This post was originally published on April 15, 2014. At CCCC last month, I found myself in my room one night, reflecting on all the wonderful sessions I’d attended and ideas I’d heard. In one session, Elisabeth Kramer-Simpson from New Mexico Tech and Elizabeth Tomlinson from West Virginia University inspired me with their discussion of internships and open writing assignments in the technical writing classroom.            As I thought about their presentations, I realized that I wasn’t content with the project I was planning to introduce the Monday after I returned from the convention. I had an odd desire to go into the classroom and say, “Let’s scrap the plan for the rest of the term. What do you want to know about technical writing this term?”            I knew it wouldn’t be the most responsible plan, but I was tempted. If students would engage, it could lead to a great series of activities. I wasn’t sure that they would engage though, and I feared that the more structured activities we had completed before I went off to CCCC would clash with such a completely open plan.            I found myself searching for a middle ground. The next project was to be job-application materials. The assignment I had always used was to ask students to find a job posting and write a cover letter and resume to apply for the job. I wondered, though, what would happen if I asked them all to write their own assignment for the project.            I began wondering how opening the assignment to more choice would customize it to what the student truly needed or wanted. If the student was trying to get a summer job, she could write the application materials the job asked for. If she wanted to establish an online portfolio, she could write the texts for that. If she was trying to network with people interested in the same discipline, she could write the documents that would help her do that.            I imagined that the deliverables for the assignment could include all of the following:            a traditional resume and cover letter an application essay a personal website a cleaned up public Facebook profile a  Linked In profile a GitHub repository and profile an Academia.edu profile            The more that I thought about the options, the more I found myself wondering why I should be the one to define what they need as job application materials. Why not let them tell me what they needed?            So I scrapped my original plans and created a new, open assignment that let students choose the project they would work on. The result? Students actually smiled when I explained that they could do whatever job application materials were appropriate for what they wanted to do in the near future. I had students who excitedly told me they never had time to work on GitHub, and that they were so glad that they could do so as homework now.  Other students told me that their academic advisors had been urging them to set up a LinkedIn profile but they hadn't gotten to it. Now they could.            We wrapped up the project last week, and it has been one of the best activities I’ve taught. There was enough overlap in what the different tasks they chose called for that we had plenty to talk about and work on in class. At the same time, they have all had the chance to work on documents they needed and wanted to work on. Why didn’t I  choose this option before?                       [Photo: Jobs Help Wanted by photologue_np, on Flickr] ... View more

One of the readings we took out for the third edition of Emerging was Malcolm Gladwell’s “Small Change.” I liked the piece quite a bit and I’ve wanted something from Gladwell in the book since the first edition because I’ve always considered him an important public intellectual. The challenge with Gladwell is that while his ideas are always awesomely complex, those ideas tend to be diffused across his writing and illustrated more with anecdote than with the kinds of evidence we might want students to use. “Small Change,” one of his standalone essays, was a good compromise. In the essay, Gladwell takes on the notion that “the revolution will be tweeted,” arguing that real change requires strong ties (illustrated by the close bonds of those who took part in the civil rights movement) rather than the weak ties promoted by social media tools like Twitter. That notion of strong versus weak ties formed the core argument of his essay, but as an argument it ended up feeling just a bit weak. Fortunately, we were able to add an essay that works with the same ideas and offers a bit more depth, Charles Duhigg’s “From Civil Rights to Mega-Churches,” from his book The Power of Habit. Duhigg traces the same forces at work in the Civil Rights movement as Gladwell does, noting the role that strong ties played in the Montgomery bus boycott. Like Gladwell, too, Duhigg uses quite a bit of anecdote to make his point—which is great because those stories make the reading quite engaging. But unlike Gladwell, Duhigg also grounded his argument, looking at the origin of the notions of strong and weak ties. He goes on to connect these social forces to peer pressure, expanding that concept by looking at the explosive growth of the Saddleback Church. The end result is an essay that engages many of the same concepts as Gladwell’s work but with more depth. Duhigg would be great for any sequence of assignments on social change. I can see using his essay in conjunction with Appiah or Epstein or Yoshino. I hope you will consider using it and I hope to walk through some of the other new readings we have in the posts to come! 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

“Let’s consider beginning the writing process not with the introduction, but with drafting body paragraphs,” I suggest to students in the third week of class.  “Imagine that you have taken the same route every day in your commute to school. But one day the city announces a long-term construction project on that route. So you need to change your public transit stop, or you must leave the freeway before your usual exit, or you have to come down a different path to reach this classroom building. At first this difference may feel unusual or awkward, or even very uncomfortable. In a sense, I am inviting you to do just that, to change your route to writing, to learn new practices to move from process to product.” Indeed, some students responded as if they had encountered just such a roadblock, one that is not just inconvenient but disorienting, and were feeling frustrated with an unanticipated change of plans. Adam Grant, in his essays on creativity in the New York Times Sunday Review, has explored similar roadblocks. In “Why I Taught Myself to Procrastinate,” Grant considers that the right kind of procrastination can lead to “divergent,” and more creative thinking. Most of Grant’s examples in this essay focus on experienced writers, such as graduate students or professionals. Andrea Lunsford’s January 26th Bits post On Procrastination​ summarizes the reactions of respondents on the Writing Program Administrator’s listserv to Grant’s thoughts on the topic. However, in a subsequent essay, “How to Raise a Creative Child: Back Off,” Grant points to another issue that has recently arisen in my introduction to academic writing courses: the problem of too much practice. “The more we practice,” Grant offers, “the more we become…trapped in familiar ways of thinking.” The insights that Grant gleans from recent research seem especially pertinent to observations of my students’ writing processes over the last several years. That is, many students now insist that the introduction and the thesis must be composed first before the body paragraphs can be written. The students’ prior knowledge of the writing process seems to have become a kind of checklist to complete in lockstep, even as they are presented with new strategies for writing, and even when the old process no longer worked for them. As students undertake the difficult