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

The most difficult times of the pandemic often felt like living in a chrysalis, and for the sake of metaphor, I can imagine a butterfly emerging. With imagination, I can picture the butterfly wondering what happens next. Where will they go? What will they do? How will they avoid the predators that eat butterflies for breakfast?  Butterfly at the Voelker Orth Museum, Bird Sanctuary, and Victorian Garden Queens, NY Photo by Susan Bernstein, July 27, 2022   That metaphor seems like college right now–all of us, students and teachers, emerging from the chrysalis. Teachers might remember what college was like before March 2020. A teacher, newly emergent, might feel nostalgia for pre-pandemic classrooms, for the time before the devastating memories of transitioning to online learning in the midst of a global emergency. The chrysalis formed in that transition. The hope of returning to normalcy kept the chrysalis viable.   This is not necessarily the fault of teachers, and especially not the fault of contingent faculty, who exist in a labor system that offers no stability. For contingent faculty, there is no normalcy. Students who are entering college for the first time also have not experienced normalcy; they cannot find comfort in the memory of pre-pandemic college classrooms because no memory exists, and nostalgia also does not exist. What first-time-in-college students–and especially FirstGen and BIPOC students–encounter in college classrooms is their complete reality of college: College might include pre-pandemic relics that now might not make much sense, including general education requirements, course overloads necessary to complete general education requirements, and expensive unpaid parking fees (on campuses with too few parking spaces, no less) that place holds on registration for the next semester. This list does not include student loans and the astronomical financial costs of college, many of which seem opaque, such as the high costs of required materials for required courses. This is the only college world the students have ever known. No wonder, then, that many people do not stay in college, or choose not to enroll at all.  Yet these alternatives to college completion are not the same as a chrysalis that fails to develop. The butterfly still emerges, and still searches for the means to launch their flight. College could well have been that means, but a launch pad littered with obstacles fabricated from nostalgia offers precious little space to begin a successful flight. Success in the wake of this pandemic must be differently measured. But that is not all. College also needs to change. The launching pad needs to be cleared of pre-pandemic debris that served no one before March 2020, and that three years later remains intolerable.  The butterfly emerges from the chrysalis, and in that moment of emergence, the world is made new. In that moment, attention must be paid. This is not a metaphor, but a call to refuse nostalgia and to refuse normalcy. This is a call for change. ... View more

If, as I noted in last month’s post, attempting to keep students from using chat generative pre-trained transformers is all but impossible, how might ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence language programs be used productively for teaching and learning? That’s a question that has already generated a tremendous amount of thought and research among educators, with the proliferation of ideas and suggestions growing on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Among the resources I recommend are the work being done by Anna Mills, who curates AI Text Generators: Sources to Stimulate Discussion Among Teachers for the WAC Clearinghouse, and Rhonda Grego, Dean of the School of English and Humanities at Midlands Technical College in Columbia, South Carolina, who has created a detailed and annotated list of scholarly articles with a focus on classes in which writing is a major component of the syllabus. As with my previous posts, the rapid development of AI, and educators’ responses to its perils and triumphs, means the following ideas are only suggestions, places to begin. Actively assign ChatGPT as part of the coursework. While we want our class discussion to be models of invention and creativity, ChatGPT obviously offers a much quicker way to generate essay ideas worth discussing. Rather than a desultory ten or fifteen minutes with students kicking around one or two obvious or half-formed ideas, they could spend their time evaluating and critiquing the ideas offered by GPT, which is particularly adept at generating pros and cons for specific arguments. AI appears equally deft at summarizing complex arguments. Students can practice this essential skill by writing their own summaries of readings or topics in-class, then comparing them with AI-generated summaries. Conversely, the AI summary can be created first, then dissected by the class for flaws and omissions, of which there are sure to be some. Indeed, just about any early-process writing activity, from generating a thesis to locating sources to creating an outline, can be supplemented, or complicated, by AI input. In this model, AI acts as a kind of tutor, prompting students to try ideas, answering questions, responding to student concerns and skepticism--essentially becoming something like the online writing guide that so many software developers have worked so long to create. Allow students to use ChatGPT as they wish, but ask them to be honest about how they have used it. Once students begin using AI as a partner, it will be tempting for them to say, as they might to an overeager parent, “You’re so good at this, why don’t you just go ahead and do it yourself?” If, as we will see in next month’s post, detecting this sort of plagiarism is problematic, should we just give in and acknowledge its inevitability? Ethan Mollick, a professor of management at Wharton, concedes: “I think everybody is cheating ... I mean, it’s happening. So what I’m asking students to do is just be honest with me.... Tell me what they use ChatGPT for, tell me what they used as prompts to get it to do what they