This blog series is written by Julia Domenicucci, an editor at Macmillan Learning, in conjunction with Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. Class discussion can be a great way to engage students with each other and with course materials. Using podcasts as the basis for a discussion in your composition course can also serve as a nice change from talking about the usual essays, stories, or instructional content. This blog post outlines some discussion ideas for using podcasts in two ways—talking about podcasts and talking about the content of podcasts. Podcasts are well-established, but their popularity seems to increase every day—and for good reason! They are engaging and creative, and they cover every topic imaginable. They are also great for the classroom: you can use them to encourage student engagement and introduce multimodality.  LaunchPad and Achieve products include assignable, ad-free Grammar Girl podcasts, which you can use to support your lessons. You can assign one (or more!) of these suggested podcasts for students to listen to before class. Each podcast also comes with a complete transcript, which is perfect for students who prefer to read the content. To learn more about digital products and purchasing options, please visit Macmillan's English catalog or speak with your sales representative.   If you are using LaunchPad, refer to the unit “Grammar Girl Podcasts” for instructions on assigning podcasts. You can also find the same information on the support page "Assign Grammar Girl Podcasts."  If you are using Achieve, you can find information on assigning Grammar Girl in Achieve on the support page “Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course.” If your English Achieve product is copyright year 2021 or later, you are able to use a folder of suggested Grammar Girl podcasts in your course; please see “Using Suggested Grammar Girl Podcasts in Achieve for English Products” for more information.   Using Grammar Girl Podcasts to Talk about Podcasts as a Medium Pre-Class Work: Assign two Grammar Girl podcasts of varying lengths for your students to listen to before your next class. Suggest they make notes about the podcasts like they would for other readings or content assigned in class. For a longer podcast, you might assign “The Proto-Indo-European Language” (15:45) or “Bare Infinitivals” (15:12) or “Affect versus Effect” (09:15) and for a shorter podcast you might assign “Hyphens in Ages” (02:28) or “Pronoun Order” (02:55) or “Momentarily or In a Moment?” (01:43). Tip: If you’re using Achieve, see “Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course” and “Create an Assessment” for help with making Grammar Girl podcasts available to students. Discussion: In class, assign your students to small groups of 3-4 students, either in person or virtually. Ask them to discuss the following points: How do we, as a group, define “podcast”? How do podcasts differ from lectures, videos, or audiobooks? How are they similar? What are examples of podcasts we have listened to? How are the two Grammar Girl podcasts we listened to similar? Different? What is the structure of each of the podcasts we listened to? Is there an introduction, middle, and/or conclusion?  What are the other defining elements of these podcasts? How did the content inform the length of each podcast? Did either podcast feel too long or too short? If too long, what information could have been removed? If too short, what could have been added? What questions do I still have after listening to this podcast, either about the content or about how it was created? Reflection: After discussing in their groups, ask each student to write a summary of the group’s thoughts. Come back to discuss the questions, and each group’s answers, as a class. Tip: If you are using an Achieve English course, consider creating a custom Writing Assignment that students can use to submit their reflections. Refer to the article “Guide to Writing assignments for instructors” for help with Writing Assignments.   Using Grammar Girl Podcasts to Generate Discussion around a Topic Pre-Class Work: Assign two Grammar Girl podcasts on a topic (or similar topics) you want your students to work with. As they listen, ask students to record the following for each podcast: 1 thing they learned 1 question they still have 1 personal connection (to an experience, piece of writing, class, etc.) Tip: If you’re using Achieve, consider assigning podcasts from the folder of suggested Grammar Girl podcasts in your course; please see “Using Suggested Grammar Girl Podcasts in Achieve for English Products” for more information. Or, you can assign podcasts from the categories that these podcasts are organized into, like “Academic Reading, Writing, and Speaking,” “Adjectives and Adverbs,” or “Word Usage.” See “Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course” for help with assigning podcasts other than those in the suggested podcasts folder. Discussion: In class, assign your students to small groups of 3-4 students. Ask them to discuss the following points: Summarize the topic(s) covered in the podcast. What were the differences between how the podcasts addressed the topic(s)? The lessons learned from each podcast. Were any of our takeaways the same? Similar? The questions we still have. How might we find the answers to these questions? Presentation: Students should then take their findings and create a short 3-4 minute presentation based on their discussions. The presentation should include a summary, their takeaways, and any remaining questions. Encourage students to use visuals (images, graphs) as well as text, and cite their sources (the podcasts, the image creators, etc.). Each group can then present to their classmates, or the presentations can be shared online.   This semester, be sure to check out our other Grammar Girl assignment ideas. You can access previous posts from the Bedford Bits home page or by visiting “30+ Grammar Girl Assignments for Your Next Class” on the Quick and Dirty Tips website (these assignments are based on some of the blog posts, and six of them include downloadable PDFs!).   Have you used Grammar Girl—or any other podcasts—in your classes? Let us know in the comments. We’d love to hear from you and learn about how you are using podcasts this semester—or in past semesters!   Credit: "Old phone" by nicolasnova is marked with CC BY 2.0. ... View more

I'm currently reading Plurilingual Pedagogies for Multilingual Writing Classrooms, edited by Kay M. Losey and Gail Shuck, and it includes Shawna Shapiro's "'Language and Social Justice': A (Surprisingly) Plurilingual First-Year Seminar." While this essay has not helped me make clear distinctions between plurilingualism and translingualism, it has reminded me of the critically important work Shapiro has been doing for years now, slowly and steadily and carefully building a case for putting critical language awareness at the heart of our writing classrooms and our writing curricula. I've been privileged in the last year or so to follow Shapiro's work closely and to be part of a group with whom she shared chapters of her new book, Cultivating Critical Language Awareness in the Writing Classroom. This book is thoroughly grounded in theory and research, but also in the daily practicalities of teaching writing. In fact, I'd say that is one significant hallmark of all Shapiro's work: the weaving of theory and practice, along with the insistence on collaboration and on attending with great care to the voices of students. This new book has been called a critical "toolkit for supporting and embracing linguistic diversity" in writing classes, and it certainly is that, though the "toolkit" is embedded in a rich historical and theoretical context. The same can be said for her recent essay on language and social justice: it walks the walk and talks the talk of "plurilingual pedagogy," always in the service of student writers/speakers, and always deeply collaborative. In this case, the students are key collaborators in creating the principles the course rests on as well as in shaping its curriculum. We hear their voices loud and clear throughout