work of preparing for standardized testing in writing, they may have had all too much experience with practice in using a checklist or formula to shape their writing processes. By the time they reach our classes, students’ writing processes may resemble the format of the written product: introduction and thesis must be completed first, followed by the body and the conclusion. If students encountered a roadblock en route to completing their introduction, they often would stop writing completely, relying on procrastination and the pressure of deadlines to force their essays to completion. Students resist not for the sake of resistance, but from a deeper sense of cognitive dissonance and frustration. Some students made the difficult discovery that this practice of procrastination did not lead to their best work. So this semester, we are experimenting with taking a different road. I posted a letter to students on my course website, offering the following suggestions for reconsidering the differences between the processes and products of writing in our classroom: Later in the term, we will consider one of King’s most stirring refutations of his opposition, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” For the moment, as a class, we are experimenting with a change of practice, drafting the body first instead of the introduction. As this unconventional process takes hold, the hope is that students will gain comfort from having multiple strategies for approaching their writing. ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is   (see end of post for bio). When I teach the first semester of first-year composition, I include a few larger multimodal writing projects (one project was the subject of another post: ). In the four years that I’ve been teaching these projects, one of the constants from year to year is the uncertainty that students have for thinking about writing as anything other than words on the page. When we begin to consider what it means to compose with an abundance of media, tools, and genres, students’ uncertainty becomes more apparent. They struggle with the idea that it is okay to include other images or other elements in their writing, let alone develop an entirely different sort of text in a composition class. This, of course, is one of the reasons why teaching multimodal projects is important. This in-class activity aims to help increase comfort and rhetorical thinking. Objective To give students in-class, guided experience in using modalities beyond the linguistic to communicate an idea(s), helping students to gain comfort with multimodal composition. Background Reading The selected readings below span a range of topics, including rhetorical thinking and choice, composing multimodally and with other media, and design. This activity encourages students to think beyond satisfying the teacher’s expectations and instead, considering a specific audience and how to better communicate the message to  that audience. The St. Martin's Handbook - Ch. 16: Design for Print and Digital Writing; Ch. 18: Communicating in Other Media The Everyday Writer - Ch. 22: Making Design Decisions; Ch.24: Communicating in Other Media; Student Research Essay (pages 509-18) Writing in Action - Ch. 8: Making Design Decisions; Ch. 6: Multimodal Assignments EasyWriter - Ch. 4: Multimodal Writing Student Research Essay (from your own class or the student essay from David Craig in The St. Martin's Handbook pp. 441-9; Everyday Writer pp. 508-518; or Writing in Action pp. 444-53) Class Activity Bring an argumentative text to class that someone has published, and ask students to find supportive materials in other modalities to enhance the argument. For this activity, using a sample student text, such as David Craig’s research essay “Messaging: The Language of Youth Literacy” can work well, as it communicates through a single media and emphasizes the linguistic mode (found in Lunsford’s Everyday Writer on page 509). You could also decide to use a student-written text from another class, or create your own. Divide class into groups, giving each group a specific supporting point of the argument to work with. Ideally, this activity would take place within a computer-classroom, where students have access to the Internet so students can find online resources to complete the activities. I envision students working in small groups so they can easily discuss the rhetorical choices inherent in the class activities discussed below, helping each other consider how a different compositional choice may result in a different experience for the audience. How this is actually done can vary quite a bit. But here are some possibilities for adapting the assignment to your course goals: Limit the types of media or the specific modalities that students should locate/use to support the written argument. You might choose to limit them to images, audio materials, or video segments. What can students locate that can help to support specific ideas that the author has developed? Take the same argument in the activity above and recreate it using different modalities. Discuss the advantages/disadvantages of the multiple modalities used. For instance, how would this argument change if the author emphasized the aural mode and relied heavily on sound? Or if the author used the spatial mode to design the text differently, how would the argument change? What aspects might be improved? Would any be weakened? This text is written to a general audience, but what if the audience was specifically concerned parents, or school administrators, or local politicians? Consider this argument (or different aspects of it) aimed at one of these specific groups. What multimodal elements can students find to enhance the argument to that audience? How do these elements add to the argument? Why this modality/these elements for this specific audience? While these are just a few possibilities of how a teacher might frame this sort of activity, the hope for this activity  is that students can focus on the work of communicating a specific message without the usual pressure of developing the message. By inserting students into an existing argument, aimed at a specific audience, students can focus on the choices of how alternate materials and modalities can help a reader to make meaning from the text and how different compositional choices can result in different readings of a text. In that way, this classroom activity serves as an excellent scaffolding exercise, leading to a full multimodal assignment that allows students to focus on their own message and rhetorical delivery. Jason Dockter teaches first-year composition at Lincoln Land Community College. He completed his Ph.D. in English Studies at Illinois State University. His research focus is primarily on rhetoric/composition, with specific interests in online writing instruction and multimodal composition. Join the Macmillan Community to get offer feedback, comments, and suggestions for Jason or other instructors (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

