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.     My colleague Kate Sanchez and I are currently working on a new YouTube channel, Present-Minded Professors, which contains meditations, activities and other musings to help educators and students build awareness skills for academic success. Kate and I like to think of mindfulness as a process of noticing what is going on in the body and the mind, and we feel that this awareness can especially help students be more present for their final exams and therefore do their best work. Here is a guided meditation for final exams to play for students. It contains a brief introduction to the practice and a meditation focused on getting one’s mind and body ready immediately before taking an exam. You can pull it up on YouTube on your phone at high volume, or you can play it on a SmartBoard. If time is a consideration, pick a short piece of the meditation to play for students, or simply give students the link to the meditation so they can listen before they come into the exam room. Do what feels comfortable for you! I always find it hard to do anything “extra” during exam time, but if you have metaphorical bandwidth, the text of the meditation is at the end of this blog post. You can feel free to modify it to suit your needs and your voice and then lead your students in the meditation. As Kate and I build our YouTube channel, we would also love your feedback, especially about topics for the videos you would like to see! Feel free to comment below or in the comments section of Present-Minded Professors on YouTube. Wishing you a meaningful end-of-semester!   A Meditation for Final Exams Hello everyone. This is Elizabeth Catanese from Present-Minded Professors.  I’m here right now to provide you with a brief meditation to help prepare your mind and body for the final exam you are about to take. Please engage with this meditation in whatever way feels helpful to you. You do not have to be good at meditation to benefit from this practice. Please see all directions as suggestions. For example, when I suggest that you close your eyes, do so only if that feels possible and comfortable. The goal of this meditation is to get your body and mind ready to take the exam. Maybe you have some extra anxious energy that is not serving you. Maybe you are a bit too calm for the task ahead. When I was taking exams, I used to be so anxious that my palms would sweat and my legs would bounce up and down. We all handle exams differently. Through this meditation you will become aware of where you are. How you are feeling is okay.  Let’s begin!  Take a deep breath and exhale. If you are comfortable doing so, close your eyes. Take a moment to notice how you feel in this moment. You may be excited and anxious. You might feel ready and annoyed that that test is not in your hands right in this moment. Simply notice. How you feel right now is valid.  Take another deep breath and exhale. What does your body need right now? If you think it would help, wiggle your fingers. Stretch your arms above your head. Notice how you feels. Is there a way you could move your body right now that would help it feels it’s best? Do so now.  Take note of the energy in the room. Relax your body for a moment and in your head give good wishes to those around you.  Take another deep breath. And exhale. As the final part of this practice, please come up with an affirmation to say to yourself if you get stuck during your exam. Say it in your head a few times. For example, I often say “I am brave and capable.” And many people like “I can do this.” Take a moment to think of one unique to you.  At this point, there is no more studying left to do for this class. It is time to show what you remember, what and how you think. I would like to extend my congratulations to you for getting this far. To get to the point of a final exam takes a lot of hard work and effort. I see and applaud your effort. Your progress is beautiful. Take a final deep breath and exhale. If you feel comfortable, open your eyes.  It is now time to take your final exam. ... View more

When I was a grad student at Ohio State University, one of the professors in the department insisted that the sign announcing our department be changed from “English Department” to “Department of English,” and I remember the debate that ensued on the ramifications of that grammatical shift and the high dudgeon many colleagues worked themselves into over it. I also remember at the time thinking what an odd name it was in any event. Though I had read William Riley Parker’s 1967 essay “Where Do English Departments Come From?” and understood the lineage that had shifted, at Harvard, from rhetoric, briefly to folklore, and then to literature, and particularly literature in English, the name still seemed odd to me, given what I knew about the Department I was currently studying in. “English” did not seem parallel, to me, with the Departments of German or Spanish or Chinese. In my department, students studied and wrote dissertations on literature in English and sometimes literature in translation, certainly, but also on the history and theory of rhetoric, on folklore, on creative and other forms of writing. So “English” just seemed an odd name to me.    University Hall at Ohio State University   So odd, in fact, that in the 80s I advocated for changing the name of our departments, arguing that our name should reflect the work that we actually do. My arguments went . . . nowhere. Nevertheless, as the years wore on and as scholars of rhetoric and literacy/writing studies began to grow in number, some departments began to change their names (Oregon State, for example, went from “English” to “Writing, Literature, and Film” and new departments, separated from English, grew up around the country, with names like “Writing and Media Studies” or “Writing and Rhetoric Studies” or “Rhetoric, Media, and Social Change,” “Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication,” and so on, names that signal more clearly what the department studies and values than does the single and vague word “English.” In “The Colonialism and Racism of the ‘English’ Department,” Elizabethada A. Wright doesn’t consider this slow evolution away from “English” and doesn’t cite William Riley Parker’s work or a number of others, such as Gerald Graff or John Guillory or Robert Scholes, who examine and question the formation and practices of “English.” But that is not the focus of Wright’s critique, which centers on the hegemony of English and of its colonializing tendencies. In this regard, I was expecting to encounter the work of James Slevin, whose Introducing English includes a searing indictment of the earliest attempts to force “English” on native inhabitants.  Nevertheless, I take the point of Wright’s article seriously, and I think all of us—especially all of us in departments of “English” should be at work right now examining how when and why our departments came by that name, articulating the mission that name suggests and comparing it with the missions that other, alternative names could carry forward. We would also do well to be asking our students what they think of the name of our departments – in what ways the name seems appropriate and adequate to what they are studying and learning in their classes and what alternative names they might suggest, along with their rationales for doing so. What’s in a name? A very great deal. Years ago, my colleague Nicholas Howe said if he could form a department of his own, he would call it “The Department of Interesting People.” I am still not sure what my department title would be, but I know it would aim at using language together to create a better future. And it would NOT be “English.” What would your department name be—and why?   The image in this post is in the public domain. ... View more

