Roy Stamper​'s assignment instructions for a rhetorical analysis in the sciences. For more, see his post Foregrounding Rhetorical Awareness. ... View more

Roy Stamper​'s assignment instructions for Constructing an Advertisement. For more, see his post Foregrounding Rhetorical Awareness. ... View more

Guest blogger Jessica Saxon​ is a faculty member at Craven Community College in New Bern, North Carolina, and she teaches composition and literature courses. A former WAC coordinator at Craven, her primary interests are WAC/WID programs and creating partnerships with other community colleges and universities. She is also pursuing a PhD in narrative theory and nineteenth-century British literature at Old Dominion University. This post is the second in a series. View the first post: First Time WID Jitters and My Comfort Zone We started the natural science unit recently in my ENG 112 class. Strangely, I am much more excited about this unit than I was about the first unit in my home discipline (humanities and literature studies). We have been talking about annotated bibliographies, scholarly and non-scholarly research, APA formatting, and possible research questions for students’ natural sciences annotated bibliographies. And, having learned from my modeling mistake in the humanities unit, we will be constructing a sample annotated bibliography in APA style together in class while the students are also working on their independent projects. I teach APA style in both the natural sciences unit and the social sciences unit. However, An Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing has section on CSE (Council of Science Editors) for instructors who would prefer to use CSE for the natural sciences unit. I have decided to teach APA in the natural sciences as well as in the social sciences because (1) faculty at my home institution in the natural sciences use APA instead of CSE or another documentation style, and (2) the majority of students at my home institution have more experience with MLA than APA and therefore need additional instruction in and practice with APA style. You should, of course, use the documentation styles most appropriate for your students and your home institutions. The Assignment and Schedule Students are asked to create an annotated bibliography in APA style on a topic related to the natural sciences. They are responsible for selecting a research topic and creating focused research questions. They cannot, for example, research global warming; instead, they must narrow the topic to something along the lines of researching the melting of Greenland glaciers or sea level rise in the eastern American states or shifting weather patterns in Southeast Asia. Their annotated bibliographies must have (1) at least three academic, scholarly science journal resources and (2) at least three lay, non-academic, non-scholarly magazine (including magazine-like website) resources. Each source’s annotation must include summary, analysis, and comparison, and each annotation must address the source’s appeals to logos, pathos, and ethos as well as the source’s intended audience (including the context and purpose of the source). Each annotation needs to be no less than 160 words. Students have the month of October to complete the project: 10.1 Writer’s Journal #10: Arguments and Research Planning Introduction to Natural Sciences Writing and Annotated Bibliographies Introduction to APA Conventions and Paper Formatting 10.6 Writer’s Journal #11: APA Style Introduction to APA Style In-Text Citations and References 10.8 Process Assignment #7: Annotated Bibliography Questions and Sources 1 “Multiple Ebola Virus Transmission Events and Rapid Decline of Central African Wildlife” (available through ProQuest Central) Annotated Bibliography Questions and Sources Workshop 1 Sample Annotated Bibliography Workshop 1 for “Multiple Ebola Virus” 10.13 No Class – Semester Break 10.15 Process Assignment #8: Annotated Bibliography Questions and Sources 2 “Smuggled Bushmeat Is Ebola’s Back Door to America” (available through ProQuest Central) Annotated Bibliography Questions and Sources Workshop 2 Sample Annotated Bibliography Workshop 2 for “Multiple Ebola Virus” and “Smuggled Bushmeat” 10.20 Process Assignment #9: Annotated Bibliography Draft 1 Annotated Bibliography Draft Workshop 1 10.22 Process Assignment #10: Annotated Bibliography Draft 2 Annotated Bibliography Draft Workshop 2 10.27 In-Class Work on Annotated Bibliography and Annotated Bibliography Self-Reflection  Annotated Bibliography (Due by the End of Class) Process Assignment #11: Annotated Bibliography Self-Reflection (Due by the End of Class) Reflections As I said in my previous blog post, I have been nervous about teaching this WID course for the first time. What do I know about science? Or about scientific journals? Or researching in the sciences? Or about APA style? Well, it turns out I know quite a lot already thanks to my own general education courses and to my general interest in science news. But more importantly than that, I know quite a lot about rhetoric, and that, in turn, gives me an entrance into natural sciences writing and researching. I told a group of students in my college’s Scholars in Engineer and Sciences (SEAS) program that rhetoric was their magic bullet. Sure, that’s an exaggeration, but it is not entirely untrue. With a firm understanding of rhetorical strategies and situations, a student can begin to pierce complex texts for classes and projects. It gives them a vocabulary for understanding disciplinary writing styles, research expectations, and even citation formatting. For example, in my ENG 112 class today, we went over APA style expectations and paper formatting: avoiding first-person, headers, title pages, abstracts, and so on. During our discussion of why first-person works well in humanities projects but typically not in natural sciences and social sciences projects, we linked issues of voice back to formatting: MLA wants your name in the header, but APA couldn’t care less about your name in the header, much like it doesn’t want first-person references to yourself in the body. The natural sciences project will be centering on rhetorical strategies and contexts. And the more I think about it, the more I wonder if this project might be a better first project than the literary analysis paper. This annotated bibliography gets students to work with scholarly and non-scholarly sources and makes them select (and narrow) their own topics. Plus it directly reinforces the discussions about rhetoric that we have during the first two weeks of the semester. I may have to revisit the structure of the course the next time around. How do you approach natural sciences writing and researching in your WID classes? Do you uses CSE, APA, or some other documentation style in your natural sciences unit? At what point in the semester do you tackle the natural sciences? What’s the rationale for its placement in your schedule? What sorts of natural sciences projects do your students do? Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Or share it with others and start a conversation? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

