Here at UNG, I am always teaching writing: first-year composition/corequisite, ESOL pedagogy, introduction to linguistics, an intermediate and advanced grammar sequence, and applied linguistics for language instructors.  As my colleagues in composition and rhetoric know—and as Elizabeth Wardle has argued forcefully—“there is no such thing as writing in general.”  Consider the following course project in my sophomore-level grammar class, often an English major’s first encounter with a disciplinary style that is fundamentally different from the expectations of high school, FYC, or literature survey courses.   What’s the assignment?  Students pick a sentence containing a syntactic or lexical structure deemed incorrect—or at least contested—according to some grammar or usage guides.  Students then identify the issue, describe the structure, research it in dictionaries and style guides, and ultimately collect data from media sources, corpus databases, and tools such as the Google N-gram viewer.  From this data, they make an argument concerning the usage and status of the structure.  I ask students to complete five checkpoints as the project develops.  By the third checkpoint, most students realize how different this paper will be from previous academic assignments.  Some of them panic. Most of these students are English majors who have strong sense of their own style and confidence about writing in familiar forms—arguments and literary analyses.   They have not, however, written extensively about language, nor have they worked with the types of sources required for this paper, much less primary data sources.  So, while we are learning about grammar, we are also learning how to write like grammarians—or linguists.  In addition to checkpoints, I require peer review sessions with our writing fellows, the writing center, or our supplemental peer instructor.   I ask students to submit final drafts with annotations to show how they incorporated feedback from peers, and I also ask them to reflect on my feedback and submit a response. I urge them to think about how they have grown not only in their understanding of syntactic concepts but also writing concepts—and what they will take with them going forward. We use the following handout as students begin drafting their papers.  On the left side are concepts that are common to all writing situations—and despite the novelty of this assignment, students do have experience from which to draw.  On the right side are specific realizations of these concepts in the context of writing about grammar.  But we can also use this sheet to consider other assignments they will encounter—and to think about how to adapt their writing to fit new contexts.  We are always teaching writing, indeed. ... View more

I’ve been following the journalism of Clive Thompson ever since I encountered his writing in the early days of Wired, and over the years I’ve learned not only from his Wired columns but from books like Smarter Than You Think: How How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better (2013) and Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World (2019), and most recently from is columns in Medium, where he sometimes posts about his own writing process. In one post, for example, he wrote about his ongoing battles with procrastination and said that one way he helps avoid the worst bouts of it is by “parking downhill.” By that he means that when he is writing a draft, he always stops work “downhill,” that is at an “easy” place where he knows what is coming next. That helps the next day when he sits down to take up the task at hand again. This is a good tip, one I have often shared with students, many of whom are master procrastinators. In another post titled “One Weird Trick for Writing a First Draft,” Thompson says that once he has done his research and needs to begin writing, he will begin doing almost anything but that: “rearranging my desk, tackling old email, going down Wikipedia rat holes.” (Do you know the feeling? In fact, in drafting this blog post I am avoiding work on a foreword I have promised to write!) Thompson argues that procrastination is ultimately about fear—fear of getting stuck, that words won’t come, that the project is above and beyond his capabilities, and so on. My students share some of these fears, as well as others; and that fear stands in the way of their progress. But Thompson to the rescue. He says he has developed “four rules for writing first-draft prose,” and they are pretty interesting: Begin each paragraph with a hyphen Lower-case the first letter of every sentence Don’t put a period at the end of a sentence (though question marks and exclamation points are OK) Instead, end each sentence with two forward slashes// These “rules” help, Thompson argues, because they make his writing look provisional, unfinished, not really “official,” and therefore not so threatening of failure. As he says, he can “regard the sentences and paragraphs as a form of clay that I’m still just sort of generally shifting around . . . [it is] still under construction.” This kind of “under construction” writing doesn’t look “finished,” and so he is less tempted to spend time obsessing on revising a phrase, choosing perfect punctuation, etc. Instead, he can just keep on going. His provisional writing seems like “Lego bricks I’m combining and recombining to see what shape they might make.” He is also less attached to such provisional writing, so he finds it easier to toss it if it just isn’t going anywhere.  Thompson says he leaves his drafts in their “provisional” format until the day before they are due. “This frees me up,” he says, “on this final day to become an obsessive about word choice on a sentence-by-sentence level” and on tempo, rhythm, pacing. I think students will like the way Thompson thinks as well as his self-deprecating and witty openness about his own processes of composing. And they may even decide to try out some of his “tricks.”    Photo by Nick Morrison ... 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   Last semester I created a blog post about a final exam meditation for students on the YouTube channel, Present-Minded Professors (created by me and my colleague Kate Sanchez, who is also an English professor at Community College of Philadelphia). I received feedback from some that the meditation was calming and empowering and had some great results. I learned from others that the meditation felt much too long. One student exclaimed “it’s time to give us the test!” Another student tapped his pencil nervously then chomped on his pencil eraser until it fell off into his mouth. Contrary to mindfulness activities in a classroom where an exam is not being given, there was not an opportunity to process and validate what students were feeling. Two of my colleagues emailed me to let me know they had had similar experiences, and I noted on YouTube that the average watch time for the meditation was 1 minute and thirty seconds—many professors had just played the beginning of the meditation for students. Students are often anxious to get started on their exams, which is the origin for the need for a meditation; however, amping anxiety before a test can, of course, be counterproductive if we cannot provide all the tools to help students cope with the anxiety in the moment. My work with mindfulness has taught me that it is important to walk the line between helping students know that all emotional experiences are valid and helping them compartmentalize, when needed, for the task at hand. One of the challenges of being an academic who, like many of us, is in love with the power of language is learning that sometimes the deepest experiences can come from the briefest handful of content. Here is a shorter meditation for students before taking exams. In the new meditation I have included some affirmations and the sound of a few chimes to create relaxation and help students to center their bodies and minds. I am excited to share this meditation with students before they take their exams this semester, and I would encourage you to play it or, if you are inspired, create your own short meditation. If you’re able to record your meditation in advance, the ability to amplify your voice on a SmartBoard may help students pay the most attention. I wish you peace and presence as we move through the semester! ... View more