I just returned from a visit with grandnieces Audrey (11) and Lila (8) and, as always, I loved observing what they were up to regarding literacy/ies. They had a two-day holiday from school, so in all, we had three days for fun. We started by seeing the new Star Wars film, which they judged to be “way too long” but engaging; they were outraged by the death of a favorite character, and they loved Finn. They also deftly pointed out several product placements, showing that their critical antennae are up at least part of the time. The next day we had rain and even some snow, so that meant—reading! We have our own book clubs when I’m not there: each girl chooses a book, and we read two chapters and then have a text or FaceTime talk about it. I am constantly impressed with their reflections and with how they anticipate what may happen next (and why). This day, though, we could read together. Lila chose one of Frances O’Roark Dowell’s Phineas L. MacGuire books, and over the course of the day she read the entire volume to me out loud. She has a wicked sense of humor and a very soft heart, so we had to pause and laugh or commiserate often as the adventures piled up. Once she misread, saying “He rode his book” rather than “He rode his bike” and got so tickled that she lost her breath laughing—and then rode around the room on her book. She also took to correcting Phineas (known as Mac), who is prone to refer to “Me and Marcus.” Lila silently changed this to “Marcus and I,” nodding disapprovingly as she did so. This book’s lessons are pretty obvious—compassion and kindness win out over obnoxiousness and selfishness every time—so we talked about that and about experiences she had had with both in her second grade class. Eight-year-olds have a lot on their minds, as this reading experience reminded me. And so do eleven-year-olds.  Audrey and I took turns reading the third book in Lois Lowry’s Giver series. Since we’d already read the first two books in our typical book club way, we spent some time talking about what had happened in The Giver and Gathering Blue, including a meditation on “utopian” and “dystopian” and the role these words played in the series. Then we plunged in to The Messenger, which Audrey soon said “cut to the chase” better and more quickly than the first two. She picked up right away on the word “trade,” saying “there’s something going on with this word!” And she was right, as the plot turns on an ominous Trade Mart that comes to threaten the village. We stopped often to reflect on events and talk about our expectations and hopes for the characters, our assessment of the story (“really gripping!”), and words (“Wow, ‘subtle’ has a ‘b’ in it. How cool!”). We didn’t finish the book in one day, but did so in the car on the way to the airport. Now we are embarking on the fourth and last book in the series, Son, and I look forward to many text messages and emails and phone calls about it. After a day of reading and with the weather still bad they turned to building. They each had a Roominate kit (started by girls and meant for girls—and boys—who want to build things). The kits come with four pieces of plastic (about 10” by 8” ) meant to serve as three walls and a floor—and then a bunch of other smaller plastic parts that can be fit together in different ways, colored paper and felt, and a few other things. There are some pictures but only bare-bones instruction:  “just build whatever you imagine!” they say. Lila quickly announced she was going to build a restaurant called Avery’s. She papered the walls, built four tables for two, fit them out with napkins, menus, and candles, and set up a serving station. She made a big menu board (ice cream sundaes for $4; chicken tenders for $3; grilled cheese sandwiches “on the house”) as well as a “daily specials” board, a welcome sign, and a tipping policy (“give a lot”).  Audrey took more time to think but then decided to build her ideal cabin for Camp Kanata, where she and Lila will spend two weeks this summer. If you can enlarge the photo below, you’ll see how intricate the work is: the stack of tiny felt t-shirts on the top shelf of a cupboard, next to a dress hanging on a paper hanger; the two bunk beds with quilts and pillows and signs for the girls assigned to them (Eva, Audrey, etc.); the windows, broom (made with a cut-off pencil) and paper dustpan; the bedside table with its candle (“really, really hard to make”) and The Giver on it; a bookshelf (Smile is there, along with Moby Dick); and what she called “signage”—Cabin Clean Up Score Card, Camp Rules, Chore Chart, even a fan (top right) that she rigged up with batteries (it works!). Audrey and Lila worked all day on these construction projects, chatting away, often to themselves, about challenges and problems they had to solve and the effects they were trying to create. Since they were working with very small items like candles, a lot of hand-eye-brain coordination was called for, along with concentration and focus. I had a hard time getting them to take a break for lunch! They graciously let me join the team and I was sometimes allowed to help out (“Aunt A, would you cut another circle just like this one?”). So the maker movement—and reading—are alive and well in Chapel Hill. And on these two days, while both girls used the Internet to look up things they needed (definitions of terms, how to do this or that), they were not as tied to the iPads as they are sometimes wont to be. For now, I’m starting our next “book club” books and watching for additions and improvements to the Roominates! ... View more

Surely it was the first time in the history of American presidential elections that a candidate had made such a statement: “I could stand in the middle of 5 th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” The American public has heard so many outrageous statements from Donald Trump that this recent one wasn’t even the lead story on the evening news. In fact, it produced hardly a ripple in the press. Even though the statement is a bit of an exaggeration, Trump’s comment comes closer to the truth than some might like: He can at least say such a thing and not lose voters. Why? What has happened to the classical definition of a rhetor as a good man skilled in speaking? What has happened to the notion that a successful argument is a blend of logos, pathos, and ethos? Source: Ninian Reid on Flikr​ Some fact-checking organizations have claimed that 75% or more of what Trump says is not true. Facts—or lack thereof—would be a large part of the logical component, or logos, of his argument. A Washington Post article near the end of 2015 posed “4 theories why Donald Trump’s many falsehoods aren’t hurting him”:  People simply believe him—or at least want to. People don’t care that he’s not accurate. It’s Trump’s word against the media’s. People just aren’t paying attention. Others can analyze Trump’s veracity compared to the media’s. Considering the fourth theory, people who just aren’t paying attention and thus haven’t decided whom to vote for, or just won’t vote, are not being reached by any argument by any candidate. Those who are paying attention but who say they will vote for Trump anyway are responding to the pathos and/or the ethos of his argument, which is the basis for the first two theories in any case. People who simply believe a candidate based on who he or she is (or appears to be) are responding to how that candidate presents himself or herself as an ethical being. Those who don’t care if a candidate is accurate or not are responding emotionally and not logically. Books will be written in coming years about the emotional hold that Donald Trump has over a diverse segment of the American public. It would take an examination of the American psyche to explain what needs Trump fills for which of the various groups who flock to his rallies and who indicate they plan to vote for him. Trump has shaken up American politics for the very reason that he has an emotional hold over American voters that outweighs reason. Join the Macmillan Community to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post and to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