Kim Haimes-Korn​'s list of example ideologies for her multimodal project: Multimodal Mondays: Cultural Ideologies and Visual Rhetoric. ... View more

The 10th Biennial Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference concluded on October 31, 2015, and what a celebration! Hosted by Maureen Goggin and Shirley Rose (and their fabulous team) at Arizona State University, this was one of the very best of all the conferences so far: brilliant! I have been at most of these conferences, including the first one, held at Oregon State University in 1997 and hosted by Lisa Ede and Cheryl Glenn. Lisa and Cheryl had been given some funding from their dean that year, and they proposed to use it to hold a conference on feminism and rhetoric, thinking it would be a one-time affair. But when we gathered in Corvallis, so enthusiastic were all the participants that toward the end of the conference colleagues from the University of Minnesota rose to say that the show simply HAD to go on—and offered to host it in 1999. Thus was born the Biennial Conference, with this year being the tenth consecutive one, now supported and sponsored by the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, a remarkable group with a juried journal, Peitho. Every one of the meetings has been special in its own way: who can forget Joy Harjo and her band in Minnesota, the Deaf poets at Ohio State, or Lynda Barry bringing down the house at Stanford! Cheryl Glenn and Lisa Ede Cheryl Glenn, Laura Jagles, and Me But I cannot remember enjoying a conference—any conference—any more than I did this one, nor can I remember learning more. “Women’s Ways of Making” began with “writing workshops” in which established scholars met with graduate students or new professors to discuss the making of dissertations and articles and offer advice and counsel. The ninety minutes I spent with a Syracuse grad student LaToya Sawyer were enlightening and inspiring: her project is amazing, and I feel privileged to be along for the ride. This was only one of several sessions devoted to mentoring, a key theme of the conference during which the very first Lisa Ede Mentoring Award went to Cheryl Glenn. With LaToya Sawyer From a session focusing on the work of Ann Berthoff and Wendy Bishop to one that featured two talks on feminist methodologies, to panels on reproductive rights, ethics, and feminist design making, this conference carried all of us along in its joyful wake. The opening ceremony’s keynote address by fiber artist Ann Morton held us spellbound, as she recounted her work with “brave knitters” and other women makers who transformed an empty block in Phoenix into a blossoming of blankets for homeless citizens. During lunch, we were invited to browse the “Plenary Making Session,” where artists were weaving, spinning, knitting, making jewelry, and more. And the screening of Cathy Stevulak and Catherine Masud’s documentary “Threads: The Art and Life of Surayia Rahman” was packed with conference-goers thrilled to meet “Aunty” Surayia and learn of the transformative effect of her embroidering projects (though we fell silent and stunned when we learned that Surayia’s designs had been appropriated by others and she was denied copyright, showing once again how corporate interests continue to trump indigenous works of art). More engaging and engaged panels, plenary addresses, and mentoring sessions flowed throughout Friday, culminating in a presentation by the renowned Scottsdale Chorus that featured Women’s Ways of Making Music. Not to be missed! And then there were even more panels and events on Saturday, a true feast for everyone there. I know I speak for everyone at this remarkable meeting in extending congratulations and deepest thanks to the Arizona State team (and especially to the indefatigable Maureen and Shirley, who are without a doubt women makers on the move). So check out the links above – and stay tuned for information on the 2017 Conference so you can mark your calendar and plan to attend.  ... View more

Guest blogger Amanda Gaddam​ is an adjunct instructor in the First-Year Writing Program and the School for New Learning at DePaul University. She holds a B.A. in English with a concentration in Literary Studies and a M.A. in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse with a concentration in Teaching Writing and Language from DePaul, and her research interests include first-year composition, adult and non-traditional students, and writing center pedagogies. In my first-ever, first-year composition class, I posed the question “What blogs do you read?” to my class, which I felt confident would yield numerous responses and a fruitful discussion.  Instead, my question was met with silence and blinking.  It turns out that my students then—and most of my first-year composition students now—did and do read blogs, but they didn’t and don’t know that they’re reading them.  Fashion blogs, health and fitness blogs, music blogs, tech blogs, and even microblogs like Tumblr—all of these make appearances during students’ daily rounds on the internet, but they aren’t necessarily aware of the fascinating and specific rhetorical choices in arrangement and tone, nor can they identify (right away) the particular conventions that govern these texts.   As Miller and Shepherd note in their 2011 article, “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog,” blogs make for interesting genre analysis discussions; because they rely so heavily on hypertextual, visual, and audio elements, they also provide for a unique multimodal assignment.  The following project and accompanying activities are designed as a low-stakes way to get students asking the right questions about the material they see everyday and recreating appropriate rhetorical choices in multimodal environments for themselves.  Low-stakes projects are particularly important for multimodal composing because most students, despite the technological proficiency that they might have, tend to be apprehensive about writing in unfamiliar genres and need the safety of a low-pressure composing environment to experiment with non-textual elements like video or audio. ASSIGNMENT Step One I introduce the definition, concept, and purpose of genre analysis in a short lecture. Step Two Students complete an in-class, small-group genre analysis activity using the complaint letter as an example genre. Students consider four sample complaint letters using questions adapted from Bawarshi and Reiff’s Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy (all handouts available here).  