In my last blog (Some Popular Cultural Critical Thinking Flash Cards) I sketched out three critical thinking "flashcards," with suggestions for exploring the semiotic implications of the outsized importance of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, the El Niño Deluge (that still isn't), and the endless parades of celebrity gowns on red carpets during pop culture awards season.  So I thought that this time, in the spirit of the Sunday Times Crossword puzzles, I would give the "answers" to these flashcards, interpretive analyses that can lead us beyond the superficial play of ordinary experience into the more profound regions of human and cultural being. So let's start with the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primaries.  There were three questions on that flashcard.  To wit: 1. Why do candidates running for their party's presidential nomination make such a big deal about Iowa and New Hampshire in the first place?  2. Why do the mass media make such a big deal about Iowa and New Hampshire?  And, 3. Why do consumers of the mass media continue to read, watch, or click on news stories about Iowa and New Hampshire? To these questions I added a few clues: consider the innate human desire to know the future now, thus making any sort of tea leaf reading an irresistible draw.  Consider also the inertial power of sheer tradition in presidential politics.  And, finally, consider what could be done to disrupt this tradition.  So, the answer to number 1 is, quite simply, candidates make such a big deal about Iowa and New Hampshire because those events are given enormous amounts of media attention, attention that includes a certain ritualistic mythology that claims that these two electoral occasions have some sort of magical power to winnow the field and even determine the nominee. This answer explains numbers 2 and 3 simultaneously.  That is, the mass media make such a big deal out of Iowa and New Hampshire because they know the draw of that mythology, the innate human curiosity to see whether the magic will happen again.  To put this another way, there is a fundamental human desire to know the future.  This desire goes beyond mere curiosity into the deep need human beings have for a sense of security, and the magical promise of fortune telling, of seeing the future, is an ancient expression of that need.  So, with the desire for tea leaves (augury) and the power of tradition (ritual) driving audience behavior, the media can be sure that people will pay attention to their onslaught of Iowa/New Hampshire stories, and thus, that there will be a large audience (market) for the advertisers and data miners that pay the bills and provide the profits.  You might say that it is all a matter of profisy. Now to the weather. There too I proposed three questions: 1. What is this mass of high pressure doing here for such a long time at this time of year?  2. With global warming throwing both the atmosphere and atmospheric science completely out of whack, is a reliance on past El Niño performances quite justified? And, 3. What does the deluge of news reports about deluges—and their absence—have in common with the Iowa/New Hampshire phenomenon?  The answers, of course, are pretty straightforward. Questions number 1 and 2 share the implication that it is time to realize that the old weather certainties, hard won through years of meteorological research, are crumbling in the face of a complete changing of the game through rapid climate change. Always an uncertain activity, predicting the weather has become more uncertain than ever before.  Global warming doesn't mean hot weather everywhere at the same time: it means unprecedented and unpredictable extremes of heat, cold, drought, and deluge.  But the mass media don't like to talk about that unpredictability much, partly through fear of conservative backlash (it is still a tricky business to even talk about global warming: I once moderated a science-oriented website wherein the conservatives who ran the place would not allow anyone to discuss global warming), and partly because it is more profitable to pretend that the tea leaves are still in play, that the weather's fortune still can be told.  And thus, the answer to number 3: the whole matter has a lot in common with the Iowa/New Hampshire phenomenon.  Weather related fortune telling attracts readers, which itself attracts advertising and marketing dollars—especially if the tea leaves auger death and destruction in vast floods (Watch out! Here comes El Niño!—we're still getting a lot of that here in Southern California, complete with pathetic fallacy and infantile personification).  In short, more profisy. And finally, celebrity gowns on red carpets.   There too, I proposed three questions:  1. Why, we can ask, is this happening?  2. What can we learn about ourselves by thinking critically about it?  And 3. What does all the attention paid to celebrity gowns on red carpets have in common both with El Niño reporting and the Iowa/New Hampshire phenomenon?   And the answers are: it is profitable for both celebrities and the mass media alike to stage and broadcast this ritual because audiences respond to it, thus attracting advertising and marketing dollars.  What we learn about ourselves is that, while we think of ourselves as a democratic and egalitarian nation, we are fascinated by wealth and privilege, and pay lavish homage to it.  Some watch the red carpet parade vicariously, and dream of being on the red carpet themselves, or at least of having a dress like that (haute couture usually makes its way to the department stores eventually).  Others watch simply to ogle the ever-more-exposed bodies of the women (it is virtually always only women who are featured on the red carpet), and sex, of course, is perhaps the deepest instinctive driver of them all.  And so the red carpet report has something in common with the weather and with Iowa and New Hampshire after all: not as profisy but in the way that the mass media profit by playing upon our deepest (and often most primitive) fantasies and desires. Altogether, our three flashcards point to signs not of hyperreality but of hypercapitalism: of a society that runs on the profit motive, even to the point of contradicting proclaimed values and broadcasting misleading information.  The interesting thing about this is that it is an historically unprecedented form of hegemony, because the subjects of that hegemony don't have to participate.  The whole show—profisy, money worshipping voyeurism—would end if the audience refused to watch.  In the sixties a popular slogan was "what if they gave a war and no one came?"  We could (more realistically) ask today, "what if they staged a red carpet fashion show and no one cared?"  Or an Iowa/New Hampshire election, and no one tuned in?  Or ran a screamingly headlined weather story that no one read? I'll leave the answers to those questions to you. ... View more