In my last post I discussed some of the challenges of WAC/WID in the FYC classroom as well as the tools the new edition of Emerging offers to help you meet some of those challenges. In this post I want to think about research, which can be just as challenging to teach in the FYC classroom. I touch on one of these challenges in the introduction to Emerging: Research is also an important skill of critical thinking. But “research” is a much trickier term than it used to be. It used to be that research involved looking up specific subjects on little cards or ponderous indexes of journals in the library and then hunting down books in the library stacks or finding articles on microfilm. It required a good deal of training to do well. For most of us today, though, the basic methods of research are nearly instinctive. If you were given a blank search box, you would know what to do — just type in some search terms and start looking at the results until you find what you need. And in fact we often do this kind of research every day: researching what school to attend, or information on your favorite band, or where to get the best tattoo. But academic research is very different from this kind of research. When you research on the Web, you gather and summarize existing information. When academics do research, though, their goal is to produce new information. (21) I think this problem—life in a search culture—is compounded by some of the work students do before they reach our classrooms. In high school, my sense is that often writing a “research paper” means “read a bunch of sources and summarize the information,” which is exactly what I don’t want students to do in my classroom. These challenges around research, or perhaps more properly “researched writing” or “researched arguments,” are further compounded by the same WAC/WID issues I discussed in the last post. That is, students won’t really learn how to research until they enter their disciplines, and each discipline has its own rules for research governing how to conduct it, what counts as evidence, and how to present it. Rock, meet hard place. On the one hand, I feel the need to teach students how to break out of the “research paper means summarizing sources, which is what I do in a search culture all the time” mold, but on the other hand, I can’t really teach them how to research in ways that will remain meaningful as they journey into their majors and careers. The approach I tend to take is to boil academic research down to its barest form. It’s an approach I’ve taken when teaching research to graduate students as well. And it comes down to this: Is(S) = Kn If you’ve ever been exposed to my Super Secret Formula for connecting readings (now, of course, not so secret) then you already know I have a fondness for formulae, mostly because 1) they are so alien to writing processes and thus force the mind into new modes of thinking, but also because 2) they provide good, simple, concrete scaffolds for work. In this case, the formula is meant to express my sense that all academic research involves taking Ideas About Stuff (Is) and applying it to Stuff (S) in order to create New Knowledge (Kn). What I am expressing here is nothing new, really. Ideas About Stuff might be recast as secondary sources, or theoretical knowledge, or paradigms, or frames. Stuff is really just a more generalized way of saying primary sources, or practice, or cases. What I find useful about my more abstracted approach is that sometimes secondary sources can serve as primary sources—one could, for example, do a Marxist analysis of feminism. But the central points are that 1) academic research produces new knowledge and 2) that happens by moving between theories and examples. A biologist might take ideas about DNA replication to develop a new drug for cancer. An engineer might take ideas about energy efficiency to design a new engine. A business person might take ideas about economic trends to predict the stock market. In all cases, academics take ideas about how the world works and use them to predict or change what happens. The revised introduction to Emerging introduces this approach to students. It also covers the difference between having sources and using sources, as well as the need for understanding how research happens in the disciplines. We went even further with this edition, though, by providing two assignment sequences specifically about research. Both use the readings from the book as a starting point, to help students acquire the basic skills of making arguments and working with sources, and then invite students to locate their own sources to extend the conversation. It’s a kind of deeply scaffolded introduction to research. I don’t know that Emerging is the ideal text for a course solely devoted to researched writing, but if those kinds of assignments form part of your FYC course then we’ve offered new tools for you to use. I hope you enjoy them. 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

How do we meet our writing goals and help our students meet writing goals in the midst of other demands? My favorite recent book on this topic is Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. It’s a portable encyclopedia of the daily schedules of artists, psychologists, theologians, and authors. Toni Morrison (single mother of two with a full time job as an editor at Random House) explains that “it does seem hectic,” but she doesn’t do “anything else.” She avoids cocktail parties and evening events because that is when she works. And, “When I sit down to write I never brood….. I can’t afford it.”  She makes it clear that there’s really not likely going to be, for most of us, a regular time to write. She grabbed weekends, evenings, predawn time. Haruki Murakami wakes at 4 am and writes until 9 am or 10 am. He also turns down invitations. What I notice, reading Currey’s charming, delicious compendium, is that creating a writing life is actually less about a cushy life filled with luxurious writing hours and more about saying no to almost everything else. And, reading the lives of artists while thinking about students as our semesters get underway, I see that it’s more than a bit challenging to be 20 years old and newly free in in the world, and then, if one would like to become a writer, tasked with saying no to all of your friends, parties, weekend getaways, football games, laying out in the sun. I asked three of my colleagues, graduate students in the MFA program at the University of South Florida, to address the question: how do you get your writing done while teaching? Annalise Mabe said she writes best when she has a deadline for class. Carmella Guiol recently got rid of the internet at home, and for her, hours and hours of writing time opened up.  Chelsea Dingman, prolific writer and mother of two boys, gets up monstrously early, and writes in any spare hour during the day. These three writers get their creative work done by saying no to a lot and they can do that because they love the work and they have been rewarded by long hours of practice with visible, measurable proof of improvement.  Can we help our students experience more deeply how rewarding practice is? (The recent film Seymour provides a terrific discussion of the delicious rewards of pure practice.) I’m not sure. I know when they are required to spend more time on a piece (writing a sonnet, for example), they learn more as writers, produce better work, and they are often surprised at the correlation between time spent on writing and the success of the piece. This semester, I’m working on creating assignment sequences that are meaningful and challenging. I’m trying to do a better job of explaining to my students why we’re doing this work, and what they’ll be able to do at the end of the semester, and showing them, along the way, exactly what is happening in terms of skill development and knowledge acquisition.  I’m modeling a working writing life for them by sharing my triumphs and failures I’ve met my new year’s writing goals four days out of 24 so far this year, but at least I’m aware of what I want and where I am. ... View more