want, and that’s all I’m asking from them. We’re in a world where this is happening, but now it’s just going to be at an even grander scale.” Clearly, this approach is not without its drawbacks. What criteria are we using to grade student work not actually produced by students? Whom (or What), exactly, are we grading? Mollick’s proposal may but pragmatic, but it is not far from a tactic discussed last month: not grading at all. Emphasize the writing process and have students show their work. A more productive approach is to insist that students be transparent about their own writing processes. While we may preach the gospel of process, too often, especially for teachers with heavy composition loads, it’s much easier simply to assess product. Among the many recommendations composition teachers have made for responding to AI, two occur frequently: 1) Have students do more work in class, with the teacher maintaining a productively intrusive presence from the beginning to the end of the assignment, and 2) insist that each of those stages in the process is read and assessed by the instructor to ensure that the work is consistent with the student’s own writing. If ChatGPT is part of the process, its use should be akin to that of tutoring session or a database search, and every aspect of its use should be well-documented. Prioritize quality over quantity. An emphasis on an instructor’s close involvement in the composition process, in tandem with AI’s ease in creating competent product—ChatGPT can meet a semester’s word count in a couple of minutes—should encourage educators to move away from word count as a mark of achievement and toward fewer essays, with more drafts, more in-class work, and more attention to detail. Again, students may consult AI as they compose, but the instructor’s emphasis should be on helping them craft their own sentences and paragraphs rather than cutting and pasting ready-made computer-generated prose. Assign multimodal writing. Many professors devoted to multimodal composition have been frustrated by the pace at which their colleagues have adopted non-alphabetic writing practices, but ChatGPT’s wizardry with words should go a long way towards making college composition classes places where, in addition to written text, “essays” consist of images, sound, video, computer graphics, and whatever else persuasively forwards an argument. Insist on accuracy and facts. Those who are doubtful of AI’s impending ability to conquer the world often point to the wild inaccuracies to which it is given. In class, let AI have its say on the topic under discussion, then have students do their best to identify what is false or misstated. Because ChatGPT is so error-prone, students will need to be more alert than ever to fact-checking information, certainly a worthwhile development in our era of exaggerations, lies and blatant misinformation. Nurture the individual writer. ChatGPT relies on groupthink and hivemind; its prose lacks individual creativity and flair. Media Studies professor Ian Bogost compared a conversation with ChatGPT to “every other interaction one has on the internet, where some guy (always a guy) tries to convert the skim of a Wikipedia article into a case of definitive expertise.” Bloviating generalizations that anyone can make are just as unappealing in college writing as they ever were. Instead, we writing teachers should be cultivating the distinctive voice given to every human being. In class, analyze the prose of ChatGPT, pointing out its blandness, the fact that, as Bogost notes, the writing is “formulaic in structure, style, and content” and “consistently uninteresting as prose.” Rewrite sentences and paragraphs to rehumanize AI’s list of facts and figures. Peter Elbow, Anne Lamott, Natalie Ginsberg: be ready in the wings; we may need you. ... View more

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

Bedford/St. Martin's is pleased to announce the participants in the 2023 Bedford New Scholars Advisory Board! Advisory Board members are: Emily Aguilar   Emily Aguilar (recommended by Danelle Dyckhoff) is a Master's student in English at California State University, Los Angeles, where she is also a Teaching Associate. Her experience teaching first-year writing has amplified her approach to equity-based teaching, especially for ESL students and students with disabilities. She hopes to teach writing as an exercise toward liberation. In addition to her interests in pedagogy, she is interested in literary trauma studies, theories in modernism and postmodernism, speculative fiction, and literature of the incarcerated. Hannah Benefiel Hannah Benefiel (recommended by Kyle Jensen) is a Writing, Rhetoric, and Composition PhD student at Arizona State University. She writes about eating disorders, food as medicine, embodied technical communication, and religious trauma. Currently, she is working on her dissertation that frames eating disorder recovery texts as rhetorical education through the lens of rhythm, myth, and graphic medicine. She serves as the Assistant Director of Writing programs and teaches Professional and Technical Communication, Composition 1&2, and the First Year Composition TA practicum. Jacqueline Cano Diaz Jacqueline Cano Diaz (recommended by Joel Schneier) is pursuing an English MA in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Central Florida, where her thesis work centers on the rhetorical aspects of clothing choice, particularly as a woman of color in academia. She teaches Composition I and Composition II as part of the First Year Composition Program. Her research primarily focuses on material and visual rhetorics through a feminist and queer studies lens. In addition to her thesis research, she has applied these interests to study alienation and identification in Halloween costuming and, most recently, literacy activities involved in birdwatching. Ronada Dominique   Ronada Dominique (recommended by Courtney Wooten) is pursuing her PhD in English concentrating on Writing and Rhetoric at George Mason University. She teaches FYC courses and served as the Graduate Writing Program Administrator, overseeing PhD mentoring and professional development and assisting