I’m a fan of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and have been ever since doing some research on colleges and universities in Florida (when I was teaching at Hillsborough Community College in Tampa). My research led me to Bethune-Cookman University, which was founded by Mary McLeod Bethune in Daytona Beach, Florida in 1904—with $1.50. Originally a school for “literary and industrial training” for African American girls, the school developed into a normal school and then into an Institute, a junior college, a college, and eventually a university. Through the decades, the development of Bethune-Cookman stood as testimony to the vigor and determination of one woman. Well, that was in the 1960s, but it started me on following HBCUs, such as Ohio’s Wilberforce University, near Columbus where I taught at Ohio State for many years.  Wilberforce was founded in 1856 and says of its mission, “As the Underground Railroad provided a route from physical bondage, the University was formed to provide an intellectual Mecca and refuge from slavery’s first rule: ignorance.” While I was at Ohio State I got to visit Wilberforce and to conduct a series of campus exchanges. As always when I visit a historically Black college, I learned about fascinating people, like Hallie Quinn Brown, who attended and later taught at Wilberforce and represented the United States at the International Congress of Women in London in 1899. (You can read about Brown’s teaching of rhetoric, writing, and speaking in Susan Kates’s “Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education.”) I was fortunate during my time at Ohio State to become friends with Beverly Moss, who has taught me a great deal and who talked with me about her undergraduate education at HBCU Spelman College (and neighboring Morehouse). I got to know more about Spelman as I worked with graduate students who had attended those schools, and later at Stanford I was able to help one of my undergrads spend a term at Spelman, a term she said deeply influenced her education and her ways of thinking. So it probably goes without saying that I jump at every chance to visit an HBCU. My most recent opportunity came a couple of weeks ago when I traveled to Tallahassee to visit Florida A&M University. I’ve read quite a bit about the founding of FAMU in 1887 as a normal school for African American students—and I’ve followed the ups and downs and ups of their fabled marching band. But I had never had a chance to spend time on the campus. I arrived too late to go to campus but went the next morning in time to stroll around the grounds a bit before conducting a workshop on teaching writing with faculty members in English. There I met a vibrant group, from a brand new member fresh from the Ph.D. to a person who had taught FAMU students for 59 years (!), and all of them committed and connected to the 10,000 strong student body there. After the workshop, I had a couple of hours free, so I headed over to the Black Archives Research Center and Museum and learned about many alums, including tennis great Althea Gibson  and Effie Carrie Mitchell Hampton (right), the first African American physician to practice in Florida. I also saw original panels of early comics artist Richard Outcault’s “Pore Lil Mose,” the first comic in the United States to feature (and positively) an African American character. As someone who routinely taught courses on comics and graphic narratives, I certainly knew about Outcault—but did NOT know about Pore Lil Mose, which is quite remarkable to me. I also visited FAMU’s bustling Writing Research Center, directed by Professor Veronica Yon, to meet some remarkable tutors, and to see the center in action. The place was absolutely humming, almost every table taken up with tutors and students working on writing. One thing I always appreciate during such visits is the extraordinary openness and friendliness of the students, and this visit to FAMU was no exception. On my walks around campus, I was welcomed by a number of students, who recognized me from a poster announcing the public talk I was to give that night: I even got a big hug from one beautiful and bright first-year student! So I wasn’t surprised at the warm welcome I got at the Writing Center, but I was delighted when one of the tutors identified herself as a member of a spoken word group, Voices, and who volunteered to perform some poetry at a reception scheduled before my talk. True to her word, she and another Voices participant showed up at the reception and performed two wonderfully rich and provocative poems, with energy and grace and poise. Wonderful! When the time for my own talk came, I tried hard to draw on the energy and poise of those student poets. I talked about the opportunities students now have to inhabit multiple literacies in ways that could hardly have been imagined even two decades ago, and later I enjoyed a lively Q and A session. The audience included faculty from FAMU and several other nearby universities, as well as many FAMU students. As always at HBCUs, I received very direct and often tough questions (“What made you want to write?” “How do you nurture creativity in academic writing?” “How did you first get published?” “Have you ever been misunderstood in your writing—and what did you do about it?”) Their own answers to some of these questions went well past anything I might have said. When I got back to my hotel, I realized I’d been on campus, going nonstop, for 12 hours. Yet I felt I had enough energy to run around the hotel more than once. Indeed, I did take a walk, just to think back over the day and to take in all I had seen and learned. So many thanks to my generous and gracious hosts at FAMU for a truly remarkable couple of days. Now I’m looking forward to my NEXT visit. ... View more

For this post I wanted to highlight just one reading from the new edition of Emerging. For this week I’ve selected Sandra Allen's “A World Without Wine.” Allen was a last minute addition. In fact, I think it was the last essay we selected, turning to it after we found out we couldn’t afford the permissions costs for one of the other readings. I think it’s a nice piece of serendipity, as I really enjoy this essay. Allen is writing about global climate change—a pressing issue for students to consider—but through the lens of one unexpected and potentially devastating impact: the loss of the world’s great wine-growing regions. As it turns out (perhaps not surprisingly), wine grapes are quite delicate and require a very specific environment. If it’s a bit too hot or too cold or too wet or too dry an entire vintage can be impacted. Scientists now believe that shifts in global weather patterns will cause a concomitant shift in viticulture, devastating historical wine-growing regions, like France and California. I love it because it takes something abstract, scientific, mocked, and vaguely threatening (global climate change) and phrases it through something specific and concrete, relatable, interesting, and compelling. That is, students may not care much about global climate change but there’s a better chance that they will care about wine. It’s that specific effect that raises awareness of the larger issue. Allen’s essay was originally published on Buzzfeed, the internet site that offers news and quizzes and recipes. I struggled with taking an essay from such a “non-academic” source, but in the end Allen’s ability to communicate the effects of climate change so compellingly won out. It’s one of a few essays we’ve added to talk about the environment and it also works within our existing essays about food and agriculture. It’s also great for thinking about science and technology. In the end, I think it’s a bit versatile and I hope you will check it out. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

