suggest you make some effort to contribute.” But I held my tongue.  My son once told me he thought most students were conditioned not to trust instructors, not to respond, not to feel safe speaking in the classroom.  So, I did not chastise.  All told, we had been through several minutes of silence, so I just made a concluding comment and transitioned to the next point of focus: “I see you guys are giving this some thought—sometimes it takes a while to put those thoughts into words.  That question of tone is something you will want to consider as you get started on our next paper.  Let’s take a look at those instructions.” That session was an incredible disappointment to me—the pace, energy, and lack of participation felt like so much wasted time.  After class, I emailed my usual reminder about what students needed to do (in this case, choose the argument text they wanted to analyze), but I had no confidence that we would accomplish much in the next class.   Over the next 48 hours, I received emails from all eight of those students:  they were sending me links to the articles they had chosen, making sure that they would be good choices for the assignment.  And during the next class, all eight of them worked on annotating the language and argument components in their chosen texts.  As I walked around the room to talk to them individually, they identified the claims, audience, reasons, evidence—and even tone—in their chosen pieces.   Students who had made no obvious connection to the material two days before left the class with working thesis statements and outlines. I am so grateful for the perspective of wise students—much younger than I am—who remind me not to waste the silence. ... View more

by Jenn Fishman and Darci Thoune This is the fifth post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a 2-day annual event hosted online and in Milwaukee, WI, by a group that includes Darci and Jenn. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “symposium.”  Professional meetings are a mixed bag, whatever we call them: conferences, conventions, institutes, seminars, or workshops. On one hand, they give us chances to share work, learn from each other, and network beyond our home programs, departments, and campuses. On the other hand, conference-going can seem obligatory (i.e., just another CV line); attending can present real hardships, financial and otherwise; and too often professional meetings reinforce institutional biases. So, how do we make choices about what to participate in, how, when, and why?  Some of us involved in the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS) recently asked ourselves these questions thinking about our own, much beloved annual event. The WIS just turned 5, and 29 of us celebrated with an article that appears in Community Literacy Journal (17.2). Our conversations were free-ranging reflections on our upstart event, a local meeting with national reach that usually registers about 100 onsite and online participants, all writers and writing educators. Talking with each other confirmed our sense that the WIS is a “happening,” which Geoff Sirc defines as “a space no one wants to leave.” That feeling was shared by one-time attendees and regular participants. It even inspired some colleagues, including Jessie Wirkus Haynes at Bellin College and Barb Clauer and Melissa Kaplan at Lansing Community College, to plan WIS satellite events that will take place on their campuses later this year.    Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin hosts the annual Writing Innovation Symposium     But what happens at the WIS or any other professional meeting to make it a “happening”: to make participants feel drawn to stay or, in our case, to return from year to year and even to extend their experience in some way?  While we don’t have a single answer or recipe to share, we have some ideas. We notice, for example, that the WIS centers us as writers as well as writing educators, and the event itself centers on interactivity that is rooted in relations. For example, in 2023 when our theme was “Writing As_____,” plenary presenter Melissa Tayles did more than talk to us about trauma-informed writing pedagogy. She got us writing and helped us develop what she described as “sustainable plans for instructor well-being and regulation in the writing process.” The next day at the plenary workshop, Barb and Melissa invited us to write collaboratively, and we spent 2 hours immersed in the collective creativity of their Community-Generated Poetry Project. Before and after these sessions, we talked to each other. We talked about the plenaries and the courses we were teaching. We talked about our students, our writing research, and our families. We swapped references and recipes. We connected as writers and writing educators—and as people. At the closing session, when a student group called The Comet Project performed some of our poems (from the plenary workshop), we were rapt. Together, we laughed at the humor they found in our words, and we were moved by the depth and emotion they discovered in our drafts. When they finished, as we applauded and applauded, it sure seemed like no one wanted to leave.  We draw from this set of observations a sense of how important it is for conferences and symposia to welcome us as we are and wish to be, both professionally and more broadly, more personally. We see how glad WIS participants are, including ourselves, to reciprocate: to offer things we know about writing and to glean new knowledge—and not just by listening. WIS taps into a shared desire for something that might be comparable to the hands-on learning that many of us like to incorporate into our classes. WIS also cultivates a robust “underlife” by giving participants so many opportunities for the exchanges they wish to have over and above–as well as before, during, and after—formal programming.  As we and our WIS colleague Jennifer Kontny embark on more formal inquiry into what makes a professional meeting a happening, we wonder how you would describe the conventions, seminars, workshops, &c. that have meant the most to you.   If you’re interested in learning more about the WIS consider joining us in Milwaukee at WIS 2024! Read our CFP here. ... View more