the essay, culminating in student writing for a "Writing beyond the Classroom" assignment that invited students to use their entire writing and linguistic repertoires. The two poems and the presentation of them described at the end of the essay demonstrate the power of mixing languages, of the human voice, and of the possibilities embodied in a plurilingual pedagogy. There are other terrific essays in Plurilingual Pedagogies for Multilingual Writing Classrooms, and I expect I will be writing about them in due time. But today, I want to recommend Shapiro's article in particular—and her book. When I think back on my early days of teaching, with only an MA in literature, I know I would have given just about anything to have had these resources at my disposal. But in addition to her book and many articles, Shapiro is building an amazing online resource for all of us. Called the CLA Collective, this is first a companion website to Shapiro's book, but as I know from many conversations with her, Shawna sees it as potentially so much more. Rather, she envisions it as a gathering space or hub for all teachers of writing, one where we can share and learn from one another. (You can join the Collective by going to the "Connect" page and simply signing up.) But even in its early stages, the site is full of information and resources, including syllabi, handouts, readings, "Shawna's 'Top 5' lists of other websites"—and more. If you are looking for ways to promote social justice in and through your pedagogy and to encourage and enable linguistic pluralism—while attending to everything else your university expects of you AND teaching multiple courses every single term—then this new book and website can be of enormous help. Maybe I'll see you at the CLA Collective! Image Credit: "Stack of thin flexicover books on reflective table" by Horia Varlan, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Commenting on student papers, for me, involves a lot of sipping tea and staring into space. So, my eyes often rest on this young tree growing across the street from my work table at home. Springtime floats on the breeze some days in March in Indiana, but buds are still tight, so I can see clearly the serpentine structure of this tree. I admire the way it has veered off course — due to wind, or kids hanging on low branches (there’s a school nearby) — and then found its way back to the vertical climb. How? Through continued growth. Yes, I’m dealing in metaphor here; it’s an occupational hazard of English majors. But now that we’re midway through the semester, it’s a good time to check in with students — and with ourselves as instructors — to see what’s going well, and what we might do differently as we all continue to grow. Andrea Lunsford’s recent post, “On Engaging Respectfully,” reminds us of the power of using our writing classrooms to help students practice (including failing and trying again) the skills we need now for deep, thorny, and necessary conversations in this divided world. Self-reflection and self-assessment are also skills our students take with them into other courses and far beyond. For many years, I’ve given over to students the power to assess their own participation. If you’d like to dip your toe into the practice of “Ungrading,” handing students the responsibility for this aspect of their evaluation is a low-stakes and high-impact place to begin, since “participation” grades are inherently subjective from the instructor’s perspective. As I wrote about here, students tend to handle this responsibility with seriousness and aplomb if they are offered some guidance and encouragement to reward themselves for growth. In my classes, we reflect in the first days of the semester on the power of taking risks and stretching ourselves as learners. Students set specific participation goals for themselves. Now that we’re midway through the semester, it’s helpful to carve out class time for self-reflection to see if they think they are veering off course, and how they would like to continue to grow. The assignment doesn’t take long: In a paragraph, please reflect on your own participation and attendance in this course up to this point in the semester. How are you challenging yourself? What are you pleased with? How would you like to progress or grow between now and the end of the semester? Remember that at the end of the semester, I will ask you to weigh in with a written self-assessment and numbers (out of a possible 200 points) about your attendance and participation over the whole semester. This is a time to pause and reflect and set some goals for the rest of our time together. I’m always illuminated by their self-assessments, which are often humble and frequently funny. They help me evaluate whether I’m doing enough to structure democratic discussions and activities that engage each individual. Like students, at this point in the semester, I, too, can fall back on tried and tired activities that don’t push any of us into new territory.  I see self-assessment as more than a “course correction,” though that might be part of what happens with this assignment. But that phrase doesn’t capture the value I see in that serpentine tree, more interesting for its serpentine journey. Nor does it capture the environment I try to cultivate in my classroom, where students can transform themselves by taking risks, often by failing for a bit while trying something new, rather than following the straight line of what they’ve always done to succeed in school.  Wisdom, strength, and even grace come from allowing ourselves to veer into new territory, reflecting on what we learn along the way.   Image Credit: Photograph taken by the post’s author, April Lidinsky ... View more

When Harper & Row, way back in 1990 when it was still called Harper & Row, picked up my book The Signs of Our Time: Semiotics: The Hidden Messages of Environments, Objects, and Cultural Images (1988) for republication in their Perennial Library series, they made a subtle change in the subtitle of the book, changing it to The Secret Meanings of Everyday Life. I had no say in the matter, but I knew why they made the change: clearly the idea was to make the title more intriguing for potential readers who, in this conspiracy-obsessed society of ours, believe that a lot is being hidden from them and they want to find out what it is because they think that it is doing them harm. (It bears noting that I didn't have anything to do with the original subtitle either, which also attempts to pique reader interest with a promise of revelation, of a lifting of the veil on something that has been concealed, something dangerous.) In reality, however, the practice of cultural semiotics has nothing at all to do with concealment or secrecy. If there is any element of occultation at all in the matter it is simply that of what is hidden in plain sight, of what appears to us right there in the open inviting us to ask questions about it, questions that can be answered by looking at other perfectly visible cultural phenomena that both contextualize and explain what we are seeing through what I call "systems of association and difference" in every edition of Signs of Life the USA, the book that grew out of The Signs of Our Time way back in 1994. Take, for example, the recent headline from the Los Angeles news source KTLA: "Super Bowl commercials: Heavy on celebrities and nostalgia".  Now, over the years I have performed a lot of semiotic analyses of Super Bowl commercials, both of individual advertisements and of the way that the ads have become almost as important as the game itself. I have analyzed puppies and vampires, office workers and blue jeans, attack dogs and pink bunnies .  .  .  