Last spring, I posted a Bits blog on peer groups in the writing classroom (Peer Groups in the Technology-Enabled Writing Classroom) . I’d like to extend that post here, with a focus on collaborative writing. My guess is that most writing teachers use peer review as a primary instructional strategy. I imagine many fewer teachers use collaborative writing or team-based assignments. I see the strategies as related, particularly in first-year composition. Though I have always taught first-year writing, my research and professional interests, from dissertation onward, have focused on scientific, technical, and medical communication. In all such contexts, documents tend to have multiple authors. These authors must plan, draft, and revise documents as a collaborative process. My work in various industries (computer, health, pharmaceutical, government) has convinced me that ability to write in teams is a critical workplace skill. And having to perform as a group member is increasingly typical of many college classes. When I teach first-year writing, I import instructional strategies that have proven productive over the years in my tech or business writing classes. So while I begin the term with an individual writing assignment, with peer review, I then move to a second assignment, where pairs of students work together to produce a single text. Writing with a partner brings process issues into open discussion: What are we trying to do? What do we know or need to learn? How do you want to manage this assignment? What’s our timetable? Should we meet and work together or pass the draft text back and forth? Can we simply divide the text into parts, compose individually, and then fit them together? (Probably not, at least not without sufficient planning.) A third assignment places students in teams of four, by combining two pairs. I am lucky to teach in spaces that support teamwork with tables and shared monitors (seeClassroom Design​ and The Writing on the Wall ). By this point, I’ve seen individuals and pairs perform, so when I match pairs, I can try to spread talent and motivation evenly across the teams. Students have the advantage of knowing another’s habits and talents, while the challenge of collaboration is ratcheted up. Working with three other people is much more difficult than working with one other person. I ask for a written team plan, based on a clear task description, indicating roles and responsibilities, providing a schedule, and allocating hours among team members. Explicit planning helps me know what is going on in the teams, and it helps teams coalesce around shared goals. Teams allocate time for research, drafting, reviewing, and revising, with the goal of bringing an explicit process to their collaborative efforts. Throughout this work, I stress commitment to team members. Students must notify their teams if they are going to have to miss a class. Students are coached to discuss team issues and individual performance on a regular basis. With five or six teams in the room, I can easily visit each team each period, so I know how things are going. Team members formally evaluate each other on performance, in writing and orally, at project midpoint and in a debriefing at the project closeout, where we reflect on how the teams have performed. Teams know they will share one grade. In the final third of the course, individuals pursue independently researched projects related to their majors. They stay on their teams, so they have a forum for discussing their projects, and so they have trusted peers to review their work. The pacing of the course, from individual to pairs to four-person teams, and then back to individual performance gives a nice rhythm to the course, and it allows grades to be assigned as a combination of individual and collaborative performance. If you are someone who values peer review, I would challenge you to extend your practice to collaborative writing. If you already use collaborative assignments and writing teams, I’d welcome your comments. ... View more

Last week, I heard from a colleague in South Carolina who had visited one of my technical writing course websites and wanted more information on the discussion forum activities that I ask students to complete. As I replied to her email message, I realized that there was a lot that I do with online forum discussions that I haven’t ever written down. I didn’t have any links to point her to! Today I plan to fix that problem by sharing the details on how I set up online discussions as a participation activity, how I manage students, and how I assess their work in these discussions. Next week, I’ll share the three kinds of discussion that I ask students to participate in. Setting Up the Discussions I require participation in the discussion forums as a part of my course, mentioning the requirement on the syllabus and on the course’s assignment overview page. Since the course I am teaching is 100% online, there is no classroom discussion. I use the Discussions tool in Canvas, our CMS, as a substitute for the interaction and conversations that would typically take place in a face-to-face class. I don’t bother with much discussion of netiquette. All work and participation in the course is already governed by the Undergraduate Honor System and the Virginia Tech Principles of Community, so troubling behavior is already covered. Along with those two documents, I use relevant information from Chapter 3 of the textbook I use, Practical Strategies for Technical Communication by Mike Markel. This chapter discusses how social media and other electronic tools such as messaging technologies, wikis, and shared document workspaces can be useful for collaboration in the workplace. I ask students to read that chapter in the first week of the course to address other issues of appropriateness and professionalism in online communication. Further, this overview of digital collaboration gives the class’s online discussion additional relevance as preparation for the workplace. Arranging Students into Groups In the face-to-face classroom, many of the discussion questions I use work well in a full-class discussion. Online, however, students have a harder time engaging with 21 other students in a full-class discussion. The long, scrolling list of replies creates a giant screen of text, with 22 students repeating one another’s points either because they haven’t read what has already been posted or because posts have been added while they are writing. The best solution I have found is to arrange students into small groups of five to six students each. Canvas allows me to limit students to discussing with the members of their group only. It’s much easier for a student to have an engaged discussion of ideas with four other people than it is with 21 others. There are ways to set up a similar situation with other CMS or discussion forum tools. Before I used Canvas, I set up copies of the same prompt with the group name in the subject line (e.g., Group One Biography Discussion, Group Two Biography Discussion). I assigned students to groups in a post