­Multimodal Mondays: Can I Use That Image? Understanding Visual Attribution Practices Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. She also trains graduate student writing 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 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 Digital and multimodal composers use images across their projects to create engaging visual content. It is so easy for students to search the internet and include images in their texts, but we want them to ask the question, Can I use that image? This is particularly important amidst conversations relating to intellectual property and ethical dilemmas related to image use. I find that students often use visuals without considering if they have permission to do so and feel as if they have free reign with anything that is out there. Many times, students do not even realize they are violating copyright. With multimodal composition, we encourage students to incorporate images and curated content in their digital work, so it is vital that they develop the knowledge and skills to make strong, ethical choices. Since there are so many changes every day in relation to digital content – it is both the wild west and a moving target -- I think it is a worthy effort to teach students ethical image use and thoughtful citation practices.  These activities and assignments help students to critically evaluate found sources for ethical image use. Background and Resources Introduce Terms and Definitions Introduce students to the concepts of Copyright, Fair Use, and Public Domain. I show them this short video, Creativity, Copyright and Fair Use produced through Common Sense Education, a site that prepares students for digital citizenship and does a good job of introducing these terms and provides a wealth of resources.  This helps situate and contextualize the larger conversation in relation to intellectual property. Conduct Image Searches Through Google I have students conduct image searches through Google search functions by asking them to generate keywords related to their subjects. They can pull these keywords from previously written texts, research, or just brainstorm subjects they are considering.  The next step is to show them how to find out if these images are copyright free and available for open use. Google has a built-in tool that filters image results to search for Creative Commons licenses. When we conduct a search, the engine generally brings up all articles and references. We can click on images in the search bar menu to bring up images only and narrow the search to include only copyright free images. After we enter our search term into the Google Images search bar, click on Tools and we see a drop-down menu under Usage Rights that allows us to choose a type of license. It gives the options of “All,” “Creative Commons”, or “Commercial and other licenses” (See Google Support document, Find Images You Can Use and Share for specific instructions).  Once we choose Creative Commons it filters out and narrows down the options to those that are copyright free. We could stop right there but there is an additional step that helps us learn more about the details of the usage rights for that particular image. If we click on the tag “License details” or “Learn More” we can find out more information about the terms of use that defines how they can use that image such as “free to use with attribution.” Understanding Types of Images: Sunset: End of another day? or transition? or happiness? How do images communicate meaning -- literal or representative? It is important that students understand the difference between literal and representative images. Literal images capture experiences or objects in their most basic sense without metaphor or interpretation.  These images are usually direct references to ideas or concepts and generally not subject to varied interpretations. Representative images are abstract and often symbolize something and include metaphor or interpretation. They are usually indirect and are subject to multiple, possible interpretations.  So, we can think of our search for a sunset to represent an actual reference to the sun setting (literal image) or we can think of it as a metaphor for transition (representative image) or a feeling such as happiness. We can also ask students to use search terms that start out as abstract such as freedom, love, success, or racism, to see what kinds of images surface with these terms. I like to have students do these kinds of searches in both the invention (for idea generation) and drafting phases (for image inclusion) of their composing processes. Captions Contextualize the Image Captions bring images and text together to communicate interrelated meaning. We can’t just insert an image and expect it to speak for itself. It is our responsibility to create context as the writing of captions is more than just identification (“This is a sunset”) and should instead be considered an integral part of the writing and connect to the written ideas. “Providing captions for images allows you to contextualize the relevance of this visual content as it relates to your research” (Purdue Owl). We can extend information, explain details, ask provoking questions, and present additional engaging content for readers to consider. We can also include linked reference information to connect the image to its original source or, in the case of referenced images provide citation details. Check out and share this article on How to Write Good Captions. We should also ask students to consider captioning images for digital accessibility through alt text tags. Copyright free resources It is important that students know about the abundance of copyright-free resources available to them. I introduce them to Creative Commons, Public Domain, and other third-party resources that offer copyright free images for use in blogs, articles, and other educational work such as Unsplash, Pexels, or Pixabay among others. These resources also allow users to explore deeper with instructions for attribution and license details. Just exposing them to these resources creates awareness and invites them to be part of larger communities of image makers. Steps to the Assignment Although these prompts can be used in isolation for random terms, it is best to have them connected to particular projects to make them more meaningful.   Introduce terms and definitions for Fair Use, Creative Commons, and Public Domain. Have students choose keywords from their writing or brainstorm on their subjects to provide search terms. Ask them to enter keywords into a Google search -- include both literal and representative terms.   Filter images for usage rights. Have them dig deeper and identify license details to find out what they need to do to use the image.  Caption the image with meaningful connections and citation if necessary. Insert the captioned image into their digital content. Remind them to position the image near the text to which it is connected.  Reflection on the Activities Students often see images on the internet and assume if something is out there, that they have the right to use it for their own purposes. This myth is supported through meme culture that relies on the repetition and distribution of undocumented images. In this world today issues of intellectual property and AI necessitate that students understand and have access to these tools to make informed choices. This seems like common knowledge, but I find that most students do not know how to conduct this kind of deeper search that outlines citation practices and the best methods for attribution. This kind of awareness is important for ethical image use and helps us communicate that we are thoughtfully using images in good faith.   ... View more