One year ago, I wrote here about the threat of a Constitutional crisis. In doing so, I cited a speech made by Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court, on the occasion of the 200th birthday of the Constitution in 1987. Marshall wrote, “I plan to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution as a living document, including the Bill of Rights and the other amendments protecting individual freedoms and human rights.” He continued, “Along the way, new constitutional principles have emerged to meet the challenges of a changing society. The progress has been dramatic, and it will continue. The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 could not have envisioned these changes. They could not have imagined, nor would they have accepted, that the document they were drafting would one day be construed by a Supreme Court to which had been appointed a woman and the descendent of an African slave. ‘We the People’ no longer enslave, but the credit does not belong to the Framers. It belongs to those who refused to acquiesce in outdated notions of ‘liberty,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘equality,’ and who strived to better them.” Since the 2020 elections, across our nation, dozens of laws have been proposed—and most of them have been passed—that acquiesce in outdated notions of liberty, justice, and equality. Often these laws have been passed with their proponents knowing full they will not withstand a constitutional challenge. They do, however, reveal the biases of those who support them. They also reveal why Marshall was right in stressing that the Constitution was and must remain a living document. For example, there is endless debate about what rights to gun ownership are established by the Second Amendment, an amendment written before bullets as we know them had even been invented, let alone semiautomatic weapons. When Marshall wrote of “new constitutional principles [which] have emerged to meet the challenges of a changing society,” he had in mind, among others, the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which ended slavery and the denial of the vote based on race, respectively. During his lifetime, he saw progress toward a more just and equal nation. Had he lived into the twenty-first century, he would have been horrified to see us moving backward. Last week Marshall would have seen a glaring backward movement in the area of racial justice as he watched with the rest of the nation what happened in Tennessee. The Tennessee state legislature expelled Rep. Justin J. Pearson and Rep. Justin Jones, two young black representatives because they took part in a peaceful protest against the gun violence that most recently took six lives at an elementary school in Nashville. These representatives were removed from political office after being duly elected by their constituents, leaving those constituents temporarily without representation. Representative Gloria Johnson, a white Democrat, participated in the same protest but was not removed from office. Ironically, quiet racial gerrymandering of voting districts is what brought into power state legislatures that are able to get by with such blatant injustices. While both Rep. Justin J. Pearson and Rep. Justin Jones have been reinstated, the backlash from their expulsion will unravel in the weeks to come. Our Constitution assumed men of honor would be the ones enforcing it. Unfortunately, as the Constitution evolves we may have to legislate standards of integrity as well. For the better part of 200 years, Americans used the power of the vote to say no to politicians involved in a scandal or espousing blatant racism—except in the South, where that remains a problem. Our Founders didn’t think they needed to be made explicit. Perhaps today they do.   "Constitution"  by EpicTop10.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Jordan Hill, composition instructor in the Global First Year program at Florida International University. A recently-selected Fulbright Scholar, he will soon move to Italy to research a short story collection. Idioms I tell my class of international students that a certain American literary character is “an odd duck.” They stare at me with tilted heads and confused smiles. I imagine what they must be imagining—Jay Gatsby as a strange waterfowl. I clear my throat. “Sorry, everyone,” I say. “An ‘odd duck’ is an idiom. An expression.” How can I explain this? “An odd duck is sort of like a black sheep.” Again, the quizzical faces. Too late, I register my second, unintentional idiom. I sigh and explain what happened. They laugh, and I try again.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines.   ... 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.   While taking education courses in college, my peers and I were asked to think of metaphors for our pedagogy. At the time, I found inspiration in the idea of being the conductor of an orchestra, using my conductors’ wand to help bring out the creative genius of my students. I imagined my hair getting ruffled by the breeze created by my own motion as my body kept time—the community of it all, the uproarious appreciation of the crowd. But after 15 years of being a college professor, my metaphor for teaching has evolved from “I am a conductor,” to “I am a circle-creator.” It’s a metaphor that reminds me to bring students together (often into the shape of a circle), to constantly renew my commitment to circle back to previous concepts before building on them, and to help students build cyclical routines. My new metaphor is not as glamorous, and in the strict sense of definitions, it’s only metaphor-adjacent, but it works a lot better for me. The circle-creator metaphor speaks to me because I find it valuable to be at the edges of the classroom, alongside my students, where we can encourage each other and learn collaboratively. This allows for insights to come from the voices of students, rather than just my own, resulting in a deeper understanding of the material. However, creating a literal circle in the classroom can be a challenge, as my current Humanities 101 students can confirm. After attempting to arrange desks into a circle, the result often looks more like an octopus having a bad day. Additionally, one or more students may end up sitting outside of the circle (by choice or by chance), and the pace of discussion can make it easy to miss opportunities that help students deepen their analysis. That being said, I like the circle formation precisely because it is not always easy; together in the circle, we strive to make meaning together, and there is always something about the literal or metaphorical configuration to improve upon next time. The circle-creator metaphor also works for me because it reflects the iterative nature of teaching. A student may understand a concept one week and forget it the next. To solidify and deepen our understanding, I remind myself to circle back to previous concepts before moving on to new ones. For example, before discussing the shift to monotheism in Ancient Rome under Constantine, I asked my students to recall what they remembered about the shift to monotheism under Akhenaton in Ancient Egypt. My students and I think about how history repeats itself, and we repeat ourselves too. Thinking about the circle-creator metaphor helps me to slow my teaching down—to offer reminders and opportunities to rethink, instead of just plowing ahead. When teaching study skills in my English 097 class, I also think about the circle-creator metaphor in terms of routines. I encourage my students to make small changes in their study process, such as writing down exactly when they plan to do their homework for the class. We then circle back the next day to see how it went. If a student says that a strategy didn’t work for them, I remind them that it may be useful to try it more than once. We also talk about how good habits, once established, can come and go. I share with them that I, too, constantly slip and have to circle back to my better habits like going to bed on time, and properly managing my grading time. I believe that using metaphors for teaching can clarify our practices and our values and keep us fresh. The circle-creator metaphor works for me because it reflects the power of collaboration and the cyclical nature of learning. Comment below about the metaphor(s) that work for you! ... View more