on the course website, and then students were able to discuss the ideas by simply choosing the right subject line. Assessing Online Discussions Admittedly, all the discussion questions I use require a lot of reading and grading on my part. I typically grade discussion participation based on whether the student did the work and the amount of effort that went into the task. I consider the forum posts as first draft writing, so I do not mark errors in spelling or grammar. I do ask students to focus on a professional presentation of ideas, and I contact anyone who is being too informal privately to correct the situation. At the end of the term, I ask students to write a Completion Report that reviews their participation in the forums by looking at the frequency of posts, reviewing the best posts, and providing an overall assessment of their work during the term. Their self-assessment in this final project gives me all the details I need to determine their participation grades for the course. Suggestions? If you use online forums in your class, whether it’s face-to-face, hybrid, or online, please tell me about the strategies that you use in the comments below. How do you manage the discussion? What assessment strategies do you use? I want to hear from you! And be sure to come back next week for my post on the prompts I use for online discussions. [Photo: Detail from University Life 143 by Francisco Osorio, on Flickr] ... View more

This post originally published on Bedford Bits on February 5, 2014.   We’ve been busy building new spaces for learning at the University of Delaware. As we upgrade classrooms and public areas, we are trying to build spaces that encourage the kinds of social interactions that support learning. In this Bits column and the next, I’d like to discuss some of our actions. What I’ll be discussing is not so much writing classes and classrooms, but the more general instructional environment. As a writing teacher, I try to influence what happens across campus to support writing as a mode of learning. Last fall, we opened our new ISE Lab (Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Laboratory). It’s a beautiful building, meant to support both interdisciplinary research and teaching. All labs in the building must cross disciplinary boundaries. Classes meeting in the building are likewise expected to be interdisciplinary. Four floors of new problem-based learning classrooms are designed for groups of 48 students in introductory science courses. Each team-based classroom is flanked by two labs with 24 workstations. One very cool feature is the paint on the walls. It’s writable. So students and faculty can stand at the walls and write—just about anywhere. The painted surface is better than whiteboards, erasing easily and cleanly, and people love it when they first see it. I think it has something to do with our toddler instincts to pick up a crayon and use the surfaces in front of us for drawing and writing. There’s a feeling of violating a long-standing prohibition. Our writable walls follow various experiments that move us from classrooms with a single front blackboard, to classrooms paneled in blackboards, to better surfaces, with walls that serve as useful projection areas, walls covered in hard plastic panels that accept dry erase, walls with monitors, projectors that allow annotation on and capture of projected texts, and so on. I tend to encourage all such developments. If we want to encourage teamwork, collaboration, and group problem solving, then teams need places to think, spaces to get their thinking out in the open. The best way to do that is to write ideas where everyone can see them. The importance of shared spaces to creative problem solving is something I’ve written about, following my work in the pharmaceutical industry. My thinking was triggered in part by Michael Schrage’s book,No More Teams!: Mastering the Dynamics of Creative Collaboration(1995), which arose from Shrage’s work at Xerox’s PARC labs. In classrooms (writing and other subjects), we’ve noticed that we get much better teamwork if we don’t allow each student to have a laptop open. We gather teams around a screen, with one person controlling the projected text. Then everyone can focus on the same space and actually work together, writing together. Technology often poses such antipathies, either pushing people toward private worlds or drawing people together into social experiences. Writing, as we know, can be solitary or social. As teachers, we can create mediated spaces to foster the social interaction. ... View more

This post was originally published on Bedford Bits on June 6, 2013. I continue to think about  classroom design that supports the kinds of teaching we are interested in doing. I have written about my experience in Bits, when I discussed innovative design in a highly mediated classroom I used for first-year writing at Delaware. I rely a lot on team-based learning, and I always seek classrooms that are set up for teamwork. I am not alone. Our team-based or problem-based learning classrooms are the most requested designs on our campus. Our colleagues in information technology who support classroom instruction have been developing new ideas for classroom design, including highly modular furnishings, lots of writing space on all the walls, multiple wall-mounted displays, and software to manage the distribution of teamwork and allow for sharing among teams or with the full class. As we have remodeled older buildings and classrooms, we’ve progressively enhanced and expanded our team-based learning settings. An interesting argument has come up recently: Should we build classrooms that force instructors to accommodate their instruction to a team-based setting, or should we design classrooms that are flexible and that can be arranged for either front-and-center teaching or for team-based arrangements? I am tending toward the position of my Business College colleague, Mark Serva: If we want to encourage new models of engaged teaching, Mark argues, we should design spaces that do not accommodate front-and-center teaching. We should force the changes we desire in instructional delivery by changing the setting. If we create flexible spaces that allow instructors to rearrange the space for front-and-center teaching, they will default to their comfort zone. Since we already have plenty of classrooms that support lecture or lecture/discussion, Mark says, we ought to now take the plunge and design classrooms that unambiguously support team-based learning. These arguments are playing out right now in discussions with scheduling and academic technologies about furnishings and technologies for remodeled classrooms. In two months, we are set to open a new Interdisciplinary Science & Engineering Lab on campus, with four floors of integrated team spaces and wet labs. The team spaces will fit a maximum of 48 students, who will use the central space for team-based learning and the flanking labs (each with 24 stations) to solve problems in a lab environment. In a somewhat audacious move, we designed these spaces to force science teaching away from lecture. We also set the expectation that any teaching in this new building would be interdisciplinary. We imagined that we could integrate instruction