I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the longitudinal study I conducted at the turn of this century, one in which I followed a cohort of Stanford students from their incoming year through one year past their graduation. In particular, I’ve been thinking about what I learned about their connection to what they wrote. At the beginning of the study, students didn’t seem to feel any strong connection at all: they were writing to get a grade, to get a job, or for other practical reasons. In short, they didn’t see the writing they were doing as connected to their identities, to who they were as people. As the years went on, however, student participants began to feel more connected to their writing, began to take ownership of it and see writing as a way to make their marks on the world. In fact, they started to define writing as something that gets up off the page and makes something good happen in the world. And as a reflection of themselves, of their thoughts and character and purposes.  I’m thinking about this shift in their relationship to writing because I am wondering what we would find now: especially with the rise of misinformation and deep fakes, along with the rise of AI generated text, I wonder how students’ perception of their relationship to writing is shifting and changing now. Do they feel that the writing they do at least has the potential to embody their hopes and dreams, to represent their authentic selves? Do they feel identified with their writing? And if so, to what degree, and why?     These seem like pressing questions to me, ones that can best be pursued in longitudinal studies like the one I began over two decades ago now. I know that Jessica Enoch and her colleagues at the University of Maryland are considering such a study, and I hope that they will do so—and that others will follow their lead. We are clearly living in a great watershed moment in terms of writing: how to define it, how to understand who and/or what can deploy it, whether it can in the future be “owned” in the traditional sense of copyright, and perhaps most important, how it can reflect and create our best selves rather than our worst. Can writing still be the means of “making something good happen in the world”?  Food for thought, especially for those of us who are privileged to teach writing today.   Image created with Microsoft Designer   ... View more

Over the next four months, I will offer five tips to students writing in each of the four genres covered in my textbook, Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief. The suggestions will highlight advice that, over my decades of teaching, I have found to be the most useful for writers just beginning their journeys into the creation of literature. I’ll begin with poetry, the first genre covered in the text, and also the one that I turn to first when I have something to say. Many students approach the writing of poetry with the sense that anything goes, that whatever leaps from the writer’s brain to their fingertips is, almost by definition, a poem. I don’t believe that’s the case, which may make me sound overly fussy, but if each utterance is the equal of every other utterance, there’s no real point in holding a class on creative writing. Everyone who composes a poem is already writing as well as they ever will. So, granting for the moment that student writing may be made stronger in a classroom setting through mentoring by instructors and peers, here are my Top 5 Tips for Beginning Poetry Writing Students: Use the concrete and specific to evoke the universal. One of the most common assumptions new creative writers make is that the more general and abstract their work, the more likely readers will insert themselves into the piece. The idea is that specific details about specific experiences shut out those who have not experienced the exact same events. In fact, the opposite occurs in creative writing. The vaguer the presentation, the more likely the reader is to drift away from it, whereas vivid details help us to imagine seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and touching what the poet hopes to convey, thereby triggering similarly rich visual and sensual memories of our own. Compose in terms of lines rather than sentences. The prose poem aside, free verse and metered poetry consists primarily of lines rather than the sentences that run through them. This is one of poetry’s great, and underappreciated, freedoms—the right to stop and start a poetic line wherever that break can open up meaning and insight and generate excitement. The least interesting poems tend to be those whose lines consist solely of complete sentences. Simply running one sentence into the next line (enjambment) can suddenly open up a range of new ways to envision the poem. Read your work aloud before presenting it to others. Unless you’re a musical marvel, you wouldn’t impose a song you’d never rehearsed before on friends and family, much less on an audience of strangers. Make sure that at the end of every draft, you let your poem be heard—even if you’re the only one listening. How a poem sounds aloud is often quite different from the way you imagine it in your head. Revise. It’s the rare poem that cannot be made better through serious reconsideration and rewriting. Especially when you’re starting out, you’re likely to use language you’ve heard before, phrases that make strike the ears of more experienced readers as cliché. As you rework your images and lines, try to create a poem that’s both strange and clear. That might sound like an odd combination, but we can only view new worlds and ideas when we can plainly see them. Read, read, read. It’s been said many times, but it bears repeating: good writers are good readers, and great writers are great readers. Being familiar with renowned work from the past and present, if only because it will help you decide what you don’t want to do yourself, is essential. In fact, many writers believe that the best cure for writer’s block is reading the work of other writers. Poets, in particular, benefit from encountering as many short poems as possible. A topic, specific form, or even an image or a phrase encountered in another poem can be just what you need to get started on your own. ... View more