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 Writing in digital spaces asks us to rethink the nature of writing. Our students compose through non-linear writing and interactive formats. Site maps are used in interactive design to help users find our sites and content and enhance SEO (search engine optimization).  Although this is important for those composing in online formats, I use site maps in my classes as part of the planning and revision processes.    It is often difficult for students to get their minds around non-linear writing. They are used to writing in a vertical format, where readers read from top to bottom and left to right. Generally, the author controls where the reader goes through linear progression. With webtexts and interactive writing, the audience takes on a participatory role through which writers and readers work together to understand meaning and readers have choices about where to go next, thus creating documents that are read deep vs from top to bottom. Celia Pearce in the Ins and Outs of Interactive Storytelling, provides a good working definition for these terms: “In the context of interactivity, linear is defined as any body of content (i.e., information) that is meant to be seen or heard in the same order every time it is experienced.” She continues, “Non-linear, on the other hand, is defined as any body of content that is structured such that its final delivery is variable. Each time it is seen or heard, it can be presented in a different order, based on input from the user, or (as I prefer to call it) the player.” Teaching students to write in this way is a challenge as it asks them to include multimedia and multimodal components, embedded links and incorporate design cues that allow readers to move around and participate in the narrative. See my previous post on Foundations for Non-linear Writing for including these components.   I use site maps in my courses to help students see the connection between their ideas and the ways that form and content work together. My students are not web designers and my goal at this point is not to have them understand SEO and other back-end strategies for location and distribution of their work (although this is important down the line if they continue in these areas).  Instead, I use them as planning and revision documents that help them conceptualize the structure of non-linear writing.    Here are two examples of how I use them in my classes:    Sitemaps for Interactive Writing I have students write interactive feature articles that require many branching directions and pathways. For these articles, the site map helps students organize their work and shape the writing through identifying embedded links, exploratory paths, and multimodal components. Here is a sample from a Sense of Place interactive article:  Talia Dodenhoff’s Site map for Sense of Place Interactive Feature Article (2022)   Sitemaps for Organizing Online Portfolios  I use online portfolios in many of my classes. One class in particular encourages students to curate a collection of artifacts that represent their marketable skills. This portfolio assists them on the job market as they shape a professional identity and allows future employers to understand the connections between their work and their abilities.  Students in this context need to understand the connections between their artifacts through categorizing and organizing.    For both of these examples, students need to create a hierarchy of pages and elements and detail the connections between components. Here is a sample of a site map for an online portfolio: Isabel McNamara’s Sitemap for an online portfolio (2022)   Steps to the assignment:  Give students context through discussing linear and non-linear composition.  Explain the concept of site maps and talk about how they are similar and different from outlines and other processes of linear writing. Students are generally familiar with outlines, so this is a good place to start.  I usually show them a couple of examples to get an idea of the visual sitemap.  Have students to review their work and list the components included in their articles and in their portfolios. Ask them to specifically name their ideas rather than rely on generic naming. Encourage them to talk about hierarchy and to look for categories and connections between their ideas and components.    I introduce a site map generator tool/app that allows them to create the maps in real time and through fluid design that can change as the projects progress. I like Gloomaps because it is simple and free but there are many other free tools and apps for site map design. This app helps you create a map that is available for 14 days unless it is revisited and will renew each time for dynamic interaction as students revise and refer back to it as an organizing document. Students can also save their sitemaps to their computers in PNG or PDF formats. Here is a short instructional video on the site that demonstrates the building process.  Share sitemaps in peer groups or project for the whole class to get feedback.   Have students revisit the sitemap several times during the process and revise it based on new ideas and directions.        Reflection on the Activity  This activity goes far to help students understand that they are not just dropping a paper online and that they must think differently in these contexts. It allows them to engage in dynamic, fluid design that trains them to be strong interactive composers. It emphasizes a visual planning and revising through new conceptual lenses.      Works Cited:  Pearce, C. (1994, May 1). The ins & outs of non-linear storytelling, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics. DeepDyve. Retrieved March 27, 2023, from https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/the-ins-outs-of-non-linear-storytelling-QwtZIQstxb  ... View more

