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

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been re-evaluating the power of digital technologies. But not, as you might expect, AI tools like ChatGPT. Actually, I’ve been pondering Google Translate.   Ten or twelve years ago, I recall discussions among ESL and FYC colleagues in which Google Translate was censured as an impediment to both language acquisition and writing development.  But within a few years, the tone had softened considerably, and many of us working with multilingual writers recognized the benefits of this Google tool for academic readers and writers trying to deal with unfamiliar vocabulary. There was a  particular value in classes with students from many language backgrounds: students with shared linguistic resources could rely on each other, but others—such as speakers of Nepali or Korean or Lingala in the class—often felt left out.  Google Translate was a resource for them, and it seemed to level the playing field. For translations of words and short sentences, this tool made sense.   Still, 1o years ago, I would not have encouraged a student to write a complete piece in a different language and produce the English version through Google Translate.     This spring, however, one of my students submitted the first draft of his literacy narrative in both Spanish and English. He had added an annotation:  the English version came from Google Translate.     My first instinct was to invite the student to my office and make it clear that he should not do this again.  But I hesitated. After all, it was not a final piece, and it was clear the student was engaged in the assignment. When I asked about his process, he explained that he just “felt more comfortable” beginning in Spanish.     So I let the process stand, and I provided feedback as I normally would, asking questions about the content, organization, word choice. The student began revising the English version. To my surprise, however, he did not delete the Spanish original on his working draft. It was a touchstone for him, a point of assessment and reflection.  The student asked questions of his own, met with our writing fellows, and discussed the piece with classmates.     He has since completed two additional assignment drafts using the compose/translate/revise method.  He recognizes the potential difficulties and risks inherent in this method, and he does not use it for every assignment. He knows he has to assess meaning, word choice, paragraph structure, and syntax.   I am not sure this process would be effective for all students, but for this student in particular, the use of Google Translate in the composing process engages him in metalinguistic and meta-rhetorical talk. As Myhill and Newman have suggested:   “Learners’ capacity to think metalinguistically about writing and to enact that thinking in the composing of text is enabled through high-quality classroom talk. . . . Potentially, classroom talk can be the cultural tool which supports the construction of shared declarative metalinguistic knowledge and the psychological tool which supports writers’ cognitive capacities to use that knowledge procedurally in the shaping of their own written texts.”  (Myhill and Newman, 2016, p. 178).    My student is certainly developing “declarative metalinguistic knowledge” and using that knowledge to shape his own written texts.   In a sense, my student is deploying all the tools and resources (community, digital, and linguistic) available to him to compose, revise, and transform meaningful texts.  His process, in fact, reminds me of my son’s artwork; my son uses a host of digital tools to transform photos into abstract works of art, as in the example below.      The initial inspiration is no longer recognizable or even recoverable: each choice my son makes takes the piece further from its original source.  But those choices are thoughtful and purposeful, made according to his initial vision of the piece. We can even see the process of composition and transformation condensed in a time-lapse video of his work.         I would love to have a time-lapse video of my student’s composing process—from his freewriting and revision in Spanish, to the first iteration of an English translation, to the interactions and edits which will ultimately lead to an essay in his final portfolio. Through notes and annotations, he has already documented at least part of his process.     Ten years ago, I might have told this student that his extensive use of Google Translate wasn’t really “writing in English.”  But like my student’s narrative or my son’s artwork, I have seen my teaching transformed through disciplinary communities, interactions with students and colleagues, and a host of digital, rhetorical, and linguistic resources.  Such transformation is certainly a good thing.   Image credit: Murray Moore ... View more

  Logical fallacies can be the source of humor or the source of the most successful acts of deceit ever pulled off. To learn to avoid fallacies in their own writing, students need to practice recognizing and understanding the fallacies in what they read and hear. They will be less susceptible to flawed logic if they practice spotting it in everyday rhetoric. Commercials and ads provide plenty of examples for practice. You can ask your students to bring in or jot down examples of fallacies they find in ads and then can discuss in class what fallacies they illustrate. Here are a few examples: Faulty Use of Authority: Mila Kunis endorsing Jim Beam. False Dilemma: “Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline.” Ad Populum: “Lipton Ice Tea. Join the Dance.” Appeal to Tradition: For lemonade (or almost anything else) — "Just like grandma used to make.” It’s not always easy to categorize logical fallacies, but the important thing is for students to recognize what is wrong with the logic even if the line between types of fallacies is sometimes blurry. Remember also that the fact that an advertising strategy is not logical does not mean that it is not effective. You may want to move from such an exercise to consider logical fallacies drawn from the news, perhaps bringing in some examples and asking the students to find others.  