the list goes on and on. But this time I want to look not at any particular Super Bowl LVI ads per se, but what has been said about them generally in the mass media. Here are some more headlines to give you some idea of their drift: "Touchdown or fumble? Check out the celebrities who star in the 2022 Super Bowl ads"; "Here are the top celebrity 2022 Super Bowl commercials"; "The Super Bowl ads showed celebrities rule the world. We’re just buying stuff in it"; and so on and so forth. So it isn't just KTLA that noticed how celebrity performers dominated this year's Super Bowl advert extravaganza. As I say, it's all in plain sight. But what does it tell us? We can begin our analysis with a simple question: to wit, why were there so many celebrity adverts at this year's Super Bowl?; to which KTLA offers a succinct answer: Off the field, Super Bowl advertisers were in a tough competition of their own. Advertisers shelled out up to $7 million for 30 seconds of airtime during the Super Bowl, so they pulled out all the stops to win over the estimated 100 million people that tune into the game. Big stars, humor and a heavy dose of nostalgia were prevalent throughout the night. So far so good, but now we are faced with another question: how does such star power translate into effective advertising? The answer to this question is practically self-evident: Americans are not only entertained by celebrities—and thus associate their pleasure in watching celebrity ads with the products being advertised, enhancing the possibility that they will purchase them—they also tend to identify with, and, accordingly, to trust them. Advertisers have known this for a very long time, so the system to which the Super Bowl LVI ads belong is a large and historically well-grounded one. In one sense, then, the ads this year were nothing new. But the fact that so many mass media reports highlighted the sheer volume of celebrity ads this time around marks a difference, a difference not in kind but in degree. There just seem to have been a lot more celebrities featured in this year's Super Bowl ads than there have been in past years, and this difference raises further cultural-semiotic questions. One such question could be, what is it with celebrities anyway these days?, and George Packer's essay "Celebrating Inequality" (which you can find on pages 86-88 in the 10th edition of Signs of Life in the USA) provides a trenchant answer. As my head note to Packer's analysis puts it: "Our age is lousy with celebrities," George Packer quips .  .  .  and it’s only getting worse. Indeed, in tough times like today’s, when the gap between the rich and the poor yawns ever wider, celebrities loom larger on the social horizon than they have in more equitable times, overshadowing the rest of us. And we’re not just talking about entertainers. Indeed, as Packer notes, they include entrepreneurs, bankers, computer engineers, real estate developers, media executives, journalists, politicians, scientists, and even chefs. And as the new celebrity deities gobble up whatever opportunities are left in America, Packer believes, America itself is turning backward to the days of the Jazz Age and Jay Gatsby. So, meet the new celebrity gods; same as the old celebrity gods — or "something far more perverse." Packer's essay was written in 2013, and since then the situation has only intensified, with Super Bowl LVI being just one signifier of this intensification. In the intervening years the power of the Internet "influencer" has also grown, along with that of the traditional celebrity, within a social environment in which fewer and fewer people are taking up more and more space. The Super Bowl ads are a case in point. Advert roles that once went to non-celebrity performers are increasingly going to the already successful. This is not trivial if you are a budding actor yourself, because television advertising has long been a gateway to an economically sustainable career for non-celebrity performers. When we expand the system further, we can see, for example, how the career path of journalism has been similarly affected, with only a handful of celebrity journalists raking in most of the money while the rest flounder as freelancers or simply give their writing away for nothing. And I hardly need to explain how the adjunctification of higher education is affecting many of the members of the Macmillan Learning community, as a shrinking number of TED-talk-level celebrity professors enjoy a growing proportion of the financial rewards. The list of examples could go on and on. As I say, all of this is in plain sight. There is no conspiracy. One only needs to look at what is going on all around us, and our own participation in it. Thus, in what constitutes nothing less than a betrayal of the American dream, the victims of a society that is producing fewer and fewer "winners" and more and more "losers" are looking in the wrong places for the sources of their distress, laughing at funny Super Bowl commercials starring A-list performers when the joke, in the end, is on them.   Image Credit: "365 x36 Guinea Pig Conspiracy" by David Masters is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

I wonder how many teachers of writing are beginning to think it’s time to take a linguistic time out and think through a number of terms that are coming at us from all sides. Here are just a few of them: bilingual (and in particular “dominant bilingual,” “balanced bilingual,” ”incipient bilingual,” etc.), multilingual, metrolingual, polylingual, plurilingual, translingual, languaging. . . I could go on and on. And I’ve been reading as fast as I can, trying to keep track of all the permutations of these terms, the controversies swirling around them, and the ideological freight that each term carries. Not to mention the choices hard-working teachers have to make, often on the fly. In Marshall and Moore’s 2018 study “Plurilingualism Amid the Panoply of Lingualisms: Addressing Critiques and Misconceptions in Education,” published in the International Journal of Multilingualism, they distinguish plurilingualism (which comes from European theorists) by saying that it moves away “from the view of languages as separate, parallel, autonomous systems based on discourses of complete competencies to a view that recognizes hybridity and varying degrees of competence between and within languages” (3)—except that such a distinction also seems to apply to translingualism, and perhaps other terms as well. One very recent book that is helping me think about these terms is Kay M. Losey and Gail Shuck’s edited volume Plurilingual Pedagogies for Multilingual Writing Classrooms, though its title demonstrates terministic slippage at work. From what I’ve read of this book so far, the authors seem to be making a very strong case for moving swiftly away from the heretofore dominant English-only approach in writing classes (a good start) to what they present as a plurilingual approach that would recognize and value “the many proficiencies students bring with them to the classroom” and thus create “a classroom climate of mutual respect and admiration, fostering self-efficacy and self-confidence in learners” in which “students’ full identities and backgrounds. . . would become an essential, honored part of the classroom community” (2). I applaud this approach—but it seems to me characteristic of translingual and even multilingual approaches as well. I feel like I am swimming in alphabet soup. I clearly need to stop complaining, dig deeper, and do much more reading. And then perhaps I can write something that will clarify these terms—if only for myself. Words—and definitions—matter. So if you can clarify distinctions among these terms, I am all ears and would appreciate the help! Image Credit: "Hostelling International 19" by orijinal, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