Red banner embroidered with NO CUTS PSC CUNY placed on a classroom window ledge. The window overlooks the boulevard in front of campus.     The First Day of Class: Lab Hour Neurodivergent Teaching    Excerpt from my first-day teaching journal (revised for clarity) We are in a room in a building that faces the Boulevard. In front of the building my colleagues are protesting university budget cuts. We can hear them chanting through the window.  I admit–it’s distracting. I said to the students that half my heart is out there but my whole self is here in this room with them, and that this campus is an incredible place with an incredible history. While I wish I was at the rally, it’s good to be in class too–this teaching and learning–is deeply connected to what’s going on outside.    This semester my section of College Writing includes an additional lab hour once a week and is required for all students. For the lab hour, the class is divided into two smaller sections and each section meets with me one hour a week for extra writing practice.    On the first day of lab class, immediately following College Writing, after a long hike one floor down from our classroom and through several labyrinthian hallways with confusing signage, we arrived in the room and settled into our new seats. I invited students to take out paper and pen (to write in a different modality off the screen) and offered them the following writing prompt: Introduce yourself to me as a learner. How do you learn best? What engaged you most in English 110 today? What was not interesting? What else do you want me to know about you as a student in College Writing? Then, ask me a question—about the class, about me, about anything you’d like to know. I will read the questions ANONYMOUSLY and respond as best I can.  As writing began, we opened the window for ventilation. That’s when we heard the chanting outside: REVERSE THE CUTS The room faced the main entrance to campus, and this classroom building also housed the college's administrative offices. We were listening to my colleagues at a union rally in front of the building. The cuts mentioned in the chant referred to the 24 full-time temporary faculty who were fired two weeks before the beginning of the semester to save money for the college. The students were interested, and I briefly explained the purpose of the union rally. As the chants continued, the students wrote down their writing experiences and their questions. The questions generally focused on the syllabus, and students had other questions too. Which writers and books did I recommend (besides James Baldwin who we’re reading in class, Martin Luther King’’s speeches and essays other than “I Have a Dream,” and bell hooks’ “All About Love”)? What is my favorite activity in NYC? (Long walks in Manhattan and Queens, and visiting the New York Public Library at 5th Ave. and 42nd St.) I wrote with the students as well, and took advantage of the opportunity afforded by writing to process the usual and unusual challenges of this first day of Spring Semester 2024. Ceiling at the New York Public Library with a painting of clouds and sky surrounded by an ornate frame.   ... View more

In 2010, writer and longtime NPR commentator on All Things Considered and Washington Post columnist Michele Norris ordered 200 postcards that read: “Race. Your thoughts. 6 words. Please send.” She started leaving them in bookstores, at coffee shops, in the seat pockets on airplanes, without much hope of a big response. She shouldn’t have worried: people started filling them out, stamping them, and sending them, eventually adding up to over 500,000 messages. Norris includes many of them, along—each a little gem of a story—in her Our Hidden Conversations, along with interviews with numerous correspondents and essays by Norris in what the New York Times describes as an “open-mic town hall gone right.” Here are just a few of the six-sentence responses she received: “I wish he was a girl”; “I’m only Asian when it’s convenient”; “No, really, where are you from?”; “With kids, I’m dad—alone, thug”; “Underneath, we all taste like chicken”; “My beautiful Black boys deserve HOPE.” Morris reports being surprised that she heard from so many white people, though postcards came from dozens of racial and ethnic groups, as well as from over 100 countries. And while she started the project out of a sense that people at the time were very uncomfortable talking about race, these handwritten postcards proved that they had profound thoughts on race that they wanted to share. Michele Norris accepts the Peabody Award for "The Race Card Project."   In addition to the Peabody-winning narrative archive The Race Card Project and Our Hidden Conversations, Norris is the author of The Grace of Silence and host of the podcast Your Mama’s Kitchen. Her work is accessible and challenging at the same time, and I think students could spend some time doing a little research on her and her publications; they can also listen to her reporting during the dozen years she was a host for All Things Considered, hearing the rhythms and timbre of her voice, which carries so much personality. But in these times when students may feel uncomfortable engaging any number of highly contentious, emotion-laden topics in class, perhaps we could take a tip from Norris, asking students to write six words, and six words only, on a controversial or difficult topic you are dealing with in class. They might also bring in six-word responses from five or six other people. Then as a class, you could choose two or three responses to focus on, first in small groups and then in a whole-class discussion. Perhaps some of these six-word stories would yield new insights for the whole class to ponder, and lead to some open, honest, and respectful conversation. Image via WikiCommons   ... 