False Analogy: The most infamous example this month has been Fox News’ Tucker Carlson’s editing 44,000 hours of January 6th footage and characterizing the remaining brief clip as the actions of innocent sightseers being escorted through the Capitol. Post Hoc or Doubtful Cause: Because some childhood inoculations are given around the same age as parents often become aware of the first symptoms of autism in their children, a group of anti-vaxxers now object to having their children inoculated. It has been proven that the inoculations do not cause autism, but the misguided belief of a few has led to a rise in the number of cases of some diseases once virtually eliminated in the U. S. Ad Hominem: It is common in politics to attack an opponent, and in this age of a decisive split between parties, those attacks are as heated as ever. An ad hominem fallacy occurs when the person making an argument is attacked instead of his or her argument. It is an attempt to distract from the issue at hand. For example, critics have been using Biden’s age to argue that he is not fit to be president of the U.S. Slippery Slope: This sort of poor reasoning is exactly why a bank failure such as the recent one in California sends shock waves through the financial community. Unfortunately, it has happened before that the failure of one or a few banks caused a panic, which caused people to pull their money out of other banks, which caused more banks to fail. It’s not hard to find examples of bad logic, but it takes practice. Students generally enjoy these exercises. The challenge comes in seeing their own flaws in logic as they draft their essays. "I must be a cat"  by Nattiebug is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

For our 2nd writing project this semester, we are working on creating multimedia projects. The intention is to create a deeper understanding of our class’s key source, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” by James Baldwin. We are returning to this source with 3 central goals in mind: To practice part-to-whole analysis, students will find a section from “Artist’s Struggle “ that caught their attention while composing Writing Project 1. They will analyze how and why this part of the text caught their attention, and explain how this section exemplifies  Baldwin’s overall message.  To prepare for Writing Project 3, the researched essay, students will engage with deeper reading of “Artist’s Struggle.” For WP 3, students will use the section from WP 2 to find an additional source by James Baldwin that speaks to connected or similar concerns. “Artist’s Struggle” presents many of the germinal themes that Baldwin revisited throughout his life, including the idea of artists bearing witness to and recording cataclysmic events in order to move audiences to action. In investigating Baldwin’s work in more depth, the hope is that students will explore and synthesize questions and concerns from across the semester. To understand Baldwin’s work more fully, students will engage with the artistic process of writing for discovery. For facilitating this part of the assignment, I will offer examples of projects that students have created in the last several years, including videos, drawings, and collages. In reconsidering the third goal, I wondered how to introduce poetry as an additional possibility for a multimedia project. Then I remembered the concept of cross out, or erasure, poems. To create an erasure poem, the Poetry Foundation suggests the following process: “Cross out words or entire phrases to make a new poem ‘within’ or ‘underneath’ the real one.”  My thought was that, using their selected section from “Artist’s Struggle,” students use Baldwin’s original words to create their own cross out poem. I tried out this process myself  to see how it might work and what it might look like.   First, in order to have a clear reference point, I copied a sample section into a Google Doc: If I spend weeks and months avoiding my typewriter—and I do, sharpening pencils, trying to avoid going where I know I’ve got to go—then one has got to use this to learn humility. After all, there is a kind of saving egotism too, a cruel and dangerous but also saving egotism, about the artist’s condition, which is this: I know that if I survive it, when the tears have stopped flowing or when the blood has dried, when the storm has settled, I do have a typewriter which is my torment but is also my work. If I can survive it, I can always go back there, and if I’ve not turned into a total liar, then I can use it and prepare myself in this way for the next inevitable and possibly fatal disaster. But if I find that hard to do—and I have a weapon which most people don’t have—then one must understand how hard it is for almost anybody else to do it at all. (Baldwin 68) Next, I recopied the section and added cross outs using strikethrough formatting. This was not an easy process, and I spent some time figuring out what words to keep to make meaning (and a poem!) from the original section.  