with MA/MFA/Phd orientations. As a Black Millennial Mother in higher education, Ronada explores the representation of Black scholars in Writing Studies publications and how research impacts the Black Experience in higher education classrooms. Starting her PhD studies with a 3-month-old infant, Ronada understands the importance of representation and legacy and wants to ensure that those who are responsible for shaping the academic landscape of the future are equipped to do so. Samira Grayson   Samira Grayson (recommended by Kate Pantelides) is pursuing her PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition at Middle Tennessee State University. She has taught Expository Writing and Research and Argumentation (the first year writing sequence at MTSU), and currently serves as the University Writing Center’s program coordinator. Her research interests include writing center and writing program administration, spatial rhetorics and place-based pedagogy, feminist historiography and research methods, and notions of authorship in collaborative writing. She is a member of WPA-GO’s digital presence committee and was recently published in Peitho. Hannah Hopkins Hannah Hopkins (recommended by Diane Davis) is pursuing a PhD in the Rhetoric & Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. She is an Assistant Director of the Digital Writing and Research Lab and an Assistant Instructor for the Center for Teaching and Learning. Hannah teaches a variety of courses in writing and pedagogy, with a focus on digital rhetoric. Students in her special topics course "Rhetoric of Data Justice" create podcasts that explore data justice controversies. Hannah also teaches an introductory pedagogy course for graduate students. Hannah's research investigates storytelling with and about data, data centers, and networked technologies. Her current research engages ways that communities build power through, with, and against digital memory infrastructures, including recent work building solar-powered computers. Amanda E. Scott   Amanda E. Scott (recommended by Brian Gogan) is pursuing a PhD in English with a concentration in Creative Writing at Western Michigan University, where she currently serves as an Assistant Director of First-Year Writing. She's taught a variety of undergraduate courses, including developmental writing, first-year composition, technical writing, and editing, as well as graduate-level courses in publishing. Her research, which often explores the intersections between inclusive writing practices, ethical design, and social inequities, has appeared in Technical Communication Quarterly and the Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning. Christopher Luis Shosted Christopher Luis Shosted (recommended by Brooke Rollins) is currently enrolled at Lehigh University where he studies the intersection of rhetoric and literary studies. He teaches courses in the First-Year Writing Program at Lehigh focusing on introducing students to the conventions of academic writing and research as well as persuasive arguments as they exist outside of the university. Additionally, Christopher has also served as the assistant to the First-Year Writing Program working with the director to build protocols for programmatic assessment, educating new teachers joining the program through a year-long practicum, and drafting new iterations of shared syllabi. His research areas focus on applications of classical rhetoric to modern situations and the assessment of student writing along large and small scales. Christopher also currently serves as a co-editor of the Program Profiles section of Composition Forum. Kristen Wheaton Kristen Wheaton (recommended by Dr. Roxanne Mountford) is pursuing her PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Writing Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She teaches primarily First-Year Composition and is currently one of only three instructors leading the co-requisite course first introduced in Fall of 2022. In addition to her teaching role, Kristen is currently the Senior Assistant Director of First-Year Composition. Her research interests include resistance rhetorics, genre theory, ethos, and rhetorics of difference. Ashleah Wimberly Ashleah Wimberly (recommended by Elias Dominguez-Barajas) is pursuing their PhD in Rhetoric and Composition at Florida State University, where they hope to defend their dissertation on graduate instructor literacies in Spring 2024. They teach a variety of courses, including first and second year composition and upper-level courses in FSU's Editing, Writing, & Media program such as Rhetoric, Article & Essay Techniques, and Writing in Print & Online. Ashleah has served as a mentor to incoming graduate instructors and as an assistant to the Composition Program. In these roles, they've overseen the mentoring and training of graduate instructors, helped design and implement assessment protocols, and assisted the program director in various administrative tasks. Prior to their work at FSU, Ashleah also co-wrote a custom textbook for the University of North Dakota and assisted librarians in creating custom lessons tailored to the Composition program there. Ashleah's research primarily centers around pedagogy, with strong interests in literacy studies, identity, and accessibility. ... View more