Like so many fellow citizens, I’ve been watching television and reading news reports—lately with horror and deep concern. In the midst of the Israel-Hamas war, college campuses have become small war zones of their own, with antisemitism and Islamophobia rampant, with university officials struggling to respond effectively. Extremism is at work almost everywhere I look, and divides seem never to have been deeper or wider. I had these deeply troubling thoughts on my mind when I stumbled on an article on “Why Campuses Need Centers for Pluralism” by Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith America and author of We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy (2022). Patel sees the current divisions on campuses reaching a crisis point, where many students “are in extreme distress, feeling profound isolation, and a handful are even taking part in actions that border on physical violence. Some are no longer willing to sit in class together. One can only imagine the tension in the dining hall, the relationships that have crumbled and the number of student groups that are melting down.” Across the country, writing teachers don’t have to imagine such tensions; they are living with them every day.  We can, of course, look on such times as offering up teachable moments—or at least we can hope for such moments, when we can guide students in gaining more information about and understanding of the history of the Middle East, though doing so is not likely to resolve current tensions or change hearts and minds. Patel admits as much, before going on to say that, as one who has devoted his life to “proactively engaging religious diversity” he believes that being able to work with people with whom you disagree is the single most important value for a diverse community. Imagine if doctors who have different views on the war in the Middle East refused to perform heart surgery together. Or if firefighters who had different politics regarding gun control refused to fight fires together. Or if Little League coaches with different views on abortion refused to coach together. Patel argues that campuses should develop Centers for Pluralism, whose goal would be to prepare students, faculty, and staff alike to engage across differences, becoming “models of cooperation between people of different identities and ideologies and training grounds for leaders who can bridge divides.” He recognizes the difficulty of doing so, especially in the present moment, arguing that too many campuses have developed policies and practices that increase tensions rather than building pluralistic cooperation, so much so that campus offices that traditionally facilitated cooperative dialogue instead “actually help fan the flames that now threaten to engulf” the campus. One example of a "Center for Pluralism" in Ottawa, Canada Patel believes that the last ten years or so have seen the growth of a robust “pluralism field,” and he gives many examples of such groups at work (see his article in Inside Higher Education for names of these groups and links to them, as well as links to a number of campus-based pluralist projects). The need for Centers for Pluralism, Patel says, has never been more crucial, first because of the horrific Middle East war we are witnessing from afar but also from deep divides over issues related to gun control, reproductive rights, or the election of 2024. What we need, in Patel’s view, are leaders who can help people who disagree on X still work effectively together on Y or Z: “We want students to be protesting respectfully on the quad, but we also need them to be working together to find cures for cancer.”  Having spent much of my life advocating for and teaching collaboration and collaborative strategies, Patel’s argument resonates with me, and reminds me of the role writing teachers can play in creating the kind of classroom ethos that can accommodate differences and disagreements while also providing students opportunities to listen across those differences and to do so in a safe space.  Right now, as I hear of so many hate-filled acts taking place on and off campus, I know I do not have all the answers or the strategies necessary to find ways to listen to one another with the goal of understanding, especially when we do not agree. But I also know that I—like writing teachers everywhere—must keep on trying. As Wayne Booth once famously remarked, “The only real alternative to war is rhetoric”—that is to say: the kind of talking and mutual conversation that respects differences, listens actively, builds understanding, and, where possible, seeks common ground.   Image by Jozsef Varga via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

by Abigayle Farrier, Ph.D., professor of English at University of North Texas This is the fourth post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a 2-day annual event hosted online and in Milwaukee, WI. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “symposium.”  I arched my eyebrows at the text I received, double checking that the sender was, in fact, my best friend from grad school – a fellow college writing instructor – and not one of my friends who teaches elementary school. It didn’t take long for my friend, Katelyn Thompson, an instructor at Kilgore College, to explain that she was giving her students a day to do arts and crafts. In the middle of their major research paper, Katelyn asks her students to take a break from writing and draw pictures that correspond to their topic, color outside the lines, and generally return to behavior we typically relegate to our elementary school days. “Kindergarten day” has now become a permanent part of her pedagogy, and she credits improved metacognition and student engagement to this strategy. A student collage As the semester continued, I often returned to the idea of crafting in the college composition classroom and found myself wishing I had asked students to create artistic renditions of their first paper, a personal narrative. Pairing an assignment that requires students to reflect on who they are and where