As a follow-up discussion, students use what they have learned about the contextual factors and features of the genre to theorize their own approach to writing a complaint letter. Step Three I divide students into groups of four or five and assign each group a sub-genre of blogs.  Here are some examples of blogs I’ve assigned in the past: Students then use the questions from the in-class genre analysis activity to research the given example blogs and find one additional blog example from the Internet that fits within their assigned sub-genre.  One of their homework assignments is to bring their notes on these blogs to class in preparation for group work. Step Four Students share their findings from this inquiry with their group in order to come to a consensus about the common features, content, audiences, and contexts of their assigned sub-genre.  They use this information to plan a concept for a blog of their own. Step Five In cooperation with their groups, students create their blog and each compose individual blog posts that purposefully incorporate multimedia elements, like images, video, audio, and links to other content.  All rhetorical choices about content, arrangement, and style belong to the students. Because first-year writing students at DePaul use Digication for their final ePortfolios, I require that the groups use Digication for this blog project and that they purposefully incorporate multimedia elements like images, video, audio, and links to other web content.  The opportunity to learn the various features of Digication without fear of compromising their grade and the chance to practice the skills of multimodal composing on this platform make for thoughtful and well integrated multimodal final assignments. However, this project could easily be completed using free platforms such as Wordpress or Wix. Step Six Students showcase their group blogs and individual blog posts and justify their rhetorical choices to the class in informal presentations.  Neither the blogs nor the presentations are graded at this time; the presentations serve as an opportunity for peer feedback and review before revising the project, and, if they choose, submitting it for a grade in their final ePortfolio. I ask students to write a short analysis reflecting on the rhetorical choices they made for both the blog as a whole and their individual posts, and if they choose to submit the project for a grade, they present these analyses in their final ePortfolio.  I also find that they like to discuss this project in their end-of-term reflection letters, and they note that the collaboration, experimentation, and creativity of the assignment make it their favorite project of the quarter. REFLECTION Fortunately, I have found that students’ engagement with this assignment does not necessarily correspond to their technological acumen; rather, they use both the low-stakes occasion for experimentation and the collaboration with their peers as opportunities to learn something new about the more technical aspects of multimodal composing.  The fact that this assignment is low-pressure doesn’t mean that they don’t try.  In fact, without the stress of a grade, students are more likely to try new rhetorical strategies—and sometimes fail to use these strategies effectively—but their trials and errors show that they’re genuinely working through the best ways to approximate the genre. STUDENT WORK Check out some examples of what some of my students have created for their blogs in the past: The students assigned to tech blogs used the information they collected about the most common features and content to create this title, concept, and header image for their blog.  Their analyses indicate that they put a great deal of thought and conversation into selecting the colors, typeface, and imagery they deemed rhetorically appropriate. The students assigned to create a political blog noted that one of the most important features of blogs is the interactivity between readers and bloggers.  They approximated this element in their own blog by providing comments on each other's individual blog posts. This student recreated a common rhetorical choice in blog arrangement: the use of a lede accompanied by a hyperlink from the blog's homepage, which redirects readers to the full-length blog post.  In his analysis and in the informal presentation, the student and his group theorized that this choice forced readers to click further into the blog, exposing them to more content, and, in the case of for-profit blogs, more advertisements.   Click here for more examples, handouts, and descriptions of the assignment and associated activities.  Want to collaborate with Andrea on a Multimodal Monday assignment or be a guest blogger? Send ideas to leah.rang@macmillan.com for possible inclusion in a future post. ... View more

Earlier this month, Macmillan released our book An Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing. Stacey, Roy, and I have been responding to several questions since the book’s release about how to teach a WID-focused foundational writing course effectively. One of the questions I hear most often is: How do you help writing teachers feel comfortable with teaching a Writing in the Disciplines (WID) course, especially when those instructors primarily come from English? As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, one of the challenges to teaching a WID approach is the faculty members’ comfort level with the approach. For many, it feels like a departure from what they are used to teaching in a writing course. But the first step to helping teachers feel comfortable with a WID approach is helping them draw on the strengths they already possess to help students analyze and understand writing in a variety of contexts. It’s just that in this case, the rhetorical contexts are academic, cross-disciplinary ones. The second step is providing solid, ongoing professional development to help them develop expertise that will strengthen what they’re doing in the course. In this blog post, I provide a few suggestions from an administrative perspective about how to begin taking those two steps. DRAWING ON EXISTING STRENGTHS One of the break-through moments for me as Roy, Stacey, and I wrote our textbook was realizing that the importance of close observation in academic inquiry provided a connection across disciplines. Observation is one of the cornerstones of much academic inquiry, including textual analysis, a practice nearly every teacher in English is familiar with. In literary studies, careful, critical observation is essential to close reading. In