To keep a visual record of our class discussions for our first writing project, I took photos of each day’s class notes from the dry erase board. The photo that struck me the most was a list of qualities that the students admired about Chiminanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story”, her use of language and the message of her TED Talk.  Here is the students’ list: Inspiring Truthful Thoughtful Empowering Straightforward Reflective Passionate Intelligent “Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize,” Adichie states. Reflecting on the students’ work and rereading Adichie’s transcript draws me again to that word “empower.” In my first years out of graduate school, empowerment was discussed as a laudable goal for writers transitioning to college writing. However, empowerment did not have a fixed outcome that could be adequately assessed, and eventually its use fell out of fashion. Throughout those discussions of our inability to measure empowerment, I remember my frustration. What would happen to the teaching and learning of writing if we focused only on quantifiable outcomes? What would happen to writing instruction if we removed the verb “empower” from our vocabulary? I need not have worried. Years later, I have my response. The students have returned what they needed to the lexicon of their own education. The root word “empower” appears both in Adichie’s talk and in the students’ list of admirable traits about Adichie’s persuasive voice. Good writing, the students agreed, must be empowering for its audience. In my inbox last night was a message containing the audio file and the lyrics of a song my student, Jeffrey Hack, had written about Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story.” The student had performed the song in class a few weeks before to supportive applause from peers.  That day, the students had completed and turned in their first college writing project. The mood was celebratory. Listening to Jeffrey’s voice in the song recording reminds me of our work against dispossession and dehumanization. The combination of lyrics and music portray a deep yearning for a world in which we move beyond stereotypes and begin to fathom the multiple stories of people’s lives. Even more poignantly, the song calls out to us to gain self-awareness of our role in perpetuating stereotypes. Here are the lyrics and the link for Jeffrey’s song: A Single Story (audio file) I'm tired of feeling abandoned These words are getting to my head There's no way out, or to come about Judging me by who I am Stop trying to be something else Instead go better yourself These words need to stop right now You're not helping anyone out I know that it's wrong to be on the other side of criticizing someone else We have a single story that we can't wait to say But the truth of every matter is it isn't there to stay We think so much about every negative in our way And we find out that we're awesome at the end of every day We need to stop trying to create something that is fake, a disgrace to the amazing human race Jeffrey’s song and the students’ words from the list offer us significant challenges as teachers of writing. The students hope for inspiration, for straightforwardness, for passion. They challenge us to become truthful, empowering, and reflective. From these thoughtful considerations, we move on to Writing Project 2 and the never-ending work of empowerment. ... View more

I’ve titled the new course I’m running this fall boldly: The Art and Craft of Teaching Creative Writing. I’ve been preparing the course over the past year. I’ve read pedagogical theory. I’ve spoken with a wonderful professor in the Education Department about how to best structure such a class.  I’ve talked with my colleagues who teach the course in our department and I’ve pored over their syllabi.  I’ve gone back to the classes I took in the education department myself, and I’ve wondered, a lot, what do I know about teaching creative writing and how did I learn what I know? Some of the material is familiar ground for me. I’ve written a textbook on the topic, The Practice of Creative Writing, and an instructor’s manual that goes with the book, and certainly I’m using that material in my course, to some extent. But teaching teachers is to stand in a different place from writing instruction for students. And standing in this new place, thinking about how to teach a class just for teachers of writing, all of whom are in our MFA program, I keep noticing a singular feature of the landscape; I keep coming back to one idea. Teaching well is the same as writing well. A good writing class session is so very like a good story or well formed poem. There’s a purpose. Things are clear. Mysterious, perhaps, frustrating, perhaps, but the work to figure it all out is possible, and rewarding. It’s pleasurable to experience more than one time. Humor is good, but not required.  What’s required is depth and truth and a kind of vulnerability and strong yearning to say yes, this matters.  This is important.  There are some surprises in the session/story and there’s heart, dialogue, drama, and a satisfying close that makes you want to come back in again. Designing a semester-long course is, for me, like designing a novel. There’s a main story line and my work is to get all the characters and plot points (or, in the case of class, lessons and readings) formed into satisfying, interesting chapters (Tuesdays and Thursdays). There’s almost nothing I’d rather do than design these experiences. So, unsurprisingly, the two things that have most improved my teaching have been the very same two things that have most improved my writing.  Devotion to clarity.  When I first started writing, I wanted to try to express something of my inner life in language. The things that worried me came out in a tumble. There was a lot of energy on my early pages, but not a lot of clarity. Where are we? Why are we here? Similarly, my early syllabi meant well.  But I was prone to getting off track, off topic, revising mid semester, even mid class period because I could see something so much better once I was in the midst of teaching it.  