Recently, Jerry Nelms posted a very interesting comment on procrastination to the WPA listserv. In it, he reviewed some research on procrastination and recommended Eric Jaffe's "Why Wait? The Science Behind Procrastination," published in Observer 26.4 (April 2013). I expect as many teachers procrastinate as do students. I am certainly not a procrastinator (described in the literature as people who chronically put things off even though they know doing so is harmful). But I have had my moments: I vividly remember having an assignment to review Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations shortly after it came out. I was still in graduate school and awed at the opportunity to review a work I greatly admired. In fact, I felt intimidated, and these feelings led me to put off and put off and put off. Eventually, I recall giving myself a stern talking-to and deciding that I would not allow myself to do a single thing until I had written five pages of the review. It took me more than eight hours and I was sweating it all the way through, but I sat at the typewriter until I had those pages. In his WPA listserv post, Jerry points out that he sees students procrastinate out of such intimidation, or out of fear that they won’t do a good enough job. These students may not be “official” procrastinators—the twenty-some percent of us who are chronic procrastinators—but even occasional procrastination in high-stakes circumstances can be a serious challenge. In J. R. Ferrari’s Still Procrastinating? The No Regrets Guide to Getting It Done (2010), he recommends several ways to combat procrastination, including offering rewards for those who get things done early rather than punishments for those who are late. He uses the tax deadline as an example, saying that even procrastinators might get their taxes in early if they had a financial incentive. This strikes me as a sensible idea that could easily be adapted to the classroom: for major assignments, students could get a bonus of some kind for early submission. Better yet, individuals could offer themselves an incentive: a special treat if they get the assignment done ahead of time. Source: Post Memes on Flikr​ In his post, Jerry Nelms recommends putting the topic of procrastination front and center in the classroom, talking through some of the research on it, pointing out that chronic procrastinators often don’t do nearly as well on assignments as their non-procrastinating peers, and asking students to join in conversation about their own putting-it-off habits, and how to overcome them. When my students are working on a major project, we almost always break it into smaller parts or tasks, so that the deadlines are less intimidating and hence easier to meet. In addition, I ask students to make a term calendar, working backwards from the due dates of all their assignments (we try for all classes) and then figuring out when the assignment needs to be started in order to get it in on time (or earlier). Many students keep electronic calendars, though I still see a good number who like to hold onto a paper copy—or who keep both an electronic and a paper calendar. I first started keeping such a calendar in my first year of college: my week-at-a-glance book was always with me, and it served me very well. The transition from high school to college, where students must take charge of their own time, is a difficult one for many, as it was for me. An assignment calendar can help! Research shows that for chronic procrastinators counseling can be valuable, and such help is usually available on college campuses. But most conclude that in the long run, dealing with procrastination is a matter of failing to self-regulate. That’s something most people can do a little work on, and it’s worth discussing with our students. ... View more

It has been a grim couple of weeks for rock-and-roll. First Motörhead’s Lemmy, then David Bowie, then Glenn Frey, and (just this morning as I write this), Dallas Taylor have all passed and gone. Let us hope that no new names appear between now and my Bits blog deadline and posting dates. But as is often the case when a major pop music icon joins the Righteous Brothers’ “Rock and Roll Heaven” (Alan O’Day actually composed that song, and he’s there now, too, along with Bobby Hatfield), an opportunity for cultural reflection arises, and when it comes to Bowie and Frey that moment is especially significant. Because David Bowie and Glenn Frey were, in their very different ways, not simply mega-selling musical superstars, they were both shapers and reflectors of the profound cultural changes that, with the benefit of a lot of hindsight, reveal how the 1970s formed a crucial transition between the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s—revolutions that continue to do battle to this day for the possession of America’s soul. In short, there’s a lot to think about right now. In looking at the cultural legacies of Bowie, Frey, and the 1970s, we will not be concerned with matters of aesthetic quality nor even aesthetic influence. Nor will we be concerned with the surprisingly complicated history of David Bowie’s personal politics (you may be astounded to learn that this pioneer of gender b(l)ending got into a good deal of hot water in the 1970s for some unambiguously pro-fascist—even pro-Hitler!—pronouncements). Rather, we are only concerned with the music, and what that music tells us. Let’s start with the very well known facts, beginning with Glenn Frey. With Roger McGuinn, Chris Hillman, Gram Parsons, Clarence White, and the Flying Burrito Brothers, Frey and the Eagles pretty much invented the musical genre of country rock. And while the new genre did not at all represent any particular political attitude (being nothing more than an aesthetic exploration for its creators), rock critics at the time recognized the essential political retreat that this genre represented. For after a decade when rock-and-roll became not only the background music to, but a voice for, the political upheavals of the 1960s, the “Peaceful Easy Feeling” of 1970s country rock was all too apparently a reflection of a widespread cultural pullback from the storm and stress of the preceding decade. Along with pop cultural fads celebrating such country icons as 18 wheeler truck drivers (yes, there was both a pop tune and a movie, both called “Convoy,” celebrating those long haulers and their CB radios in the days before cell phones), coal miners’ daughter (also a movie and a song), and good country people (I swear, lots of people really liked The Waltons), country rock, a new kid in town indeed, took the roll out of pop music even as America began to settle down into a sort of nostalgic traditionalism. No wonder country rock was often associated with “soft rock.” Source: Alejandro Garcia/Craniodsgn But popular culture is a very complicated thing indeed, and at the same time that country rock was softening up rock-and-roll, David Bowie and his Glam Rock pioneers were manufacturing a very different sort of music, one focused on transgressive gender expression. Surely we should see this as a counter-gesture to the mild conservatism of country rock. But somehow, with its transparent manipulations of sexual identity for commercial and aesthetic ends, Bowie’s glam phase has a more postmodern than political appearance. Indeed, even Bowie’s singing voice, which was always powerful and versatile, often sounds like he is singing in postmodern quotation marks—that is, drawing attention to the fact that he is, after all, performing a role—an impression that especially comes across in his pastiches of lounge-singers. Against the sixties’ quest for authenticity, Bowie opposed a chameleon-like non-identity (something in which he anticipated Madonna by a number of years) in the service more of art than idealism. One way or another, by the end of the 1970s the spirit of the sixties was finished in popular culture (punk’s role in this is a whole ‘nother blog). Then the counter-attack began, setting the stage for the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s and the dismantling of a half century of New Deal progressivism that popular music (in the decade of Duran Duran) had almost nothing to say about beyond the occasional outburst of a Bruce Springsteen and or Neil Young. So, while David Bowie and Glenn Frey by no means should be seen as intending what happened, they were dynamic figures in a vast cultural movement to the right. Though the decades since (the nineties, the aughts, the twenty-teens) have presented their own popular cultural politics and perspectives, the seventies increasingly appear to be a hinge upon which American history has turned. ... View more