in introductory biology and chemistry courses around problem-based learning, do away with massive lecture hall experiences, and create real, exploratory lab experiences that would not be the familiar cookbook style of lab. Making all of this a reality is proving to be quite difficult. Over the years, we have become very dependent on traditional approaches to instruction as content delivery, and changing to more active forms of teaching and learning is a challenge. It is very much an open question as to what sort of teaching will take place in these new learning environments. Change is proving to be difficult and divisive. I’d like to encourage you to get engaged with classroom design on your campus as a route to encouraging more active and collaborative learning, the kind of instruction we have valued and practiced for years in our comp classrooms. I think what happens in classrooms depends to some significant extent on the physical and technological configuration of those classrooms. And if your campus has made significant moves to design new classroom spaces, I’d be interested in hearing about your experience. ... View more

The Multimodal Mondays series proudly features pedagogy, activity ideas, and assignments from guest bloggers, instructors who are teaching multimodal composition with great creativity and resourcefulness. We've made it a goal to feature a variety of approaches and modalities, including Blogs (Multimodal Mondays: Using Blog Design to Teach Authorial Ethos) Videos (Multimodal Mondays: Revising the Syllabus into a Blog) Social Media (Multimodal Mondays: Writing Collaborative Hashtag(#) Grammar in Social Media Spaces) Time Capsules (Multimodal Mondays: Community-Based Projects and Interactive Work Teams) Playdoh (Multimodal Mondays: Play day! ) ...and some really great general advice (Multimodal Mondays: Building Comfort with Multimodal Composing In Class and Multimodal Mondays: Finding Our Comfort Zones in the New Year...and maybe even breaking out of them!)) And those are but a very few highlights of all the great advice and assignments we've seen--and all the possibilities! Some assignments and approaches pop up more than others, likely because they're easier to manage in the classroom and because both we and our students might be more familiar with them: assignments built on social media, blogs, etc. But is there a certain modality you've wanted to try but don't know how to approach? A software program that holds possibility but you'd like to know more? A new idea for using images so you don't keep recycling the activity you've done for the past four semesters? Let me know in the comments below so we can feature that activity assignment you're looking for. Or, if you have a great assignment you'd like to share as a guest blogger on Multimodal Mondays, we'd love to have you. Just send a message to Leah Rang​ with your idea. ... View more

Headlines almost any day of the week give us ample material to practice writing claims on argumentative topics and to explore the differences among the three types of claims featured in the Toulmin model: claims of fact, value, and policy. It may help to think of the claim as the thesis of the argument, but the term claim puts a bit more of an argumentative slant on the subject, in the sense that you are claiming, or asserting, that something is true, but you may have to provide evidence to convince others that it is. A claim of fact is different from a fact in that you must convince an audience that it is true, usually by providing factual support such as statistics, examples, and testimony. Claims of fact may need to be proven because people interpret facts differently, because interpretation may depend on the causal relationship between facts, because facts can be used to make an educated guess about the future, or because new data is available that changes interpretation. A claim of fact is worded as if it were a true statement, but labeling a statement a claim of fact does not make it true.     Consider these claims drawn from recent headlines: The results of presidential primaries so far this election cycle suggest that voters are supporting “outsiders” with little or no experience in elected office. School shootings are more frequent in the United States than in other countries. The primary results in Iowa and New Hampshire are not necessarily an accurate predictor of the outcome of primaries nationwide. African-American voters will have more of an impact on the outcome of future primaries than they have had thus far. The first three examples could be supported by facts or statistical support. The fourth is a prediction about the future, but one that could be supported with statistics about the relative numbers of African-American voters in Iowa and New Hampshire compared to South Carolina and the states voting on Super Tuesday. Claims of value are judgment claims. They express relative worth or merit, approval or disapproval. Some statements are simply expressions of personal opinion: I prefer Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. Statements of personal opinion or taste do not have to be proven, even though, in this case, interested voters may spend considerable time defending their preferences or even working for a candidate of their choice. Consider these examples: Experience as a U. S. senator is better experience for serving as president than experience as a governor. Students are safer with armed guards on school premises than without. The process for selecting Academy Award nominees is unfair to minorities. Words such as better, safer, and unfair make these statements judgements, or claims of value, rather than claims of fact. How convincing an argument in support of the first would be would depend on establishing the standards by which one type of experience is deemed by our society to be better than another. The second would depend on how the term safer is defined and how convincing a case can be made that armed guards in schools would provide that increased safety. The third, again, depends on what standards are used to judge whether a process is fair or not and how convincing a case can be made that the process violates that standard. Claims of policy address what should or should not be done in the future. They tend to be the most difficult claims to support because usually you have to prove that a problem exists and then to build a convincing case that the solution you propose would solve that problem. Consider these examples: The Electoral College should be replaced by popular vote as the means of electing the U.S. president. Schoolteachers should be armed. Schoolteachers should not be armed. Purchasing guns should require more careful screening. American citizens must preserve their rights to own guns. The process for selecting Academy Award nominees should be revised. Hillary Clinton should be elected. Donald Trump should be elected. . . . The list could go on and on. Obviously even this short list highlights groups that are diametrically opposed and thus who may never accept one another’s arguments. The role of the arguer is to build as convincing a case as possible. Any single day’s headlines or any single hour of any news program provides ample material for practice in identifying all three types of claims. [Image Source: U.S. Department of State] ... View more