Students, like readers, want things to be clear and to be fair.                                      Attempting to be honest, authentic, vulnerable and sincere in my speech and action in real life has translated to the page for me as a writer. When I stopped trying to be artful and clever, when I let go of thought-experiments and intensive language play, I was able to work more on the very hard good work of creating a meaningful experience for the reader.  The work became less about me and my life and more an attempt to be in conversation with my fellow humans.  In the classroom, instead of trying to be Miss PhD Professor Really Does Know or, as I got older, Your Fun Young Professory Friend, instead of trying to be anything in the classroom other than myself—a person who studies the art and craft of writing—I tried to be more myself. The two endeavors—a devotion to clarity and a moment-by-moment attempt to be honest and thoughtful—are extremely challenging pursuits, at least for me.  Some practices off the page have supported me: cultivating friendships and mentorships with master craftsman, a meditation practice, and reading. This semester, I want to support my students in becoming the kinds of teachers they most want to be. I want to help them write about teaching in ways that are clear and meaningful. I want everything we do this semester to help us in the classroom, but also on the page. I think the art and craft of teaching and the art and craft of creating literature are twins. I would love to hear what you think. I’m at sellersh@usf.edu. ... View more

To me, one of the most exciting aspects of teaching a WID-based curriculum was student conferencing, which I tailored in a unique way to fit the assignment sequence and objectives for the English 101 courses I taught at NC State. There are at least two ways to approach teaching a WID-based composition course. First, you can ask students to analyze texts representative of the fields in which they’re majoring. The second approach is to ask students to produce texts native to those disciplines. Of course, these two approaches are not mutually exclusive, and what I learned from other faculty in our program at NC State was that different faculty emphasized different approaches. Assignment Sequence My assignment sequence at State went like this: 1) Research Topic Proposal and Presentation 2) Primary Research Logbook and Reflection 3) Literature Review 4) Revised Primary Research Design and Academic Conference Poster. For the research topic proposal, I asked students to analyze two scholarly articles (preferably empirically-based research studies) as a basis for proposing their own research questions and methodological approaches for the semester. Students had autonomy in selecting their articles, but they were accountable for explaining the methodologies and results reported in the articles when they delivered their proposal. Conferencing I conferenced with students immediately after they presented their research topic proposal, and these conferences stand in my mind as some of the most enjoyable moments in my nearly twenty years of teaching First-Year Writing. Why did I find the student conferences so enjoyable?  We talked ideas. We talked about interests. We talked. Far too often student conferences break down into a teacher explaining why a particular sentence is “not good” or “could be better written this way.” This kind of conferencing is just painful to me because invariably a student feels talked down to and becomes defensive. Furthermore, it promotes a hierarchy I find counterproductive to authentic learning. Typically I would start a conference with small talk to get a student chatting and put him/her at ease. I’d get the spotlight off of me by asking them questions. We would talk about their research topic proposal, what they learned, what they liked, what they didn’t like. I would ask students about their background, interests, hobbies, jobs, favorite vacations, what they were thinking about majoring in, and then out of that conversation a beautiful and marvelous thing would happen. We would begin talking about how to shape their interests, their expertise into legitimate and authentic research for the rest of the semester. Students would come to realize that they were experts in areas that I was not, and that they could teach me something (and others, too) about their interests. I’ll offer one example to keep it concise. Michael’s Story A student comes into my office and sits down at the table across from me. We’ll call him “Michael.” Michael is shy but obviously very bright and seems a little fearful of the teacher (me) and how this first conference is going to go. After small talk about the week and how things are going, we discuss his research topic proposal, and he says he has no idea how he’s going to conduct research this semester. He tells me he’s majoring in Materials Science, a field of which I know exactly squadoosh. Ten minutes go by, and Michael is really stuck. I’m kind of stuck, too, because I don’t know anything about Materials Science. I’m a novelist for crying out loud. So I ask Michael, “Do you have any hobbies?” He looks at me with a sheepish sparkle in his blue eyes and says, “Not really. I play the guitar. I don’t really have any hobbies.” “You play the guitar? That’s cool. How’d you get into that?” “Oh, I had a buddy in high school who was a luthier.” I’m thinking, What the heck is a luthier? Michael breaks out of his shyness for a moment, gets kind of excited, and tells me, “He had a workshop, and we used to build guitars.” And then like Bam! Pow! his research design landed on that table between us like a finely tuned Martin acoustic. I said, “Well, there’s your study. You’re majoring in Materials Science. Why don’t you research different types of guitars?” He thinks about it for a moment. “I could look at different types of woods, densities, strings, timbres? Stuff like that?” “Uh, yeah. That would be kind of brilliant.” I have never in