Writing in Bedford Bits, Jean Bohannon calls attention to the need for faculty to find comfort zones in their teaching. For many faculty getting students to read, to read well, to read challenging course texts or even sometimes what faculty hope will be accessible course texts, creates great discomfort. And sometimes that discomfort leads to frustration and anger. I think the books outlined below can help forestall that. The post that follows then, is a slightly edited version of an email I sent to the Writing Program Administrator's discussion list (WPA-L). It stems from a recent discussion that was kicked off with the subject line, "Getting Students to Read" (https://lists.asu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind1601&L=WPA-L#61 ). That discussion sprung from my pointing out a nice piece by John Warner in Inside Higher Ed called "When Students Won't Do the Reading" (https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/when-students-wont-do-reading ). I really recommend a visit to John's post before reading about the books below. It won't take long and his approach and calm set well the stage for the approaches books two, three, and four take. As the discussion around "Getting Students to Read" grew to about 50 or so posts, David Schwalm created a new subject line, “Accelerating acquisition of reading ability, was Getting students to read,” and reframed the discussion as one of having, very often, to teach a lot about how to read in a short window of time. He frames the issue this way (https://lists.asu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1601&L=WPA-L&F=&S=&P=341076 😞 In response to David's post, I pointed to the following four books. As you'll see in the brief discussion, I highly recommend the fourth book, Ellen Carillo's Securing a Place for Reading Composition as a first choice for writing teachers. But I am finding that the work in Reading for Understanding2e pairs very nicely with Carillo's study and recommendations. So if you have room in the budget for two, get them both. The first two are professional resources from the Bedford/St. Martin's Imprint of Macmillan Learning, and if you're considering them, your sales rep can help you order them or you can request a free exam copy easily enough by registering as a faculty member at the pages the links below will take you to. The books' tables of contents, which the URLs below will also show, give you a sense of what the books offer and why they'll likely be useful. One: Teaching Developmental Reading: Historical, Theoretical, and Practical Background Readings by Sonya Armstrong , Norman A. Stahl (Northern Illinois University) , Hunter R. Boylan (Appalachian State University) http://tinyurl.com/hwmdshk​ While focused on developmental reading, it has a some pieces, such as this one by Frances O. Triggs, "From Remedial Reading: The Diagnosis and Correction of Reading Difficulties at the College Level" that get at a final question in David's post, ""what it is that makes reading (and writing) difficult or easy for college students?" The following three books offer more comfort -- they give good advice faculty can follow. Book three on the list, Reading for Understanding 2e, speaks to faculty in any college course, not just first year composition. Two: Reading to Learn and Writing to Teach: Literacy Strategies for Online Writing Instruction by Beth Hewett (Past Chair, CCCC Committee for Effective Practices in Online Writing)  http://tinyurl.com/j962cra​  This Bedford/St. Martin's imprint title is summed up well at its catalog page, and you'll see why it might be useful, especially if you're teaching online, have concerns with students reading ability and skills, and want some practical, and based in current learning theory, ideas for addressing their reading. Three -- Start Here if You're Not a Writing Teacher: I also really like Reading for Understanding 2e, described more here --http://ncarbone.blogspot.com/2015/06/reading-about-reading-apprenticeship.html. There's a link from that blog post to sample chapters from the book by Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, and Lynn Murphy, including one a link to chapter two, "The Reading Apprenticeship Framework," which, in language and approaches that folks can appreciate, gives shape to how the book thinks about reading and the teaching of reading, urging, as their subtitle says a reading apprenticeship. The book speaks to high school and college classrooms. What it does is give every instructor -- an appendix offers strategies for addressing reading in science, math, literature, history and other disciplines -- a lens for seeing their way to better strategies for making their students stronger academic and scholarly readers. Four -- Start Here if You Are a Writing Teacher: I mention books two and three above because they get at something raised in the fourth book -- one that might be the place folks on this list will want to start: Ellen C. Carillo's Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance for Teaching For Transfer (Utah State U. Press -- http://tinyurl.com/homllft).  Carillo notes on page 32 that "Despite their commitment to foregrounding the practice of reading in their writing courses, 51 percent of the [writing] instructors interviewed were not secure in their abilities to teach reading." Another reason for writing instructors to start with Carillo is that Carillo starts with writing instructors, on page one in the first sentence, "In the final months of 2009 (https://lists.asu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0910&L=WPA-L#100 ), the WPA listserv (WPA-L) saw an onslaught of detailed responses to an initial post with the deceptively simple subject line: "How well do your students read . . .?" In chapter 6, "Teaching Mindful Reading to Promote the Transfer of Reading Knowledge," Carillo calls for and describes a mindful reading framework, one whose elements also appear in Reading to Understand 2e, touches on the need for that framework to also be metacognitive and then moves to ideas for assignments and recommends some essays and textbooks that can be used in courses to promote transferable reading skills. All of which is to say, Carillo moves from her own research -- a survey on the role of reading in fyc inspired by discussions here (and a survey that find participation from members here) -- to scholarship on transfer and reading to some things folks can do. If you're teaching a writing and teaching of writing course, it'd be a good book to consider. More and more graduate students, in composition and rhetoric and other disciplines will be heading to two-year colleges to do their work, or to four year teaching institutions. For those who go as writing teachers, the increased use of combined reading and writing courses, or writing courses that increasingly also emphasize reading, will be something they'll want to be able to talk about in interviews. Carillo's book will be especially helpful to rhetoric and writing instructors, when applying for those jobs; it will help them to be more confident about the discussion of reading and writing. Or to put it as Jean Bohannon might, help them to be more comfortable. ... View more