This blog series is written by Julia Domenicucci, an editor at Macmillan Learning, in conjunction with Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.   Punctuation is often, literally, the smallest portion of a piece of writing—but it can have incredible impact. Assign Grammar Girl podcasts about punctuation to your students; then, use the activities in this blog post to explore punctuation choices in both professional and student writing. Podcasts are well-established, but their popularity seems to increase every day—and for good reason! They are engaging and creative, and they cover every topic imaginable. They are also great for the classroom: you can use them to encourage student engagement and introduce multimodality.  LaunchPad and Achieve products include assignable, ad-free Grammar Girl podcasts, which you can use to support your lessons. You can assign one (or all!) of these suggested podcasts for students to listen to before class. Each podcast also comes with a complete transcript, which is perfect for students who aren’t audio learners or otherwise prefer to read the content. To learn more about digital products and purchasing options, please visit Macmillan's English catalog or speak with your sales representative.  If you are using LaunchPad, refer to the unit “Grammar Girl Podcasts” for instructions on assigning podcasts. You can also find the same information on the support page "Assign Grammar Girl Podcasts." If you are using Achieve, you can find information on assigning Grammar Girl in Achieve on the support page “Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course.” If your English Achieve product is copyright year 2021 or later, you are able to use a folder of suggested Grammar Girl podcasts in your course; please see “Using Suggested Grammar Girl Podcasts in Achieve for English Products” for more information.   Using Grammar Girl Podcasts to Explore Punctuation Choices Pre-Class Work: Ask students to come to class with three items: 1) a recent news article, 2) a recent opinion piece or editorial, 3) a recent essay or piece of writing from this course. These should all be digital versions, as students will be working with the text. Assign 2-3 podcasts about punctuation for students to listen to before class. You can choose any podcasts you wish, but you may wish to use some of the following: Commas: Oxford, Appositive, Nonrestrictive Punctuating Questions Quotation Marks and Punctuation How to Use Semicolons Dashes, Parentheses, and Commas Parentheses, Brackets, and Braces The Ampersand Tip: If you’re using Achieve, see “Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course” and “Create an Assessment” for help with making Grammar Girl podcasts available to students. Tip: If you want the class to work with the same piece of text, consider choosing an article for this activity. Or, use this blog post! Assignment Part 1: In class, ask students to take their news article or editorial and choose a paragraph that is at least five sentences long. They should copy the paragraph into a file so they can work with the text. Then, based on what podcasts you have assigned for pre-class work, ask students to do one of the following: Delete all commas in the paragraph. Replace all semicolons with periods and all periods with semicolons. Replace all question marks with exclamation marks. Replace dashes with parentheses and parentheses with dashes. Replace all instances of “and” with an ampersand (&). Ask students to write a brief reflection answering the following questions: How does this change affect the clarity or my understanding of the passage? How does the tone change—or not change—due to these edits? If I were writing this passage, what punctuation choices would I have made? When might unexpected or nontraditional punctuation like this be appropriate? For what audiences? What type of writing? Then, ask students to revisit the original passage and make an additional edit based on the podcasts you assigned (and what you have not already requested they try): Delete all commas in the paragraph. Replace all semicolons with periods. Replace all question marks with exclamation marks. Replace dashes with parentheses and parentheses with dashes. Replace all instances of “and” with an ampersand (&). Again, ask students to write a brief reflection answering the following questions: How does this change affect the clarity or my understanding of the passage? How does the tone change—or not change—due to these edits? If I were writing this passage, what punctuation choices would I have made? When might unexpected or nontraditional punctuation like this be appropriate? For what audiences? What type of writing? Reconvene as a class and discuss the students’ findings and thoughts. Tip: If you are using an Achieve English course, consider creating a custom Writing Assignment that students can use to submit their reflections. Refer to the article “Guide to Writing assignments for instructors” for help with Writing Assignments. Assignment Part 2: Place students in small groups and ask them to share the first paragraph of their essay with their peers. Students should then discuss the following: What punctuation is effective? What is not? Does the punctuation support the tone the writer is aiming for? What edits to punctuation might the writer consider? If students get stuck, suggest they revisit the podcast transcripts for ideas.   Advanced Assignment: Complete the activity using a piece of literature. Consider assigning a short story to the class, or ask students to bring in a novel they’ve recently read. Students should choose two or three paragraphs and should copy the paragraph into a file so they can work with the text. Then, based on what podcasts you have assigned for pre-class work, ask students to do one of the following: Delete all commas. Delete all periods. Replace all semicolons with periods and all periods with semicolons. Replace all question marks with exclamation marks. Replace dashes with parentheses and parentheses with dashes. Replace all instances of “and” with an ampersand (&). Delete all quotation marks. Ask students to write a brief reflection answering the following questions: How does this change affect the clarity or my understanding of the passage? How does the tone change—or not change—due to these edits? If I were writing this passage, what punctuation choices would I have made? What literature have I read that uses unexpected or nontraditional punctuation?   This semester, be sure to check out our other Grammar Girl assignment ideas. You can access previous posts from the Bedford Bits home page or by visiting “30+ Grammar Girl Assignments for Your Next Class” on the Quick and Dirty Tips website (these assignments are based on some of the blog posts, and six of them include downloadable PDFs!).   Have you used Grammar Girl—or any other podcasts—in your classes? Let us know in the comments. We’d love to hear from you and learn about how you are using podcasts this semester—or in past semesters!   Credit: "Punctuation marks made of puzzle pieces" by Horia Varlan is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

“Engaging respectfully with others” is a theme in all my textbooks, as is the need to learn how to engage with people you don’t agree with. I’ve been brought back to this topic lately close to home. I live in a small, managed community on the northern California coast dedicated to “living lightly with the land” and one another. The pandemic has brought hardships here, as everywhere, and tempers have frayed—lately over issues such as carbon sequestration, expansion of our homeowner association facilities, and—most acutely—over astronomical legal fees few seem to understand and steep increases in dues. While I have seen far more vitriol on social media, some rancor has been evident on our local list serv, though people disagree even on that: some say there’s been no rancor or vitriol, just “the truth and tough facts,” while others disagree strenuously. Lately some members have made pleas for better and more open listening, and especially for “more respect, kindness, and humility in our discourse.” One person recommended that we remember, and carefully consider, the Rotary International Four-Way Test­—"Is it the TRUTH? Is it FAIR to all concerned? Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS? Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?”