by Holly Burgess, Ph.D candidate, Marquette University This is the third post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a 2-day annual event hosted online and in Milwaukee, WI. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “symposium.”  On January 7, 2023,  Tyre Nichols was murdered by officers of the Memphis Police Department. Tyre Nichols was a father, son, photographer, friend, skateboarder, and so much more. His life mattered. Twenty-one days later, the police footage of Nichols’s death was streamed via the media. On January 28, 2023, unable to sleep, I debated whether to write to my students about Tyre Nichols. I began to draw comparisons between Tyre and myself; we are both twenty-nine years old, Black, and enjoy Memphis. As an avid Elvis fan, I’ve visited Memphis, TN, three times in my life; Graceland became a sacred place to visit and spend time. I remember the first time my mother brought me to Memphis for my fifteenth birthday; I was excited to be in a predominantly Black city. Residing in Wisconsin, I was raised in a predominately white suburb, my heart yearning to be amongst Black people and culture. When we left the gates of Graceland, I cried. Looking back, I realize why Memphis is so special to me—Memphians treat you like family and welcome you in with their southern hospitality. I knew Tyre Nichols’s death would leave Memphis in civil unrest, hurting and longing for change. I knew that my students would also be hurting. I emailed my two English classes my thoughts about Nichols. I told my students that I would open space for them to discuss their feelings and grief regarding Nichols. I drafted a call-to-action to the English Department, demanding they release a statement about Tyre Nichols’s death. My call-to-action resulted in other Black students and faculty members expressing their demands to the department, which led to the formation of a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) steering committee that aims to: promote Black faculty/students' work, creating more Black-oriented events like celebrating Black History Month, hiring and retaining Black faculty and students, creating more curriculum based upon African American literature, culture, and rhetoric. While these initiatives are a great first start for confronting the anti-Blackness that lies in society and academia, one thing I learned is that even in times of trauma and hurt, white colleagues assume that Black faculty and graduate students have all the answers, that we have ready-made lesson plans about how to teach police brutality, institutional racism, and violence in our classrooms. The fact is that we’re people first, and we are hurting. We’re not immediately ready to develop and steer curricula based on our identities and emotions. We need time to process the grief as a community before we are tasked with guiding white academics who wish to do better. In February, I attended the 2023 Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS) at Marquette University. This year’s theme of the WIS is Writing as ____, wherein the presenters were tasked with filling in the blank. I chose to fill my blank with “Writing as a Black Scholar.” At the WIS, I presented a poster titled “The People Are Rising”: Revolution and Violence in African American Social Movements and Literature.” My poster was an overview of my forthcoming dissertation; I have created a literary genealogy of four generations of Black social movements. I trace how each generation reacts and responds to police brutality and violence. During my poster presentation, a few audience members were interested in my dissertation and academic work; however, most wanted to make a spectacle about my statement on Tyre Nichols and my accidental activism within the English Department. My name was now attached to Tyre Nichols and the departmental change that it sparked rather than my dissertation or scholarly work. I’m a Black Ph.D. candidate and know the cost of activism. Accidental activism results in white colleagues looking to you for readings, guidance, lesson plans, and workshops; it places a heavier burden on you to steer a department into anti-racist pedagogy and social progress. I have been dubbed the “girl in the Tyre Nichols email” rather than an emerging Black scholar. I recognize why more experienced BIPOC faculty members feel jaded about the prospect of change within English departments. It requires extra work from them, a minority tax. Social progress relies on BIPOC faculty rather than white colleagues self-educating. I’m unsure what can be done to change the English literature canon or anti-racism, but I can suggest incorporating more Black authors and texts into your classes—reaching beyond the standard of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. Incorporate Black musicians, poets, and rappers, and your students will thank you.   If you’re interested in learning more about the WIS consider joining us in Milwaukee at WIS 2024! Read our CFP here. ... View more

A plastic bag of multicolored paper scraps rests on a table next to a sketch book with a small black journal on top. Photo by Susan Bernstein, October 19 2023   “This light held the power to illuminate, even to redeem and reconcile and heal.” - James Baldwin,  “On the Painter Beauford Delaney” (1965).    Writing Project 2: Application/Multimedia   In WP 2, you will apply Baldwin’s ideas about art and artists to your own work with creating multimedia. First you will summarize and interpret Baldwin’s ideas to connect “Artist’s Struggle” to two new readings, “On the Painter Beauford Delaney” and “What’s the Reason Why?” Then, you will create a multimedia project and apply Baldwin’s ideas to your own work. The second piece was part of a New York Times symposium featuring best-selling novels of the early 1960s, including Baldwin’s 1962 novel Another Country. We will hold one class meeting at the campus art museum for a tour and an art-making workshop. Anything you experience/create at the museum can be part of Writing Project 2. Paintbrush hovers above paper plate with acrylic pain in rainbow colors. Photo by Susan Bernstein, October 19 2023   In the midst of a rainy downcast autumn, I reconsidered how to revise the prompt and supporting activities for Writing Project 2, Application/Multimedia. From the beginning of the course, students had a keen interest in Baldwin’s work, wanting to know more about his life, his activism, and his work as an artist. For Writing Project 1, we considered Baldwin’s beliefs about the purposes of art, especially on how the artist has a responsibility to use their suffering “to help you suffer less.” We also focused on Baldwin’s “imprecise words,” about how art is something that “lives behind the words.”  