twenty years had a kid take off and run with research like Michael did the rest of the semester. Turns out he was an absolute expert on guitars and digital audio equipment far beyond my ken. And most importantly my lack of expertise in both—and in Materials Science—didn’t matter. In that fifteen-minute conference, I had talked with him. I had let him know that his interests mattered. They were valuable. And that as his English 101 teacher I wanted him to teach me about what he knew and what he would come to know the rest of the semester. _____ Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! Stacey Cochran is the bestselling author of Eddie & Sunny​. He has taught First-Year Writing for nearly twenty years at East Carolina University, Mesa Community College, North Carolina State University, and most recently the University of Arizona. He lives in Tucson with his wife Susan Miller-Cochran and their two kids Sam and Harper. He is currently at work trying futilely to overcome his impostor syndrome. ... View more

A song written by my student Jeffrey Hack​ in response to Chiminanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story”. I'm tired of feeling abandoned These words are getting to my head There's no way out, or to come about Judging me by who I am Stop trying to be something else Instead go better yourself These words need to stop right now You're not helping anyone out I know that it's wrong to be on the other side of criticizing someone else We have a single story that we can't wait to say But the truth of every matter is it isn't there to stay We think so much about every negative in our way And we find out that we're awesome at the end of every day We need to stop trying to create something that is fake, a disgrace to the amazing human race Read more about this assignment in my blog post Empowering Writing. ... View more

I've recently reread James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (yes, the whole thing, cover to cover), which, naturally enough, has gotten me thinking about, well, James Agee.  And to think about James Agee leads to thinking about his contribution to the history of film criticism.  Which leads to thinking about the history of film criticism itself.  Which is pretty much the way that topics for popular cultural semiotic analysis get generated. So here goes. I am assuming that you know who James Agee was/is.  Perhaps I shouldn't, for while Agee is wildly popular among his devotees, his fame doesn't go much beyond a rather passionate circle of friends.  A mid-20th century poet, novelist, pioneer film critic, passionate muckraking journalist, screenwriter (he wrote the screenplay for The African Queen), and all-around man-about New York and Hollywood who seems to have known (or been known by) just about every famous mid-20th century writer I can think of, Agee burned out at 45 in 1955 from basically too many drinks, cigarettes, and late nights (over which I will here, consistent with the Hays Code, draw a discreet curtain).  So that takes care of the introductions. Agee, as I've said, was something of a pioneer in film criticism.  With no formal training in the art whatsoever, Agee wrote spellbinding reviews of popular movies, helping to pave the way for such later luminaries of the popular film review as Pauline Kael, David Denby, and Vincent Canby. These critics (and many more: don't hesitate to add your favorites in the Comments section) carved out a space for serious criticism of commercial films in the newspapers and magazines of America, addressing themselves to ordinary moviegoers rather than to an academic audience—and managed to make a living at it without academic appointments. To say that the space for such a profession is drastically shrinking (along with paying journalistic careers as well) in the era of the Internet blog and movie review sites like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb.com—not to mention pop culture podcasts—is to say nothing that hasn't been said many times before: it is a favorite topic on personal movie review blogs whose cinephilic authors are long on movie knowledge, and very short on paying projects.  What I want to do here is situate the phenomenon in a larger cultural system, or context, to see what it might tell us about the current state of American culture. When we do this, we can find a great number of intellectual pursuits today that require much learning and high-level writing ability, which are exploding with participants and imploding as viable ways to make a living.  To go back to journalism, while there are more journalists today than there have ever been before, the vast majority must make do with pitifully compensated freelance work (no benefits, no job security, no job, actually) or nothing at all (did you know that The Huffington Post does not pay its contributors?).  Now let's turn to academia—especially the literary profession. You probably do know what is happening there: what jobs exist are overwhelmingly in adjunct ranks (especially—and notoriously—in the teaching of writing).  Indeed, the figure I keep seeing is that something like 70% of the university/college teaching in this country is performed by adjuncts.  I don't think that I have to explain to you what this means in terms of job security and pay.  (For an excellent blog article describing the trials and tribulations of an adjunct professor-turned-freelance- journalist, please read Nathaniel Oliver's "Where is the Grass Greener?" at The Chronicle of Higher Education). What is happening here is a massive transfer of wealth from what might be called, in general terms, the writing professions, over to the technological professions.  This transfer is part of a much larger socio-economic phenomenon that has seen an ever-increasing concentration of the world's wealth into fewer and fewer hands.  Even within what is left of the writing professions, such a division between the haves and the have-nots is occurring, with those relative few who can make a living—the last well compensated journalists, the last formally employed movie critics, the last tenured professors—often doing quite well, edging into the upper-middle class even as their less fortunate colleagues fall into poverty (note bene: I am not whining here; personally, I am doing fine).  