—while another sent in a “think before you speak” poster from her elementary child’s classroom that asks of what you are going to say: “Is it true? Is it helpful? Is it important? Is it necessary? Is it kind?” And yet another person recommended that as we communicate with one another, we will be wise to focus on “Inquiry over Advocacy, Learning over Blame, and Impact over Intent.” All good advice—in fact, words to live and act by. But these guidelines rest on an enthymeme—or unstated assumption—that all people are worthy of and deserve respect. Articulating this assumption has provoked big-time response from my students, so much so that I have to allow plenty of time in class for discussion and debate, and we have to agree on some rules of the road, such as how long any one person can speak, how we will take turns and respond to one another, etc. I find students pretty evenly divided right now, with many insisting that respect is a human right that applies to everyone and with many others disagreeing. Both sides can offer multiple examples in support of their conviction, and a few insist that “it all depends.” Almost all students I’ve explored this question with draw the line at personal safety, saying that engaging respectfully demands that you be safe from attack, violence, and harm. Of course, this principle raises other thorny questions, such as what constitute “harm.” The best we can usually do is work through a few hypothetical case studies together, trying to decide whether the people involved can and should engage respectfully or, if not, what they should do, just how they should disengage, or how they might de-escalate the situation. These are scenarios and questions I would not have thought to ask my students 20 years ago, but today they seem important and necessary. Now I’m thinking hard about how to answer them in my textbooks that want to help all college students. It’s a tall order, and I’ll write more when I have a better handle on practical, helpful guidelines and suggestions. In the meantime, I would be grateful for some help from my wise and generous colleagues. Image Credit: "Speech bubbles at Erg" by Marc Wathieu, used under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license ... View more

    The Beijing Olympics has, of course, been in the headlines for much of February. With an event so large, there are inevitably many controversies to consider as examples of argumentation. Many claims about the Olympics will take the form of claims of value about individual athletes or teams because as we watch them, we are making value judgments just as surely as the judges are although theirs are judgments based on years of experience and training. When politics enters in, we move largely into the realm of claims of policy. After the 2014 Sochi Olympics, Russia was technically banned from competing in the next three Olympics because of doping. Russian athletes are still allowed to compete, however, under the “Russian Olympic Committee” instead of competing for their country. That in itself, of course, is controversial. It seems to be a distinction without a difference. Then the world of Olympic figure skating was rocked by the revelation that one of the skaters who led the ROC to team gold had tested positive for a banned substance: trimetazidine, a drug used primarily for heart patients but one that increases blood flow and stamina and thus can enhance athletic performance. The name of the athlete should not have been released because she is a minor, but the fact that there was only one minor on the gold-medal team made it obvious that the guilty party was Kamila Valieva, favored to win the women’s individual gold as well. One reason for her high scores is her ability to complete the quadruple jump--the first woman to ever land one in Olympic competition--and she landed two! The logical conclusion that many drew was that Valieva should be suspended and that her team should not receive the team gold. In fact, the medal ceremony for the team competition was suddenly scrapped when the drug test results were revealed. To complicate matters, though, the drug test was administered on December 25th, and the results were not reported until February 8th. Negative drug tests indicated that Valieva did not have trimetazidine in her system at the Olympics, but she did when she qualified. Technically she is classified as a “protected person” because of her age, and many, including former winners of Olympic figure skating medals, like Katarina Witt, blame Valieva’s coaches, not Valieva herself. Witt claims, “What they knowingly did to her, if true, cannot be surpassed in inhumanity.”  What seemed like a fairly clear case that Valieva should be suspended from competition is thus complicated by the time lag since the positive test and her age—complicated enough, in fact, that the Court of Arbitration for Sport made the decision not to suspend her, stating that to do so would cause Valieva “irreparable harm.” Juliet Macur and Andrew Keh of the New York Times report, “The panel ruled on a narrow question: Did Russia act improperly when it lifted a suspension of Valieva last week only one day after imposing it? That decision effectively cleared the path for Valieva to compete in the singles event, but three organizations—the International Olympic Committee, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and skating’s global governing body—immediately challenged it in appeals to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the highest legal authority in global sports.” The court of public opinion may not be as forgiving. And the gold-medal podium may be a very lonely place for a fifteen-year-old. Photo: “Olympic Rings”  by Paul R. is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

Twitter is a mystery to me. I cannot manage the flow of information; I feel inundated and overwhelmed by the threads that appear (despite the fact that I have carefully limited the number of people I follow). Nonetheless, I am delighted at times by snippets of wisdom or encouragement, as well as by trends that prod my own thinking about pedagogy. One recent trend involves a photo or concept accompanied by a question—and then the phrase “wrong answers only.” This thread, for example, interrogated the notion of Gricean maxims, a standard in the pragmatics section of any introductory linguistics textbook. While most answers were just fun (the Gricean Maxims are an indie band or perhaps a type of hair coloring), others challenged the maxims with a healthy dose of sarcasm for their so-called “neutrality” as a framework for analyzing discourse. The “wrong answers only” thread starter invites participants to have some fun, yes, but also to define via the negative or to confront assumptions and points of confusion. Such an activity, to me, seems ideally suited to a college classroom: I am wondering if others have used that as a discussion starter or writing assignment in their classes.  I plan to try a couple of “wrong answers only” activities in the next couple of weeks. As a mid-term exercise in a course I’m teaching on second language/multilingual (L2/Lx) writing, I am going to have students revisit some of the key questions we asked at the beginning of the term: who is an L2/Lx writer? What does L2/Lx writing look like? Where does L2/Lx writing occur? What sorts of pedagogies promote L2/Lx writing development? I am going to ask the students to consider these—and some of the assumptions we’ve already uncovered—by having them give me “wrong-answers” only. We’ll start that discussion in a synchronous Zoom session, and we’ll shift it to the asynchronous discussion board after that.  I will also try this as a class-closing exercise in my first-year/corequisite writing course: we’ll take a concept—thesis, introduction, paragraph, sentence, organization, source, etc.—and I’ll ask students to post a definition or example, anonymously, “wrong answers only.” Their responses can serve as a basis for reflection or discussion in subsequent classes—and a way to see how their perception of key concepts can evolve over the course of the semester. Have you used “wrong answers only” (or a variation thereof) in your composition courses? What happened? I’d love to hear from you.   ... View more