You may have seen a post on Inside Higher Education's blog by Georgetown Professor Edward J. Maloney, “The 4 Stages of AI.” Amidst all the wringing of hands and near hysterical hubbub surrounding the current state of artificial intelligence research and practice, I found Maloney’s take sensible, straightforward, and worth a read. In brief, Maloney has surveyed responses to the current status of AI “from ‘don’t worry about it’ to ‘it’s the end of humanity,” concluding that no matter who turns out to be right, “much of how we work and communicate is likely to change.” That is the conclusion I have certainly come to, and like so many other teachers of writing, I am interested in engaging with the latest AI developments that we can use for writing, coding, and research. Likening our current situation as the AI version of “the seven stages of grief,” though Maloney articulates only four stages, which he describes as moving from defensiveness to avoidance to acceptance to reimagination. I think this framework can serve us teachers of writing and reading and speaking very well. We can begin, Maloney suggests, with considering whether and how to regulate some AI programs—from an outright ban, as Italy seems to be trying to do, to the use of tools to detect AI at work, to asking students to cite any text generated by AI, or other such policies. Maloney hopes that we will move beyond a focus on regulation, moving from a ‘position of restriction” to one of opportunity to learn how to work effectively with AI. Maloney’s second stage of AI is therefore to “adapt” to the definite downsides and limitations of the current tools through more one-on-one or small group writing with our students, doing more and more writing in class, or tying assignments closely to in-class discussions that ChatGPT and similar programs would not be privy to. But he cautions that we should retain a strong focus on student learning (rather than on restrictions and punishment).     In Maloney’s third stage, “integrate,” we would use AI tools to foster learning and engagement, helping students learn how to use AI productively and ethically. Many writing teachers are already well into such integration, asking students to use ChatGPT, for example, to outline or draft essays they would then revise, or to use AI to revise and polish drafts they’ve already written. Other teachers are asking students to analyze pieces of writing by ChatGPT or similar programs and to write evaluations of them. As Maloney puts it, “We should teach our students to use these tools in the same way we teach them how to use a calculator, a spreadsheet, or the internet, all tools that have been variously banned …” To me, these three stages seem well conceived and described. But it is the fourth most drew my attention. Here Maloney acknowledges that engaging AI is bound to affect and change how we teach, and one strong implication of such change is that we may well “need to reimagine what it means to learn, communicate, or create.” Doing so, he says, may reveal that our current approaches to teaching are “structurally misaligned” with the needs of students today and in the future. The AI thus may do far more than add to how we teach: … the new crop of AI tools have the potential to shift something fundamental. Human beings are language-producing beings. Our primacy in this domain may be changing. If that happens, communication may change. What we think of as knowledge production may change. Indeed. It seems to me inevitable that communication and knowledge production will change, are already in the process of changing. All I need to do is look over the forty-five years I (and others!) have been arguing that writing is not a solitary, singular act (the myth of the lone author struggling in a garret to produce a great and unique work) but rather thoroughly collaborative seems positively quaint today. As teachers of writing and reading and speaking, we need to be charting these changes, documenting them and analyzing them. We are going to need new robust definitions of basic terms like “writing” and “speaking” and “reading,” not to mention “collaboration” that can underpin our efforts to teach these communicative acts in swiftly changing times. Seems to me to be a pretty exciting time to be teaching, and learning!   Photo by Levart_Photographer on Unsplash ... View more

At a recent Teaching and Learning Conference sponsored by the University System of Georgia, I was struck by the number of presentations focused on HIPs:  high impact practices. HIPs are described by George Kuh and Carol Schneider in a 2008 book as evidence-based teaching practices that can transform the lives of students who participate in them. The list of practices includes first-year seminars, internships, capstone courses, e-portfolios, and service learning (among others). The American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has developed training for HIPs through an annual Institute.     The HIPs are not meant to be small tweaks tagged onto existing course structures; rather, they require the intentional design of experiences—often multi-semester experiences—that engage students in deep, active, and reflective learning.  Some of the exemplary models suggest a strong level of institutional commitment to implement the HIPs—from personnel and training to technology (for e-portfolios) and scheduling resources.    Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash   But while the adoption of one of the HIPs can seem daunting to individual faculty, there is a second HIP publication that is equally important—but not always as well known. In a 2013 publication, Kuh and O’Donnell outline eight characteristics that make a practice “high-impact.” It’s not that all HIPs demonstrate all eight traits, but they all involve some combination of these: Performance expectations set at appropriately high levels Significant investment of time and effort by students over an extended period of time Interactions with faculty and peers about substantive matters Experiences with diversity, wherein students are exposed to and must contend with people and circumstances that differ from those with which students are familiar Frequent, timely, and constructive feedback Periodic, structured opportunities to reflect and integrate learning Opportunities to discover relevance of learning through real-world applications Public demonstration of competence   Even without significant institutional investment of time or resources, instructors of FYC/corequisite and stand-alone developmental courses can ensure their students have access to “HIP classrooms” and learning experiences shaped by these eight elements.     Over the past two years, for example, I’ve seen the power of inviting Writing Fellows (junior and seniors) into the corequisite classroom to talk—and listen—to non-traditional and multilingual students. For our FYC students, such embedded tutoring covers element #3 (interactions with peers); for the Fellows, it covers #4 (experiences with diversity). Both groups then reflect and revise #6 (periodic, structured opportunities to reflect).     