they came from – a topic that often results in papers on their childhood – with an arts and crafts day seemed like a perfect fit. I was eager to implement this idea of composing with art supplies, but struggled to find another obvious opportunity in my curriculum. My class that semester, in the fall of 2021, was a Monday/Wednesday class that ended at 6:50pm. For many of my students, this was the first time they had been in-person since their junior year of high school. I sat alone in my deserted office hours, looking at the lesson plan I didn’t quite feel like teaching, and knew that attendance was unlikely to be high after a draining day back from the longest vacation of the semester. I suddenly remembered “kindergarten day!” In a rather frantic dash, I gathered up old magazines the department had sitting in stacks, grabbed all the scissors, tape, and glue sticks I could see, and found – by some miracle – exactly twenty abandoned folders that could serve as canvases. I hurried to my class, expecting to encounter approximately five students who had made it back on campus. To my surprise, fifteen pairs of eyes greeted me. “Welcome to kindergarten day!” My students watched with befuddled amusement as I put only two sentences on the board: “Using the materials provided, find at least 5 images and a couple of phrases that represent your writing, writing process, and/or who you are as a writer. Create a collage in the folders provided.” Over the course of the next hour, my students chatted energetically with one another as they created works of art that spoke to not only their work in our class but to who they are as people. One student captioned an image of an opened pill with glitter spilling out: “I uncap the mess that is my brain and see what sticks.” Another wrote, “(What happens halfway through)…Things Fall Apart” and “I was flying (by the seat of my pants)” as he blended article headlines with his own descriptors of his writing process. This activity – which was intended to be a low-stakes creative assignment, ended up generating thought-provoking and quite beautiful representations of students’ identities and their relationships with writing. A student collage As I concluded the class, I asked my students to come to the board and write their own “Why I Write” statement, inspired by Terry Tempest Williams, and the reflection motivated by their collage work. We all stood there in silence for a minute after the last person finished. I generally pride myself on having an inclusive, community-based classroom, but I had never felt anything quite like this before. What had begun as a filler activity on a down day had become the most meaningful activity we did all semester. There was now a connection between the members of my class that had not existed before. This experience left us with a renewed sense of the importance of writing, of composing, of connecting with ourselves and with others. Picture of the whiteboard with my students’ “Why I Write” statements Now, I teach this activity towards the end of every semester. Students reflect on how their writing processes have changed over the course of the semester, how connections – to their homes, their communities, themselves, and our class – shape their writing, and how writing has shaped and been shaped by their identities. To be sure, our in-person, hands-on activity contrasts sharply with the digital forms of communication that are now part of our writing lives, from online meetings to AI-generated writing. But perhaps there’s something we can all learn from a return to “kindergarten days.” What other hands-on activities are you incorporating in your writing classrooms? Do you integrate creative or artistic activities into your lesson plans? Have you found this to be successful in your own classroom? I would love to hear from other instructors who have incorporated similar activities – and those who have chosen not to.   If you’re interested in learning more about the WIS consider joining us in Milwaukee at WIS 2024! Read our CFP here. ... View more

Writing in Counter Arts and recently reprinted in Medium, journalist and digital media expert Jeff Hayward stumbled on an AI “test” offered by the Globe and Mail. Fourteen questions in all, asking a test taker to distinguish between images, voice/video clips, and texts created by humans and generative AI. Hayward was relieved, and just a little surprised, that he got all the questions in the first two sets correct: the AI generated images were somehow “just too perfect,” he said, and the voice/video cliffs felt somehow “off” to him—and his hunches paid off.  What really did surprise him, however, was the fact that he got all three of the questions about written passages wrong, thinking that the AI-generated texts sounded “more human” than those generated by humans. So an experienced working journalist, who spends time every day writing and studying writing by others, was taken in by AI. Yikes! The Globe and Mail quiz is behind a paywall, but I was able to take a look at it without being able to take it. My guess is that I would have been very lucky to get a third of the answers right—and be relatively unable to distinguish material generated by humans from those generated by generative AI. Double yikes! I’m wondering how our students fare at such tasks. And while the Globe and Mail quiz is available only to subscribers, here are a couple of other similar online quizzes that are accessible, the first from Buzzfeed and the second from the Statistics and Tech Data Library. You might want to try then out with your students. I, meanwhile, am trying to learn to get better at this kind of detection!     ... View more