For Writing Project 2, we added two new pieces (see the works cited list at the end of this post), “What’s the Reason Why?,” in which Baldwin briefly discusses the influence of jazz on his writing process. In the second piece, Baldwin pays tribute to his lifelong mentor, the painter Beauford Delaney  Through him, Baldwin learns how to see light as a “miracle” and that “great art can only be created out of love.” Working with a colleague at the on-campus teaching museum, we conceived of an experiential learning field trip during which the students would first tour the current exhibit, Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence, described by the museum as: [A] new form of bead work, the ndwango (“cloth”), developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The plain black fabric that serves as a foundation for this exquisite beadwork is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts that many of them wore growing up. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists use colored Czech glass beads to transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form of remarkable visual depth. After a brief introduction to the exhibit, the students engaged in viewing the artwork on their own, then met again for a group discussion to process their thoughts and interpretations. During the last part of the field trip, students participated in an art-making workshop to experiment with multimedia material in order to connect the exhibit to Baldwin’s writing.  As a participant observer, I noticed that the main theme of the field trip seemed to be connection. I wrote the following entry in my journal: If I try to process this field trip at the moment, it’s images of interacting that I hope to remember– students interacting with: Insights from Baldwin’s writing. My colleague’s questions about what they saw and how they interpreted what they saw. The art-making materials: paint, crayons, multicolored paper scraps, glue, and paper. The art of the Ubuhle women, the glistening beads on black fabric, flowers, spirals, suns, trees, and images of home in their own artwork.  Yet most of all, I remember the students’ interactions with each other, sitting on the floor of the museum writing and thinking, visiting the upstairs gallery, observing the images, asking questions and sharing perceptions. Later, the students sat together making art inspired by the exhibit, talking quietly, laughing softly, working with intention at the long tables placed in the museum lobby.   I paced the floor, observing the transformation of the lobby space, walking with a few crayons and a sketchbook in hand, thinking of sunbursts, of future possibilities, of present moments, drawing streaks of light and dark colors across the page. Crayons of many colors in and out of boxes. Photo by Susan Bernstein, October 19 2023     Works Cited Baldwin, James. “The Artist's Struggle for Integrity.” ​​The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings​, Vintage International, 2011, pp. 50–64. Ebook pages,63-70. https://bibliotecadaluta.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/james_baldwin_randall_kenan-the_cross_of_redemptio.pdf   Baldwin, James. “On the Painter Beauford Delaney” Collected Essays. Library Of America. (1998). Edited by Toni Morrison.  pp. 720-721. Ebook pages 728-729. (Collection open source). https://archive.org/details/JamesBaldwinCollectedEssaysLibraryOfAmerica1998/page/n125/mode/2up?view=theater. Baldwin, James. “What’s the Reason Why?.” ​​The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings​ , Vintage International, 2011, pp. 48-49.  Ebook page 62. https://bibliotecadaluta.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/james_baldwin_randall_kenan-the_cross_of_redemptio.pdf    ... View more

Ann Charters edits The Story and its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. The new Compact Tenth Edition is now available.   Are authors of new short stories capable of showing us today’s reality? Or do we now live in such endangered times that only ordinary people – not gifted young fiction writers such as Saïd Sayrafiezadeh and Lauren Groff – can testify to our predicament? In Sigrid Nunez’s short novel The Friend (2018), she presents both sides of the proposition that the existential reality of contemporary life can no longer be expressed through fiction. Since today’s world is full of victims, “we need documentary fiction, stories cut from ordinary, individual life. No invention. No authorial point of view” (p. 191). As Nunez understands, fiction as autobiography, or autobiography as fiction, has been with us for a long time in the work of international novelists such as Proust, Isherwood, Duras, and Knausgaard (p. 188). In the United States, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) is a ground-breaking example of what he called the “true-story novel,” or a narrative based on his own adventures. Kerouac (1922-1969) was an American experimental writer. His short story “October in the Railroad Earth,” in the tenth edition of The Story and Its Writer, is a description of how he worked a job on the railroad in San Francisco in October 1952. Kerouac’s story is true to the facts of his experience, embellished as fiction with his exuberant wordplay as he experimented with the writing method he called spontaneous prose. His “true-story” approach was taken up by many young journalists and fiction writers. It is now known as “autofiction.” “Autofiction,” a mixture of autobiography and fiction, is the approach taken frequently by college students enrolled in workshop classes in fiction writing. The danger is that young writers sometimes appropriate into their stories the experiences of other people, invading their privacy and crossing a moral line. An example would be the story “Cat People” by Kristen Roupenian, first published in the December 2017 issue of The New Yorker. You can read more about this controversial story in the revised chapter on the history of the short story in the new Compact edition. As Toni Morrison understood, “A person owns his life. It’s not for another to use it for fiction” (Nunez, 57). In my opinion, the form of the short story is flexible enough to continue to engage the imagination of young writers today. As Lydia Davis recognized, we live in an ever-expanding world of narrative possibilities, not only on film but also on the printed page. These include flash fictions like Davis’s story “The Caterpillar”; meditations like George Saunders’ “Stix”; and logic games like Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings.” Gifted young storytellers like Lauren Groff continue to take the traditional approach when they create a work of short fiction out of their sense of being victimized in our challenging moment of history. In her story “The Midnight Zone,” Groff dramatizes the struggle of many women to achieve their own high expectations of “doing it all” – fulfilling the conflicting roles expected of them. Did the accident befalling the mother alone with two small children in a Florida “hunting camp shipwrecked in twenty miles of scrub” actually happen to Groff? Read her story and decide for yourself. ... View more

I am pleased to announce that I am currently working on the 11th edition of Signs of Life in the USA, and for this reason will be taking a sabbatical from my Bedford Bits blog posts this year.    The new edition will be paying particular attention to the ever-worsening political and cultural divisions in this country and the ways in which our popular culture both reflects and contributes to them. I am choosing this focus because of the urgency, especially in the light of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, of the topic, and the necessity for careful critical thinking at a time national crisis. You can find a number of indications of the kind of topics the book will address in my posts over the last couple of years.   This will be the first edition of Signs of Life without the direct co-authorship of Sonia Maasik, but her presence will remain throughout the text, most profoundly in the way her spirit is guiding me on every step of this publication journey. The book will be part of Sonia's legacy and is dedicated to her. ... View more