bell hooks, by Cmongirl, is available to use in the public domain.    In the fall of 1994, at the beginning of my second year of teaching at a two-year college in a large mid-Atlantic city, I found bell hooks Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom at a local bookstore. I flipped through the book, eventually landing on the essay “Embracing Change: Teaching in a Multicultural World.” In 2022, we would reframe “multiculturalism” as diversity, equity, and inclusion, and nearly thirty years later hooks’ words feel as moving and as relevant to me as that afternoon in the bookstore.    “Embracing Change” begins:  Despite the contemporary focus on multiculturalism in our society, particularly in education, there is not nearly enough practical discussion of ways classroom settings can be transformed so that the learning experience if inclusive. If the effort to respect and honor the social reality and experiences of groups in this society who are nonwhite is to be reflected inn a pedagogical process, then as teachers– on all levels, from elementary to university settings– we must acknowledge that our style  of teaching may need to change (p. 35).   These opening sentences were thrilling to me, and gave insight into my own teaching and learning about multiculturalism in graduate school in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At that time, “multiculturalism,” in practice, often meant changing the syllabus to include writers of color, women, and working class folks. While these changes, in theory, seemed significant to me at the time, changing the sources alone did not lead, in practice, to antiracist classrooms.     For example, as a TA and instructor of record for first-year-writing courses, I taught texts by James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr. to demonstrate how they used rhetorical appeals to structure their arguments. However, in the pedagogical approach introduced in our teaching practicum, teaching the rhetorical situation of audience, purpose, and occasion did not include  historical conditions of racism and white supremacy faced by Baldwin and King as writers and rhetors, and that necessitated antiracist arguments in the first place.     The attention to racism and white supremacy was the gap that bell hooks’ work filled in my education as a teacher. Rather than presenting a generic one-size-fits-all pedagogy, Teaching to Transgress included both theory and practice through a Black feminist intersectional lens.  In other words, hooks suggests why “we must acknowledge that our style of teaching may need to change” ( and offers concrete suggestions for how teachers might approach changing our style.    Years later, in revising Teaching Developmental Writing 4e, my editor and I agreed that “Embracing Change: Teaching in a Multicultural World.” seemed as pertinent as ever. The revision took shape in the aftermath of Occupy Wall Street, and the killing of Trayvon Martin, a young seventeen-year-old Black man, shot to death by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, In 2013, George Zimmerman’s acquittal of all charges in Trayvon Martin’s killing was the catalyst for the beginning of #BlackLivesMatter  as conceived by Alicia Garza, Patrisee Cullors, and Opal Tometi.    For 2022 readers, hooks’ work in “Embracing Change” presents a means of activating diversity, equity, and inclusion beyond adding a few more sources to the class reading list. hooks’  description of the major tenets of a multicultural classroom include:   “To recognize the value of each individual voice” through keeping journals and writing paragraphs in class to one another (p. 40) To learn from our students, and in order to gain an openness toward “different ways of knowing” (p. 41) To study, understand, and discuss whiteness (p.  43). This does not mean recentering whiteness, but instead gaining a deeper sense of historical and cultural perspectives on coming to be seen as white, and such perspectives inform racism and antiracism    While these pedagogical tenents might be seen as commonplaces in 2022, in 1994, hooks’ work felt revelatory.  When I finished graduate school in a decidedly rural setting, I moved from a well-funded Research 1 flagship institution to an urban two-year college that was one of the most poorly funded post-secondary institutions in the same state. The contrast in institutional resource was a deeply troubling introduction to the material and economic realities of neoliberalism.    In light of these stark inequities, Teaching to Transgress opened my mind to reframing  teaching, as hooks suggests, as the practice of freedom, and to comprehending the work of this work teaching beyond the surface level. In other words, given the economic disparities so prevalent in funding for public higher education, it would not be enough to merely restate that all students are capable of learning and growing. Instead, as a teacher,  if the world was ever going to change for the better, I would also need to remain capable of  learning and growing from and alongside my students. Nearly thirty years later, I am grateful to bell hooks for sharing this wisdom, and for the opportunity to recommend her work to a new generation of readers.     Keywords: bell hooks; diversity, equity, and inclusion; first-year writing; professional development ... View more

This week I stumbled across a familiar 1994 essay of Peter Elbow’s called "Ranking, Evaluating, Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment,” published in College English. Finding the essay again was like finding an old friend. Peter Elbow is actually an old friend, and a treasured one, but this essay in particular stuck with me over the decades for its focus on liking, and the importance of liking to improvement in writing. After discussing and dismissing ranking as completely unhelpful, and discussing, critiquing, and then offering a revised model of evaluating, Elbow turns to the concept most attractive to me in this essay, and sums up his argument about liking here: It's not improvement that leads to liking, but rather liking that leads to improvement. It's the mark of good writers to like their writing. Liking is not same as evaluating. We can often criticize something better when we like it. We learn to like our writing when we have a respected reader who likes it. Therefore, it's the mark of good teachers to like students and their writing. (13) Elbow concludes his essay not by rejecting evaluation out of hand but by asking that teachers of writing “learn to be better likers: liking our own and our students’ writing, and realizing that liking need not get in the way of clear-eyed evaluation.” I think I remember this article so clearly also because Elbow talks about what happens when we don’t like our own or our students’ writing, or ultimately when we don’t like students. I have had numerous colleagues who didn’t like students and were proud of it—and I have seen the effects such attitudes have over time. On the other hand, I’ve seen and felt what it means to like students and their writing—or to love it and them in the way bell hooks describes in Teaching to Transgress. As I reread and rethink Elbow’s article, however, I find myself concentrating not so much on teachers but more on how to engage students in being better “likers” of their own writing, and even more important, of doing the hard work of understanding where that liking comes from. So I find myself rethinking the questions I ask students to address with every draft they give me: When did I start writing this piece, and how long did it take me to get a draft? What is still worrying me about this draft, and why ? If I were starting over completely new, what would I do differently and why? What sentence or passage in this draft do I like best—and why? I’d now add to that last question, “What do I like about my writing?” And then, “Where does that liking come from? What influences in your life have led you to like some things about your writing—your parents and teachers? School in general? Your friends? Writers you admire? What else?” In other words, I’d like students to probe what they like, to figure out why they like it and especially whether they “like” something in their writing because they’ve been told, explicitly or much more likely implicitly, by someone or something that it’s good and worthy of being liked. This kind of exercise is hard to do—so students need to work with it several times before they may begin to uncover the sources of their own likes and dislikes in their writing. And they probably will be surprised to find that those likes and dislikes have developed, often unconsciously, from societal cues and reinforcements, and especially from what schools and other institutions (religious ones, for example) have taught them to like and value. At that point, they can begin to ask whether they question any of those likes or values—and why. And then, they may be in a position to reconsider what they like (and dislike) and to make plans for improving or changing their writing accordingly. And, I hope, to like it even more. In the meantime, thanks to Peter Elbow for prompting me to think about the role that liking plays in writing and writing development. Image Credit: Photo 216 by rawpixel.com, used under a Public Domain license ... View more

