In these dark days of so much hatred and war, I am grateful for even brief moments of comfort and hope (not coincidentally the title of a wonderful album from Yo Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott). This holiday season offers some such moments—whether in the tradition of Hanukkah, which concluded on December 15; Christmas and its associated holy days; Kwanzaa, which stretches from December 26 to January 1; the Muslim Eid al-Fitr, which marks the close of the holy month of Ramadan; the Buddhist Rohatsu, which falls on December 8—or another important event.   Whatever traditions you and your students are marking this year, I hope that the events will bring time for reflection and reassessment, and especially for grace and goodness and kindness and love. In these times, we must search for, honor, and hold on to our commonalities—with persistence and commitment. This is our time to shine, to make our light known, and to share it freely.   Happy holidays to all! Andrea ... 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.   ‘Twas the night before finals and all through the halls, Photo by Markus Spiske via Unsplash Teachers were dealing with frantic phone calls. The students who’d waited till semester’s end, Now begged for extensions or to do work again. Red pens were a-marking and grades calculating. The final draft essays on the desk accumulating. There’s not enough coffee; there’s not enough cakes To make it through the mass of grading that waits. When, what to my blurry, tired eyes should appear, But the gleam of my computer beckoning me near. The ChatGPT login called out from the screen. Its promise to help me reached out like a dream. So I typed out a prompt to feed the AI. It can scan essays for me in the blink of an eye. It won’t do the whole job, but it offers reprieve, Highlighting some errors with computerized ease. With digital fury, it scanned work with glee, Spotting errors in syntax - a pixelated referee. Yet, amidst all the whirr as it processed the text, There still are some issues AI can’t detect. For remember, dear teacher, in this AI-filled quest, That no silicon robot can replace what is best. Armed with a teacher’s skill, wisdom, and grace, I then graded the full essay at my very own pace. I can give my attention to ideas and to rhetoric. I can comment on the essay’s argument and aesthetic. My time and attention goes to process and writing With time saved by no longer comma splice fighting. There’s no CyberClaus There’s no Robo St. Nick If you’re looking for shortcuts, I don’t have a real trick. But AI gives feedback, and it gives it quite quickly Though using it sometimes may feel a bit prickly. It doesn’t grade essays; it won’t do all your work, But a cyber assistant surely can’t hurt. Your students can use it to correct their own drafts, To find their own errors and rhetorical gaffs. You can even use it as a first run pre-grader, As long as you take your own look at the work later. So, my gift to you is this sample AI prompt To use if you want to give this method a romp. Use it with caution; use it with care. It’s not a replacement for your pedagogical flare: In the realm of essays, where ideas take flight, I seek AI’s aid to make them grammatically right. Enhance their structure; let coherence gleam; Analyze them with care; like a well-crafted dream; Give 4 suggestions to fortify this writing. Identify errors; make the vocab exciting. Now, ask for my essay; let the writing unfold In the digital realm, where great stories are told. ... 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.     Every teacher who is talking about AI is also talking about cheating.  My response in these conversations is pretty cynical: “cheaters gonna cheat.” Somewhere in ancient Sumeria, scholars earnestly etched out the first cuneiform lesson plans while their students passed papyrus crib sheets and used their barley money to outsource their homework. Cheating is an ancient tradition as sacred to assignments as procrastination. It’s not that I’m giving up on academic integrity; it’s just that my time and mental health can’t survive if I focus for too long on policing cheating. The reality is that if the goal is just a grade, it is faster and easier to cheat, and with generative AI advancing faster than Hermes on roller blades, there’s very little chance that I’ll catch it. Instead, I need a modern hoplite spear to deflect their temptation to cheat to protect myself and my students from the weaknesses that may lead them to seek solutions from ChatGPT instead of their professor. I’m getting to a point here … syllabus policy statements. Revising our academic integrity policies has never been a more Herculean task and, at times, it will feel like a Sisyphean one. Where do we even start? I suspect that if we start with a list of restrictions and prohibitions, especially when it comes to generative AI, we essentially create a challenge to the cheaters to see if they can outsmart us – and they can.  