by Darci Thoune and Jenn Fishman This is the second post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a 2-day annual event hosted online and in Milwaukee, WI, by a group that includes Darci and Jenn. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “symposium.”  As Jenn and I explored in our last blog post on the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), putting our finger on how this modest symposium makes so much magic is challenging. But with some reflection it’s easier and easier to see that part of what makes the WIS special is collaboration—and we mean collaboration on every level. Yes, there are the regulars who serve on the Steering Committee and those who faithfully travel to Milwaukee when she is at her least hospitable, but there are others as well. We’re thinking about the graduate students and early career folks who join us as active participants in a symposium that works with and against the expectations of a traditional conference. As we entered our 3rd year of the WIS we wondered how we could manifest more of this—more support for a wider range of participants and more opportunities for them to be meaningfully involved in the WIS magic making. As writing administrators, we’re accustomed to being scrappy and opportunistic when it comes to funding. Knowing that we wanted to find more ways to support (in travel funding, in mentoring, in networking opportunities) WIS participants from a wide range of perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds, we approached the amazing Laura Davidson at Bedford/St. Martin’s with a wild request--namely, would they support the travel expenses of two to three WIS Bedford/St. Martin’s (WIS B/SM) Fellows? Our hope was that a WIS B/SM Fellow’s Program would especially prioritize participation by first-gen, BIPOC, and multiply marginalized undergraduates, graduate students, contingent faculty, and early career scholars. We were delighted that Laura (and the rest of the B/SM team) enthusiastically jumped at the opportunity to work with all of us involved in the WIS. This program has become a source of reliable funding and support for--at this point--five WIS B/SM Fellows. Over the first 2 years, the Fellows have been an illustrious bunch. In 2022, the inaugural fellows were Amy Patterson and Ulisa Blakely, who both joined us remotely. Amy Zoomed in from Boston where she was a postdoctoral associate at Northeastern University, teaching multilingual writing and advanced writing in the disciplines. Ulisa, at the time, was a graduate student at Northeastern Illinois University, studying multimodality, technology, and literacy. The following year, we welcomed three fellows, although only two were able to attend. The 2023 cohort included Holly Burgess and Shiva Mainaly, who were able to attend in person, and Abigayle Farrier, whose attendance onsite and online was foiled by the winter storms that turned much of Texas into a no-fly zone just as the WIS was getting underway.  In addition to supporting our WIS B/SM Fellows with travel funding, Laura’s team also offered an opportunity for the WIS B/SM Fellows to contribute to the Bedford Bits blog. Our first two incredible blogposts are forthcoming from Holly and Abigayle. In Holly’s upcoming post, “Writing as a Black Scholar: Teaching Black Activism, Hip-Hop, and The Cost of Activism,” we learn about the many ways one Black teacher does activist work in and out of the classroom at a primarily white institution. In Abigayle’s post, “Today Is Kindergarten Day!” we are encouraged to remember that writing is a hands-on activity and that we sometimes need to create spaces in our classes for students to play. In both posts, we’re inspired to reflect on our identities and our relationships in our programs and in our classrooms. With the continued support of the superheroes at Macmillan, we look forward to the submissions from this year’s WIS B/SM Fellows. Interested in becoming a WIS B/SM Fellow? Follow this link for the WIS 2024 CFP! We also invite you to learn more about the WIS via the latest issue of Community Literacy Journal, which includes look back at the symposium’s first five years, coauthored by 29 WISters including Holly and Abigayle. If you’re interested in learning more about the WIS consider joining us in Milwaukee at WIS 2024! Read our CFP here.   ... View more

This is the inaugural post in a new series on teaching in a post-AI classroom called Bits on Bots. Be sure to follow along with posts tagged with "Bits on Bots."  Jennifer Duncan has been teaching English for twenty years, first at Chattanooga State Community College in Tennessee and now at Georgia State University’s Perimeter College in Atlanta, GA where she is Associate Professor of English.  For the last ten years, she has focused exclusively on online teaching concentrating on creating authentic and meaningful learning opportunities for students in composition and literature courses.   I remember in the 1980s when my family got our first microwave – a hulking thing that came with its own cart and a payment plan. It also came with a recipe book which touted the amazing things this miracle machine could do. From scrambled eggs to Thanksgiving dinner, it promised my mom she’d never be more than 30 minutes from a world class feast. Now, I love a Hot Pocket as much as any 80s kid, but if you ever tasted one of those microwave turkeys or slimy bowls of eggs, you know that despite its promises, a microwave can’t do everything! That microwave lesson probably affects how I’m approaching AI in my composition classes as much any of the research (also newly nuked and still in its “let it rest” phase) I’ve encountered so far. I figure the odds of composition teachers being replaced by AI are about the same as that of my microwave replacing Gordon Ramsey. Both can produce dinner, but they certainly aren’t equally palatable. Instead, through experimentation and experience, we’ll determine what things the AI is good for and what still needs to be in the hands of a skilled professional. It’s easy to think of AI as an essay generating machine, and yes, it can do that – just like you technically can nuke a turkey – but you’ll definitely notice a difference in the taste. But, just like that trusty microwave, when used properly, it can be a powerful tool in my students’ writing arsenal: right now, I’m teaching my students to use AI as their writing prep chef (I’m all in on this cooking metaphor now, so hold on). If the first step in writing is generating, cultivating, and curating ideas, LLMs (large language models) can help my students do that quickly and effectively – IF, I teach them how. So, gone are my lessons in free writing and clustering, replaced with lessons on generating, synthesizing, combining, and choosing from AI generated topics. Old lessons in audience analysis are served with a side of lessons on prompt engineering because both require students to think about context, purpose, and desired outcomes. But beyond writing, I’m encouraging my students to use AI as a coach.  Can’t understand the difference between vivid language and imagery? Ask ChatGPT for a quick refresher.  Need a research strategy or writing schedule? Ask ChatGPT to create that schedule.  How about a grammar check because your unreasonable professor won’t fix comma splices for you?  Yes, AI can help with that too. Sure, I might prefer that they use the tutoring center, but years of experience have taught me they aren’t going, so, like the microwave bags of vegetables that appeared on our family table, AI essay reviews are better than not having anything to offer at all. Through experimentation, I’m working with my students to find appropriate ways this tool can speed up their writing process, fill gaps in their preparation, and develop technical skills that they can take beyond my classroom and into their professional lives.  Some experiments will go badly (ever see what happens to aluminum foil in a microwave?), but others will allow my students to move past hurdles to get their finished product on the table, much like the defrost function can move that frozen chicken towards turning into dinner. Here’s the thing – my mom never wanted to be a chef. With a job, three kids, and a husband working night shifts, she wanted to get food on the table so that she could spend her time and energy on what mattered most – the homemade cake she’d pull out of the oven to the delight of everyone – and the microwave helped her do that.  I’m hoping I can help my students learn how AI can help them work through their writing gaps so that their ideas can fill up a room like the smell of a freshly baked cake. ... View more