To put this another way, the kinds of middle-class professions that certainly attracted me in the 1970s and have attracted anyone who reads the Bits blogs, have, like most middle-class professions in America today, melted away in the face of a technological economy that offers a clear path to the upper-middle and upper class for those who choose it, while effectively hollowing out the middle.  This shift in the economic infrastructure (if I may use classic Marxist terminology) is a major driver in the transformation of America from a (broadly speaking) middle-class to what might be called an all-or-none society, with an increasingly prosperous upper-middle and upper class, and an increasingly desperate everybody else. So whether or not the craft of film criticism is better or worse in the era of Rotten Tomatoes is not my point. My point is that the near disappearance of the profession of film criticism is a sign, a signifier of the place of the literate arts in America today.  And given the fact that so many people are choosing to practice the literate arts today in spite of the economic consequences, it can also be taken as a sign of the continuing passion (and, I dare say, need) for writing in America—a passion and need to which our neoliberal society can only pay lip service, not a living wage.  One wonders what Agee, passionate explorer of the plight of the agricultural working class that he was, would say about that. ... View more

This post originally appeared on February 21, 2014. A while ago, a Joss Whedon quote was being passed around the Internet. He’d been telling an audience about his frustration with repeatedly being asked, “Why do you write these strong woman characters?” His response (now immortalized in a million Facebook posts): “Because you’re still asking me that question.” There’s another frustrating question that’s made the rounds both in and out of academia for some time: “Why teach or study literature?” And its sister question: “Why teach or study creative writing?” In other words, what’s the point of a subject that doesn’t automatically provide its students with a clear, established path to financial security or career? We like answers to our problems: the next step in one’s career trajectory is X. The best school district in the area is Y. In order to heal the sore throat, take A, gargle B, drink C. It’s uncomfortable not having answers, and no one likes being uncomfortable. So the key difficulty here—the key reason, I think, that the question gets asked—is that the point of studying creative writing isn’t to generate answers. It’s to generate questions. It’s to work continually to understand that the world is not a set of dichotomies—that most situations, to be understood fully, require a willingness to see nuance. To be a good writer, you must be willing to be uncomfortable, to empathize with both protagonist and antagonist, to write the poem that acknowledges the messy side of an experience. Creative writing classes center around questions. Why might this author have used this point of view? What does this detail reveal about this character’s desire? What connotations are packed into this word? What does this syntax suggest about this speaker? What is he trying to prove? Why a train ride instead of a road trip? Why an elm instead of a pine? With whom do you sympathize? Why? Asking these questions, we continually strengthen and deepen our craft. And these skills are transferable: if you can effectively structure a poem, then you can probably effectively structure a presentation, a work email, a letter to shareholders. But more importantly, if you can effectively structure a poem, then you have effectively structured a poem. There are other benefits to studying creative writing, though, that transcend the classroom and the workspace and even the page. The study of creative writing is also the study of human nature—both others’ and our own. If you’re asking questions of your characters, your word choice, your writerly allegiances, then you’re probably also asking those questions of the world around you. Why might my mother have said this? Do I truly believe all people who are X are also Y? Can I champion this one ideal and simultaneously reject this one? What does this detail reveal about my desire? With whom do I sympathize? Why? So why study creative writing? Because we need more people who understand that the world is made up of shadings and gradations, complex characters, and mysteries. Because we need more poems and stories and essays and novels and plays to guide us through those mysteries. Because someone out there is still asking that question. And anyone asking that question probably isn’t asking enough other ones. ... View more

I’ve written about Duarte before, and in particular about her books Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations and Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences. I came across Slide:ology when it was first published in 2008 and immediately introduced her ideas to the students in my second-year writing class, who were preparing presentations. Her advice about slides was contrary to the usual “no more than five bullet points per slide,” arguing that slides should be visually powerful and engaging on their own terms and that one word or one striking image can enhance a presentation much more than three bullet points. Since then I’ve watched a number of TED Talks that use Duarte’s principles and have seen students take them up to great effect. Then in Resonate I learned about the extensive research Duarte has done on the structure of effective presentations. She looked at hundreds of speeches—from Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” to Steve Jobs’s iPhone launch speech—and found that they all shared a similar structure. Each moved from “what is” or the status quo to “what