Instead of setting up an adversarial system, however, an academic integrity policy can be reframed as an agreement – a description of what students have the right to expect of me, their classmates, and each other. Like all modern writers tasked with creating a document with which they have no context or experience, I started my new policy statement by invoking Athena, sacrificing a USB drive, and consulting ChatGPT. It’s the 21st-century version of seeking wisdom from the Oracle, only with fewer riddles and more cat memes. To be honest (which is sort of the point), it generated some great ideas, the most compelling of which being the need for transparency.   Full transparency in teaching requires that I disclose to my students that generative AI is constantly improving, which means that course policies may change during the semester. Most importantly, any policy I create must affirm students’ rights to expect clear instructions about when and how AI is allowed, and it must offer grace when mistakes are made. Their responsibility is to honestly disclose when and how they use AI in their work. In my class, they do this by answering reflection questions before they submit every assignment, but that’s just one method.  Ryan Watkins' "From AI to A+"and Erika Martinez’s “Guidelines for Generative AI Use” each provide excellent starting points for clarifying AI usage for both teachers and students. My disclosure strategy seems to be working, and I’ve learned a lot. The reflection questions reinforce my optimistic philosophy that most students don’t cheat from malice or deception, but from misunderstanding or even from fear.  When students tell me what they have done with the AI, we can discuss what is and is not appropriate.  For example, one of my students showed me how she used ChatGPT to define some rhetorical terms she was too embarrassed to admit she didn’t know; another student used it to explain the opposing point of view to his argument so that he could counter it.  I didn’t tell my students to do either of these things, but they taught me great ways to use the tool to enter the rhetorical conversation.  On the other hand, when a student showed me the “help” she received from ChatGPT, I had to address the fact that she had pretty much let the AI write her entire essay; however, because she was honest – and honestly confused – we worked together to develop an appropriate plan before she was required to redo the entire assignment.  No Fs were needed; some education was, but that’s what I’m here for – literally. So, like a Pedagogical Prometheus, I’m handing my students a fiery gift – the knowledge that generative AI exists and I don’t know everything about it – in hopes that they’ll use it to illuminate their writing and not burn down the entire course. We can even improve their writing and my teaching while avoiding angering the academic gods, one honest conversation at a time. ... View more

Last week, I wrote about women’s attempts to get into the act where speaking was concerned, and about how colleges tried to prevent that from happening. As odd as it seems from our perspective today, those efforts tied in to the growing prominence of writing and the decline in power of speaking. (This is definitely the longest post I have subjected readers to, but I hope some will bear with me.) While oral discourse practices certainly continued into the 19th century, writing grew in power and prestige. In the ancient world, the “artistic proofs”—i.e., those created by the rhetor and delivered orally—were considered most persuasive, but by the 19th century, the “inartistic proofs”—written laws, testimonies, and so on—claimed superiority: “put it in writing” became the byword. Aided by new technologies such as improved typewriters, better printing presses, inexpensive writing equipment, newspapers, magazines, and books proliferated at a great rate, and the reading public expanded exponentially. Colleges, whose enrollments soared in the last half of the century, began to focus much more on writing than speaking. After all, colleges no longer prepared white men just for the bar, the statehouse, or the pulpit, but for careers in business and industry, where writing was increasingly the major mode of communication. And burgeoning enrollments meant that it was harder and harder to have students give speeches of all kinds: writing increasingly became the means of showing that you were worthy of progressing through the college years—and of success in the business world. Much has been written of Harvard’s Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory, and of the traditional Harvard curriculum that featured four years of rhetorical education. That curriculum began to change not only with growing enrollments but with the appointment of Francis James Child to the Chair in 1851. A folklorist by training and trade, Child turned away from rhetoric and its commitment to speaking in favor of reading and writing: students increasingly spent their time in the analysis and interpretation of written literary texts