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.   Recently at Community College of Philadelphia, there has been a lot of talk about the 80/20 rule, which states that 80% of outcomes come from 20% of the causes. It’s the principle that has been reflected on in many places, such as the powerful book by Keller and Papasan called The One Thing. The basic principle is that often we are driven to do more to get better results, but more success and meaning can come when we don’t divide our focus—when we do less of what matters less. In other words, the idea behind the 80/20 rule is to identify the 20% that really matters and put our focus there. This is hard for professors in the classroom; we’re in a field where we are taught that everything matters. I have felt burdened by trying to help students’ lives outside of school, their emotional lives inside of it, trying to undo some of the challenges of a broken-in-some-places Philadelphia high school educational system while providing a rich education for a diverse audience of students ranging from age 16-60 (often in one class). There are, of course, institutional pressures as well—things we all “must do” that we would not do if not being forced to do them. Though the circumstances for all of us are different, I think it is safe to say that we have all been told, explicitly or implicitly, that doing more is the way to achieve better outcomes. At Community College of Philadelphia last semester, instructors were challenged to explore the less is more approach and add just one thing that might improve student learning. We could pick it, and there was no pressure for the “one thing” to succeed. We were just asked to do it and then to report back about how it went. I brought in career counseling to talk to my English class and tried to facilitate connections between the work we were doing in reading and writing and student career aspirations; it was pretty successful, but what I found most effective was a debrief conversation afterwards where people told stories about struggling to find and keep employment. It didn’t exactly relate to our course content as I’d hoped, but it helped me connect with students as I, too, have had struggles finding jobs at moments in my life and career, and I was happy to share my stories right along with students. By the end of the conversation, a few students had very specific goals—to reach out to career counseling to get help on a resume, to apply to two more jobs, and to get some new interview clothing. At the end of the conversation, they felt connected to each other and to me as well as empowered to take next steps that they had chosen. I didn’t seamlessly fold the activity into my curriculum, but it was still what I would consider a success. But exactly what about it made it successful? When I attended the debrief about the CCP “one thing” projects, something began to strike me. It didn’t really matter what the “one thing” was (or even the subject where the “one thing” project occurred). Of course, the content always related in some way to course goals, but what mattered after that fundamental link was established was something else entirely. What mattered was whether the interventions did one of two things: They either fostered student empowerment, fostered connection (to self, others or professor) or, in some cases, they fostered both empowerment and connection. This semester, I’m going to ask myself some questions about my lessons, assignments and practices. Does this assignment, lesson or practice foster connection and/or does it empower students? If not, I’ll consider letting it go. Though there is, for me, always grief in letting go, I’m hoping that the questions will lead me to put more of my energy into what matters most this semester for the greater good of myself and my students. ... View more

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to follow my own winding path toward understanding, resisting, and reimagining research methods in writing and rhetoric. Here’s where I have ended up! Even as I and other colleagues were making changes and rethinking research methods, many colleagues in English studies weren’t taking the same journey I was on, were still holding to traditional and (to me) outmoded ways of researching and reporting on that research. Some years ago, I overheard a white woman high in the MLA hierarchy remark that earlier work Jackie Royster had done in Traces of a Stream wasn’t really research with a capital R; “it’s mere recovery,” she said. I am seldom speechless, but that comment took my breath away: as if “recovery” could ever be “mere.” And as if the work of allowing us to hear, at long last, the voices and thoughts and goals and dreams of these foremothers, and to understand their legacy of advocacy and activism and leadership were in any way simple or “mere.” Give me a break. So Jackie Royster and Beverly Moss and Shirley Logan have long been teaching me how to understand not just feminist methods but Black feminist methods. But to Shirley’s Black feminist historiography, Beverly’s Black feminist ethnography, Jackie and Gesa’s articulation of those four powerful feminist rhetorical practices—and all their embodiment of the fully engaged, non-neutral, passionate research described by Nisha Shammugaraj as the “intimacy in feminist methodologies” I would add the work of several others who have continued to challenge and expand my concepts of research methods and methodologies in the field of rhetoric and composition.  