This post was originally published June 3, 2014. In July, I will begin teaching an online section of Technical Writing. The course takes place completely online. I’ll never meet with the students in a face-to-face classroom, and there will be no set meeting time for the class. Students will log in whenever they like and access resources on the course website and in Virginia Tech’s CMS. These classes are usually made up of students who are off campus for the summer, often working or doing an internship, and who are taking the course in their spare time. There is also the possibility of international students who are out of the country for the summer and military students who are serving somewhere. I expect to see some similarities among the group. In particular, I believe most of them will be splitting their time between the course and some other major activity (like an internship). The biggest challenge I see is building community among this group of students. They are likely to have some common experiences, but these students probably don’t know each other and are  not likely to connect with one another beyond completing the activities for the course. After all, logistics are against them grabbing coffee after class or meeting at the library to work on an assignment together. I decided that I wanted my first writing assignment for the course to work on two goals: to help students get to know one another and to work on a writing task that fits the focus and objectives of the course. There are hundreds of online icebreaker activities I could try, but I wanted to find something that was appropriate to the kind of workplace writing the course focuses on. After some research, I decided to try a professional bio assignment. I’m still working on the details, but generally, students will imagine that they have taken a new position with a company and have been asked to provide a short biography statement for the company newsletter or the team section of the company website. While the textbook I use doesn’t address the genre specifically, I found quite a few useful webpages that students can read and compare, including the following: How to Write Short Company Newsletter Bios of Employees (eHow) Transform Staff Bios from Mundane to Magical in 6 Easy Steps (GettingAttention.org) “Meet the Team” Pages: Examples and Trends (Smashing Magazine) How to Write a Short Bio About Yourself (Chron) How to Write a Snappy, Tight Professional Bio (NBC Chicago) How to Write a Sample Self-Bio at a New Job (Global Post) Writing a Professional Biography (U of Rochester) Top Ten Tips for Writing a Professional Overview or Biography (Ezine @rticles) My plan is to ask students to review those articles and chat in an online forum about issues of style, audience, and purpose. After their exploration, they will write their own bios, choosing a style and format that is appropriate for a job they aspire to have. I’ll ask them to share their bios in the online forum as well, and I’ll have them provide one another feedback. By the end of the unit, I hope they’ll know each other a little better, understand a bit more about the basics of technical writing, and have a bio they can use in the future. Once I finish designing the assignment, I will be sure to share it here. For now, I need to get back to planning that course. It’s just a month away! [Photo: Cinderella's Using WiFi by David Goehring, on Flickr] ... View more

Every spring I’m tasked with teaching the Introduction to Literary Theory course.  My structure for the first part of the course is to assign two days to each general type of theory that I introduce to students -- one day to introduce the major concepts of a theory, one day to have the students apply the theory to a short story.  When I teach the basics of New Historicism, I like to have the students do a bit of online research to have them find things that might be relevant to Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case.” To find things, it’s been particularly useful to send them to the ever-growing digital collections of the Library of Congress.  I gave the students some suggestions for things to look for (men’s fashion; education; Pittsburgh; railroad travel) and set them to work in our building’s computer lab. Once students find files that they think are relevant -- whether  pictures or documents -- they email them to me.  We work through a number of the pictures discussing what they can tell us about the early 20th century in the United States and how that understanding might illuminate our reading of Cather’s short story.  Particularly useful this time around were the documents and images students found about education.  For example, a couple of students came across this image of “an old fashioned boys’ school” that shows just how prescriptive and even imprisoning the schooling was -- and that’s something that Paul rebels against.  Even though the photo is clearly staged, the students could parse the details and think significantly about what perceptions of education were 100 years ago.  One of my constant pieces of advice for my students is to embrace the digital.  They don’t necessarily need to read e-books or learn to code, but they do need to learn to search for things and to become comfortable in a digital environment. “I don’t do computers” isn’t a choice at this point for our students.  And the fact is, we’ve got an extraordinary set of tools available to us freely for our research: with more and more libraries and museums digitizing part or all of their collections, we have opportunities to explore things that were shut off from most of us just a few years ago.  It doesn’t replace the experience of seeing the artwork or the rare book in person and this doesn’t replace the experience of working with the expert librarian, but it does open up new avenues for teaching -- and I’m excited by the possibilities. ... View more

In 2008, I had a chance to choose the three books that Stanford would send to all incoming students. It was a task I relished, and I remember the tall stack of books I had in the office: so many choices! I ended up choosing Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (luckily, this was before Diaz won the Pulitzer for that book; I don’t think we would have been able to get him after that!); Z. Z. Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, and Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons! I had help from the Dean of Students’ office in arranging for the visits (and talking the three authors into coming for a very small honorarium!), though I was in on the planning enough to know how difficult the logistics were. But the books went out to all the frosh that summer and eventually the big day arrived. I wrote about it at the time as a kind of wild, rock-star-concert atmosphere in the auditorium as the students waited for the event to start. They were doing cheers and chanting the authors’ names over and over, so much so that Barry, Diaz, and Packer were more than a little taken aback. When they finally took the stage (sitting in comfy chairs with me at the mike), the students just went nuts. But they finally calmed down and we spent an hour and a half in Q and A with the authors. The questions came fast and furious—and all three of the authors were magnificent, answering at length and engaging each other in conversation as well. I had been to several of these events but this was definitely the most successful: students seemed to have read all three books and wanted to talk, talk, talk about them. At the end of the event, they went back to their dorms where faculty from the writing program led them in continued discussion. And all that year I ran into students who remembered the night and came up to tell me that they “really liked” one or more of the books. Stanford still carries on this tradition and in fact the 2015-16 books were chosen by Stanford’s President, John Hennessey: The Innovators by Walter Isaacson, This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff, and Cane River by Lalita Tademy. From what I read about the event, the students were fired up again, and they especially loved being in conversation with President Hennessey as well as the authors. I wonder which of the books they found most appealing and why. And which they will remember. I think of events like this when I heard that students no longer read. I don’t think that’s true: students are reading all the time, especially on social media. And the students I talk to want to read more; I often meet students at our writing center—or a writing center on another campus—where students tell me they want more time for reading—“just for fun” reading. So when I heard from a student who was at the three books event in 2008, saying he was working in San Francisco, I jumped at the chance to catch up with him. I met this student his first year, and while he was a science/technology major, I served as an informal mentor throughout his years at Stanford. We had a long reunion over brunch, and while he was telling me about his job (in computer design), he suddenly stopped and said “Oh wow, I just remembered the three books.” He went on to “remember” them in detail, dwelling especially on Oscar Wao. With a family from the Dominican Republic, he said he “felt proud” to be reading a book by a Dominican author and he talked at length about not just the Spanish in the book but the Dominican Spanish: “I wondered how all the other students were dealing with that language gap?” he said. We ended up making a list of books he wants to read (including Brian Selznick’s The Marvels and background reading on Hamilton). He’s a busy guy—but he says he spends at least one evening a week reading. I think this former student is not alone. After all, story is at the heart of who we are as humans. People, I believe, yearn for stories. And so they read! ... View more

In the last edition of Emerging, we were able to include some visual texts as well as some material in the introduction on thinking and writing about visuals. I really enjoyed the visual texts we chose: a collection of PostSecret postcards, some moving watercolors about war by artist Steve Mumford, and a collection of infographics. The problem is that it’s really hard to use visual texts in a course that’s not entirely devoted to visual texts, and especially to use them instead in a course that’s about working closely with textual sources in support of academic argument. We’ve taken all of those readings out of the third edition but we’re still thinking about the role of the photographic and the visual on our world today. So, we’ve added three great new essays that speak to and/or include visual elements BUT also have the kind of textual elements that work well in the kind of FYC classroom we imagine for Emerging. I think Torie Rose DeGhett’s “The War Photo No One Would Publish” is particularly powerful. DeGhett is writing about a disturbing image taken during the Gulf War by Kenneth Jarecke, one so disturbing that many venues refused to publish it (we did manage to get the rights to include it in Emerging and, yes, it is quite graphic). DeGhett’s essay speaks to the power of the image as well as the politics of censorship in the press. But what I love about this essay (as with so many essays in Emerging) is that it’s also about war and our ability to see and respond to it. So while it’s great in a series of assignments about photography or media, it’s also great in a series about censorship or war. Tomas van Houtryve is also thinking about imaging technologies and war in “From the Eyes of a Drone.” The essay is composed primarily of a series of images van Houtryve took with a commercially available drone, inspired by and reflective of images taken by drones used in areas of war and conflict. Van Houtryve thus goes one step further than DeGhett but, looking directly at the weaponization of photography and so similarly works across a range of sequenced assignments, including anything on visuals/images of war, with sequences on technology as well. Finally, Nick Paumgarten’s “We Are a Camera” examines the GoPro phenomenon and the implications of point-of-view video. Paumgarten is driven by the story of the GoPro but his essay also has the most philosophical overtones as he muses on the impact that video mediation has on our experience and memory of events. There’s also a great bit near the very end that hints at the kind of surveillance culture that Peter Singer discusses in “Visible Man: Ethics in a World Without Secrets.” All of these essays include or reference visual texts (Paumgarten points to several famous GoPro videos on YouTube) but they also offer students context for reading and understanding the visuals as well as ideas for thinking about how visual texts impact our world today. I love them all and think they’re all fine additions to Emerging. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

I just read a fascinating essay in the December 2015 issue of College Composition and Communication​:  Amy Robillard’s“Prototypical Reading: Volume, Desire, Anxiety.”  Robillard opens the essay by recalling an article she had written in 2006, one in which she commented on the trend in composition studies to refer to students whose writing we examine by first name only—or anonymously, thereby subsuming their writing under our own pedagogical practices. A few years later, she picked up an article by Mariolina Salvatori making much the same point, though it had been written three years before Robillard’s 2006 piece.  “I might have caught myself plagiarizing,” she writes, and she goes on to argue that, rather than being a crime of writing, it is rather a crime of reading: of not reading enough, of not being thorough enough.   What follows is a detailed discussion of the prototype of “writer” and “reader,” which finds that the identity of “writer” is still associated with literature (we might claim to be technical writers or print journalists, but if we call ourselves “writers,” it still points to literary production).  “Reader,” however, does not designate a profession at all:  when asked what one does, she says, the response “I’m a reader” would not suffice.  “Reader,” then, is more available as an identity than “writer,” though this definition, too, assumes the reading of literature.  Claiming such identities is, for Robillard, anxiety-producing, entailing a lack.  I’ve oversimplified this article here—and recommend that you check it out and read the piece in its entirety.  