and wrote their “themes” in response. By the beginning of the 20th century, John Clapp—writing in the English Journal, summed up the situation by noting that “for the purposes of the intellectual life, which college graduates are to lead, talking is of little importance, and writing of very great importance” (23). University Museum at Harvard University Strongly influenced by Harvard’s entry exam, which focused exclusively on print literary texts, and by the Modern Language Association, founded in 1883 to “promote the study of literature and language,” departments of English in the U.S. dropped “rhetoric” or an emphasis on speaking in favor of reading and writing about literature. The MLA, however, fractured in the early twentieth century as scholars interested in the teaching of composition and rhetoric split off in 1911 to form the National Council of Teachers of English in response to what they called the “changing needs and values regarding education, particularly English language education” of an “increasingly diverse student population” who were being failed by the very narrow curriculum offered in schools and colleges. In 1914, teachers of speech and linguists also left the MLA, forming the National Communication Association; this group will hold its 105th convention this fall with a theme of “Rhetoric for Survival.”  Some attention to elocution lingered in pre-college US classes (my grandmother remembered weekly recitations in her Tennessee Quaker school—telling me more than once about the boy in her class who recited the very same poem every week for an entire year without the teacher noticing it!). But by the mid-twentieth century, the shift from the ear and mouth (for speaking) to the eye and hand (for writing) seemed complete. In the United States, first-year writing programs and graduate programs in composition became ubiquitous, and few thought to question the status of writing “properly” as a key to success.  When Walter Ong and Eric Havelock began publishing works about the rise of literacy in the ancient world, they seemed to reify the centrality of writing not just to academic and professional success but to thought itself. In Orality and Literacy Ong describes the revolution in technology that was writing, a revolution he viewed as rippling throughout society, transforming the way people think as they move from the immediate and concrete ways of knowing in an oral culture to the more abstract ways of knowing in a literate culture. In his words: Writing, commitment of the word to space, enlarges the potentiality of language almost beyond measure, [and] restructures thought (7-8). In much of his work, then, Ong posits a tension between the “old oral, mnemonic world of imitation, aggregative, redundant, copious, traditionalist, warmly human, participatory,” and the “analytic, sparse, exact, abstract, visualist, immobile world of [Platonic] ideas” (164) and writing. Many scholars (such as Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, Brian Street and Beth Daniells) pushed back against a “great divide” or “great leap” theory of literacy, rejecting what they saw as a totalizing view of writing as a technology that transforms thought. Indeed, in his later work, Ong is more judicious in the claims he makes for writing, perhaps recognizing that Eric Havelock and others might have gone too far in arguing for a direct causal link between literacy and abstract or ”philosophical” thought. Janet Emig, another scholar who compares speech and writing, earned a Ph.D. in Education at Harvard, where she studied cognitive theories and student learning. Her study of the composing processes of 12th graders was a groundbreaking book that took the relatively new field of “rhetoric and composition” in the U.S. by storm. But her 1977 essay, “Writing as Mode of Learning” also worked to underscore the primary importance of writing. Emig opens this seminal article by saying that “Writing represents a unique mode of learning—not merely valuable, not merely special, but unique . . . writing possesses a cluster of attributes that correspond uniquely to certain powerful learning strategies” (122). Emig makes clear that she is not denigrating the importance of talking to learning, but she goes on to focus on the differences between the two and to argue that if talk is important to learning, writing is absolutely vital. She warns against blurring or ignoring these differences, which she spends the rest of the article enumerating. Arguing that “writing involves the fullest possible functioning of the brain, which entails the active participation in the process of both the left and right hemispheres Writing is markedly bispheral,” Emig goes on to describe writing as learned behavior (speaking is natural, she says); as a technology (speaking is organic); as slower than most talking and thus better at enabling learning. Writing results in a visible graphic product, and is a stark and barren medium (in contrast to the rich luxuriance of talk). She concludes that