Campus of Spelman College, historically Black women’s college in Atlanta, GA, in 1908   I’m thinking for instance of my Stanford colleague Adam Banks, whose visionary leadership has created an undergraduate writing program (and a new certificate in cultural rhetorics) that engages students in the kinds of research I have been talking about. Adam and Keith Gilyard’s On African American Rhetoric articulates and embodies African American ways of knowing while demonstrating how tropes emerging from African American culture enrich our understanding of texts and act as touchpoints of African American critical methods. Signifying, call and response, narrative sequencing, and especially storytelling emerge as key concepts and methods in African American Rhetoric, as does the figure of the “digital griot” in Banks’s earlier book. For examples of such methods at work, we can look to Adam’s writings on Black Twitter, Tara Conley’s Black Feminist Hashtag Project, and Lou Maraj’s analysis of hashtags and hashtagging as method in his Black or Right: Anti-racist Campus Rhetorics. And also to Aja Martinez’s concept of “counterstory,” which provides yet another powerful method now available to feminist scholars and researchers.  These writers have been my teachers, especially over the last two decades, as they have sought to theorize, practice, and embody new ways of understanding and doing research, new or reimagined methods to use in doing so. Even more recently, I have also been learning from Carmen Kynard, whose Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacies Studies I studied long and hard. In a recent College English essay on “Racial Memory, Radical Reparative Justice, and Black Feminist Pedagogical Futures,” she offers—among other things—the story of “a Black feminist methodology” that is sometimes her “pissed dafuq off and holding onto my righteous anger” and other times “a story of writing classrooms” that reaches toward the ideal of “freedom and creative imagination” and “radical possibility.”  Drawing on the work of Gwen Pough, Kynard recommends a “counterdisciplinary stance” and Black storymaking—"the counter-academic, counter-positivist, and antineutral writing of unapologetic Black feminist storymaking/futuremaking,” which is, she says, an example of Black feminist methodology (329) (the kind of “antineutral writing of unapologetic Black feminist storymaking that is another hallmark of Jackie Royster’s work). It’s important to note that by “storymaking,” Kynard is not referring to linear, white, western narrative patterns. Rather, she refers to narrative sequencing (described decades ago by Dr. G), narrative that relies on “multiple, seemingly meandering stories . . . that take you to and through complicated experiences and meanings.” This storymaking is intimate, she says, full of pain and witnessing “on the screen, on the page, in the field, or in the archive--where you must build out a non-linear past and present that has been trying with all its might to erase every trace of you” (329). Kynard calls, then, for “Black, racially lived analysis” that can disrupt how the academy as a knowledge manufacturer/information industrial complex does its work” (330) and concludes by saying that such change, and the radical reparative justice she goes on to describe, are “largely impossible” if scholars “do not put themselves in the role of learning from Black folx” (341). Earlier in this essay, Kynard speaks directly to composition/rhetoric studies, saying that she “loves the work of rhet-comp, just not the field,” admonishing the field that “it’s time for you to roll with some Black feminism” (323).  Now in my 81st year, I am looking back on one white woman’s very long journey toward understanding—and deep change. I think back to my hopelessly naïve notion of how to set up quantitative and qualitative studies as though I could do so following a cut and cried series of steps from research question through to results and “discussion,” and I am chagrined by the stumbles I made along the journey. But also amazed by the amount that I have learned, and learned in my bones and in my guts, not just in my brain—and how much I have been able to share with students In my classes and in my textbooks. That’s largely thanks to the scholars of color I have been taught and mentored by, colleagues whose thinking and ways of doing research have helped shape and reshape my teaching, my research, and the writing I do for students. After all these years, I’m still going to school with them, and while I cannot ever claim to experience the world in the same way, nor do I always agree with every rhetorical move they make, I will continue to learn from Black and indigenous scholars of color. With deep gratitude.  At this point on my journey, I can say with confidence: we got this! The methods I have surveyed here constitute a full and robust set of Black/Feminist methods that we can and must teach in undergraduate and graduate seminars, make explicit in all our own work, and claim—and keep claiming—as powerful and efficacious tools. Let me repeat: thanks to the work of so many: we got this! Thanks for letting me take you along on this trip down my own memory lane. And in case you’re interested, here are the sources I’ve relied on: Works Cited Banks, Adam. Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Digital Age. Southern Illinois UP, 2011. Conley, Tara. Hashtagfeminism.com Crenshaw, Kimberlé, University of Chicago Legal Forum Volume 1989:1. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” Gilyard, Keith and Adam Banks. On African American Rhetoric. Routledge, 2018.  Glenn, Cheryl. “Truth, Lies, and Method: Revisiting Feminist Historiography.” College English (Jan 2000): 387-389. Kirsch, Gesa and Liz Rohan. Behind the Archives: Research as a Lived Process. Southern Illinois UP, 2008. Kynard, Carmen. “’Oh No She Did NOT Bring Her Ass Up in Here with That!’: Racial Memory, Radical Reparative Justice, and Black Feminist Pedagogical Futures.”College English March, 2023: 318-45.  ______________. Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century In Composition-Literacies Studies. SUNY P, 2013.  Logan, Shirley. We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth Century Black Women. Southern Illinois UP, 1999.  Maraj, Louis. Black or Right: Anti-racist Campus Rhetorics. Utah State UP, 2020.  Martinez, Aja. Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory. NCTE, 2020.  Moss, Beverly. "Ethnography and Composition: Studying Language at Home." Methods and Methodology: A Sourcebook for Composition Researchers. Eds.Gesa Kirsch and Patricia Sullivan. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1992.153-71.  _____________. "Intersections of Race and Class in the  Academy." Coming to Class: Pedagogy and the Social Class of Teachers. Eds. Gary Tate, Alan Shepard, and John  McMillan. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1998. 157-169. Ronald, Kate and Joy Ritchie. Teaching Rhetorica: Theory, Pedagogy, Practice. Heinemann, 2006. Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Making the World a Better Place: African American Women Advocates, Activists, and Leaders, 1773-1900. U Pittsburgh P, 2023.  ______________________. Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells. Bedford Books, 1996. ______________________. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Change among African American Women. U Pittsburgh P, 2000. Royster, Jacqueline Jones and Gesa Kirsch. Feminist Rhetorical Practices. Southern Illinois UP, 2012.  Schell, Eileen and K. J. Rawson. Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies. U Pittsburgh P, 2010. Shammugaraj, Nisha. “The Foregrounding of Intimacy in Qualitative Research,” presentation at the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference, Spelman College, October 2, 2023. Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin’ and Testifyin’: The Language of Black America. Wayne State UP, 1977. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. ... View more

Last week, I began describing the journey I’ve been on for about 50 years now, one in which I first tried to master (or at least understand!) traditional research methods in our field, but then went on to begin questioning many of these methods and searching for more expansive and inclusive understandings of what it means to do research on writing and rhetoric in our time. Here's the next installments of these thoughts: In the late 80s and early 90s, then, I was on my personal journey to try to think about “research” and research methods in what for me were expansive, but still inadequate ways. I remember reading, and teaching, Jackie Royster’s 1996 Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells the year it was published (and many years after that). And then in 2000 her Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women and Shirley Logan’s 1999 We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth Century Black Women and seeing the kind of passionate, engaged research Jackie and Shirley were conducting, what methods they were using as they were redefining what research in writing studies could and should look like and helping me to expand my understanding in ways that were transformational. Later, books like Gesa Kirsch and Liz Rohan’s Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process (2008), Kate Ronald and Joy Ritchie’s Teaching Rhetorica: Theory, Pedagogy, Practice (2006), and Eileen Schell and K. J. Rawson’s Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies (2010) helped me to further articulate the kind of research I wanted to practice—and teach my students to practice. And then came Jackie Royster and Gesa Kirsch’s 2012 Feminist Rhetorical Practices, so richly informed by feminist—and Black feminist—thought. I remember sitting with that book and then reading it with pen in hand, underlining and annotating, talking to and with it. Fully taking in what “critical imagination,” “strategic contemplation,” “social circulation,” and a “global perspective” mean as methods, as ways of knowing and of making meaning. Seeing how these four practices could broaden not only what “counts” as research but who “counts” as researchers and research subjects and scenes. Then tracking back over all of Jackie’s work that I had read, and returning to my hero since 1977, Geneva Smitherman—the divine Dr. G., whose Talkin’ and Testifyin’ electrified me but that I now understood, methodologically, on a much deeper level. I was still learning, still being challenged to rethink what constitutes methods in our field, and who gets to decide.  During these years I was also learning from teachers, students, and researchers from the Navajo nation, with whom I had an opportunity to work at the Bread Loaf School of English and its Teacher Network. I vividly remember one research project Navajo youth undertook to learn about how elders in their community had dealt with crises in their lives. To do so, the young people planned to talk individually with elders and were, at first, referring to the “interviews” they might conduct. That is until an elder asked them to think about that word “interview” and its connotations, suggesting that the word didn’t seem to fit well with Navajo ways of thinking and learning. After thinking about the baggage the word “interview” seemed to carry, the group decided against the use of that term and that method, adopting instead “conversation” to characterize the interactions they planned to have—the method they intended to use.  