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been re-evaluating the power of digital technologies. But not, as you might expect, AI tools like ChatGPT. Actually, I’ve been pondering Google Translate.   Ten or twelve years ago, I recall discussions among ESL and FYC colleagues in which Google Translate was censured as an impediment to both language acquisition and writing development.  But within a few years, the tone had softened considerably, and many of us working with multilingual writers recognized the benefits of this Google tool for academic readers and writers trying to deal with unfamiliar vocabulary. There was a  particular value in classes with students from many language backgrounds: students with shared linguistic resources could rely on each other, but others—such as speakers of Nepali or Korean or Lingala in the class—often felt left out.  Google Translate was a resource for them, and it seemed to level the playing field. For translations of words and short sentences, this tool made sense.   Still, 1o years ago, I would not have encouraged a student to write a complete piece in a different language and produce the English version through Google Translate.     This spring, however, one of my students submitted the first draft of his literacy narrative in both Spanish and English. He had added an annotation:  the English version came from Google Translate.     My first instinct was to invite the student to my office and make it clear that he should not do this again.  But I hesitated. After all, it was not a final piece, and it was clear the student was engaged in the assignment. When I asked about his process, he explained that he just “felt more comfortable” beginning in Spanish.     So I let the process stand, and I provided feedback as I normally would, asking questions about the content, organization, word choice. The student began revising the English version. To my surprise, however, he did not delete the Spanish original on his working draft. It was a touchstone for him, a point of assessment and reflection.  The student asked questions of his own, met with our writing fellows, and discussed the piece with classmates.     He has since completed two additional assignment drafts using the compose/translate/revise method.  He recognizes the potential difficulties and risks inherent in this method, and he does not use it for every assignment. He knows he has to assess meaning, word choice, paragraph structure, and syntax.   I am not sure this process would be effective for all students, but for this student in particular, the use of Google Translate in the composing process engages him in metalinguistic and meta-rhetorical talk. As Myhill and Newman have suggested:   “Learners’ capacity to think metalinguistically about writing and to enact that thinking in the composing of text is enabled through high-quality classroom talk. . . . Potentially, classroom talk can be the cultural tool which supports the construction of shared declarative metalinguistic knowledge and the psychological tool which supports writers’ cognitive capacities to use that knowledge procedurally in the shaping of their own written texts.”  (Myhill and Newman, 2016, p. 178).    My student is certainly developing “declarative metalinguistic knowledge” and using that knowledge to shape his own written texts.   In a sense, my student is deploying all the tools and resources (community, digital, and linguistic) available to him to compose, revise, and transform meaningful texts.  His process, in fact, reminds me of my son’s artwork; my son uses a host of digital tools to transform photos into abstract works of art, as in the example below.      The initial inspiration is no longer recognizable or even recoverable: each choice my son makes takes the piece further from its original source.  But those choices are thoughtful and purposeful, made according to his initial vision of the piece. We can even see the process of composition and transformation condensed in a time-lapse video of his work.         I would love to have a time-lapse video of my student’s composing process—from his freewriting and revision in Spanish, to the first iteration of an English translation, to the interactions and edits which will ultimately lead to an essay in his final portfolio. Through notes and annotations, he has already documented at least part of his process.     Ten years ago, I might have told this student that his extensive use of Google Translate wasn’t really “writing in English.”  But like my student’s narrative or my son’s artwork, I have seen my teaching transformed through disciplinary communities, interactions with students and colleagues, and a host of digital, rhetorical, and linguistic resources.  Such transformation is certainly a good thing.   Image credit: Murray Moore ... View more

  Logical fallacies can be the source of humor or the source of the most successful acts of deceit ever pulled off. To learn to avoid fallacies in their own writing, students need to practice recognizing and understanding the fallacies in what they read and hear. They will be less susceptible to flawed logic if they practice spotting it in everyday rhetoric. Commercials and ads provide plenty of examples for practice. You can ask your students to bring in or jot down examples of fallacies they find in ads and then can discuss in class what fallacies they illustrate. Here are a few examples: Faulty Use of Authority: Mila Kunis endorsing Jim Beam. False Dilemma: “Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline.” Ad Populum: “Lipton Ice Tea. Join the Dance.” Appeal to Tradition: For lemonade (or almost anything else) — "Just like grandma used to make.” It’s not always easy to categorize logical fallacies, but the important thing is for students to recognize what is wrong with the logic even if the line between types of fallacies is sometimes blurry. Remember also that the fact that an advertising strategy is not logical does not mean that it is not effective. You may want to move from such an exercise to consider logical fallacies drawn from the news, perhaps bringing in some examples and asking the students to find others.  False Analogy: The most infamous example this month has been Fox News’ Tucker Carlson’s editing 44,000 hours of January 6th footage and characterizing the remaining brief clip as the actions of innocent sightseers being escorted through the Capitol. Post Hoc or Doubtful Cause: Because some childhood inoculations are given around the same age as parents often become aware of the first symptoms of autism in their children, a group of anti-vaxxers now object to having their children inoculated. It has been proven that the inoculations do not cause autism, but the misguided belief of a few has led to a rise in the number of cases of some diseases once virtually eliminated in the U. S. Ad Hominem: It is common in politics to attack an opponent, and in this age of a decisive split between parties, those attacks are as heated as ever. An ad hominem fallacy occurs when the person making an argument is attacked instead of his or her argument. It is an attempt to distract from the issue at hand. For example, critics have been using Biden’s age to argue that he is not fit to be president of the U.S. Slippery Slope: This sort of poor reasoning is exactly why a bank failure such as the recent one in California sends shock waves through the financial community. Unfortunately, it has happened before that the failure of one or a few banks caused a panic, which caused people to pull their money out of other banks, which caused more banks to fail. It’s not hard to find examples of bad logic, but it takes practice. Students generally enjoy these exercises. The challenge comes in seeing their own flaws in logic as they draft their essays. "I must be a cat"  by Nattiebug is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