What does your HIP classroom look like? Are you making intentional changes to be more HIP-focused? I’d love to hear about it. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Jordan Hill, composition instructor in the Global First Year program at Florida International University. A recently-selected Fulbright Scholar, he will soon move to Italy to research a short story collection. Idioms I tell my class of international students that a certain American literary character is “an odd duck.” They stare at me with tilted heads and confused smiles. I imagine what they must be imagining—Jay Gatsby as a strange waterfowl. I clear my throat. “Sorry, everyone,” I say. “An ‘odd duck’ is an idiom. An expression.” How can I explain this? “An odd duck is sort of like a black sheep.” Again, the quizzical faces. Too late, I register my second, unintentional idiom. I sigh and explain what happened. They laugh, and I try again.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines.   ... View more

Whether one regards the sudden emergence of ChatGPT as an opportunity, a disruption, or a disaster, it is here to stay and will have to be adapted to if one wishes to continue to impart the critical thinking and writing skills that are the traditional learning outcomes of a college composition class. This is not unlike the introduction of the pocket calculator in the classroom more than a generation ago. Of course, a great deal of attention has already been paid to this topic, and will continue to do so in the years to come as AI technology evolves, but for the purposes of this blog I wish to focus on a simple set of DO/DON'T recommendations, especially if one has adopted a popular cultural semiotics approach to writing instruction. I will start with a single DON'T: DON'T create writing assignments that ask your students to "write a semiotic analysis of... [fill in the blank]." I am quite confident that ChatGPT would be (or will soon become) perfectly capable of generating a semiotic analysis of practically any popular cultural topic given the enormous amount of relevant material to be found on the Internet for AI to aggregate, as well as the growing cultural familiarity of the word "semiotics" itself. I also wouldn't be surprised if the generated texts turned out to be rather astute—after all, as I have noted before, artificial intelligence and the semiotic method as I describe it in Signs of Life in the USA have a good deal in common insofar as both explore and identify significant patterns in human behavior. So, if you want to be sure that your students are discovering their own semiotic patterns and presenting them in their own words, DON'T (I repeat) present them with these kinds of open-ended assignments. On the other hand, I very much doubt that ChatGPT would be able to make anything out of something like this: "After carefully situating your topic in an historically informed system of associations and differences, write an abductive analysis of it." Of course, you wouldn't want to write your instructions in quite this highly condensed a manner. If you are using (or have ever used) Signs of Life in your writing class, however, you will recognize that the gist of the semiotic method as it is presented in that book is contained in this sentence.   This takes me to my recommended DO: DO create assignments that require your students to make explicit the particular elements of the semiotic method that they have employed in the formation of their own analyses. My DO/DON'T recommendation, of course, is simply a version of traditional assignment-writing practices intended to ensure that the work that students turn in is their own, adapted in this instance for users of Signs of Life in the USA, and I wrote my assignments in precisely this manner when I was teaching my popular cultural semiotics classes. It was helpful to me, and I hope that it may prove helpful to you.   Photo by Jonathan Kemper (2023), used under the Unsplash License. ... View more

I recently had an opportunity to sit in on the dissertation defense of Dr. O.W. Petcoff at Texas Tech University’s program in Technical Communication and Rhetoric. In addition, I had the pleasure of reading her dissertation and talking with her about her work, both before and after the defense. Petcoff was teaching developmental reading and writing at a Texas community college, where one major goal was to help her adult learners achieve “area mastery proficiencies” called for by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Her dissertation grew out of observing what she calls her students’ “borderline obsession with texting” and their familiarity and comfort level with emojis as means of communication—she describes some of the texts she saw (but could not comprehend) as “a combination of hieroglyphics, shorthand, and Klingon”). Increasingly intrigued by the disconnect between her students’ traditional academic literacy skills and heir avid communication via texting, she asked “how were they able to so freely communicate with fellow classmates, some of whom spoke different languages, but struggle with traditional reading and writing?” They were doing so, she found, using a combination of emojis and textisms (defined by linguists as abbreviations, letter/number homophones, and emoticons).      Petcoff set off to do what teachers of writing do: move from close observation of students and their ways of communicating to research. She read deeply in semiotics (and discovered Marcel Danesi’s The Semiotics of Emoji) and began to trace the history of pictorial language and ideographs. She returned to the Students’ Right to their Own Language and many other calls for attending to, and respecting, all of our students’ languages and dialects—and she began to conceptualize her dissertation study, “Exploring Emoji as a Literacy Instructional Tool in the Developmental Reading and Writing Classroom.”  I am certain that Petcoff will be publishing her findings and the implications of those findings in a number of venues, and these publications will be ones to watch for. In her carefully designed study, Petcoff analyzed her students’ communicative abilities related to their use of emojis and textisms, showing that their understanding (reading) of texts improved significantly and that emoji serve as a powerful semiotic multimodal literacy and rhetorical tool within an instructional framework based on semiotics, new literacy theory, and anti-racist practices.  Language—our means of making sense of the world—is always changing and shifting and adapting. And language is already visual: as Leslie Marmon Silko reminds us, written words are, after all, images. The evolution of language into more pictographic visual signs is entirely possible if not already well in progress. So we need much more work on these issues. In the meantime, teachers of writing and reading can gather important information from close observation of student writing on devices of all kinds.    Photo by Kindel Media on Pexels. ... View more