In 1996, Lisa Ede and Cheryl Glenn began imagining a conference that would bring together rhetorical and feminist scholars, groups that heretofore had not had much to do with one another. There were feminists aplenty among rhetoricians, but feminists across other disciplines seemed reluctant to cross the border into rhetoric. Lisa and Cheryl aimed to begin some cross-disciplinary conversations, and so they invited two keynote speakers: Jackie Royster from rhetoric and writing studies and feminist philosopher Nancy Tuana. We all gathered in Corvallis in late August 1997, excited and expectant. The conference more than lived up to expectations, and by the time the first day of the meeting concluded, people were asking Lisa and Cheryl when the next conference would be. Since they had only planned a one-time conference, they had no answers to this question—but conference goers soon took matters into their own hands, and Lillian Bridwell Bowles and her colleagues at the University of Minnesota volunteered to hold the next “fem/rhets” conference, as it came to be called, two years from then, in 1999. The conference was soon “adopted” by the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, a fairly new organization at the time (founded in 1989)—and it has been held every other year since 1997 (in 2013 my colleagues at Stanford and I had the great pleasure of hosting the conference). I’ve attended most of the fourteen conferences, and I was determined to make this year’s, especially because it was being held at Spelman. And indeed, I made it there for the second and third days of the conference, and I came away impressed and inspired by the scholarly projects I heard described. In fact, I wished that every teacher of writing and rhetoric I know could have been there with me!   Spelman College hosted 2023's FemRhets Conference   One panel, "Counter Storytelling: A Feminist Antiracist Approach to Dismantle Colonial Archival Logics," interrogated the archival logic at work in how and what we (are allowed to) remember, reminding us that archives are constructs, constructs that have great power and arguing that we and our students need to examine archives with this fact of life in mind, and to “re-story” archival records when necessary. Another panel on Rhetorical Consent and the Foregrounding of Intimacy in Qualitative Research asked us to reconsider the relationship between researcher and “subjects,” and to work toward a more capacious theory that would acknowledge and honor the “intimacy” that characterizes some of the best qualitative research studies. Yet another took a new look at the rhetorical canons of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery: Efe Plange demonstrated the ways in which a group of Ghanian feminists used invention in satirical and humorous ways to flip the script on all-male panels devoted to women’s issues; Sarah Flores looked at arrangement through the lens of the Mexican Cookbook for the American Home; Jordynn Jack reimagined style as she argued that weaving and not embroidery is the key textile. In embroidery, the stitches are added on to a fabric, but in weaving the pattern is woven in from the beginning to the end; it is evident from planning through completion and thus captures the rhetorical nature of “style” much better than embroidery ever could. Jessica Enoch examined feminist approaches to public memory studies and called for “commemorative accountability”; and Britt Starr explored the ways in which social media platforms both liberate and constrain young feminist activists’ access to systems of delivery (especially TikTok) today. Finally, a roundtable discussion on community-led digital archives featured descriptions of the Digital Transgender Archive (K.J. Rawson) as well as reports on Black ooral history projects (Rachel l McIntosh) and the Digital Archive of Indigenous Languages (Ellen Cushman), all of them tremendously important—and exciting. I came away from this conference thinking about how these and other sessions offered so many ideas for rethinking how we teach research and just what a “research” project can be. What a joy it is to introduce students to such a more broad and inclusive vision of research—and to show them how such research can and should be connected to who they are and where they come from. Bravo Spelman and the Coalition of Feminist Scholars for supporting and showcasing this wide range of groundbreaking studies. ... View more

by Jenn Fishman and Darci Thoune This is the first post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a 2-day annual event hosted online and in Milwaukee, WI, by a group that includes Darci and Jenn. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “symposium.”  Five years is and isn’t a long time, especially in higher education. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly 60% of college students finish their undergrad degrees in 5 years, while the Survey of Earned Doctorates reports the median time to PhD isn't much longer: just 5.8 years. For all of us involved in the annual Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), 5 years turned out to be just enough time for us to realize that we were really on to something—and to start putting it into words.  Since its founding in 2018, the WIS has been a regional event with national reach. Annually, in the dead of winter, the WIS lures writers and writing educators from all over North America to Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI, for two days of writing activity. As co-founder and Chief Capacitator, Jenn leads the cross-institutional steering committee that brings each symposium to life. In 2022-2023, that group was helmed by Darci, Jennifer Kontny, and Patrick Thomas; it also included Grant Gosizk, Jackielee Derks, Jenna Green, Kayla Urban Fettig, Kelsey Otero, Lilly Campbell, Maxwell Gray, Sara Heaser, Shevaun Watson, and Tara Baillargeon.    Marquette University hosts the Writing Innovation Symposium   When we look back and try to put a finger on what, exactly, makes the WIS the WIS, a few concrete details come immediately to mind, starting with our modest size. Usually, the WIS registers about 100. Participants come mainly from across academic ranks, roles, and disciplines, though non-ac colleagues tell us they feel right at home. The weather is also a contributing factor. Together, we have braved both ice and snowstorms as well as a polar vortex, which dropped the temperature to -23! Yet, it’s always warm and cozy in the University Libraries, where on-site we hunker down, while off-site attendees click in and out of Zoom sessions and Slack channels to join us. In so many ways, the WIS is Brigadoon, and for the 48 hours we gather each year, we form something that feels like community. In many ways, COVID-19 amplified this sense. The 2020 WIS was the last professional event many of us attended before the global pandemic was declared. Likewise, the 2022 WIS was the first in-person conference for a lot of us—and not just because it fit our budgets and schedules. Just as magnetic objects create force fields that attract particular elements (i.e., iron, nickel), the WIS draws writers and writing educators in a powerful way. By inviting everyone to base their contributions on work they have done—writing, writing pedagogy, research, writing administration—the WIS affirms the expertise that each participant brings with them. The WIS also primes attendees to learn from one another, and in doing so it affirms that everyone, from plenary presenters to the newest graduate teachers, has something to learn.  