These Navajo researchers as well as scholars like Jackie Royster, Shirley Logan, and Beverly Moss have led me to rethink almost everything I do, from teaching to research to program administration, and so much more. Jackie’s latest book, Making the World a Better Place: African American Advocates, Activists , and Leaders, 1773-1900 (2023) is part of that “so much more.” In this monumental volume, Royster argues that the advocacy and activism of everyday African American women—far from being on the margins—were at the very heart of efforts to build and sustain this nation—not just during the civil rights movement but from their earliest presence here in 1619. What it takes to demonstrate this truth is, in Royster’s words, “to have enough imagination and fortitude to search for evidence from wherever it may be located and to extend the scope of analysis and interpretation to account for these data” and furthermore to use “a multi-lensed theoretical and analytical viewpoint” that focuses on “intersections of gender [and sexuality], race, culture, class, power, and place” in order to “bring a more fully rendered sociohistorical texture to the rhetorical actions” of these women and “to take into account their standpoints as a particular set of stakeholders within community and nation-building processes" (4). Throughout this book, moreover, Royster—herself an advocate and activist and leader—employs the words of the African American women, enabling them to speak for themselves in articulating their ways of being and doing in social spaces.  It goes without saying, though I want to underscore it here, that I have been incredibly fortunate to have studied and learned from now going on three generations of scholars of color and that my own work is indebted to them in countless ways, particularly when it comes to understanding the relationships among research, researcher, and researched. I’m still learning, of course, and next week I’ll try to sum up where I stand on research methodology in writing studies today .  ... View more

I’ve been thinking a lot about research this past year, and especially so as I prepared a brief presentation for the Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference held at Spelman College in the fall of 2023. In that presentation, I traced my own journey toward learning about, and then learning to question—and eventually to expand—research methods in our field. My aim as always is to bring these issues back to our classrooms, to bring debates and re-thinking in our field to our students and in this case, particularly, to change the ways students think about and carry out the still-going-strong “research-based assignment.”    Here is the opening of the presentation I gave at Fem/Rhets (I will share more in the next couple of weeks along with my most current thinking about student research and researchers): Flash way back to the 1970s when I was in graduate school. There were no courses in rhetoric or writing studies when I got there (and only a few when I left in 1977), and there were no courses, really, on methods. Close reading was THE method, and we were expected to come in knowing how to deploy that one. I eventually took a course on quantitative and qualitative methods, though it was not in my department but in Communications. And I found a guide book, Statistics without Tears, that I used to help me design some fairly lame studies that I used in my dissertation on Basic Writing. That was it. I can’t remember anyone ever talking about comparative methods, or about what later seemed to be obvious pitfalls of any methods that grew out of positivism. Much less about feminist methods. But I was interested in, and worried about, HOW we were doing what we were doing, and so I kept thinking and fretting about these issues as I began my college teaching career at the University of British Columbia. By the time I got to Ohio State in late 1986, I had a list of questions, and I used these questions to design a graduate course on research methods in rhetoric and writing. We read Janice Lauer and others (such as Richard Young) on quantitative methods but spent much of our time defining qualitative methods for ourselves and trying to shape what we came up with to feminist ends.  While we were doing this course—in 1991 I think—we had a chance to read a pre-publication copy of Gesa Kirsch and Patricia Sullivan’s Methods and Methodology in Composition Research—a collection of 14 essays that discussed historical, theoretical, and—ta-da!—feminist scholarship as well as case study and ethnographic research, textual analysis, and cognitive, experimental, and descriptive research. Other essays touched on collaborative research and writing (a pet project of mine and Lisa Ede’s) and the politics of comp research. What a huge change from my own grad student days 18 years earlier! Our class was inspired to write a collaborative review of this forthcoming book, doing some interviewing of our own and grounding what we had to say in feminist principles of standpoint theory and narrative framing.  This period saw a proliferation of articles and books about method and methodology, especially on ethnography and, later, autoethnography—accompanied by a vigorous debate between proponents of qualitative and quantitative methods that at times became rancorous. So as you can tell, I was a pretty slow learner in those days, though the more I learned how to use quantitative methods especially, the more questions I had about their efficacy in terms of writing research. And I was learning that qualitative methods contained restrictions that seemed somehow inadequate to the goals of the kinds of research needed for our field. Next week, I will continue this saga, which is giving me a chance to look back over my fifty-plus years in the field and assess my changing understanding of research methodologies. Please stay tuned!   Broadmoor, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