writing has always had an “aura” or “mystique” surrounding it (while speaking has been seen as mundane and ephemeral) and that “because writing is often our representation of the world made visible, embodying both process and product, writing is more readily a form and source of learning than talking” (124). I remember reading this essay—and then rereading it—as an awe-struck graduate student who not only studied writing and rhetoric in my PhD program but worked hard to legitimate writing studies as of equal significance and importance to the reading of literature. So by the time Emig and Ong were publishing their work on literacy, I was a passionate advocate of writing and of its importance to research, to theories of communication, and to teaching. I am still an advocate of writing, but as I said earlier, now I see it differently than I did then; I see the complexities and the destructive hold that an obsession with “proper” writing has had on generations of writers. And as I came to interrogate my own advocacy of writing and writing itself, I began asking “and what about speaking?” Indeed, it was hard not to ask such questions as the seismic shift in technologies of communication became impossible to ignore. Walter Ong had written about “secondary orality,” that is orality that is singularly marked by writing; I began to think about “secondary literacy,” that is writing that is singularly marked by speaking.  Cindy Selfe answered my question—“what about speaking?”—in a brilliant 2009 essay, “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimedia Composing.” In this essay, Selfe traces the history of the aural composing modalities of speech, music, and sound and shows how they have been systematically eclipsed by the written word. This is a state of affairs Selfe finds understandable but regrettable: The contemporary adherence to alphabetic-only composition constrains the semiotic efforts of individuals and groups who value multiple modalities of expression. (616) In short, the view of writing as the desirable literacy has severely limited the communicative capabilities of writers everywhere. But Selfe too wants to resist a dichotomous binary between speaking and writing, and she tries to do this by adopting the term “aurality”: In using the term ”aurality” rather than the more common orality, I hope to resist models of an oral/literate divide and simplistic characterizations of cultures or groups as either oral or literate in their communicative practices. Humans make and communicate meaning through a combination of modalities—sound, still and moving images, words among them—and using a variety of media. As Selfe points out, during this period the growing status of vision “gradually undermined the position still occupied by other forms of sensory experience.” Seeing is believing. Put it in writing. So the spoken word, with its “soulful’ knowledge, turned inward to the largely silent practices exemplified by St. Jerome’s suspiciously silent reading. Great Shakespearean works were now not heard but rather read and subjected to written analysis: classrooms were quiet spaces where students read and wrote and observed.  Some white women along with African Americans and Hispanics in the U.S. and Indigenous people across North America often retained an attachment to what Selfe terms the network of aurality. Despite often being denied higher education, members of this group still managed to learn writing skills—and to deploy them with passion and precision—while rejecting the violence of literacy and also holding on to oral traditions: storytelling, embodied performances and presentations, church-related activities, verbal games, and other parts of what Peter Elbow terms “vernacular eloquence” in his book-length discussion of “what speech can bring to writing." And indeed, orality/aurality persisted as a kind of steady undertow to writing: teachers and scholars continued to refer to “voice,” to “tone,” to “rhythm," to the flow and musicality of prose. Still, as Selfe notes, “By the end of the twentieth century, the ideological privileging of writing was so firmly established that it had become almost fully naturalized.” During the period of the late 90s and early 2000s, as I continued to explore the history of writing (I taught a course on the history of writing at Ohio State and the Bread Loaf School of English for well over a decade), including its powers and its problems, I began to teach another course that I called “The Language Wars.” This course traced the struggle for the vernacular and the rise of vernacular languages across Europe, then shifted to the United States and the obsession with error-free prose as “good” writing—and the inevitable backlash against this obsession coming from all directions, and especially from women and people of color. We read and interrogated the Students’ Right to their Own Language documents and examined the AAVE debate in detail. We read the work of Michelle Cliff, who said after finishing her Ph.D. in, I think, Victorian