For our 2nd writing project this semester, we are working on creating multimedia projects. The intention is to create a deeper understanding of our class’s key source, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” by James Baldwin. We are returning to this source with 3 central goals in mind: To practice part-to-whole analysis, students will find a section from “Artist’s Struggle “ that caught their attention while composing Writing Project 1. They will analyze how and why this part of the text caught their attention, and explain how this section exemplifies  Baldwin’s overall message.  To prepare for Writing Project 3, the researched essay, students will engage with deeper reading of “Artist’s Struggle.” For WP 3, students will use the section from WP 2 to find an additional source by James Baldwin that speaks to connected or similar concerns. “Artist’s Struggle” presents many of the germinal themes that Baldwin revisited throughout his life, including the idea of artists bearing witness to and recording cataclysmic events in order to move audiences to action. In investigating Baldwin’s work in more depth, the hope is that students will explore and synthesize questions and concerns from across the semester. To understand Baldwin’s work more fully, students will engage with the artistic process of writing for discovery. For facilitating this part of the assignment, I will offer examples of projects that students have created in the last several years, including videos, drawings, and collages. In reconsidering the third goal, I wondered how to introduce poetry as an additional possibility for a multimedia project. Then I remembered the concept of cross out, or erasure, poems. To create an erasure poem, the Poetry Foundation suggests the following process: “Cross out words or entire phrases to make a new poem ‘within’ or ‘underneath’ the real one.”  My thought was that, using their selected section from “Artist’s Struggle,” students use Baldwin’s original words to create their own cross out poem. I tried out this process myself  to see how it might work and what it might look like.   First, in order to have a clear reference point, I copied a sample section into a Google Doc: If I spend weeks and months avoiding my typewriter—and I do, sharpening pencils, trying to avoid going where I know I’ve got to go—then one has got to use this to learn humility. After all, there is a kind of saving egotism too, a cruel and dangerous but also saving egotism, about the artist’s condition, which is this: I know that if I survive it, when the tears have stopped flowing or when the blood has dried, when the storm has settled, I do have a typewriter which is my torment but is also my work. If I can survive it, I can always go back there, and if I’ve not turned into a total liar, then I can use it and prepare myself in this way for the next inevitable and possibly fatal disaster. But if I find that hard to do—and I have a weapon which most people don’t have—then one must understand how hard it is for almost anybody else to do it at all. (Baldwin 68) Next, I recopied the section and added cross outs using strikethrough formatting. This was not an easy process, and I spent some time figuring out what words to keep to make meaning (and a poem!) from the original section.  If I spend weeks and months avoiding my typewriter—and I do, sharpening pencils, trying to avoid going where I know I’ve got to go—then one has got to use this to learn humility. After all, there is a kind of saving egotism too, a cruel and dangerous but also saving egotism, about the artist’s condition, which is this: I know that if I survive it, when the tears have stopped flowing or when the blood has dried, when the storm has settled, I do have a typewriter which is my torment but is also my work. If I can survive it, I can always go back there, and if I’ve not turned into a total liar, then I can use it and prepare myself in this way for the next inevitable and possibly fatal disaster. But if i find that hard to do—and I have a weapon which most people don’t have—then one must understand how hard it is for almost anybody else to do it at all.  In the process of choosing the cross outs, I found myself slowing down and reading more deeply to discover how Baldwin used language to make meaning. I noticed, as if for the first time, how Baldwin used verbs, conjunctions, and punctuation to create meaning. Even though I regularly teach these stylistic features, I realized that I was creating something new from something seemingly very familiar. I looked more closely at sentences and key words to figure out how the component parts could work together as a reimagined whole. What I discovered was that erasing words and punctuation allowed me to better understand the heart of Baldwin’s message—a condensed version, in a sense. In other words, the erasure of words helped me to concretize meaning in a text where meaning can seem abstract and elusive.  I wished I had thought of this for WP 1, I noted to myself. Perhaps it would have helped with the initial struggles with the text. On the other hand, those initial struggles seem like an important part of the process. In and out of the classroom any of us might struggle to make sense of a complicated world. The hope is that having struggled with a difficult text there will be a transfer of skills that is applicable to other situations in which students find it difficult to make meaning from a first encounter.  The final step in my process was to put my strikethrough formatted text into a Word document and to use the drawing function to cross out the words in digital purple marker. Here is a screenshot of the poem:   Cross Out Poem using a section of “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” by James Baldwin Poem and Photo by Susan Bernstein March 15, 2023. It is perhaps an interesting way to teach paraphrase, as well as a different approach to the writing process and close reading and analysis. Indeed, as with any form of interpretation based on existing evidence, I imagine that the same passage would yield many different cross out poems. But for the moment, the hope is that students will experience for themselves what it means, as artists writing for discovery, to struggle with their integrity. ... View more

A few weeks ago I climbed the steps at 100 East End Avenue in New York, which the independent Chapin school calls home. I was there to celebrate teachers, the mission driving The Academy for Teachers, a nonprofit dedicated to honoring and supporting teachers “as valued professionals in need of the latest knowledge and inspiration.” Conceived of and directed by teacher and writer Sam Swope (see his The Araboolies of Liberty Street and I am a Pencil, for example), the Academy urges all of us to give teachers the R E S P E C T that Aretha sings about, along with “the support they need to keep them where they belong—in the classroom inspiring our children for years to come.” In pursuit of this goal, Sam and his team at the Academy offer “master classes” for teachers from public, private, and charter schools to attend three ninety-minute sessions led by artists and thinkers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Gloria Steinem, Jane Goodall, Julia Alvarez, Robert Battle, and others. The intense workshops and conversations led by these experts continue to enrich and inspire the teachers who get to spend time with them, so much so that these teachers are four times more likely than others to stay in the classroom, often against the great odds that all of us know about. The faculty for these master classes come from across the disciplines and artistic fields. On this particular evening, we are gathering to hear The Kronos Quartet perform “A Teacher’s Suite,” commissioned by the Academy to honor teachers and featuring the voices of many of the Academy fellows who have participated in master classes. Kronos had led transformative master classes for the Academy, working with teachers of music to bring new ways of thinking and experiencing music into their classrooms, and this concert followed up on those classes and showcased Kronos’s own interest in and dedication to teaching and to learning.     