the sciences and social sciences, observation is essential for collecting primary data. Therefore, careful attention to observation and what it looks like as disciplinary inquiry can provide a common thread for teachers and students. I try to encourage teachers to introduce students to a range of ways to observe texts, drawing on their existing strengths in critical inquiry and textual analysis. As students hone their observational powers, they can also be encouraged to think about how those skills of critical observation can transfer across disciplines and into other contexts. BUILDING RESOURCES FOR TEACHERS Depending on the backgrounds and experience of the teachers in your writing program, a variety of ongoing professional development opportunities can help them continue to develop expertise in several areas: in academic writing to draw on real examples of writing in various disciplines in writing studies and rhetorical principles to help students practice rhetorical analysis of academic texts and ask important questions to understand disciplinary genres in transfer of knowledge to use the knowledge they are building in your course as they encounter writing in other academic and non-academic contexts. The following list offers some suggestions for providing these kinds of opportunities: Start a reading group for teachers in your writing program where you can read and discuss current work on disciplinary writing, academic genres, and transfer of knowledge. Consider highlighting the work, writing, and research of faculty on your campus by incorporating their work into low-stakes and high-stakes assignments in your writing program or compiling a reader (online or in print) of faculty research to give examples of different disciplinary genres. Host a panel for your writing faculty where you invite faculty from other disciplines to talk about their writing and the writing they assign in their classes.  Develop partnerships with faculty across disciplines. One of the most innovative I’ve seen is the SWAP program developed at North Carolina State University​ by Susanna Klingenberg to bring STEM graduate students into writing classes and writing faculty into STEM classes. What are some other ideas you have about supporting faculty as they teach a WID-based curriculum? What are the biggest questions and concerns that you have about trying a WID approach? If you’ve tried it already, what are some of the strategies you have found to be most effective? Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Or share it with others and start a conversation? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

No, this isn’t about the new Peanuts movie (though that deserves some attention too); it’s about the #BoycottStarWarsVII campaign on Twitter, which began to get media attention in places like the L.A. Times, the Hollywood Reporter, Esquire Magazine, and The Daily Show on October 20.  I do not know what the status of this thing will be by the time this blog appears—indeed, according to Fruzsina Eordogh at motherboard.vice.com and Luke O’Neil at esquire.com (among others), the whole thing was a wildly successful "troll" and should never have received so much attention in the first place.  But at the risk of feeding some trolls (especially a couple who call themselves "Lord Humungus" and "End Cultural Marxism"), I want to address the matter semiotically anyway. The gist of the boycott's "complaint" is that the new Star Wars film is committing a sort of ethnic cleansing (the word being used is “genocide”) against whites because the movie features a black male lead and is directed by Jewish director J.J. Abrams, who, as the Twitter feed doubles down on its racist calumnies, is part of an international Jewish conspiracy against white people.  Yes, that’s what is really appearing: look at the “discussion” for yourself to see—if you can stomach it. Given the problem posed by “Poe’s Law” (the precept that things are so goofy on the Internet that you can’t ever be certain whether someone is being ironic or wacky), it’s hard to tell whether the trolls trolling the trolls here are serious or not, but for my part, I am inclined to think that at least some of them are. Here’s why. When set into a semiotic system, the #BoycottStarWarsVII caper can be seen to bear a number of the markers of the real thing—especially in the claiming of victim status by white supremacists.  If you look around the Internet­ you can see a lot of this sort of thing.  Consider, for example, a report from the September 19th issue of the Richmond Times Dispatch, which describes a stunt by a group called the Virginia Flaggers (this is a NeoConfederate organization that specializes in promoting the public display of the Confederate Battle flag) who recently chartered an airplane to carry a banner declaring "Confederate Heros [sic] Matter".  This was not a hoax. Or consider the blatant, Goebbels-like anti-Semitism in the #BoycottStarWarsVII Twitter feed.  This also can be found all over the internet.  For an example, I'll provide a link to an anti-NeoConfederate blog hosted by Professor Brooks Simpson of Arizona State University, who specializes in exposing the activities of various NeoConfederate organizations.  Have a look at the exchange, in a screen shot captured by Simpson, between Kevin Levin (another anti-NeoConfederate Civil War blogger) and someone calling himself "Battlefield Tramper."  This too is no hoax. But pointing out that the Twitter flap reveals the existence of virulent racism in America isn't much of a discovery, of course. We already knew that.  What I want to look at next is the fact that it is a new Star Wars film that is the site of such an eruption. Part of the reason that a group of committed Internet trolls chose this movie, of course, is that the franchise has been criticized before on racial lines.  Jar Jar Binks, Ewoks, Wookiees, George Lucas himself, have all been the subject of racial controversies.  But that only accentuates the point I want to make here, which is that Star Wars attracts so much cultural attention because this fantasy saga of endless warfare between the forces of good and evil has become one of (if not the) defining narratives of contemporary American culture.  If the ancient Greeks had the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Rome had the Aeneid, the Star Wars narrative has replaced that of the American Revolution (I was raised on Paul Revere; now it’s Luke Skywalker) in American consciousness.  That the saga eschews history for fantasy, and substitutes simplistic conflicts between moral absolutes for the complexities of contemporary life, is a fitting reflection of a society that knows little history and is riven by uncompromising ideological divisions.  It is no wonder that, in such an environment, Star Wars itself has become a battleground, with contending forces competing for the rights to the narrative. And then again, Star Wars has made so much money that it can make every news blip related to it a news mountain: because in a society wherein money increasingly becomes the sole measure of everything, anything having to do with the great money makers is newsworthy.  And this new episode in the unending Star Wars saga is going to make a heck of a lot of money, "boycott" or not. ... View more