could or should be,” often moving back and forth between the two before building up to a peroration about what should be. I then started looking at speeches myself and found this same structure at work in many of them. So I’ve learned a lot from Duarte about how to help students make increasingly powerful presentations. Since Duarte uses slides so frequently, I was especially interested to read that she recommends that speakers NOT begin with slides. Rather, she prefers to use 3 x 5 cards or sticky notes and put one idea on each one, then put them all up on a wall and study them. In other words, she wants to have the arc of her argument—the story she is telling—very, very clear before she starts creating slides that will embody that story. More good advice. While I’ve read most of her books, I only recently discovered Duarte’s blog, which I am now reading regularly. The most recent one, dated August 21, 2015, is entitled “Tough Audience? 5 Ways to Stay Calm, Cool, and Collected.” In it she confesses to looking forward to the next season of Downton Abbey but says that she keeps herself occupied during the wait for it by watching the British Prime Minister’s Question Time in the House of Commons. So Duarte is doing more research, studying how the PM handles tough questions and “wrangles” members of the British Parliament. She gives us a good example of the kind of research a successful rhetor needs to do, and it’s the kind of research our students can also carry out. I can imagine students doing terrific analyses of how the PM handles audiences—or of doing the same thing for current Presidential candidates. Great food for thought in class. I am also now going to recommend Duarte’s blog to students so they can follow her as well. While she has not to my knowledge studied rhetoric formally, she knows a lot about it through practice! 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

Peace is perhaps the best solution to the Syrian refugee crisis, if also the one that sometimes feels most unattainable.  All the more reason, I think, for us to find ways to teach peace in our classrooms. At my institution, we have a major Peace, Justice, and Human Rights initiative, supported by our school’s most recent strategic plan, spearheaded by our college, and connected to our local communities and donors (see a snapshot on the right). Emerging offers some options for you to initiate conversations about peace:   Madeleine Albright, “Faith and Diplomacy” Albright’s essay examines the role that faith plays in diplomacy and thus offers students a useful grounding for thinking about a complicated global situation like Syria.  While we in the United States stringently separate church and state, Albright argues, the same is not true elsewhere in the world.  Thus, in pursuing diplomacy we must attend to the role that faith and religion plays in political situations. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Making Conversation” and “The Primacy of Practice” Appiah’s essay is a perennial favorite because it so elegantly discusses the complex issues framing so many situations in the world today.  Appiah’s discussion of the difference between values and practices is also useful because it offers a macro model of social change that doesn’t depend on changing what people believe but on changing what they do. Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change” Gladwell’s goal is to interrogate the idea that “the revolution will be tweeted.”  In doing so, he explores the ways in which the Civil Rights movement used the ties between people to produce lasting social change. Thomas Friedman’s essay, “The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention,” is also a logical choice for this sequence. Friedman’s suggestion that global economic systems promote piece, and his observation that terrorist networks use the same strategies to sow chaos, both reiterates the challenge of peace and offers some possible (if limited, given their economic nature) avenues towards peace. 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

This post first appeared on March 21, 2013. Early on in my introductory poetry workshop, we discuss the difference between sentiment (emotion) and sentimentality (mawkishness, Hallmark cards, Lifetime holiday movies). First we talk about the ways in which sentimentality undercuts our ability to imbue our poems with real sentiment—it leads us toward cliché, it looks for the easy or more palatable way into an experience, it doesn’t require the level of intellectual and creative engagement we expect from good poems. Then we start making fun of poets. Okay, I say, imagine that you’re writing a parody of a poem and you want to make it wonderfully bad—full of clichés and cringe-worthy sentimentality. What are some key words you might use? “Heart,” someone always offers. We look for a little more specificity. “What should a heart not do in a poem?” I ask. “Skip a beat,” says one student. “Break,” says another. “End up in your throat,” offers someone else. Once we exhaust the heart possibilities, we move on, looking for the big offenders. What are some other words or tropes that might lead to sentimentality? I can usually get someone to come up with “soul,” which affords me an opportunity to write the word “soul” on the board, then draw a giant X through it—something I always like leaving on the board for the next class to see and fret over what sorts of things are being taught in creative writing classrooms. Usually someone mentions roses. Someone mentions the single tear. All of these go on the board (and I always offer the disclaimer that none of these rules is absolute—certainly, fantastic poems can be written using any number of potentially problematic words or images, provided the poet is savvy about how he or she uses them). Finally we move on to animals—butterflies as symbols of innocence, a bird as a vision of freedom. And, of course, there’s cuteness to be reckoned with—puppies, kittens, any three-legged quadruped. Sometimes I tell my students that they can only use a kitten in a