Symposium themes help focus our collective energy. We have worked to “Connect!” (2019), and we’ve explored some of the many connotations of “Just Writing” (2020). We’ve also come together to “Write It Out” (2022) and to fill in the blank: “Writing as _____” (2023). However, we direct our word play along with our most serious efforts, our plenaries are interactive, and our programs always include workshops as well as a session that features posters and creative, digital and analogue displays. Last year, we introduced flash talks into the mix, inviting presenters to distill their WISdom into five-minute presentations accompanied by a single artifact (e.g., handout, bookmark, cookie). Inaugural examples prompted rich exchanges about everything from “Writing in Times of Hopelessness” and “Writing as Empathic Design” to “Composing in the Pool,” “Reinventing the Writer’s Workshop,” “Writing as Resistance,” and “Writing as Power,” and “Writing as Weapon/Antidote.”  The story of WIS continues to be written. Recently, twenty-nine of us talked about an article that appears in Community Literacy Journal 17.2, and we’re glad to be contributing to Bedford Bits. Macmillan has been a vital supporter of the WIS, hosting meals and sponsoring opportunities like the workshop on Tiny Teaching Stories that Chris Anson led one year. In 2022, working in collaboration with Laura Davidson, we launched the Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellows Program. It provides WIS registration, travel monies, and mentorship opportunities to early career colleagues. To date, B/SM WIS Fellows include:  Abigayle Farrier (2023) Amy Patterson (2022) Holly Burgess (2023) Shiva Mainaly (2023) Ulisa Blakely (2022) Look for more from us as well as them in weeks to come—and consider joining us in Milwaukee at WIS 2024! Read our Call for Papers here.    Image via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

I thought I had the dry erase marker in my bookbag, but it wasn’t there. Other sources for markers weren’t accessible. The department’s supply closet was in another building, and the rooms on my floor were filled with classes in session. We were discussing the possibilities for organizing essays, specifically alternatives to the five paragraph format of introduction with 3-part thesis, 3 body paragraphs (a paragraph for each part of the thesis), and a conclusion that summarized the main points of the essay.  For several generations now, I’ve watched students learn how to expand on this template as their ideas expand beyond the constraints they have been practicing since middle school, and probably earlier. The five-paragraph format has served them well for exams, college application essays, and other rhetorical situations. But in College Writing and other courses, students are learning material and encountering assignments that don’t fit neatly within the five-paragraph model.  It is a challenging moment, made even more challenging this semester by my lack of a marker for the dry erase board. Teaching from my gut, I thought to use my hands to show how an essay could be organized: Introduction, opening body paragraphs, transition between opening and closing body paragraphs, closing body paragraphs, and a conclusion. My hands were framed somewhat like in this photo: Photo of Susan’s Hands by S. Cormany September 20, 2023 For the purposes of keeping a visual record, I asked my partner to take that picture of my hands in the same formation that I had shown the students. Once I saw the photo, I wondered if I could do something with it. Many of my students are visual learners, and I am a kinesthetic learner. Movement is important to me as a learner, and I talk with my hands, as the photo documents. I thought that I might be able to deconstruct the photo in a way that might be helpful for switching up the writing process, or at least for beginning to envision or move toward a frame for essays beyond the five-paragraph model.  Or at least that is what I tried to do at first. Then I thought about how we were approaching form and content in class. This semester, I spent time modeling how to NOT do drafts in a linear format (introduction, body, conclusion). Instead, students were assigned journal entries that asked for unpacking and translating sections of James Baldwin’s work to twenty-first century Englishes. Baldwin’s sentences are very long, so we broke the sentences into component parts to try to find the independent clause– the kernel of meaning that helps make long sentences more understandable. I explained that Baldwin spoke French as well as English, and how his knowledge of multiple languages informed the form and content of his writing.  In other words, we discussed translanguaging. Most of us in class speak multiple languages, and many of us, myself included, have experience knowing what we’re thinking and feeling, but discovering that English doesn’t have the words we need to speak and write what we need to say. We struggle with writing. Baldwin struggled with writing. This is why we read “Artist’s Struggle” as a model. This is probably another reason why I talk with my hands. Words alone aren’t enough to make meaning. As a kinesthetic learner, I often need my whole body to say what I mean and mean what I say. With that in mind, I set out to make a diagram with the photo of my hands. At first I thought I could show an alternate form of organization. Then, I thought to frame the photo of my hands as a nonlinear form of drafting, but a form that would have discrete and recognizable parts, with thumbs representing the introduction and the conclusion, and the rest of the fingers representing opening body paragraphs, closing body paragraphs, and the transitions between opening and closing body paragraphs. That diagram looks like this: Drafting Process Diagram by Susan Bernstein Different components of the essay could be drafted at different points in the process, and not necessarily in the same order the audience would find in a revision. To illustrate a possibility for reassembling the component parts of the draft, I created a more linear diagram: Revising Diagram by Susan Bernstein   The main purpose of the diagrams, in a sense, fits the theme of our class, Creativity: Think Outside the Box. There is, I suppose, an irony in using boxes to frame the drafting and revising processes; nevertheless, the most important goal is to offer students practice with learning additional strategies for approaching a writing project, whether in English, the social sciences, or, as is very common for my students, assignments for courses in STEM majors.  In other words, a ten-page researched essay in a marketing or finance course won’t fit within the frame of a five-paragraph essay. The frame has to be reassembled, and students will need to figure out the best way to reassemble and expand on their thoughts, as well as find patterns of organization that fit the meaning of their words and that their audience can productively understand. This isn’t easy work for any of us, but experimenting with variations of form and content is worthwhile work in College Writing. For me, talking with my hands, learning kinesthetically, remains critical to the practices and process of learning to write beyond the five-paragraph frame. ... View more