literature, that she never wanted to read, or write, again; of fiery women orators such as Sojourner Truth, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Anna Julia Cooper—and many others Shirley Logan has introduced us to. We read Gloria Anzaldua and studied the ways she mixed Spanish, English, Tex-Mex. We read Anishinaabe cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor’s Lost Voices and Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, a term he defines as “an active sense of presence.” I remember the excitement in our classroom as we explored these challenges to traditional print literacy and the even greater excitement as we began to compose pieces ourselves, pieces that mixed modes, languages, dialects, and soundscapes. Gloria Anzaldua When I offered this course, it was always over-enrolled, and perhaps this should have warned me that a new course I called “Writing 2.0: the Art of the Digital Essay” might not be as successful. I arrived at the first class to find only eight students in it. Taken aback, I asked them, as I always do, to introduce themselves and to tell us why they had chosen this course. The first three students said essentially the same thing: “Well, I almost did not choose this class, but I heard you were an OK teacher so I took a chance.” And why did they “almost” not choose it. Again, they were unanimous: the word “essay.” One said “that word makes me think of old people bossing me around—like “don’t get outside the lines in your coloring book.” And of course, what they had in mind was the kind of five-paragraph themes they’d written in high school and what they considered the “long boring” essays featured in many English classes. I had a hard time convincing them that the very word “essay’ carries a connotation of experimentation, of trying something out. They weren’t having it. So, when Adam Banks rose to deliver—and to perform—his CCCC chair’s address in 2015, I was ready for “Funk, Flight, and Freedom.” Adam’s talk mixed rhythms from jazz and hip hop with echoes of the African American sermonic tradition, mixed theorizing with personal anecdote, mixed high-falutin’ academic language with oral vernacular. In one particularly memorable moment, Banks paused to address “the essay,” saying that on this day, he declared it officially “retired” (long and loud applause). Speaking directly to the retiree, Adam said “don’t worry, Professor Essay; you can keep your office campus" and we will even “continue to give awards in your honor.” This is the tradition of resistance, of challenge, of counterpoint that Cindy Selfe explores and celebrates in her essay on aurality and multimodal composing. As she points out, and as Adam Banks demonstrated, discourse practices today are multimodal, multilingual, multimedia rich; they mix genres and styles across multiple semiotic channels. This shift to aurality has been enabled by digital technologies that are changing so quickly we can hardly stay abreast of them, as the possibilities for digital literacies seem almost endless. Print has not and will not disappear, but it is now accompanied by myriad blogs, vlogs, audio and video and imagistic compositions as well, full of illustrations and sounds and animations. Acknowledging the irony of a print text about aurality, Selfe includes four student examples of aural composing, with links so that readers can hear the spoken words. I was thinking of these aural compositions when I listened to friend and colleague Alice Wingwall, a noted photographer who lost her sight in 2000 but continues to work, talk to those attending an exhibit of hers about what she called “my soundscape world.” Increasingly in the U.S., universities are turning to writing programs to provide instruction in oral and multimodal forms of composing. We began this practice at Stanford in 2002, piloting a second required course that focuses on oral/multimodal presentations. In the same spirit, Stanford renamed its writing center the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking, and is expanding its support for multimodal compositions as well. Such moves underscore the point that no single mode of expression is able to convey all the meanings within a text. And what texts students are producing! Digital storytelling is going on everywhere I turn. Stanford’s Storytelling Project, which started as a second-year writing course well over a decade ago, is now a permanent fixture on campus. Just a week ago I was on campus for the Lunsford Oral Presentation of Research Awards, given to a second year student every term. We’ve been giving this award for about a decade now and I get to go every year to hear the winners make their presentation. Today, it seems, writing and speaking are thoroughly intertwined. Selfe concludes her article by reiterating that while she wants us to understand the historical dimensions of the rise of writing and the decline of orality as a general shift, she is not arguing against writing or the value we place on it. Moreover, teachers of