If I spend weeks and months avoiding my typewriter—and I do, sharpening pencils, trying to avoid going where I know I’ve got to go—then one has got to use this to learn humility. After all, there is a kind of saving egotism too, a cruel and dangerous but also saving egotism, about the artist’s condition, which is this: I know that if I survive it, when the tears have stopped flowing or when the blood has dried, when the storm has settled, I do have a typewriter which is my torment but is also my work. If I can survive it, I can always go back there, and if I’ve not turned into a total liar, then I can use it and prepare myself in this way for the next inevitable and possibly fatal disaster. But if i find that hard to do—and I have a weapon which most people don’t have—then one must understand how hard it is for almost anybody else to do it at all.  In the process of choosing the cross outs, I found myself slowing down and reading more deeply to discover how Baldwin used language to make meaning. I noticed, as if for the first time, how Baldwin used verbs, conjunctions, and punctuation to create meaning. Even though I regularly teach these stylistic features, I realized that I was creating something new from something seemingly very familiar. I looked more closely at sentences and key words to figure out how the component parts could work together as a reimagined whole. What I discovered was that erasing words and punctuation allowed me to better understand the heart of Baldwin’s message—a condensed version, in a sense. In other words, the erasure of words helped me to concretize meaning in a text where meaning can seem abstract and elusive.  I wished I had thought of this for WP 1, I noted to myself. Perhaps it would have helped with the initial struggles with the text. On the other hand, those initial struggles seem like an important part of the process. In and out of the classroom any of us might struggle to make sense of a complicated world. The hope is that having struggled with a difficult text there will be a transfer of skills that is applicable to other situations in which students find it difficult to make meaning from a first encounter.  The final step in my process was to put my strikethrough formatted text into a Word document and to use the drawing function to cross out the words in digital purple marker. Here is a screenshot of the poem:   Cross Out Poem using a section of “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” by James Baldwin Poem and Photo by Susan Bernstein March 15, 2023. It is perhaps an interesting way to teach paraphrase, as well as a different approach to the writing process and close reading and analysis. Indeed, as with any form of interpretation based on existing evidence, I imagine that the same passage would yield many different cross out poems. But for the moment, the hope is that students will experience for themselves what it means, as artists writing for discovery, to struggle with their integrity. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Xinqiang Li, a writing instructor at Michigan State University. Class as People It’s the students who have inspired me to bring out the best in my teaching. Their eager questions, timely submissions, and even the smiley faces at the end of their emails remove my nervousness and tiredness at the beginning of the semester. They remind me to teach the class as people. Gradually, I’ve learned to imagine the class as a tea house conversation. I step off the platform, walk among the students, and change the sentence “Writing is an epistemic and recursive process” into “How many drafts do you usually write?” Then, I see eyes light up in the class. Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Neil Young’s celebrated anthem “My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue)” of 1979 was a response to the punk-inspired insistence at the time that rock music was passé, at best, or dead at worst. There could be little doubt that reports of the death of rock-and-roll were highly exaggerated, as New Wave, Heavy Metal, Grunge, Alt-Rock, Post-Punk, and other new sub-genres revitalized music through the 1980s and into the ‘90s.  But as time subtracts one rock legend after another (the death of Gary Rossington being the most recent as I write these words), it may not be so premature any longer to wonder whether the once mighty House of Rock is falling into musical irrelevance. The most obvious place to start in an evaluation of the decline of rock-and-roll is with its generational history: Rock emerged in the 1950-60s as the musical voice of the Baby Boom generation, replacing jazz and swing in the pantheon of popular culture.  It evolved rapidly, producing new styles and sub-genres even as the Boomers gave way to Gen X. The sky, to borrow a line from Tom Petty, seemed to be the limit.  But a look at the most recent Grammy Awards reveals just how things have changed as the Millennials and Gen Z have settled into their place as the successors of today’s popular music.  Among the 66 awards categories this year, five were devoted to rhythm-and-blues, three to rap, and three to blues.  Lizzo won Record of the Year, and Beyoncé broke the record for Grammy awards.  For its part, Pop, as a genre in and of itself, loomed large, as it does throughout the world of contemporary popular music.  Meanwhile, there were just four categories devoted to rock, with Brandi Carlile—an alt-country star with rock-and-roll chops—taking two of them, while Ozzy Osbourne—a flash from the past if there ever was one—garnering the other two.  Adam Granduciel and The Black Keys, two more recent representatives of the rock tradition, were in the running but failed to bring home any trophies. It is evident that rock-and-roll, as we used to say, is no longer where it’s at, with such scant attention being paid to the most current bearers of the torch.  But there is more to the matter than the simple inevitabilities of generational change; after all, Gen X carried the rock tradition forward—it didn’t bury it.  