As the new year approaches (just two more days!), I am thinking of teachers of writing, of all our students, and of the world we inhabit. In my long life, I can remember some very fraught ends-of-years, but perhaps none as perilous as this one. The ongoing deadly pandemic. Social chaos. Factionalism and extremism on the rise. Threats to democracy from within. An inability, or refusal, to distinguish facts and truth from misinformation, crippling conspiracy theories, and lies. A planet teetering on the brink. And yet. We are still here. We are still teaching. We are still helping students learn to think and act for themselves—and for others. We are still creating small acts of kindness, small pockets of hope, small gestures of grace every single day. Resilience. Persistence. Perseverance. What my granny called Stick-to-it-ivity. We have all that, and more. So here’s to you and yours, with wishes for good fun, good food, and good friendship in the new year, along with safety and good health. And most of all, happy teaching. Andrea Image Credit: "Fireworks, New Years Eve, V&A Waterfront" by Derek Keats, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn, a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. 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 “Protest music has always been an essential form of political expression in the US. And at times of political and social unrest, it becomes a crucial refuge — both for musicians, as a release valve for their frustrations and convictions, and for listeners in need of a rallying cry.” – Bridgett Henwood, “The History of American Protest Music, from ‘Yankee Doodle’ to Kendrick Lamar”   One of the courses I teach is an American Literature survey course that provides opportunities to explore a broad range of texts and genres. As we study these texts, I do my best to teach strong interpretive reading strategies and to incorporate multimodal texts and representative visual composition. I work to expand students’ definition of literature and encourage them to practice critical reading strategies to interpret cultural and historical texts and contexts along with traditional texts. This assignment does all of these things, and so I think it can work for a composition course as well as a literature course. Music and lyrics are a popular form of literature that students easily connect to through their lives. I have talked about the ways I have used music in my classes in previous posts (see Music and Class Playlists), but in this assignment, I ask students to look specifically at protest music as a genre. Although protest songs are in their repertoire, students are often unaware of their historical and cultural significance and the ways they have initiated social change. As referenced in the article “The History of American Protest Music, from ‘Yankee Doodle’ to Kendrick Lamar,” “Protest music has been around for centuries: As long as people have been getting fed up with the status quo, they’ve been singing about it. And because music styles, human emotions and social issues are so wide ranging, protest songs are too.” This assignment immerses students in the history and variety of protest music and asks them to interpret particular protest songs. They also work collaboratively with others to read across the examples and present them in a multimodal slide show.   Resources The St. Martin’s Handbook – Ch. 9, Reading Critically The Everyday Writer (also available with Exercises) – Ch. 7, Critical Reading EasyWriter (also available with Exercises) – Ch. 8, Reading and Listening Analytically, Critically, and Respectfully   Steps to the Assignment Historical Context and Genre Examples - Introduce students to the genre of the protest song. I take students through an exploration of protest music and have them read a couple of sources that show the span of the genre. I like the article “The History of American Protest Music, from ‘Yankee Doodle’ to Kendrick Lamar” by Bridgett Henwood, along with some aggregate resources such as Rolling Stone’s Top Protest Songs, Best Protest Songs in History, and a protest song playlist on Spotify. I also show them the brief video “The Evolution of American Protest Music” and guide them to the Spotify playlist (both linked in the Henwood article), which provide an overview with examples. Individual Protest Song Interpretation – Each student will focus on a protest song and search to find lyrics and a video link of an example of music as protest literature or social awareness. I ask them to think about issues and ideas that are important to them and focus on the ways the song creates awareness. They should choose something that has meaning for them—one that has specific cultural, social, or historical implications in which they might be interested. Students then write a short summary that provides artist information (name, year, title, etc.) and an analysis of how and what the song is protesting, including several significant passages from the song that speak to their claims. Have them include the link to the video, and look for them to forge a strong, substantiated interpretation. Like any literature with controversial content, I urge students to be sensitive in their choices and the ways they frame their discussions. Teachers can decide to let students include explicit lyrics or edited versions of the songs based on their own classroom contexts. Individual Slide – Each student then creates an accompanying Google Slide in which they include the song title and artist, a representative image, a meaningful passage from the song, a statement of protest, and a link to the song. Collaborative Slideshow – Students work in teams for this next part and add their individual slides to a Google team slideshow. They review and listen to their teammates’ songs. As a team, they shape the collaborative slideshow to include: An original, engaging title Team number and member names Team members’ individual slides A collaborative slide for takeaways—They should read across all the songs to look for patterns, connections, larger meanings, and meaningful ideas. References Presentation – Each team presents their slideshow to the class (both individual and collaborative takeaways and connections). This allows students to discuss the range of possibilities and artists and the ways these songs affect social change and awareness. It also introduces students to songs they might not have heard before to consider for future analysis (and listening pleasure). I encourage them to take notes along the way to select songs to which they might want to return. Students then post their team slideshows to a common space (Google Drive or a course LMS). Review and Listen – Students review and listen to at least 5 unfamiliar songs from other teams' protest music collections. They post a bulleted list of their choices along with a sentence or two comment about something they considered for each song. Playlist – As a fun addition to the assignment, teachers can compile a class playlist to share with students for their own music libraries. Check out the Protest Song Playlist from my Fall 2021 class.   Reflections on the Activity The assignment draws on many multimodal components: music, representative visuals, digital representation, and collaborative digital composing. Students enjoy this assignment because it helps them appreciate the ways their critical reading skills can be applied to cultural artifacts and to their lives. And . . . almost everyone loves music! Students focused on songs that protested issues such as: Unity, peace, and strength War involvement and political change Government corruption and abuse of power Civil and human rights Violence Media influence and distortion Gender identity and empowerment Many students said that they heard these songs before but did not stop to consider their meaning or the impact they might have on social awareness and change. I always find it interesting to hear new songs and themes they select and add to my own playlist as they share their work. ... View more