In this series I’m looking at some of the features and readings we’ve added to the third edition of Emerging as well as thinking about some ways to approach teaching with it. In this post, I wanted to focus on a new feature we’ve introduced that might be useful for anyone interested in Writing Across the Curriculum / Writing in the Disciplines (WAC/WID). It’s always seemed to me that the fundamental challenge for any reader focused on WAC/WID is the fact that writing in the disciplines is usually also writing for the disciplines. That is, a reading from biology would use terminology that would only make sense to biologists. How then do we incorporate disciplinary writing into the FYC classroom? Quickly perusing some WAC/WID texts from different publishers, it seems that the answer to that question is 1) talk more generally about how writing happens in terms of genre or disciplinary conventions; 2) use readings that emerge from but are not for a discipline; or 3) both. For example, one text I looked at included Barbara Ehrenreich for Business and Economics and Mahatma Gandhi for Government and Political Science. I think it’s a bit of a stretch to imagine that either author was writing for either economists or political scientists. But what each author does is communicate disciplinary issues to a wider audience. And that’s a very good thing. After all, once students enter their disciplines and then their careers they will be called on to communicate issues from their field to other audiences all the time: clients, managers, marketers, grant committees, and more. I don’t know that the FYC classroom will ever be a perfect place to teach students how to write in their disciplines, since we’re compositionists and not physicists or sociologists or architects. But the FYC classroom is a great place to teach students that disciplines write in certain ways (and to have them think about how and why) and it’s a super great place to have them practice communicating complex ideas to a general audience. That sense of communicating complex ideas to a general audience is very much at the heart of Emerging. And for that reason we always thought the book would be useful in some WAC/WID contexts. But of course that’s not immediately apparent when looking at the table of contents of Emerging, particularly since we chose to go with an alphabetical listing of authors. The text has always included a number of alternate means of thinking about, connecting, and organizing the readings—through tags and paired readings and a thematic table of contents—but in this edition we’re making the WAC/WID connection explicit with a table of contents that groups all of the readings into a series of disciplinary conversations, so that you can quickly see all of the readings that are from or deal with issues in a particular discipline. Here’s a snapshot from the book: I was actually wonderfully surprised to see the range of disciplines we cover in the book, especially since we didn’t set out to make anything like a WAC/WID reader. And yet we have series of readings from Art, Education, the Natural Sciences, the Social Sciences, and more. We end up representing a broad spectrum of disciplines. Of course, none of the readings is writing in the disciplines in the strictest sense, which is really to say writing for those in the discipline. But if you subscribe to a more generalized approach to WAC/WID, one in which you try to introduce students to conversations within disciplines and in which you give them practice joining those conversations and their attendant modes of thinking, then you might find Emerging useful. If nothing else, it’s another tool for thinking about how to organize the readings and your assignments. Of all the features we’ve added to the apparatus this time around, it’s one of my favorites. I hope you will enjoy it. 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

A couple of years ago, I taught a May Term class called Survey of English Poetry, 1500-1700. During May Term, my students kept “commonplace books,” which turned out to be a surprisingly fun, and for some students, a very meaningful, exercise. In the Renaissance—and actually up through the nineteenth century—many people in Western culture used commonplace books as repositories of quotes, recipes, meditations, Biblical passages, illustrations, observations on nature and the passage of time, and poems. It was a way for people to represent themselves in relation to the inherited knowledge of the culture.  To emulate this practice requires a Renaissance habit of mind—a mind that is continually culling information from the world, and above all, experimenting with a “writerly” self. On the first day of class, I distributed small 3 ½ x5 ½” Moleskine blank notebooks.  Each day of May Term, I encouraged students to write excerpts of their favorite poems, horoscopes, lyrics from their favorite songs, descriptions of what they were learning in other disciplines, or any other meditations that came to mind. At first, I worried that they wouldn’t be interested in writing longhand, especially when they could just enter thoughts into Evernote on their smart phones. Remarkably, though, they were drawn to the experience, perhaps precisely because so much of what they do is relegated to screens. I was astonished by the results of this project. If you click on this link, you’ll see some examples of the most interesting commonplace books. If you want to learn a bit more about commonplace books and how they’ve been used over time, check out this page. ... View more

I will be visiting the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse in early February to work with their writing programs. The campus is an enthusiastic adopter of Writer’s Help, currently using Version 2.0. The campus is working to realize a vision we have held for Writer’s Help since our initial discussions: Wouldn’t it be great to have one writing text that could accompany a student all the way from first-year composition through college and graduation and into the workplace? Since 2003, we’ve been developing Writer’s Help with that goal in mind. As author, something I have worked hard to do is to make the advice, models, examples, and exercises reflect the many kinds of writing found not just in first-year comp, but in all classes and in workplaces beyond college. The original author of Bedford/St. Martin’s Writer’s Reference, Diana Hacker, was great at understanding how to offer advice and examples to students in a first-year writing context, where academic essays and library research papers were the dominant genres. We worked from her strong base to address more broadly the many genres of contemporary writing in both printed and electronic modes. When I visit La Crosse, I should have a chance to meet with instructors from various disciplines, so I am looking forward to hearing about their experiences. Do we have the right coverage and depth? Are they able to integrate the resource with their teaching goals? Is it enough to say “Use Writer’s Help when you need it” or are there more intentional strategies? If called upon to offer advice, here is a first pass at what I would say: As you create your writing assignments, look at the sections of Writer’s Help that show students how to read and interpret writing assignments. Make sure you clearly establish a purpose and audience for writing, and that you set expectations and constraints for writing in a particular genre. Make your assumptions explicit. See if there are good model papers in your chosen genre. If you are asking for an annotated bibliography, or literature review, or field report, be sure to explore the models in Writer’s Help and point students in that direction. Call attention to those aspects of writing you care most about (i.e., strong argumentative thesis, supporting data, inclusion of charts and graphs, documentation according to APA style). Include suggested links in your assignment. Consider how to stage an assignment effectively, by requiring some in-class time for discussing topics, doing some brainstorming, and organizing ideas. Consider intervening at various stages while the papers are in development, perhaps in conference. Set aside time in class for peer review of drafts. Have a proofing and editing session for final drafts. Spend less of your time responding to final papers and more while work is in progress. Make the work more social and collaborative. Writer’s Help has good advice on all these activities. Use your class management system to post drafts, gather peer or instructor feedback, and expose students to the work of others. Doing so will raise the bar for performance. In short, think about how best to use an available resource to support your teaching strategies and learning goals. Make Writer’s Help a valued resource for being successful in your class. Do you have tips, strategies, or assignments for using Writer’s Help in your class? Please comment below!* * To offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post, join the Macmillan Community  (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