Now that I am at least semi-retired, I am taking advantage of every chance to visit new places and to reacquaint myself with places I’ve been before. Recently, I had a chance to spend ten days in London with three friends: we rented a place on Horsemongers Mews Lane and set about visiting old haunts like the British Museum and British Library, the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery, the Tate Modern and Tate Britain, and the Globe. We took in two plays, walked some 90 miles all told, and rode endless other miles on the Tube. One highlight of this visit, however, was completely new to me. Under the tutelage of claymaker and artist Julia and archaeologist Mike, we took a walk along the Thames foreshore, at a very low tide. What a wonder awaited us! Mike and Julia sent us off in different directions, telling us simply to gather up anything that “looked interesting” to us. So we fanned out, with our plastic bags, and some 30 or 40 minutes later came together again with our treasures. Mike explained that the Thames is indeed a treasure trove of history, offering up fragments from 2000+ years ago on one shore and from Roman times forward on the other (well, that’s an oversimplification, but we were on the “Roman” side, where so much has been excavated over the centuries). Between the two of them, Mike and Julia identified everything we found, from a tiny Japanese kewpie doll that was “probably made last week” to pipe stems and bowls from the 18 th century, lots of glazed pottery from the medieval period, and tiles used in Roman buildings. Here are a few of the pieces I collected: I couldn’t help wishing that I had a group of my writing students with me to join in the fun, and I wondered what local sites might hold historical artifacts, ones I could engage students in gathering and studying and writing about. There was something magical and powerful about holding a tile that had once decorated a Roman home, or part of a teacup used in Chaucer’s time, something that pulled me back through history and connected me to it in a very visceral way. And it occurred to me that students might even be able to do archaeological “digs” in their own homes, writing about artifacts from their childhoods, or from their parents’ or grandparents’ time. Such connections with the past seem especially important in our throw-away, dash-from-one-thing-to-the-next world. Our students can benefit from making these connections, writing about them, and speculating on what artifacts our civilization will leave behind for someone a thousand years from now to happen upon. ... View more

Natalie Rowland teaches freshman composition at Florida Atlantic University and is an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing, Fiction program. A former writer, editor, and public relations supervisor in Chicago, she holds BA degrees in Communications and Comparative Literature (English Literature and French Literature) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The multitasking and tech-centric essays in Emerging are a natural starting point for freshman composition. In their day-to-day, students regularly encounter technology and are shaped by their choices to connect or disconnect with it. Whether they’re typing up a paper, listening to Spotify, or winning a self-control battle by not texting in class, they are up close and personal with the concepts presented in Richard Restak’s “Attention Deficit: The Brain Syndrome of Our Era” (p. 411) and Alexandra Samuel’s “‘Plug In Better: A Manifesto” (ePages). Yet many don’t realize it. Be it the format, the nature of coursework, or the reading level, early undergraduates (and first-semester students in particular) may not feel qualified to engage with Restak and Samuel in these discussions. They can view class reading as an “other” text from the experts, rather than something to which they can, and should, relate. To get students wrestling with concepts and making connections between text and “real world”, the following “experiments” push readers to apply the reading to themselves. By nature, they also inhibit summary and jump-start critical thinking by encouraging students to engage with the concepts: Technology Fast – For 24 hours, students commit to avoiding all forms of technology and writing about their experiences with old-fashioned pen and paper. Each time they catch themselves going to use technology, they should evaluate what they were about to do and whether or not it would have been beneficial, as well as a strategy for how to manage technology use in that particular area (as Samuel argues in “‘Plug In Better’”). Are they succeeding or falling short in their technology use? Can technology be managed? How? Technology Fest – Counter to the first experiment, students will take on the task of writing a one-page reading response to Restak (particularly his discussion in “How Many Ways Can Our Attention Be Divided?” (p. 412)) while attempting to multitask with at least three other activities. For example, a student might watch a TV show, listen to music, and Skype a friend, all while writing the response. Students must set a timer when they begin and record the total amount of time required to write their response papers. In-class discussion is a great follow-up for this: Were they successful? Who took the longest? Who was most efficient? Why do they think so? Did Restak’s arguments hold? News Assessment – Students identify and summarize a tech-related news article and apply concepts of from the readings. For example, a student might analyze Facebook’s recent announcement that more Americans are coming out on Facebook—how does this play into Restak’s section, “No Time to Listen”? Are people listening? Is Facebook a worthy or appropriate place for gender and sexuality discussion? Why or why not? For each experiment, students should be writing: they might analyze their experience in a written response; debate a particular topic, with one person writing one paragraph at a time, with a partner in class; or submit a mapped-out page of written notes as an outline for their next essay. The goal is to get them writing and analyzing; and, at the end of the day, beginning to recognize the importance of their valuable role as a writer and contributor in these discussions. Other related readings from Emerging: Marshall Poe, “The Hive” Thomas L. Friedman, “The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention” Bill Wasik, “My Crowd Experiment: The Mob Project” Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Or want to share this post or your own assignments? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved--it’s free, quick, and easy! ... View more