But I want to pause to question the assumption that writer and reader are still inevitably connected with literature.  Indeed, Robillard traces the attempts to dissociate the terms.  For years, I have asked my students whether they consider themselves “writers” and “readers,” and some of the most insightful discussions in my classes have followed from this question.  Early on, my graduate students especially associated these acts with producing and consuming literary texts.  When I simply began, however, with this question: “please call out your metaphorical associations with writing and with reading,” what emerged was a striking ambivalence.  These students almost always associated writing with positive acts of construction, birthing, building, revealing, etc. They had negative associations with reading:  “like torture,” they said, or “like falling off a cliff.”  These responses made sense at the time: their reading practices were dictated by the graduate curriculum and they felt little control over what they had to read, or why.  With writing, however, they still imagined themselves to be in some kind of control (though that assumption was certainly questionable).  Over the decades, however, writing doesn’t seem to carry the strong association with literary production that it once did.  Now when I ask students to define writing, hardly anyone mentions writing a novel or short story.  Rather, they see “writer” as someone who uses language for particular ends—across a huge range of genre and media.  Unlike a decade or so ago when the Pew Foundation reported that students did not identify social media writing as “real” writing, today’s students seem to have changed.  And their understandings of reading seem to have broadened considerably as well: they know that they are spending a large amount of time reading online (and especially on social media) and increasingly see that reading as “real.”  I want to re-read Robillard’s essay with these movements in mind, and I expect it to enrich my understanding of both reading and writing.  In the meantime, I spent some time with elementary school kids recently and asked them how many were “writers” and “readers.”  Every hand went up.  I hope soon to interview some of these youngsters about just what they associate with those two endlessly fascinating and provocative words.  ... View more

One of the most fundamental barriers to effective critical thinking about popular culture is the tendency to take everything as it is for granted, and so fail to question how things have come to be as they are, and what their being that way can tell us about ourselves and our world.  One of the major purposes of Signs of Life in the U.S.A. is to help students learn not to take things for granted, and how to think critically about them through the agency of cultural semiotics. And every one of my blogs here is written to illustrate what it looks like to think critically about the most ordinary things. In this post I want to continue in this enterprise, but a little differently.  Rather than writing a brief essay that conducts an analysis of a popular cultural topic complete with a conclusion, I want to present a number of recently appearing phenomena in the news that really could use some thinking about.  I encourage you to ask your students to do so.  You might call the following topics "critical thinking flash cards." 1. The Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. Every four years there is the same hoopla over, and punditry complaints about, the outsized influence that Iowa and New Hampshire have on the American presidential campaign.  We see the same analyses—pointing out, for example, that Iowa and New Hampshire actually don't have all that hot a record in predicting who the nominees will be, and that Iowa and New Hampshire are demographically unrepresentative of America as a whole—not to mention so small in relative population as to render their influence disproportionate in the extreme. We can also read that both parties have tried to do something about this, but have always been thwarted by the states themselves, who cherish their quadrennial moments in the sun.  There is always a good deal of hand wringing about the situation, but that only tends to contribute to the problem rather than solve it. By asking three related questions, however, we can see what is really perpetuating the Iowa/New Hampshire phenomenon, and thus a potential path to amending it.  These are: Why do candidates running for their party's presidential nomination make such a big deal about Iowa and New Hampshire in the first place?  Why do the mass media make such a big deal about Iowa and New Hampshire?  Why do consumers of the mass media continue to read, watch, or click on news stories about Iowa and New Hampshire?  As clues for thinking about these questions, consider the innate human desire to know the future now, thus making any sort of tea leaf reading an irresistible draw. Consider also the inertial power of sheer tradition in presidential politics. And, finally, consider what could be done to disrupt this tradition. 2.  The El Niño deluge that isn't (so far). Well OK, this is really only of local interest for Southern Californians, but after months of media hoopla about the terrible deluge we in So Cal are in for because of a monumental El Niño condition—a deluge which, we have been told, would burst upon us in January and February— Southern California will have received only about 4-5 inches of rain by the time this blog appears in mid-February.  This dearth of disaster is now spawning a new swarm of news articles explaining why the forecast is still correct, with reporters quoting the same meteorologists who point to the same high pressure ridge that has been keeping the really big storms from So Cal, and who also promise, on the basis of past El Niño performance, that the deluge will come (maybe in March); we just have to be patient.  And it may come, after all.  But it still behooves us to ask some questions.  These include: What is this mass of high pressure doing here for such a long time at this time of year? With global warming throwing both the atmosphere and atmospheric science completely out of whack, is a reliance on past El Niño performances quite justified? What does the deluge of news reports about deluges—and their absence—have in common with the Iowa/New Hampshire phenomenon? 3.  Celebrity gowns on red carpets. Now that the movie industry awards ceremony season is hard upon us—deluging us, one might say, with a flood of stories that are a lot more predictable than the weather—it is impossible to avoid the endless parade of images of celebrity women in their celebrity-designer gowns preening themselves on endless miles of red carpet.  Why, we can ask, is this happening?  What can we learn about ourselves by thinking critically about it?  What does all the attention paid to celebrity gowns on red carpets have in common both with El Niño reporting and the Iowa/New Hampshire phenomenon? The answers to all these questions can tell us a great deal about the kind of society we live in.  I invite you to have a try. Image source: "Election 2016" by DonkeyHotey on Flikr; "U.S. Winter Outlook" by NOAA.gov​ ... View more