writing and speaking must remember that while students today are “intuitively aware” of these changes and shifts, they still require help in understanding them fully—and utilizing them, and we must do so “in ways that are rhetorically effective, critically aware, morally responsible, and personally satisfying” (624). That’s quite a challenge to all of us. And while I have perhaps belabored Selfe’s points a bit too much, I do think it is critically important that we see the big picture of literacy changes across the millennia, that we know where we have been as well as where we are now. And where we are now – well, there’s the rub. After all, Selfe was writing a decade ago. Just think of what we have seen in terms of literacies and technologies in the last ten years. I want to move toward a conclusion, then, by considering some of these changes and innovations, in terms of their promise as well as their problematics. Yes, the relationship between writing and speaking has shifted, but as I’ve just noted, the relationship is still there, as it has been throughout history, though perhaps more intertwined and intense than ever. In fact, MIT researcher Tara Shankar has even offered a new word to capture that relationship: “spriting.” Thank you for your patience. Next week I will offer concluding thoughts and list the sources I have been relying on. Onward!   Images via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

I have written about my small FYC/Corequisite writing course this semester and the challenges that we have faced (sustained silence and misconceptions about difficulty, for example).   I have wondered at times if gaps in age and experience are insurmountable obstacles to teaching effectiveness for me. Case in point: I introduced a discussion of image analysis with a cartoon drawing of Bill Gates holding a vaccine, but not a single student in the class that day knew who Bill Gates was.  It was a teachable moment, for sure, as we searched for information on Gates, vaccines, and protests.  Still, I doubted, yet again, what I was accomplishing. The fact that three students from our already small class disappeared following Thanksgiving break only added to the frustration.  Most of the tough drafting work was complete: after Thanksgiving, students select, polish, and annotate pieces, and they craft a summative reflection to serve as an introduction to their portfolios.   I hoped the final two weeks of class would function as a workshop of sorts—open-ended space for students to collaborate and determine what they wanted to work on, getting feedback and help as needed.   But on our first day back, with a noticeably smaller group in attendance, the students drifted into isolated spaces and worked on their own.  For the next class, I invited my senior writing fellows to visit the class for open-ended conferences.  The fellows had partnered with these students outside of class, but this was the first time I had invited them into the classroom. Each of them sat next to one of the first-year writers and had a few minutes for casual chatting.  Then I heard them dive in: “So tell me what you’re working on.” “Which assignment is giving you the most trouble?” “What’s going into your portfolio?” Their talk continued.   The first-year writers began to respond, tentatively at first, and talk about their work—what they had done, what they wanted to do, what they were confused about.  In fact, these were all the things they were so often hesitant to say to me. After several minutes of these paired conversations, I heard one of the fellows call out to another fellow sitting several feet away:  “Hey, what’s that word you use when you are expecting something but you really have no reason to expect it?”  “Like a false hope?” Photo by John Schnobrich via Unsplash “Maybe.  Or ‘in vain?’” “Uh… that isn’t it.  What about…?” A few minutes passed.  The fellows were talking to each other again, but also pulled the first-year writers in: “Does this sound odd to you?” “Are you saying this?  I think it’s this word that’s tripping me up…” “Hey Dr. Moore, what do you think about when you hear this word…?” “Hey Dr. Moore, could you look at the title with us?” Talk crossed back and forth across the room, from one pair to another.   Conversations expanded, then pairs returned to more focused work. Once again this semester, learning happened in ways I did not anticipate.  My students were engaging in what Myhill and Newman (2016) call “high-quality classroom talk;” in other words, talk that is central to the development of linguistic and rhetorical control.   Students and fellows talked to each other without triangulating through me; I listened, affirmed, and supplied information as needed.   I watched and smiled. I had forgotten how much I enjoy hearing “writer talk”—and I think my students enjoyed it, too. ... View more

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

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

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