poem if the kitten is dead. I’ve found that letting students poke fun at hypothetical poems before writing their own helps them to a) stay attuned to the siren song of schlock so that they can better resist it and b) maintain a sense of humor about the whole thing so that when someone does write a poem featuring that single tear or an alarmingly mobile heart, we can talk about it without the writer feeling defensive. After all, the battle against sentimentality is one we’re all fighting. Oh—and the dead kitten thing? A grad student took on that challenge, and wrote a beautiful, spare, weird poem that opened with a dead kitten in a shoebox. The poem surprised at every turn and was just accepted for publication. Of course a dead kitten could be even more sentimental than a live one, depending on how it’s rendered—the moral here, I think, is that if we as poets choose our words and our images with an eye toward circumventing the expected, we stand a much better chance of writing poems that are resonant, moving, and completely inappropriate for Hallmark. ... View more

How many words do you hear your students say that are new to you? For me, they are usually acronyms: OMG I know, but OMGD? (Oh my god, dude). LOL I know, but LYLAS? (Love you like a sister.) Recently I’ve heard “BAE” a lot, meaning “before anyone else” and hence “baby” or “sweetheart.” Anyway, I am always aware that youthspeak is two or three hundred steps ahead of me, so I keep an ear out for what they are saying. I also look forward to learning what new words dictionaries will include: this year Merriam Webster lists “anchor baby” and “vext” (to vent via text or text by voice) as well as “photoshopographer.” The OED says it has added roughly 500 new words already this year, including “twerk” (to move with a twitching motion), “crowdfund,” and “yarn-bombing” (covering public things like telephone poles with colorful knitted materials). Yarn Bombing By Joanbanjo (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons I wonder if “on fleek”—as in being perfect or “on point” —will make it. Having “eyebrows on fleek” has evidently become popular, at least for some. I like to engage students in discussions of new words and terms and find that they love talking about the latest slang as well as words that may or may not make it into dictionaries. So I usually have a “word of the year” contest sometime near the end of fall term: we can build our vocabularies while debating what word has been so prominent in the last year that it should win the prize. The OED chose “GIF” (as a verb) as the Oxford Dictionaries USA Word of the Year for 2012, “selfie” for 2013, and “vape” for 2014. The American Dialect Society (ADS) chose “hashtag” for its 2012 Word of the Year, “because” (introducing a noun, adjective, or adverb, as in “because Monday” or “because gorgeous”) for 2013, and “#blacklivesmatter” for 2014. ADS accepts nominations for Word of the Year all year long; nominations are ordinarily announced in early January (for the year that just ended) and voting begins, with every member of the Society casting one vote. I encourage my students to submit words of the year, along with a rationale for why they should be chosen. Then when the winner and runners up are announced, we can see how our nominees fared—and learn some new words! ... View more

Compassion plays a large role in the Syrian refugee crisis.  Given its pivotal role in many systems of ethics, I think it’s also a good concept for students to explore not simply for their intellectual growth but also for their emotional development.  There are a few readings in Emerging that you can use to frame this discussion: Namit Arora, “What Do We Deserve?” Arora’s essay focuses on economic and social justice.  What makes it useful for a more general discussion about compassion is that he offers clear and well-defined models for thinking about economic equality.  Those concepts can help students to locate themselves, interrogate their own positions, and consider the impacts of economics not only on the Syrian refugee crisis but also on other matters of social justice.  Arora is also useful given the economic impact of refugees on the countries that take them in.  How much is compassion worth? Patricia Churchland, “Networking: Genes, Brains, and Behavior” Churchland plays, in part, an adversarial role here as she investigates the origins of morality and its relation to genetics.  By delineating the contours of morality, Churchland can help students to better define their own moral systems. Francis Fukuyama, “Human Dignity” Fukuyama is a challenging, meaty essay that looks at what it means to be human.  Central to this notion for Fukuyama is “Factor X,” an almost indefinable residuum of humanness.  Having mapped out their own moral and ethical systems through the previous readings, students can use Fukuyama to consider the necessary role of preserving human dignity when dealing with refugees. If you wanted to substitute a reading, consider the Dalai Lama’s “Ethics and the New Genetics.”  Although his explicit concern (like Fukuyama) is genetic technologies, the Dalai Lama’s writing is saturated with compassion and his call for a moral compass in relation to technology can be applied to other world crises, including that of the Syrian people. 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