Many commentators have noted students’ disengagement with college classes as well as their difficulties with teaching styles and course materials. In a recent article in Inside Higher Education, Colleen Flaherty, following research by Sarah Brownell and her colleagues, offers that “students concerned about teaching style are balking at instructional strategies at least as much as at perceived difficulty.” Brownell and her colleagues studied the efficacy of active learning, including barriers to active learning.  A significant finding of the study was that generalized anxiety increases students’ discomfort with small group work. “Much of student anxiety in active learning,” the researchers noted, “stems from a fear of being evaluated negatively and in the case of group work, students fear being evaluated negatively by a peer or group of their peers.”   Anecdotally, as I suggested in a post earlier this semester, anxiety is the shadow side of flow. It’s easy to imagine how students would feel anxious about their writing being judged, and worse still, not earning “A”s for their writing. Perhaps earning an “A” signifies aiming for perfection, with “A”s as essential for admission to competitive colleges, and perfection might have meant adherence to specific models, and following rules such as not using “I” in their writing. After surviving interrupted in-person schooling throughout the worst parts of the pandemic, it makes sense to me that students would not want to engage with strangers, even if those strangers are classmates or their teacher in a college writing course. It also makes sense that students would take comfort in what they already know, rather than commit to learning something new. Yet as many postsecondary educators (see Knesek for a helpful overview), earning an “A” is not the same as learning new processes and approaches to writing and rhetoric (see Von Bergen). Ungrading is certainly one solution, one which I experienced many years ago. Without the fear of a low grade appearing on my transcript, I found it easier to take risks and experiment with learning. But my high school and college years did not take place in the midst of a global pandemic. Moreover, at the end of the semester, again, in my experience, college require grades for transcripts, and students require grades to keep and apply for scholarships and post-graduate education. Ungrading does not automatically set us free from the larger systemic problems of grades and grading. Even with a philosophy of “A” for everyone, (in colleges that require letter grades, everyone still needs to have that “A” listed on a transcript. Past the halfway point of the term, I wanted to suggest to my students other considerations for growing their writing. In the Daily Syllabus Update, I posted the following list.  Tips and Hints: College Writing, as we have discussed, is different from high school writing in many ways. For instance: Following a “model” essay project does NOT mean “A” level college writing. Growing your writing often involves writing outside your comfort zone.  Writing projects do NOT have to be perfect. Learning matters more than perfection. Submitting all writing projects and journals by the final deadline matters more than perfection. Writing grows over time and with practice. DO NOT save your Writing Projects and journals for the last week of class or for the final deadline. Students in previous semesters report that this writing strategy does NOT work. In posting these “Tips and Hints,” my hope was to offer students the means to navigate through anxiety to successful completion of the semester, but not merely by adding another required course to their transcripts. Indeed, writing is a requirement, and it is also an opportunity to write– not as a means of following a model to perfection, but through the process of engaging practices and processes that allow for learning, and therefore for writing. Photo by Susan Bernstein, February 15, 2019  ... View more

Instructors have different views, understandably, on how much of themselves to disclose in the classroom. I hope, though, we all see value in revealing ourselves as fellow writers, rather than the people who simply create assignments and respond to them.  I’ve played the song “Tub-Thumping” by the band Chumbawamba in class sometimes, with its rousing and danceable chorus, “I get knocked down, but I get up again …” That’s certainly how the drafting and revision process can feel, even to those of us who have, well, been knocked down plenty. Students should know that is what it’s like to be a writer. How often have you spoken with your students about your own writing process and the inevitable struggles that come with it? I appreciated a recent “Tiny Teaching Story” by Xinquang Li, in which the classroom is re-imagined as a “tea house.” Li describes the way students’ eyes “light up” when we really engage them as people. Consider those golden moments in your classroom when a conversation achieves “lift-off.” Usually, that happens when students stop lobbing comments just to you—the artificial ping-pong of question-and-answer—and start really engaging with one another. And that can only happen when we are humble enough to share power in the classroom. When I achieve that conversational magic in the classroom, I thank bell hooks, whose inspiration to consider the classroom a “radical space of possibility” is the wisest teaching advice I’ve ever received.  