  I recently had a chance to read columnist David Brooks’s new book How to Know a Person. Brooks says it has taken him years to learn to listen with genuine curiosity to others, especially those he doesn’t agree with. He recalls his attempts to persuade through traditional argument, showing the limitations of that approach in vivid detail and his arduous search for an effective alternative. Leaning in, listening, and then listening again, giving full attention to the person you are talking to (rather than thinking about what you will say next) turns out to be the key strategy to truly “seeing” other people. Basic to Brooks’s approach is a conversational model of discourse, rather than the lecture mode practiced in much of the academy, or the debate/disputation mode of much public discourse today. In conversations, participants are in exploration mode, thinking together: the goal is often the conversation itself, rather than vanquishing an opponent. And it’s in such conversations that Brooks finds ways to “know” someone else. Research for Brooks’s book led him to identify two levels to any conversation: the first layer is the subject—what you are literally talking about. The second layer, which he dubs the underconversation, is the “flow of emotion” going between the people talking. This second layer is really important: is it making the speakers feel safe, or less so? Listened to and respected, or not? Paying attention to the underconversation led Brooks to ask different questions: not “what do you think about this topic?” but “what led you to think this way about this topic?” Most important, such conversations offered him the space to keep opening doors by saying “Tell me more. What am I missing? Tell me more.” As I read, I kept thinking about my own practices in the classroom and in the writing center. Brooks’s advice about how to really see another person (and to make sure that person feels seen) rings very true to me. It’s why in the writing program at Stanford, we made student conferences central to our pedagogy, making sure we had time for conversations with our students, one-on-one, and making sure we focused our attention, laser-like, on our students and their writing and trying to track the “underconversation” going on in each instance. And it’s why, in my work in the writing center, I focused on asking questions, almost always leading to “Tell me more.” These are such simple-sounding teaching practices, but in my experience they are often hard to implement: time pressure, distractions, and the discipline it takes to really focus our attention all work against creating the kind of conversations Brooks describes. Reading his book is a good reminder, however, of how important it is that we keep on trying. When we give students our full attention, when we find the time and space to genuinely see them—and their work—we are truly teaching.    Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash ... View more

It’s that time of year again, when major dictionaries look into the past year to see what word emerges as marking something particularly significant about that year. I always look forward to this exercise, and I almost never can predict what the words of the year will be. This year I did make a guess that “hallucinate” would be one such word, and indeed that is the term chosen by both Dictionary.com and Cambridge. Both dictionaries reported noting the new definition of “hallucinate” to indicate the mistakes, misinformation, or fabrications produced by generative AI programs. They go on to note that “AI hallucinations remind us that humans still need to bring their critical thinking skills to the use of these [AI[ tools. . . Human expertise is arguably more important than ever, to create the authoritative and and up-to-date information that LLMs can be trained on.” Cambridge also notes adding additional related words to its corpus, such as LLM (Large language models), GAI (generative AI), and GPT (ChatGPT). The Collins Dictionary group chose “AI” as their word of the year, because that technology has dominated so much of the news cycle.   But perhaps the most surprising, and intriguing, word of the year, “after 32,000 votes and a team of language experts’ advice,” is the Oxford English Dictionary’s choice of “rizz,” short for charisma, which originated in Black culture. The term went viral after TikToker Henry de Tolla used the phrase “Livvy rizzed up Baby Gronk” in a post, but was popularized by influencer Kai Cenat, who uses it frequently in his Twitch streams. In discussing “rizz,” Cenat says it’s when “you’re so slick with our words and what you’re saying to where the girl is ‘OK, who is this?’ Then you’re like ‘Yeah, I rizzed her up. I’ve got mad rizz.’” Got that? As near as I can tell, “to rizz” means to charm someone successfully. And, I suppose, “rizz,” like charisma, in some sense means the ability to do that. Hmm. . .  Which of these words seems most likely to you to survive, and why? This is the time of year to ask our students this question, and to ask them what they would choose as word of the year. Right now, I’d have to go with something related to AI: how about you? ... 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

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

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