A teacher teaches a classroom of students   I was sitting with a large group of teachers that evening as we experienced the magic that Kronos so often produces: I could actually feel the room expand with hope and pride as the music cascading around us, could feel what it means for teachers to feel honored and respected. Such a small thing, giving respect. And yet it can change lives and, perhaps, the world. In addition to master classes and special performances, the Academy publishes small chapbooks, written by master class teachers—about a teacher who was important to them. I have a collection of these gems, and looking through them now I’m drawn to one by Jacqueline Woodson, author of Brown Girl Dreaming. She remembers “Ms. Pat,” who “taught me most about what it meant to move through the world as an empath, as a philanthropist, as a thinker, as a doer, as a truly good human being.” Ms. Pat, she goes on, “rarely stepped into our classrooms. Instead, she invited us into her office—and she guided us. She truly guided us.” A teacher like that, Woodson concludes, “stays with you for a lifetime.”   I hope that each of us has a “Ms. Pat” held close in our memories, and I hope that our students will all encounter such teachers, those who will be with them for a lifetime. In the meantime, if you are reading this and have a few spare moments, check out the Academy for Teachers, and consider contributing to their mission. Director Sam Swope dreams of similar academies springing up in cities across the country, all dedicated to supporting and honoring teachers. That’s a dream I can believe in.    Image by Kenny Eliason.    ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn, a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. 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   So... The buzz lately is Open AI language generators and Chat GPT, in particular. It’s got teachers talking, scrambling, and rethinking our roles and pedagogies in the classroom and what it means to write. No doubt, as educators, we have many concerns about the negative implications of these tools. We hear tension in our communities pointing to the major disruptive impact of these language generators, or as Steven Marche writes in the Atlantic article, The College Essay is Dead (December 2022). The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up.  We will experience disruption and this tool does present us with real concerns. It is undoubtedly a major paradigm shift that asks us to rethink much of what we know about the teaching of writing. We wonder how it will challenge issues of plagiarism and intellectual property. We recognize the potential threat to students’ abilities to write and think critically on their own. We worry about a world where creativity is merely an algorithm, and the humanity of our discipline is lost.  The fact of the matter is that... we are here... there IS no turning back. We can choose to enter this conversation from a place of fear where students lose the ability to write and think critically or we can search for opportunities, new definitions, and pedagogical approaches. Theorists and practitioners, such as Professor Mike Sharple urge educators to “rethink teaching and assessment” in light of the technology, which he said, “could become a gift for student cheats, or a powerful teaching assistant, or a tool for creativity” (Marche).   Looking Back  This is not the first time in my career that I was forced to reflect on my practices because of the introduction of new technologies and tools. When we moved from typewriters to writing with computers, we had to rethink how we compose and revise. This shift opened opportunities for writers to see revision as more than correction and connected it to thinking and “Seeing again” (Re-vision). It allowed us to revise sentences during the act of composition, reorganize, and substantiate in ways that were difficult with the typewriter as a tool. It helped us to understand the recursive nature of revision beyond a lock-step process. We wondered how tools like spelling, grammar checkers, and citation generators would affect students’ abilities to spell, research and know how to write grammatically correct sentences on their own.   We were concerned when the internet hit the scene that students would no longer spend time in the library and instead find sources in ways that were much more convenient. We worried that students would no longer gain the research practices necessary to foster strong critical thinking and succeed. We had to shift our teaching to focus less on the location of sources and towards the analysis and evaluation of sources since students faced many available options. We taught them new practices such as how to use online databases, key words, and develop a critical eye towards locating themselves within a range of ideas and perspectives.   I was part of the early wave of teachers embracing multimodal composition in our writing classes. In those days, our work was met with criticism, skepticism, and fear.  Multimodal assignments were seen only as “creative” supplements to the writing of essays rather than a valid form of communication to prepare our student writers for success in college and beyond. Multimodality pushed us to think about how we defined composition and what would happen if we moved students away from alphabetic writing as their primary method of communication. We introduced multimodal texts for analysis and eventually followed with the composition of multimodal texts as a viable and compelling way to understand and express meaning. Our focus moved off the production of texts towards teaching writing as a rhetorical act through which students analyze their purposes, audiences, subjects, and contexts to come up with the best modes of delivery for their messages. We came to value rhetorical agility and new understandings of genre conventions in light of new audiences, purposes, and digital affordances. We had to redefine our definitions of originality and creativity and open our minds to the idea of remixing and recognizing the ways texts, images, sound, and motion work together to communicate meaning. We questioned our ideas on intellectual property and fair use as composition became more collaborative and participatory. We moved towards an integrated curriculum through which we engaged writers in multimodal analysis and composition throughout their writing processes – from invention to production.     Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash   Looking Forward None of us can really say where this is all going and once we get our minds around these tools, things will change again. Some, such as Ian Bogost, in his article, Chat GPT is Dumber than You Think, argue that the tool does not have the ability to, “truly understand the complexity of human language and conversation” suggesting that we will seek out a human component in these texts.  I am not sure how this will play out as we learn more about the limitations and affordances of these tools. However, I do know that I will resist practices that put us in a place of fear and have our primary goal to police student writing. First, that is not a winning game and second, it is not why we teach. Instead, we can bring these ideas into the conversation in ways that will help us learn and grow.   