The gap between the study of comics and the study of serious literature within academia has been shrinking in recent years, as campuses include more graphic novels in their first-year composition courses and in “one book” programs.  The “highbrow”/”lowbrow” divide has also been diminishing as works in comics format win prestigious literary prizes and rave reviews.  This year at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association a dozen sessions were devoted to panels on comics and graphic novels, including a panel held in a guarded room about the controversial Charlie Hebdo cartoons satirically depicting the prophet Mohammed. For those teaching writing courses, the session I participated in on Developments in Comics Pedagogy drew a particularly lively crowd, despite its early morning slot on the first day of the conference.  The panel had been organized by Derek McGrath of Stony Brook University, who has been championing comics in his regional MLA NEMLA for many years.  You can read the way he frames the session here: Primer for “Developments in Comics Pedagogy.” McGrath opened the session with a discussion of two-way communication with fans that seems to be central to the cultural conversation about manga, comics produced in Japan or in the style of Japanese comics. He noted that the process of “scanlation” encourages rich forms of engagement in which readers of comics may develop or enhance story lines as they participate in the scanning, translation, and editing of comics from one language into another language, as in the case of an issue from Soul Eater. He also talked about the way that comics functioned as “tangible objects,” even as the rise of e-books might dematerialize the text. Co-organizer Keith McCleary of the University of California, San Diego, showed several impressive examples of comics developed by his students, and he emphasized how instructors needed to manage the “high anxiety” that students have about performing as artists and how digital retracing and other computational tools might assist students worried about reproducing unrealistically dexterous production.  Those interested in McCleary’s comics pedagogy can check out his online teaching portfolio, which is packed with prompts and examples. He also chortled about his own naiveté in underestimating “the very strong political feelings that they had” and the frankness of opinions that students might express, even about superhero comics like Batwoman: Elegy and Marvel’s Civil War:   “I thought we would be on the same page.” But he acknowledged that comics helped them engage in more substantive political debate and grapple with real disagreements more than they might otherwise.  McCleary warned that too often college courses assigned the same “politically correct” memoirs in graphic novel formats, which might enforce uniformity in classroom discussion. Nick Sousanis of the University of Calgary continued the theme of ameliorating student fears, particularly among undergraduates who might identify as “non-drawers.”  Sousanis has been getting a lot of attention of late for his innovative graphic dissertation, Unflattening, which is now available from Harvard University Press.  He has been praised by luminaries such as Cathy Davidson for producing a document pointing toward avenues for completely reinventing the deliverables of a Ph.D., and by Andrea Lunsford for advancing multimodal composition.  Like McCleary, Sousanis showed the prolific work of his own students, particularly as a venue for health graphics, including a publication-worthy comic on depression.   He noted that emphasizing a full range of narrative techniques could be important and praised Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story as a useful pedagogical graphic text.  In talking about the value of sketch notes and visual analysis and annotation, he also showed the results of assigned exercises for using tracing paper atop a comics layout as a way to demonstrate graphically “how much they can notice.”  As an instructor, he characterized his task as helping students to “figure out what they don’t know that they know.” Susan E. Kirtley of Portland State University described some of the unique challenges that she faced as an administrator developing the PSU post-baccalaureate Certificate in Comic Studies and her successes recruiting faculty from multiple disciplines to teach elective courses such as Jewish comics or manga that rounded out a curriculum requiring rigorous preparation in theory and history.  She observed that participation from the local comics community had also enriched the program.  Kirtley also laughed about a student initially querying if “you want to get fired?” She credited the program’s continued good health to “speaking the administrative language” and navigating “the sheer amount of red tape,” as well as benefiting from wise counsel from peers in similar positions championing the academic value of comics, such as Ben Saunders of the University of Oregon. Maria Elsy Cardona of Saint Louis University talked about teaching Spanish literature with comics and the benefits of advertising courses with disarming cartoons.  In addition to using comics as a means to introduce students to Spanish Literature, she uses comics to address difficult issues of social justice such as gender discrimination.  In her course "Between Laughter and Tears, Gender Stereotypes in Spanish Comics"—a cross-listed course with the Department of Women and Gender Studies at SLU—she uses Spanish comics to talk about issues of gender discrimination. The course, thus, looks at gender inequality both at the local and the global level. As an expert in children’s literature, Joe Sutliff Saunders talked about the value of a comparative exercise with comics and picture books in a graduate course. He noted the value of teaching a comics course not firmly within the established body of knowledge, but at the edge of disciplinary exploration.  Eventually he dedicated a whole course to examining comics and picture books alongside each other and asking how the theory of each illuminated the other.  Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam of the University of Michigan, who has taught writing with Understanding Rhetoric, described a variety of uses for comic books in the college classroom.  She argued that teaching history with comics could be an extremely effective way to use them pedagogically, particularly in the case of covering photographic and visual representations of the Holocaust.  Like Cardona, she has used comics for teaching a foreign language, and like Sousanis and McCleary she has found herself attending to lowering classroom anxiety about artistic competence.  She plugged the online software package Pixton as a helpful tool and distributed one of her own comics to attendees. In the question and answer portion of the panel there was a wide-ranging discussion that covered everything from questions about assessment (and a possible answer in contract grading) to questions about containing textbook costs.  Of course, given the intensive review and production processes of traditional textbooks, there can be plenty of sticker shock to go around. Given this lively panel, I am pleased to have McCleary on board for the instructors’ manual of the forthcoming edition of Understanding Rhetoric. ... View more