At this point in the semester or quarter, most students are deep into revision, and are probably new to meta-cognitive reflection on this process. That takes practice! Channeling our best bell hooks and Xinquang Li, we might reflect, ourselves, on whether our classroom revision conversation is a substantive discussion that values peers as fellow writers rather than the old instructor → student dynamic of “correction.”   In our book, From Inquiry to Academic Writing my co-author, Stuart Greene, and I offer steps for peer-workshop groups, easily adapted to online formats, to empower students to take ownership of this process: The writer distributes copies of the draft to each member of the writing group (ideally, the group should not exceed four students.) The writer distributes a cover letter, setting an agenda for the group. For example, the cover letter might describe what the writer believes the strengths of the paper are and what could use some improvement. The members read the cover letter. The writer then reads the draft aloud, while members follow along, underlining passages and making notes to prepare themselves to discuss the draft. Members ask questions that help the writer identify concepts that need further elaboration or clarification. Discussion focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of the draft, appropriate to the state of writing and the writer’s concerns. (Even in the early stage, readers and the writer should sustain discussion for at least ten minutes before the next student takes a turn as a writer.)  While what happens in peer-workshop groups may not unfold as organically as a conversation over fragrant cups of tea, these guidelines move students through the dynamics of engaging with one another seriously as thinkers and writers. To me, this is the essence of bell hooks’ vision of the classroom as a “radical space of possibility.”  On revision days in class, I conclude with a talk-back session to hear that patterns that emerge from peer workshops. Just as students find they are in good company with their struggles (Why are opening and closing paragraphs so challenging, for example?), I often reveal my own writerly struggles in those discussions (I also struggle with openings and closings and lean on trusted friends and editors for help). Since we all enjoy good company, I recommend reading or re-reading John McPhee’s classic “Draft No. 4”  (perhaps with “Tub-Thumping” playing in the background). If a prolific writer of McPhee’s caliber can “get knocked down” but “get up again”—with humility and wry humor—so can we all, as fellow travelers on the writer’s journey.   Photo by April Lidinsky (2023). ... View more

  Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin toddlers, Dylan and Escher.   While taking education courses in college, my peers and I were asked to think of metaphors for our pedagogy. At the time, I found inspiration in the idea of being the conductor of an orchestra, using my conductors’ wand to help bring out the creative genius of my students. I imagined my hair getting ruffled by the breeze created by my own motion as my body kept time—the community of it all, the uproarious appreciation of the crowd. But after 15 years of being a college professor, my metaphor for teaching has evolved from “I am a conductor,” to “I am a circle-creator.” It’s a metaphor that reminds me to bring students together (often into the shape of a circle), to constantly renew my commitment to circle back to previous concepts before building on them, and to help students build cyclical routines. My new metaphor is not as glamorous, and in the strict sense of definitions, it’s only metaphor-adjacent, but it works a lot better for me. The circle-creator metaphor speaks to me because I find it valuable to be at the edges of the classroom, alongside my students, where we can encourage each other and learn collaboratively. This allows for insights to come from the voices of students, rather than just my own, resulting in a deeper understanding of the material. However, creating a literal circle in the classroom can be a challenge, as my current Humanities 101 students can confirm. After attempting to arrange desks into a circle, the result often looks more like an octopus having a bad day. Additionally, one or more students may end up sitting outside of the circle (by choice or by chance), and the pace of discussion can make it easy to miss opportunities that help students deepen their analysis. That being said, I like the circle formation precisely because it is not always easy; together in the circle, we strive to make meaning together, and there is always something about the literal or metaphorical configuration to improve upon next time. The circle-creator metaphor also works for me because it reflects the iterative nature of teaching. A student may understand a concept one week and forget it the next. To solidify and deepen our understanding, I remind myself to circle back to previous concepts before moving on to new ones. For example, before discussing the shift to monotheism in Ancient Rome under Constantine, I asked my students to recall what they remembered about the shift to monotheism under Akhenaton in Ancient Egypt. My students and I think about how history repeats itself, and we repeat ourselves too. Thinking about the circle-creator metaphor helps me to slow my teaching down—to offer reminders and opportunities to rethink, instead of just plowing ahead. When teaching study skills in my English 097 class, I also think about the circle-creator metaphor in terms of routines. I encourage my students to make small changes in their study process, such as writing down exactly when they plan to do their homework for the class. We then circle back the next day to see how it went. If a student says that a strategy didn’t work for them, I remind them that it may be useful to try it more than once. We also talk about how good habits, once established, can come and go. I share with them that I, too, constantly slip and have to circle back to my better habits like going to bed on time, and properly managing my grading time. I believe that using metaphors for teaching can clarify our practices and our values and keep us fresh. The circle-creator metaphor works for me because it reflects the power of collaboration and the cyclical nature of learning. Comment below about the metaphor(s) that work for you! ... View more