To see what deeper causes are behind the decline of rock we have to examine its racial rather than generational history. As I note in the introduction to the eighth chapter of the 10th edition of Signs of Life in the USA, “Tangled Roots: The Cultural Politics of Popular Music,” the history of American pop music is marked by racial co-creativity combined with racial marginalization and suppression, and the history of rock-and-roll is no exception.  Co-created by such pioneers as Rosetta Tharpe, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddly, and Little Richard, along with Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly, early rock-and-roll was very quickly segregated and stratified. Black performers were shunted to the side (often re-categorized into rhythm-and-blues), while white performers, most strikingly by way of the British Invasion, became the face and future of rock-and-roll.  Rock, in short, became coded as White. The ongoing waxing of such genres as rhythm-and-blues, soul, and rap, when seen against the waning of rock, perhaps suggests a cultural shift away from this history of racial repression in music, as well as the emergence of a new social dynamic in the world of contemporary music.   Photo by Mick Haupt (2020), used under the Unsplash License. ... View more

The work I have done on listening—inspired by Krista Ratcliff’s groundbreaking Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness (2005), and by long talks about “soundscapes” with a good friend who is blind—led me to stumble onto sound studies, which focuses on the concept of “sound” in modern times and most recently on technologies of sound. And then when I read Nicole Furlonge’s magical Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature (2018), I started trying hard to hear the voices in books—and to hear, really hear, the voices of those around me, particularly students. So, you can imagine that when I ran across a book called Permission to Speak: How to Change What Power Sounds Like (2023), I was instantly intrigued. This book, by speech coach and linguist Samara Bey, grew out of Bey’s experience of literally losing her voice during her grad school years, and her discovery that the troublesome nodules growing on her vocal cords and impeding her speech were caused by: her lowering her voice, mostly unconsciously, to a tone not comfortable for her. In attempts to sound a certain way—a powerful way—she had come close to silencing herself. This experience led, eventually, to her career as a speech coach and consultant, working with professionals ranging from Pierce Brosnan to Gal Gadot, and others who want help finding or reclaiming their voice. What does power sound like to you?   What intrigued Bey in her studies of voices was the “authoritative voice” she heard so much about. How did one acquire such a voice? She discusses this at some length in her introduction, but it turns out the voice of authority sounds like “straight, white, rich, remarkably large men… They are who we tend to believe. They are out experts and anchors and leaders and heroes.” Take a look at courses on “executive presence” or “how to sound like a leader,” she says, and you’ll find advice to speak slowly, keeping your voice low and steady and avoiding emotion. Hence the subtitle of her book: How to Change What Power Sounds Like. In eight chapters, she guides readers (speakers!) through discussions of breathing, vocal tics and habits, pitch and tone, the use of emotion, liking your own voice, and owning the words you choose to use. She asks, “How could we be seen and heard when we’re scrambling to hide the parts of ourselves that don’t fit the standard and squeezing our voices into the mold that was never meant to fit us?” —and goes on to argue that we can resist that “standard” and, indeed, even change it. Bey provides lots and lots of concrete examples of learning to hear and to really like your own voice, and how to inhabit it in ways that will connect you to other people. It’s her belief (and her experience) that learning about and embodying your own voice is the path toward “fundamental human coexistence” and to the “promise of belonging and the pleasure of community. It’s saying Let’s care about things together. Public speaking is just caring about things together, bigger.” Bey invites readers to join her in figuring out how they sound when they “actually believe that”—and to join her in a movement to change what power sounds like. I haven’t finished reading this book yet, but I can already see excellent applications for teaching, and for learning to listen not only to our students’ attempts to emulate the standard “voice of authority” but to the voices that carry their deepest sense of self.   Photo by Bogomil Mihaylov on Unsplash. ... View more

I have found necessary community this year in the pedagogical reading groups offered through our University Center for Excellence in Teaching. I was notably inspired by Kevin M. Gannon’s bold book Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto, which I have written about before. And while I’m still reading James M. Lang’s thought-provoking Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It, I have also written about his helpful reminder that “dis-traction” means “to drag something apart.” Taken together, I’ve come to realize that when we hold our students’ attention, we are holding the classroom community together, too. I’d been feeling like this semester had a pre-pandemic zhuzh to it, but now that midterms are hitting and spring break isn’t yet here, students are noticeably dragging and less engaged in discussion. Christine Cucciarre’s recent “Tiny Teaching Story” about the lingering weight of the pandemic is a sorrowful snapshot of this strange moment. This past week, all these threads twined together