In my survey of British Literature course, I assigned a contexts section from our anthology that talked primarily -- though not exclusively -- about leisured entertainments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  I always like taking a look at sections about non-literary culture in my literature courses, because it gives us the opportunity to think about the relationship of the author and the world she or he lived in.  I work to impress upon my students the idea that this is not simply about “background” vaguely understood, but that it’s about understanding the interaction of art and ideas.  As a guiding principle, we talk a bit about M. H. Abrams’ classification of literary theories based on the concepts of the text, the world, the audience, and the author. It’s also a good opportunity to have students think materially about the world that the authors lived in.  While on this particular day I did spend a good bit of time talking about tobacco (and looking at anti-tobacco broadsides) and time talking about the non-theatrical entertainments that a person might find in the suburbs of London, I also introduced the students to a fairly basic but important courtly dance: the pavane. The dance itself is one I learned in a workshop at the 2013 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America.  Up until this particular class I hadn’t had opportunity (or courage) to introduce my students to a dance.  However, because the steps are simple and the tempo is slow, it’s one that I can do fairly easily -- and I told my students, many of whom looked a bit weary, that if I was the one teaching it, they would certainly be able to do it, as I am famously clumsy. So I sent them outside and lined everyone up with a partner.  And we danced.  At least, we tried to dance.  We were able to discuss how this dance could inform social customs, and I’m trying, in turn, to show the students how those things should inform our understanding of the literature we’re reading.  At the very least, my students will remember that the study of literature is something that we do.  Even if it means doing something that feels a little silly. Link for the pavane (it’s a download): http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/dihtml/divideos.html#vc039 ... View more

Our Bedford/St.Martin's composition team has been eagerly awaiting the release of data from the first-ever National Census of Writing.  This ambitious effort surveyed writing centers and writing programs at two and four-year colleges and universities across the country in order to provide open-access information about the way writing is taught.  While the Inside Higher Ed article discusses some of the findings, there's a lot of interesting and surprising data to be gleaned from reading the results (surprising to me, at least).  Here are a couple of data points that stood out to me: 9% of four-year institutions who responded report an independent department is the home of their  first-year writing program, while a further 13% report that the writing program is independent.  Although most two-year institutions report that the writing program is still housed in the English department (96%), the numbers are striking and confirm the growth of independent writing programs that I've been hearing about. I found it shocking (and depressing) that 306 respondents from four -year institutions reported receiving no additional compensation or release time for "directing a site of writing."  435 reported that they do receive compensation or release time.  The numbers are even worse among reporting two-year institutions: 111 reported no additional compensation or release time, while 75 reported receiving such benefits.  Only 8 of those 75 individuals received both. I've barely started sifting through the data, but I'm looking forward to spending more time with it.  I"m also looking forward to the follow-up studies this baseline data will surely inspire.  Kudos to the writing studies community and the lead researchers for taking on this important work! ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Jeanne Bohannon (see end of post for bio). Since Traci Gardner’s insightful post in the Community about Bringing Up Accessibility, I have been thinking about ways to integrate discussions of writing for user-friendliness into my Functional Grammar course.  Most students in this course are technical communication majors, so they need to not only be aware of accessibility issues in multimodal composition but also be able to produce digital content that meets the 1973 Rehabilitation Act’s Section 508 requirements. For many of us, myself included, Section 508 is new territory in our teaching praxis.  What this means is that I am learning along with my students how and why digital writers apply the conventions of accessible texts across multiple platforms.  After participating in interactive lectures about accessible textual production, our class community decided that we would compose public blog posts that describe and apply Section 508 content for student and faculty audiences leveraging the opportunity to learn and teach in the same moments.  I have posted our process and products, which I hope you and your students will find useful. Multimodal Writing Context Students design blog posts that describe and embody foundational Section 508 requirements for digital texts.  I recommend either Edublogs or WordPress as easy introduction spaces for blogging; students majoring in technical communication at my university design content in their own web domains, which gives them greater creative and analytics control.  Either way, students compose public, digital texts with multimodal elements that serve to make informational writing both clear and interesting to read.   Measurable Learning Objectives Create digital documents that embody and explain Section 508 Criteria Synthesize content-meaning through public writing Summarize key elements of Section 508 relevant to technical writers Background Reading for Students and Instructors The St. Martin's Handbook​: Ch. 16, Design for Print and Digital Writing, including Considering Disabilities box: "Color for Contrast" Writer's Help 2.0 for Lunsford Handbooks: “Considering Disabilities” The Everyday Writer: Section 3a: Plan online assignments, including At a Glance box: “Guidelines for Creating an Online Text” Writing in Action: Section 6a: Plan online assignments, including Checklist box: “Guidelines for Creating an Online Text” EasyWriter: Section 4a: Planning online assignments, including Checklist box: “Guidelines for Creating an Online Text” Writing and Designing In our course communities, students and I crowdsource our writing assignments to make sure we meet the specific academic and professional needs of the group.  