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

When I read Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, I found myself underlining so much that I started double underlining or even triple underlining passages that I wanted to remember. One triple underlining went to this statement: The word in language is half someone else’s… it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own. Bakhtin was arguing that meaning in language arises through dialogue, through interaction and conversation, and in this sense meaning-making is always a give and take, or a struggle, for whose meaning will gain adherence, whose “mouth” the word will end up in. Similar insights regarding words and meaning can be found in the work of I. A. Richards, Kenneth Burke, and Joseph Bentley—and I have been thinking about these concepts a lot during the last few years as I’ve watched the struggle over whose mouth the word “woke” is going to be in. In The Philosophy of Rhetoric and other works, I. A. Richards explains that in any group of words, what is missing is the meaning—because meaning arises through the interaction of the words: meaning is thus contextual and metaphorical, as well as a function of interpretation. Thus, for Richards, rhetoric becomes “the study of misunderstandings and their remedies.”  Kenneth Burke’s Language as Symbolic Action introduces the concept of “terministic screens” as a metaphor for how we are able to make meaning: language for humans is like a screen that allows us to apprehend the world, yet these screens can differ widely based on each person’s experience and context. Meanings, then, are not inherent or set, but always potentially contested. Joseph Bentley was a scholar of 18th century literature, not a rhetorician, but he developed a theory that fits well into this discussion and is very useful to rhetorical analysis. In “Semantic Gravitation: An Essay on Satiric Reduction” (Modern Language Quarterly, 1969), Bentley develops this theory as part of his analysis of how satire works, but we can see such “gravitation” at work all around us in the ways words attract and repel one another. Bentley was fond of taking a satirical love poem and showing how the startling and unexpected words associated with the woman of the poem work to pull her down, semantically, into the gutter. Other love poems, of course, do just the opposite, raising the subject of the poem to near perfection through the associated words. Jonathan Swift was a master of building such gravitational forces in both poetry and prose. All of which brings me to recent uses of the word “woke.” In “A History of “Wokeness,” Aja Romano writes: Before 2014, the call to “stay woke” was, for many people, unheard of. The idea behind it was common within Black communities at that point — the notion that staying “woke” and alert to the deceptions of other people was a basic survival tactic. But in 2014, following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, “stay woke” suddenly became the cautionary watchword of Black Lives Matter activists on the streets, used in a chilling and specific context: keeping watch for police brutality and unjust police tactics. In the years since Brown’s death, “woke” has evolved into a single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory. This framing of “woke” is bipartisan: It’s used as shorthand for political progressiveness by the left, and as a denigration of leftist culture by the right. (Vox, October 9, 2020) Romano was writing three years ago, and by now through the linguistic moves I have described above, the struggle over how “woke" will be used, interpreted, and remembered is raging. The survival tactic of acute awareness that accompanied the early history of the word has given way to a “new left” view that associates “woke” with recognition of systemic and oppressive hierarchies that characterize American history and American institutions and a focus on reparations and on watchwords of diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice that have led, on some college campuses, to ironically discriminatory policies and practices. Meanwhile, on the (far) right, woke signals those who are overly politically correct; it’s used as a slur or insult and marks an attitude that is so anti-American that it must be avoided--or outlawed, as Governor DeSantis has done in signing the Stop Woke Act that is affecting public schools across Florida and in declaring his state a place “where woke goes to die.”    Marcia Fudge with "Stay Woke Vote" t-shirt in 2018   I could go on and on giving examples of how Burke’s terministic screens, Richards’s theory of contextual meaning making, and Bentley’s semantic gravitation are at work in the struggle over “woke” – and I could speculate about Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic communication and whose “mouth” this contested term will end up in (or what else might happen to it!).  But it seems more productive to bring our students into this discussion, to ask them to discover examples of semantic gravitation at work around “woke,” to gather a body of data to examine and analyze together, and then try making up a “fact sheet” that would trace changes to the meaning of the word across time, to try their hands at writing a definition of the term that they can all accept, or even to do some field research on campus to gather fellow student responses to the word. Most important would be to give students the opportunity to put the theoretical concepts I’ve introduced above into practice and to understand how language—and meaning—shift and change under such forces. In this way, they may succeed in getting the word “woke” into their own mouths and making it their own, if only for a brief time.    Image by Rep. Marcia Fudge. ... View more