In this series of posts, I’m thinking about ways to teach the Syrian refugee crisis using readings from Emerging.  Infographics offer a unique way for students to think about the crisis while also engaging metaissues of visual design and data presentation.  I would start by searching the web for these infographics, which are fairly easy to find using the search terms “infographic Syrian refugee.” (The example on the right comes from Visually.)   You might even ask students to locate these sources, allowing them to select infographics they find particularly useful or compelling. The introduction to Emerging has material on reading visual texts that can be useful in approaching infographics but there are some readings from the text you might bring into play as well. There’s a full portfolio of infographics contained in Emerging’s online content: Drake Martinet’s “Stacy Green, Will You Marry Me?,” Buckfire & Buckfire’s “Student Bullying,” and carinsurancecomparison.org’s “The Real Effects of Drunken Driving.” These online  selections (e-Pages) are useful for introducing students to the genre of the infographic and giving them a sense of the range of work it can do in terms of both rhetoric and composition.  Elizabeth Dickinson’s “The Future of Food”—contained in Emerging—is a fuller use of this genre. Dickinson’s work could be described as an infographic essay about world hunger.  Dickinson offers students additional tools for considering the rhetorical decisions involved in crafting a compelling infographic, particularly when thinking about what text to use, how to use statistics, and how to design the graphic. I think it would also be useful to have students read the selections from PostSecret in Emerging.  Though also a visual genre, PostSecret looks and acts differently than an inforgraphic. Having that contextual contrast might be a useful way into talking more about rhetoric and design. Using all of these readings together, I think it would be interesting to have students compose their own infographics about either the refugee crisis or some other compelling issue.  Such an assignment would broaden students’ understanding of composition and argument while offering them a chance for advocacy. If you have any assignments or suggestions for creating infographics, feel free link to and share in the comments below. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

I recently read Seven Habits for Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey (a party to which I am admittedly 25 years late), and as I did, I noted several ideas that translate easily to writing (for instance: “private victories precede public victories”). But the one I was most surprised by was this: “love is a verb.”  In Covey’s self-help terms: “Proactive people make love a verb” (likely true, my loved ones will probably be grateful if I manage it).  But more importantly to the purposes of creating story, Covey adds, “Love is something you do: the sacrifices you make, the giving of self….”             When, as a writer, you think of love as a verb, an action as opposed to a feeling, it becomes a lot easier to generate plot, one of the writing elements that I find hardest both to practice and to teach.             Lots of people write about love—especially student writers, who tend to treat love as a feeling—which typically yields abstract and unemotional, or at least unconvincing, writing.  Reminding students of “show don’t tell” helps. Suggesting they embody emotions in the physical world helps (it also generates a lot of descriptions of tears). But asking, how does a human being act out their love, that yields plot.             When Toni Morrison said she was writing a trilogy about love—(Beloved: family love; Jazz: romantic love; Paradise: love of God)—she didn’t mean she was writing three novels about feelings.  She was writing what people do in the name of love.  What happens when you love your baby so much you would rather kill her than allow her to grow up a slave.  What happens when you love your partner so much you would rather kill them then…. well, it turns out murder is involved in all three (to be fair, Morrison said she was writing about “excessive love”), but it doesn’t have to be that way.  The fruits of love can yield a wide variety of dramatic and/or subtle plots (and to my mind, plot is a tool in every genre of writing, not just fiction).  One of the workhorses of the creative writing classroom is to ask: What does a character want and what do they do to try to get it?  Well, a good variation would be to ask: What does a character love and what do they do because of that love?             It turns out lots of feelings can be looked at as verbs.  To haunt. To grieve. To hate. To enjoy. To fear.  It’s like a plot generator… turn emotions into actions--actions with consequences--and there you have it: plot. ... View more

At the beginning of the semester, I proposed three writing projects that would allow new college students to engage with the cognitive dissonance that accompanies the transition to college, as well as to foster resilience to persist and to thrive throughout this transition. We have reached now reached the crossroads of midterm and our second writing project. Midterm is a busy and challenging time on our large campus. In addition to academic pressures, students may face economic, social, and familial obligations as well. In this second writing project, I try to account for these challenges and obligations by inviting students to focus on the problems they have encountered with higher education. But rather than focus solely on the dissonant aspects of their education, I ask students to build resilience by concentrating on solutions as well.  Even as current events diminish the hope for easy solutions to long-standing problems, I still believe in the possibility of writing toward a more equitable future. Writing Project 2, based on “Our Universities: The Outrageous Reality” by Andrew Delbanco, an article published this past summer in the New York Review of Books, presents the problems for an audience of educated readers—precisely the audience that many students need to write for as they pursue their education beyond the basics. The following writing prompts and guidelines focus our discussion through the article and into the work of Writing Project 2. Writing Project 2: Education as Problem/Solution In Writing Project 1, you considered stories and stereotypes. As you read and write about problems and solutions associated with education, build on this knowledge and learn new theories for Writing Project 2. In doing so, you will take part in a conversation that has engaged and concerned our country for generations. To begin the discussion read “Our Universities, the Outrageous Reality” by Andrew