This is a post about discovery drafts and WHY discovery drafts matter. When writing is viewed as a product and not a process, the benefits of discovery might easily be lost. Instead, writing becomes a matter of filling in blanks for the 5 W's + H: basic questions for fulfilling the writing prompt.  Who is the audience?  What is the prompt?  Where can information be found for correct citation style?  When is the writing due?  How long must it be?   WHY must I do this writing? The first found W’s do not include pronouns and the responses are generally straightforward. WHY is the existential question that leads to other questions: Because I said so? Because the course syllabus requires this writing? Because the department or program or school requires this writing? Because the workforce requires this writing? But WHY is this writing required–here and now?  Because writing is a means of discovering what is on my mind. As a writer with ADHD, WHY causes fireworks to explode in my brain, and the fireworks explode so fast that my prefrontal cortex can’t keep up, try as I might. I might try and try and try, but the sound of explosions fill  my ears, the fast-moving colors flood the tear ducts of my eyes. My mind is overloaded with anxiety about the polluted air that follows the fireworks, and I remember the orange sky choked with Canadian wildfire smoke a month earlier and that caused another air pollution alert. I lose focus. I don’t know where to begin. Fireworks exploding over apartment buildings near the East River with the NYC skyline in the background. Photo by Susan Bernstein, July 4, 2023   Orange sky over apartment buildings near the East River in NYC at 1:58 pm, June 7, 2023. Photo by Susan Bernstein   But those events happened months ago. Isn’t it time to move on? Isn’t time for normal, or at least a new normal, and maybe even the status quo? But must climate change be accepted as the status quo? WHY?  Enter the Discovery Draft–also called a Zero Draft or a Brain Dump–where the writer writes down whatever is in their head. In grad school, I remember being told that discovery drafts meant “just putting down anything to get started.” But, as an ADHD writer teaching students actively questioning WHY, I have since learned that focus remains crucial for getting started.  These revelations came at Halloween, a day of tricks and treats. On public transit, my co-commuters were in costume and so was I. My hair was green. I wore a witch button and a #FundCUNYnow rubber bracelet. I had candy and pretzels in my backpack for sustenance to nourish the writing process. I stopped at the campus gate to take a selfie and later noticed in the photo that the wall) holding up the gate was missing a brick. Below the missing brick was a “Do Not Enter” sign.  The purpose of the sign was to keep vehicular traffic from using an exit on campus that looked like a campus entrance. There were other entrances across the Boulevard and, since the end of random testing requirements for students, staff, and faculty, we no longer needed to show our IDs at the entrance.  Nevertheless, I began deconstructing the implications of that sign for people in the neighborhood, or those riding by in cars and buses along the busy boulevard. What was the impact of seeing “Do Not Enter” posted on a college gate? My brain felt feverish.  It was time to start writing–and it was time to share the Halloween Extra Credit Assignment. Halloween selfie by the campus gate in front of a Do Not Enter sign posted on a white brick wall. One of the bricks above the sign has noticeably deteriorated. Photo by Susan Bernstein, October 31, 2023 Halloween Extra Credit Assignment projected on a classroom smart board. The last line is whited out to protect instructor's email address and submission platform information. The assignment follows. Photo by Susan Bernstein October 31, 2023     🎃📝🎃 Halloween Extra Credit Assignment 🎃📝🎃 Write a discovery draft for WP 2. This is a preliminary rough draft that is separate from the more formal rough draft due later this week, and can be written in class. You can use the Discovery Draft for your WP 2 rough draft and for your WP 2 final copy. Your discovery draft should: Respond to the following prompt: Where do you find your inspiration for writing in English 110?: the Baldwin readings? Everyday life? The museum field trip? Another artist or artistic creation (including music)? All, some, one, or none of the above? Something else?Provide evidence from analysis of texts and artwork, everyday life, Use your intellect and imagination. Take risks with what you say and how you say it, which can include (optional and as appropriate):  Examples from personal experience. This is NOT required. You can make up fictional experiences if you would like. Figurative Language and/or Creative Genres (fan fiction,science fiction, metaphors, similes, and other poetic, spoken word, and other lyrical language).   Write at least 500 words in 2 hours– but try for 800-1000 words. Don’t worry about grammar, punctuation or spelling! Submit your discovery draft to your e-journal.   While they chose not to compose in experimental genres, students wrote about a variety of inspirations, in school and out of school: reading James Baldwin, the museum tour and workshop, social justice concerns, mental health considerations, and more that could be revised for their second writing project of the term. As is my aspirational practice, I wrote in-class with the students. I wrote to shift ADHD executive function overload to hyper focus on the present: the intersections of Halloween and pedagogical theory and practice.   My writing turned out to be the discovery draft for this Bits post about discovery drafts and why they matter. Discovery drafts matter because process matters, and process allows writers to find focus. I’m not talking about lockstep drafting of intro, body, conclusion. In a discovery draft, a potential introduction might be written at the very end. Potential body paragraphs might appear out of sequence. What I mean instead is writing out of order to discover and disentangle ideas, and taking what is found to create something new.    In other words, I still want to read and create writing that goes beyond 5 W’s+H, writing that focuses on recognizing the world not only as it is, but as it could be, writing that doesn’t sit in a writing that spurs me to action, and lifts me from despair–writing that attempts to discover a conclusion, but cannot find one, and reaches out for hope instead.   “The Possible’s slow fuse is lit By the imagination.” –Emily Dickinson. Photo by Susan Bernstein, October 3, 2023.     ... View more