Here is what we came up with for the Section 508 blogging assignment: Process through and write a 500+ word blog post that includes at least one of each multimodal element (image, audio, video) based on your research into 508 requirements and our class discussions about alt-text, live captioning, and color considerations. Use at least three tags per post.  Read the posts of at least three coursemates.  Comment on their blogs in approximately 100 words, using the rhetorical analysis tools you have gained so far this semester. Submit the following in our Discussion Forum for the week, folding your critique into the week's topic.  If you get to a blog that already has at least two comments, go the next blog. Finally, reflect on your and others’ work for both our digital and in-class talks. Be ready to provide dialogic feedback to your peers. Our writing goal for this assignment is to provide well-researched, compelling blog posts that inform an audience of students, faculty, and professional content creators about key components of Section 508.  Our design goal is to construct digital pages that comply with Section 508 accessibility. Student Exemplars: Celia Fisher: "How Accessibility Benefits Your Site" ​ Eddie Khiara: Considering Disability (First Choice Tutors) ​ Jason Figueroa: 508 Access ​ Reflections on the Assignment – Students: The assignment got me thinking about how Section 508 compliance could become more commonplace; with so many 'rules', it seems unlikely that the average content creator would bother adhering to them all. In my blog post, I wrote about how making a site accessible has the potential to lead to more views through search engines' metadata crawls, because people want to know how this is a best practice impacts their web traffic. – Celia While learning about section 508 I was amazed at the amount of thought that went into the requirements and regulations. I see how having this requirement will open up your work to a wider audience. I personally use closed captions not because I have trouble hearing however, I use it more so I can have a lower volume so I won’t wake my two kids. Going through the different regulations I can see how enforcing them will actually affect other groups then the intended audience. - Jason My Reflection My goal as a writing teacher is to work with students to determine their academic and professional needs and then work alongside them as they construct texts that are relevant to them. The 508 blogging opportunity “counts” for me, in terms of multimodal composition, because it allows students to create interesting and informative digital content for a specific audience that appeals to a diversity of readers while also teaching student writers necessary requirements as they grow into professional writers. Jeanne Law Bohannon is an Assistant Professor in the Digital Writing and Media Arts (DWMA) department at Kennesaw State University. She believes in creating democratic learning spaces, where students become stakeholders in their own rhetorical growth though authentic engagement in class communities. Her research interests include evaluating digital literacies and critical pedagogies; performing feminist rhetorical recoveries; and growing informed and empowered student scholars. Reach Jeanne at: jeanne_bohannon@kennesaw.edu and www.rhetoricmatters.org Want to collaborate with Andrea on a Multimodal Monday assignment or be a guest blogger? Send ideas to leah.rang@macmillan.com for possible inclusion in a future post. ... View more

Guest blogger is a faculty member at Craven Community College in New Bern, North Carolina, and she teaches composition and literature courses. A former WAC coordinator at Craven, her primary interests are WAC/WID programs and creating partnerships with other community colleges and universities. She is also pursuing a PhD in narrative theory and nineteenth-century British literature at Old Dominion University. This is my first semester teaching ENG 112: Writing/Research in the Disciplines, a writing-in-the-disciplines (WID) class in the North Carolina community college system (NCCCS). This is the first of a series of blog contributions will be reflections on my initial experiences tackling ENG 112 this semester. Even with well over a decade of teaching experience in the NCCCS, learning to teach a WID course has been daunting—but it has also helped to reinvigorate my pedagogy. My approach to ENG 112 this semester was to start the class with what I know (humanities writing and research skills) in order to have time to pick the brains of my colleagues and create units on areas I have less experience with (natural science and social science writing and researching skills). This first blog explores the humanities unit and its literary analysis paper—a unit that turned out to be harder than I had expected. The Assignment and Schedule Students were asked to write a three-page researched analysis of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” “The Lottery,” “Everyday Use,” or “What You Pawn I Will Redeem.” In addition to citing the literature, they had to find and use 2-3 scholarly sources in their essays; they also had to use MLA style. They had the entire month of September to work on this project; the assignment was given on September 1 and due on September 29. The class is a scaffolded class with several informal journals and workshops to help students move through the writing process:  9.1 Writer’s Journal #5: Literary Studies Introduction to Humanities Writing and Literary Analysis Paper 9.3 Writer’s Journal #6: “The Yellow Wall-Paper” Analysis 1 “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (handout) Creating Analysis and Research Questions 9.8 Writer’s Journal #7: “The Yellow Wall-Paper” Analysis 2 Process Assignment #1: Literary Analysis Questions Literary Analysis Questions Workshop 9.10 Writer’s Journal #8: MLA Style Introduction to MLA Style research and Documentation 9.15 Writer’s Journal #9: Research Hunt Process Assignment #2: Literary Analysis Thesis and Works Cited 1 Literary Analysis Thesis and Works Cited Workshop 1 Research and Documentation Workshop 9.17 Process Assignment #3: Literary Analysis Thesis and Works Cited 2 Literary Analysis Thesis and Works Cited Workshop 2                                                                                            9.22 Process