Delbanco. Then, based on the article, consider an issue that poses a potential problem in education for your generation. Why would your generation consider this issue a potential problem in education? What practices, experiences, or solutions would you suggest to ameliorate this issue so that future students do not encounter the same potential problem? Why would this solution work to address the problem? Select one of the following prompts to guide your writing: Focus on a problem that Delbanco presents, and/or an issue that you have witnessed in your own education, either in college or in college preparation. What solution would you offer? Why? What objections might be raised to your solution? How and why would you respond to these objections? Choose a section of Delbanco’s article that applies specifically to readiness and preparation for college or another topic relevant for high school and/or first-year English teachers. Then, write 2 or 3 connected blog posts, of at least 600 words apiece, for an audience of English teachers. What ideas in Delbanco’s article do English teachers need to be aware of? Why? What would you want your English teachers to focus on more? What would you want them to focus on less? Why? If you wish, you may submit any of these posts for consideration for publication in Beyond the Basics. Consider the quote that Delbanco chooses to begin the book review: “The spread of education would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious distinctions in society” (Horace Mann 1848). Does this quote still have relevance in 2015? What objections might be raised to your point of view? How and why would you respond to these objections? LENGTH 1200-1800 words (4-6 pages) STYLE MLA CITATION Delbanco’s article must be quoted, summarized, and/or paraphrased with internal citations. OPTIONAL Other references may come from any of the books listed in Delbanco’s review, or any of the texts cited in the review’s footnotes. OPTIONAL You may conduct interviews with students and/or teachers for additional supporting evidence. GENRE Imagine this essay as an opinion piece written in response to Delbanco’s review. You should use the optional references sparingly, or not at all. If you find an additional source, please consult with me first. Be sure to provide me with a copy of your additional source for approval. If your students have an idea for a guest blog post based on the sample writing prompt, please let me know by December 1, 2015. I would be happy to work with student guest bloggers toward publication in Beyond the Basics. ... View more

When I share stories of my experience teaching in a WID-based curriculum, I’m often asked: So what exactly do you teach in a WID curriculum? There are all kinds of ways to answer this question, of course. I could emphasize the rhetorical principles I teach, the writing process, the evaluation of source materials, or any number of other important concepts and skills. I’ve learned, though, that what people really want is to learn more about the kinds of major writing projects I assign. Considering my course with such a question in mind, it occurs to me that I tend to organize my WID-based FYC course around two general categories of writing practice: rhetorical analysis projects and disciplinary genre projects. Rhetorical analysis projects take a number of forms, but they all serve the purpose of providing opportunities for students to analyze and reflect on the ways academic communities, among others, construct texts. When we explore writing in the natural sciences, for instance, one of my projects asks students to translate a scientific article intended for a scholarly audience into a genre aimed at a more popular audience, like a press release or a news article for a science magazine. The act of translating information into the popular genre causes students to notice numerous conventional or distinctive features of scientific writing; it further allows students to consider the appropriateness of those features when communicating the same information for a different audience. In more traditional rhetorical analyses, students are asked to identify and describe the rhetorical features of one or more academic texts.  As part of their descriptions in my assignment, I push students to explain why they believe the writers of a text made the rhetorical decisions they did. Rhetorical analysis assignments like these provide opportunities for students to consider “the how question”--How is the text constructed?--but they can also cause students to consider more deeply “the why question”--Why is the text constructed as it is? Assignments that support students as they develop an understanding of how and why texts are constructed as they are, regardless of the intended audience, rely on the kinds of transferable analytical skills we want students to practice any time they encounter a new discourse community, in college and beyond.   Disciplinary genre projects are those in which students have opportunities to practice the forms of inquiry and writing that are often specific to particular academic communities. These reflect the kinds of assignments students are likely to encounter as part of the undergraduate experience.  The chart below provides a sampling of genres students might produce in a WID-based FYC course: Discipline Some Possible Genres Humanities Interpretation of Artistic Text Review of Work of Art Social Sciences Literature Review Social Science Theory Application (Auto)ethnography Natural Sciences Formal Observation Report Research Proposal Annotated Bibliography Applied Fields Business Letter (Business), Legal Brief (Law), Discharge Instructions (Nursing) Although I’ve described two kinds of writing assignments, the point really should be that these are complementary endeavors. Practicing disciplinary genres gives students needed experience in discipline-specific inquiry, and analyzing the rhetoric of a discipline helps students understand how that research is translated to a specific audience. 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