Here are some practical ideas we can consider as we move ahead:  Let students know that we are aware of these technologies and work together with them to understand their potential and limitations. Show the tools to students. Have them play with them, discuss them, challenge them.   Study these tools as cultural artifacts in the digital landscape, including the human factors and ethical frameworks.  Use them for brainstorming and invention. AI’s can be a place for students to try out their ideas, explore sources and generate directions for research and writing. The bots can encourage us to ask thoughtful questions and follow up questions.  Understand and analyze style, tone, and voice as we can guide the tool to emulate these characteristics.  Incorporate what we already know about process approaches and scaffolding and include the tool as part of a series of incremental steps towards more finished projects.    Turn our attention towards teaching revision through thoughtful hybrid texts that recognize both student ideas and the ideas of others.    Keep our attention on teaching writing as a rhetorical act and design assignments that ask students to gain rhetorical agility.  Celebrate multimodal composition and its many possibilities for meaningful work and expand our creative and critical writing practices.   We always say that we don’t “teach tools” because tools change. Instead, we can focus on the processes of composition and develop a sense of digital intuition through which students explore new tools and learn as they go. We serve our students well to allow them to experiment with digital tools and contribute their experiences to classroom conversations and collaborative work. Ultimately, we will be OK if we keep our eyes on the prize – helping students to read, write, and think critically and recognizing the impact of their unique ideas and contributions.     Marche, Stephen. “The College Essay Is Dead.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 16 Dec. 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatgpt-ai-writing-college-student-essays/672371/. Bogost, Ian. “CHATGPT Is Dumber than You Think.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 16 Dec. 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatgpt-openai-artificial-intelligence-writing-ethics/672386/. ... View more

  In several of the earlier editions of Elements of Argument, we made use of the Stephen Toulmin term warrant. It proved to be a difficult term, even for some of us who were trying to teach it. It was easy enough for students to link the term claim to the term thesis statement and to link support with the term evidence.  The concept is no easier now that we have adopted the term assumption to replace warrant, but at least the word is familiar. Whatever we call it, this link between claim and support is critical to understanding others’ arguments and our own. Every day, millions of headlines are published in response to the events happening around us. These headlines are littered with the writer's assumptions about the outcome of an event. Having students explore assumptions in the headlines can help them to understand how a writer’s beliefs shape their argument. However, students should be aware that as readers, they will also establish their own assumptions about the content of the article based on its headline. Here’s an activity that you can use to have students explore their biases when reading headlines. Collect about 4-5 headlines and share them on the board. Here are a few examples of interesting headlines this week: Retirees lost 23% of their 401(k) savings in 2022, Fidelity says (from CNBC) Ohio train derailment happened moments after crew warned of axle overheating, NTSB says (from USA Today) Chile readies major earthquakes insurance with World Bank (from Reuters) London activists paint Ukraine’s flag in front of Russian Embassy (from The Washington Post) Then as a class, have students list what they assume the articles would address. Next, divide the class into 4-5 groups and assign each group an article. After reading, each group should explore whether their assumptions about the article were correct or incorrect and how their assumptions shaped their reading experience. This activity will help students to understand how their biases contribute to how they approach and navigate articles, which is important for them to keep in consideration when conducting research. Using assumptions to guide their research can cause students to only use articles that support their argument, creating a skewed discussion of a topic. You can use this activity to stress the importance of understanding all sides of an argument to effectively support and validate a thesis. Additionally, this activity can be used to connect with and understand your students. Our classrooms are more diverse now than ever before. Each student has their own intersectionality, experiences, and beliefs that can influence their assumptions. Understanding how students navigate headlines and the media can help you provide research resources for students, create guidance on how to frame their claims and support to bolster their arguments, and discern what motivated students to choose a specific topic to write about. Navigating the assumptions made in the headlines and our assumptions is the first step in finding the heart of a topic. Although arguments in the media are portrayed with a harsh right or wrong binary, as professors we must continue to remind students that argumentation is not about proving yourself right or someone wrong. Argumentation is simply a tool used to impact the people and world around us with the best uses of argumentation being when it is used to advocate for democracy, human rights, and our planet. "Question mark made of puzzle pieces"  by Old Photo Profile is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

For the past few weeks, American mass media outlets have been transfixed by the recent detection of a series of balloons floating over North American airspace. Even the BBC (U.S. edition) replaced the ongoing earthquake disaster in Turkey and Syria as its top headline with updates on the balloons, their destruction, the continuing attempts to determine just what they were, and the subsequent defense of having shot them down in the first place. Since none of these objects were at any time identified to be existential threats, the expensive scrambling of American fighter jets to blast them out of the sky raises an interesting question: why all the fuss? After all, the sky is filled with all sorts of flying objects, and it is hardly news that some of them are spying on us. Heck, so are Google, Facebook, Siri, Alexa, and our smartphones. What made these balloons so special? On the surface, the whole matter might not appear to be particularly relevant to a popular cultural semiotics analysis. However, the way that it has played out on both social media and the news, not to mention the entertaining theatricality of all those videos of exploding balloons, does have a cultural resonance. An analysis of that resonance can lead us to some conclusions that are worth noting. As always, with a semiotic analysis, we can begin with the construction of a system of associated and differential phenomena in order to define an interpretable context. It starts with the intense distrust of President Joe Biden on the part of the American conservatives, especially in the wake of his handling of America’s pullout from Afghanistan early in his presidency. This alone has put a great deal of pressure on the President to act decisively in the face of any perceived threat to national security, especially as America gears up for the 2024 presidential election. Given this, why hasn’t there