2019’s word was “they,” when searches in dictionaries for that word skyrocketed. 2020 was predictable: “pandemic,” as the whole world tried to take in the full havoc and tragedy the coronavirus was having everywhere—nearly five and a half million dead from the virus as I write this post. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that Merriam Webster’s Word of the Year for 2021 is “vaccine,” a word people searched the dictionary 601% more often this year than in 2020. In announcing its word of the year, Merriam Webster noted that the word partially symbolizes hope for a return to our normal lives, hopes that are being severely tested by the arrival of the Omicron variant. But Merriam Webster also notes that the word “vaccine” was “also at the center of debates about personal choice, political affiliation, professional regulations, school safety, healthcare inequality, and so much more.” Its choice, then, perfectly captures the confusion and strife we are experiencing—as hope viewed with skepticism and rejection (often based on misinformation). A complex set of associations for a complex time. The Oxford English Dictionary, while giving a nod to “jab” and “Fauci ouchie,” chose a short form of vaccine—“vax”—for its word of the year. Referring to it as “jaunty,” a senior editor for the OED reported that the word “surged dramatically, occurring more than 72 times as frequently” as it did in 2020. Oxford Languages senior editor Fiona McPherson explained that other vaccine-related words increased as well, but “nothing like vax”; “It’s a short, punchy, attention-grabbing word.” The Cambridge Dictionary took a different approach, naming “perseverance” its word of the year: We can officially announce that the Cambridge Dictionary #WordoftheYear2021 is... 🥁 perseverance (noun): continued effort to do or achieve something, even when this is difficult or takes a long time Find out more here: http://ow.ly/e33L50GO1qg   #CambridgeWOTY According to the dictionary’s press release, people around the world have looked up “resilience” 243,000 times in 2021, in large part because of attempts to cope with the pandemic but also because of NASA’s Perseverance rover, which launched in February and is now sending back reports on microbial life from the red planet. I always look forward to seeing what the American Dialect Society chooses as its word of the year, but they are always later in announcing than the dictionaries so we will have to wait for that one. In the meantime, I wonder what our students would choose as word of the year, and I always think this makes a great classroom activity or writing assignment. For months, I was favoring “slog,” which is what I’ve felt I’ve been doing for the last two years. Or perhaps “one-foot-in-front-of-the-other.” “On hold” would work too, if not for word of year then perhaps feeling of the year. At least that’s better than “despair,” which I and millions of others have also been feeling as we wait, and long for, the waning of this pandemic. In the meantime, I think I’ll go with “resilience” and continue to hope. Image Credit: "Yellowed pages from a dictionary" by Horia Varlan, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Black Panther: The Ancestral Plane NOTE: The photo is from Unsplash and is free to use under the Unsplash license. On the last day of face-to-face teaching and learning in March 2020, my first-year writing classes watched the first hour of the film Black Panther. This time, we had taken great care to investigate such historical contexts as the Black Panther Party and the 1992 civil unrest in Los Angeles, examining an early scene in the film for visual references. Students added their expertise in the work of Marvel Studios, as we laid the groundwork for self-selected topics for the second writing project.  It was Tuesday. “See you Thursday for Black Panther Part 2,” I said at the end of class. The train at rush hour was unusually empty. More commuters were wearing masks. I wrote in my journal throughout the long ride. On Twitter several hours later I saw the announcement that our university was closing down.  In the ten weeks of lockdown and confusion that followed, there was no Black Panther Part 2. Some students had already seen the film or had access to streaming services and chose to write about Black Panther anyway. But not everyone had access to the film, much less access to wifi. In April, as my city became the epicenter of the pandemic, I watched the film by myself. Although I love Black Panther, I could not bear watching the film again after that, and especially not after Chadwick Boseman died. There were too many reminders of a world that now felt lost and beyond repair. But a few weeks before the 2021 Thanksgiving holiday, we began work on writing project 3, the research paper. Students had worked on Civil Rights Movement writing for most of the semester. For the third writing project, they would need to interrogate their own learning and investigate a research question of their own choosing related to Civil Rights writing. I showed an excerpt from Stanley Nelson’s Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution.  Then, something long-sleeping stirred in my thoughts. I asked: Would you like to watch Black Panther the week of Thanksgiving? The Marvel film? The film would be an optional source for the research paper. Later that week I sent out a follow-up survey. Based on the response, there would be two watch parties, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. We would watch my copy of Black Panther together on Zoom. I envisioned the watch party as self care for students and for me as a community of writers, and as a mental health day that would allow us to keep the routine of the Zoom class. In the past, I used to set aside the week of Thanksgiving as a mental health day for all of us, students and teacher alike. My own mental health days pre-pandemic generally consisted of sleeping late, staying off the internet, and reading a book with the cat curled in my lap. This year, I would instead spend the day on Zoom watching a film that evoked painful memories of the involuntary transition from face-to-face to remote teaching and learning. What was I thinking?   I was thinking about self care as framed by Black lesbian warrior poet Audre Lorde in her book A Burst of Light. In a quote often repeated, and very often misunderstood, Lorde writes: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Lorde’s conception of self care is NOT the individualized self-care of bubble baths and essential oils, but self care as enacted by BiPOC women, a care of self that involves activism, community, and joy. Drawing on Lorde’s work, queer feminist critical race theorist Sara Ahmed  suggests, “We reassemble ourselves through the ordinary, everyday and often painstaking work of looking after ourselves; looking after each other.” I reflected once more on what self care might mean in an extended time of uncertainty and grief. Black Panther ‘s plot turns on contested ideas of self care as care for the community. Wakanda’s relationship to the rest of the world is embroiled in constant conflict, and the conflict intersects with questions from a first-year writing course focused on Civil Rights writing. In times of sorrow, exhaustion and loss, what does it mean to bear witness? To break silence? To reckon with history? Black Panther offers multiple challenges to these questions, and ends in Black joy, the joy that rests in self care and the affirmations of community.        ... View more