I’ve been following University of Pennsylvania Professor Ethan Mollick’s blog, One Useful Thing, and find his thinking and reporting about recent AI developments particularly informative. One recent post, “Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier,” summarizes results from a study of professional work in what he calls “our AI-haunted age" in an effort to answer the question of whether AI is “really a big deal for the future of work.” The answer to this question: a resounding YES. This particular research project was multidisciplinary and included scores of interviews and a number of studies designed to test the impact of AI on knowledge work. To do so, they randomized a large group of consultants and asked them to do a variety of creative, analytical, writing, and “persuasiveness” tasks for a made-up shoe company—and checked with a real-life shoe company exec to make sure the tasks were realistic.  So what did they find? In a nutshell, “for 18 different tasks, consultants using ChatGPT-4 outperformed those who did not by a lot. On every dimension. Every way we measured performance.” I’d say that’s a pretty significant finding! Moreover, the consultants did better whether or not they were familiar with the AI tool or not—as judged by both real people as well as AI graders (who agreed). This image was generated by OpenAI's DALL-E    A second finding that I found especially interesting is that the AI tool works as a skill leveler. That is, the consultants who tested lowest at the start of the study improved their performance the most (up 43% when they used AI). Those who tested highest also performed better with AI but did not experience such a significant jump.  Finally, a third finding that jumped out at me concerns a task the team designed that was “outside the AI’s frontier, where humans with high human capital doing their job would consistently outperform AI.” Mollick says that designing such a task was very difficult but that they finally were able to use “the blind spots of AI” to make sure it would give a wrong (though convincing) answer to the problem. The surprising finding, however, was that “human consultants got the problem right 84% of the time without AI help, but [. . . ] with AI, they did worse.” Investigators think that this is an example of how over-reliance on AI can backfire, and they cite another experiment that showed those who used AI often “became lazy, careless, and less skilled in their own judgment.” Such over-reliance, which the researcher referred to as “falling asleep at the wheel” gets poor results and actually harms human learning and productivity.  Mollick concludes that “people really can go on autopilot when using AI” and that “AI outputs, while of higher quality than that of humans, were also a bit homogenous and same-y in aggregate.” He urges all of us to “use AI enough for work tasks” so we can “start to understand where AI is scarily good . . . and where it falls short.” The bottom line, he says, is not about whether AI is going to remake our work world but what we will make of that. We get to make choices about how we want to use AI help to make work more productive, interesting, and meaningful. But we have to make those choices soon, so that we can begin to actively use AI in ethical and valuable ways rather than merely reacting to technological change. And that’s a pretty tall order for teachers and students of writing. We have no time to waste! ... View more

This is my second 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, which will be published in November. This month, I spoke with Charlee Sterling. Charlee earned her Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University in 2003 and currently teaches writing and literature at Goucher College in Baltimore. Charlee’s scholarly focus includes twentieth-century and contemporary American literature and Anglo-American modernism. She has previously written on the work of Edith Wharton and William Faulkner and on the ups and downs of teaching online; her current work focuses on composition pedagogy and comics, specifically the important role comics, multimodality, and popular literature and culture can play in the writing studies classroom. Charlee’s contribution to Teaching Accelerated and Corequisite Composition is “Revisiting Dweck’s Growth Mindset in the First-Year Classroom.” As its title suggests, the chapter takes another look at Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck’s concept of growth and fixed mindsets. One of the bedrocks of accelerated composition instruction, growth mindset maintains “that intelligence, talent, and ability can be learned; growth and improvement can happen through sustained effort: persistence, practice and help from others allow us to improve.” Charlee’s chapter begins with a problem: her college’s corequisite writing class is not coming together, and talk of a growth mindset seems to be especially lost on three student athletes who are loudly disruptive and openly mocking of her class. The trio is not alone in their discontent. Across the college, corequisite students often report “feeling demeaned by the class or by their professors,” which results in “a lack of engagement and, often, outright resentment.” However, after revisiting Dweck’s ideas, Charlee reconfigures her classroom so that she is able “to create opportunities for students to experience success in real time, bringing about a growth mindset by providing students with an effective strategy and praising them for using it successfully.” For Charlee, “The most important section of the chapter for current teachers of accelerated composition is the latter half, in which I discuss specific, hands-on strategies for fostering a growth mindset in the classroom.” She argues that it is essential to think deeply about “how we design our activities and assignments, how we assess them, how we encourage our students to collaborate and reflect on their own learning.” She adds that “even the most experienced teacher amongst us might have a class that we struggle with: you are not alone! Thinking about and acknowledging our own fixed or growth mindsets when it comes to teaching praxis is crucial: does what I am doing work? What could I improve upon? Where can I get the help I need to make that happen?” When I asked about any additional insights she’s had since writing her chapter, she remarked: “If you teach first-year students, then you are seeing the effects of Covid-era learning directly; we need to create inclusive classrooms with even more opportunities for growth-mindset ‘wins’ in real time so that students can see how effort can lead to improvement.” Inevitably, the specter of AI entered our conversation, with Charlee emphasizing the importance of ensuring that “students are learning to write while also learning to use AI in appropriate ways that maintain rather than undermine academic integrity.” In the current semester, she is looking to “create even more ‘metacognitive moments’ in my schedule, so that I’m not merely praising effort, but giving students the space to reflect on what they’ve learned by making the effort in the first place, which is another way to challenge the ubiquitous nature of AI writing applications.” Charlee ended our conversation on positive note, saying that one of the students she describes in her chapter as “problematic” has become “a writing major, and is now taking upper-level courses with me. There is something so powerful about this narrative, and I can’t wait to share it with my accelerated composition students!” ... View more