been even more intense pressure on the president to act with military decisiveness in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which surely presents a threat to our, and the world’s, security? Here, we find a striking difference in the way conservatives regard Russia with respect to China, their support for a former KGB chief, and their opposition to American intervention in Ukraine’s fight for survival. Suffice to say that the “Chinese spy balloon” has instigated far more national security fervor among conservatives than anything that Putin has done (thus taking its place alongside what former president Trump insisted on calling the “China virus”), leading to their demand for governmental action. All in all, we can see that the PRC, which Richard Nixon began to play off against the USSR in the days of “ping-pong diplomacy" (turning it into the "good" communist country in conservative eyes), is being restored to "enemy" status in right-wing circles. In such an environment, President Biden, whose re-election campaign announcement is expected at any moment, cannot afford to appear to be “soft” on China. Therefore, balloons (three of them turning out to be completely harmless), get expensively shot down in an environment that is, metaphorically and literally, filled with a lot of hot air.   Photo by Tobias Tullius (2020), used under the Unsplash License. ... View more

  A few months ago, I wrote in this space about the rise of AI chatbots like ChatGPT. Since then—like you, I imagine—I have been inundated with articles and YouTube videos and tweets about the still fairly new Open AI chatbot. We are seeing an understandable amount of handwringing among the academic community as administrators and teachers everywhere worry about academic integrity, about “the end of writing,” and even about their jobs. As with every sudden technological innovation, this one is unsettling at best and perhaps terrifying at worst. I have read a lot of the jeremiads and the end-of-the-world-as-we-have-known-it scenarios, and while I am sympathetic, I am at least for the time being inclined less to a “the sky is falling” stance and more to a cautious, careful look at how we and our students can work productively, and ethically, with this new tool. If the slide rule and the calculator didn’t bring the world to a halt, if television did not destroy education, then it seems unlikely that ChatGPT will do so. A recent New York Times piece takes this position. Author Kevin Roose recognizes legitimate fears about plagiarism and other ethical issues but goes on argue that “schools should thoughtfully embrace ChatGPT as a teaching aid—one that could unlock student creativity, offer personalized tutoring, and better prepare students to work alongside A.I. systems as adults.” He makes this argument for three main reasons: 1) that ignoring or trying to keep such AI tools away from students simply will not work: they are here and here to stay; 2) that ChatGPT can be an “effective teaching tool,” giving the example of a teacher whose students use the chatbot to create outlines for essays they are working on—and then go on to write stronger and more engaging essays as a result, or using the tool as an out of class tutor or a debate sparring partner or “starting point for in-class exercises"; and 3) that ChatGPT helps teach students about the world they live in, one full to bursting with AI technologies they will need to “know their way around . . . their strengths and weaknesses, their hallmarks and blind spots—in order to work alongside them.” I found Roose’s argument thoughtful and even-handed and his examples compelling. Still for me, in these fairly early days, I find that ChatGPT and tools like it seem most perfectly suited for play, for the ludic possibilities of rhetoric—as the example of students using ChatGPT to compose satiric love notes and poems demonstrates. But play, remember, is not “mere” play but a crucial part of learning and cognitive development. “Playing around” with language and other symbols is fundamental to growth. So my inclination is to encourage students to play with this new tool, pushing it to its limits, using it to entertain and amuse, all the while using such activities to learn about its strengths and weaknesses, the “blind spots” Roose mentions, and always testing it against their own creativity, ingenuity, and knowledge. We teachers of writing will have a lot to learn from such play!   Image by Jonathan Kemper reproduced under the Unsplash license.   ... View more

  We can spend days analyzing President Joe Biden’s January 7, 2023, State of the Union address to the joint houses of Congress. Given the response the speech has received, students of speech and rhetoric will likely be studying it for years to come. Although this State of the Union address has been rated as the most confrontational address ever, this address also illustrates the importance of audience awareness and the pursuit of common ground.  The key example of audience awareness that no one can stop talking about is how President Biden got the two parties to come to a consensus, right there on the floor of the chamber, on Social Security and Medicare. He was cautious in how he broached the subject. He referred to how some of his Republican colleagues have proposed sunsetting Social Security. Knowing that Republicans would oppose this statement, President Biden came prepared to support his statement by promising to send Rick Scott a copy of his written proposal which outlined the facts.   It was a guessing game throughout the speech at what points Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy would signal to his Republican colleagues that they should stand by standing himself. They were actually in the embarrassing position of NOT standing in support of such generally popular ideas as better pay for teachers and aid to Ukraine. When it came to Social Security and Medicare, the majority of Republicans were eager to distance themselves from Rick Scott in his desire to cut these popular entitlement programs. They leaped to their feet to applaud America’s seniors, and once they were there, Biden pointed out that it seemed everyone agreed that we cannot do away with Social Security and Medicare. Common ground is often the starting point for moving two opposing sides toward agreement. By getting Democrats and Republicans to agree to support what is best for the elderly he seemed to decrease by a tiny degree the schism in the room. Presidents have long brought into the chamber for the State of the Union special guests who like, in this case, Tyree Nichols’s mother and stepfather, have experienced terrible and widely publicized tragedy. Biden was respectful of the couple’s loss and actually used the difference between their experience and that of his family to illustrate the racism that still exists in America. Biden recalled that he never had to warn his sons that if they were pulled over by the police, they should turn on the inside car light, put both hands on the wheel, and make no sudden moves. The common ground, of course, is that no parent should have to. When addressing an audience with polarizing views, speakers need to be aware of how easily their message can be skewed, be strategic about how they get their message across, and bolster their supporting data against loopholes. As President Biden demonstrated in his State of the Union address, sometimes finding common ground is the simplest way to ensure that the purpose of the message is heard.    "Joe Biden"  by GPA Photo Archive is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more