as I attended a webinar by Gannon on “A Pedagogy of Hope During the Time of Monsters,” hosted by IUPUI’s Center for Teaching and Learning. According to Gannon, the “monsters” of today are the anti-democratic and anti-education forces at work in the U.S., but the “hope” comes from remembering that we can inspire agency in our students. Writing classrooms are a good place for that work. Gannon noted that learning is a social act that has both cognitive and affective components. Successful instructors give students opportunities to connect thinking and feeling, and to connect with one another. Those connections, Lang argues, are what hold students’ attention in the classroom. Similarly, Lang encourages instructors to make time in a class for students to reflect on their deeply-felt core values, citing studies which show that values-affirmation exercises can help students better articulate and access their pro-social beliefs. With both Gannon and Lang in mind, I zhuzhed my usual mid-semester student self-reflection  by asking my students to list their core values in their notes at the start of class. After a few minutes, I asked them to share what they wished to with peers around them.  After some uncertainty, a buzz slowly rose in the room. Students were smiling, nodding heads, affirming one another. After a few more minutes, we listed what they’d been talking about on the board, and students seemed to find the overlap in their values revelatory. Their list included: kindness, truthfulness, generosity, humility, open-mindedness, respect for diversity, honesty (and more). Almost poetically, the sun poked through Indiana’s winter perma-cloud at this moment, flooding our classroom with warmth just as I chalked the last inspirational word. That got a laugh. With that valued conversation warming the room, I asked students to reflect for me on their progress in the course so far. How are they challenging themselves? What are they happiest with? How are they hoping to grow by the semester’s end? Since I will be handing these reflections back to them at the semester’s end for their summative reflections, I also urged them to write an encouraging note to their future selves. I was initially met with some nervous chuckles, but when I collected the papers, I was touched to see how many students were as kind and encouraging to themselves as they had been in many discussions with one another. In his talk, Gannon quoted abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba: “Hope is a discipline—an action, a practice.” In those sunshine-washed moments in our classroom this week, that’s what I witnessed. To me, and to my students, I believe, this practice felt necessary.   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.   Many times in my teaching career, I've found myself hovering over students to make sure I can help them if they need it. There is nothing innately wrong with my desire to help; it’s just that many of us have this desire to help so ingrained in us that we can go overboard. I will never forget when a student said "Professor, please step away from my computer. I've got this. Also, you scared the crap out of me." I often have to remind myself to step back (literally!) and trust students. In contemplating my propensity for hovering, I’ve thought about how my late grandmother, Mabel, would send her four children out the door to explore nature, fully trusting their ability to play and learn independently. As part of my commitment to be more like Grandmom Mabel and not be a helicopter professor, I’ve made a commitment to incorporate in each unit of study at least one self-directed student activity that takes place during the class timeframe but outside of the walls of the classroom. Recently, I designed a photography activity for my Humanities 101 class that was based on Ancient Chinese philosophy and aesthetics: specifically, Taoism, ancient Chinese landscape painting, and Confucianism. I asked students to pair up and take twenty-five minutes in the halls of the college or outside on nearby Spring Garden Street to take a photo with a smartphone (or make a drawing) that represented an element of one of the spiritual or aesthetic philosophies. Afterward, students answered questions about their photograph, what the composition represented, and how contemporary American culture was present in their photo. Students’ responses were rich; they identified spaces on campus meant for collaboration that wound up being devoid of students. They talked about how architecture communicates feelings of stability even if that stability might not exist, and they mentioned some of their thoughts about why our college’s new learning commons might mirror a more collectivist ideology, despite the fact that we are living in an individualistic culture. A few students who had been shy about participating in class showed their creativity in this activity by turning Wawa coffee cups into timber-frame-inspired ancient Chinese architecture and photographing the results. Without my hovering over and actively surveilling them, my students could breathe, think, and engage with each other more freely, all in service of our class’s learning goals. Because the activity happened during class time, we were able to debrief and look at the photos together once they returned to our classroom, while the energy of their discoveries was still alive in the students. Be like Grandmom Mabel: open the door and send students through it. And with a lesson plan that invites students back at the end of class to share and synthesize their discoveries as a group, you can confirm, as I have, that students make important discoveries and take insight-producing creative risks when freed from the distracting noise of a helicopter hovering nearby. ... View more