Assignment #4: Literary Analysis Draft 1 Literary Analysis Draft Workshop 1 9.24 Process Assignment #5: Literary Analysis Draft 2 Literary Analysis Draft 2 Workshop 9.29 In-Class Work on Literary Analysis Paper and Literary Analysis Self-Reflection  Literary Analysis Paper (Due by the End of Class) Process Assignment #6: Literary Analysis Self-Reflection (Due by the End of Class) Reflections My personal comfort level with the content of the unit may have worked against me in this unit. Perhaps my anxiety over the later units on natural and social sciences (What kinds of assignments would I give them? What research sources might work well? Why, oh why, are APA running headers so hard to make in Word?) lulled me into a false sense of security over my humanities unit. Whatever the reason, I forgot to include two key elements the humanities unit: modeling and conferencing. The next time I teach this course, I will be reserving two days for one-on-one conferences with my students about their drafts. By sandwiching the instructor conference between a peer workshop on the thesis and works cited and one on a revised draft of the essay, I hope to capture my students at that critical moment when they have a (nearly fully?) draft of the paper and a firm topic but when there is also still time to pull a quick turn on drafts that have gone off the rails. I will also be including a sample student literary analysis for class discussion—perhaps even two sample papers (one from the textbook and one from a previous semester of my own class). The students need to be able to see examples of finished literary analyses in order to help them better understand the work of their own essays. Moreover, the students need to have one-on-one time with me early in the semester; these individual conferences can especially help those who do not wish to ask for help in public spaces like the classroom. But overall, the unit went rather smoothly, especially as I began to correct for my early errors in modeling and for the lack of conferences. In order to work in some last minute modeling and conferencing, I cut my draft workshops in half; the class spent 30 minutes in the two peer drafts workshops (rather than the full 75 minutes), and the last 45 minutes of class those days was spent with volunteers putting their draft up on the projector. In these projector conference workshops, the volunteers would ask questions about their drafts and talk through the problems they had been encountering, and the class and I would help the volunteers work through their questions and problems. While students are sometimes reluctant to volunteer, once the class sees the quality of feedback being produced by the group (and starts to see how their problems with the paper are similar to the ones being discussed in a volunteer’s paper), I wind up with more volunteers than I have time to work with (which in turn gets these students into my office…of their own free will!). What did you do in your first WID course? What was your approach to the schedule and assignments? How did the successes and shortcomings of that first semester shape your WID course into a more effective and engaging course in later semesters? Share your answers, comments, and advice in the comments below. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Or share it with others and start a conversation? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

A week or so ago, I got an email message from a former student who had been in one of my classes at Ohio State some 25 years ago. That was enough of a treat in and of itself. But the message went on to describe how much this former student now writes in his position as a city planner, and also to remark on what he most remembered about our class. He wrote: “I remember what I think was our second day of class. You came in and went straight to the white board and drew a thick black line from one end of it to the other. On one end you wrote, in big capital letters, WRITE. On the other end you wrote WRITTEN. Then you talked to us about the choices we were going to have to make to figure out whether we were going to WRITE, that is take action on our own and with some authority, or whether we were going to be WRITTEN by people outside of us. I remember writing those two words down in my notebook and looking at them every so often during the rest of that year. I wanted to WRITE. Looking back, I can see that I have often been able to WRITE but that I’ve also been WRITTEN, especially by my job and by some groups I belong to. I guess I’ve ended up somewhere in the middle of that line, but I hope just a little more toward WRITE.” I’ve started many of my classes over the years with this same strategy and I’ve always found that students are very interested in this binary and how it applies to their lives. They don’t need to read Foucault (though that wouldn’t be a bad thing) to know they occupy various subject positions, nor do they need a lot of postructuralist theory to alert them to the fact that key elements in their lives—their families, their religious institutions, their schools, and more—are powerful shapers of their lives. In fact, these institutions are often set on writing them—making them into the ideal child, the ideal worshipper, the ideal student, and so on. They feel these pressures keenly. And while they may at first blush and claim that they have a lot of agency, not too far into our discussion they begin to see that what they thought were their own decisions were ones that had been made at least partially for them by others. We often spend some time making similes or metaphors for what it feels like to write or be written. Usually we draw pictures as well, then use these materials to write what amount to brief essays on rhetorical agency and how available it is to us. This is of course a huge question today, when many feel at the mercy of huge economic and political forces it’s hard to understand, much less control. But for that very reason, it seems more important than ever to engage students in grappling with the subject agency and of looking for ways to enhance it in their everyday lives. We often put ourselves somewhere along the continuum and then chart how we feel about that placement during the course of the term. Like all binaries, this one is over-simple, which students come to see. But it is a useful concept for them as they begin their college journeys. And for some—like my former student—it’s germane even 25 years later! ​ Andrea Lunsford and student Jelani Lynch talk about the power of writing in Video Link : 1233a video in the Macmillan Community. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Or share it with others and start a conversation? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more