Recent events have starkly highlighted the disturbing prevalence of rape culture on college campuses. I would hope that this might be an issue of particular importance to students.  Here are some ways you might teach this topic. Offensive banners promoting rape culture get ODU fraternity suspended. Source: wtkr.com Sabrina Rubin Erdely, “Kiki Kannibal: The Girl Who Played With Fire.”  The case of Kiki Kannibal offers a broad grounding to the ways in which rape culture operates, with a particular context on online identities and social media.  By following Kiki’s story, students can see the complex ways that various levels of violence effect young adults generally and women especially. Mara Hvistendahl, “Missing: 163 Million Women.”  Hvistendahl’s essay looks at the serious global consequences resulting from different cultures’ preference for male children.  I would want to use it in this context to give students a global perspective on the way women are devalued and also to help them think about some of the real consequences that come from that. Rebekah Nathan, “Community and Diversity.”  For sure this sequence would demand Nathan.  Her essay about her experience as a first year student at the college where she is in fact a professor reveals serious fractures between colleges’ ideals of community and diversity and the reality of student life.  Though Nathan focuses more on race than gender, I still think it would be vital in helping students further dissect the gap between projected ideals and lived realities. Kenji Yoshino, “Preface” and “The New Civil Rights.” Yoshino offers two useful lines of analysis for looking at campus rape culture.  The first, covering, can help students think about the ways in which the identity and behavior of women is necessarily limited. The second, civil rights, might offer students strategies for changing rape culture while also underscoring some of the problems that come from trying to generate any social change. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

This blog was originally posted on December 9, 2014. With two weeks left in the semester, my students are busy revising creative nonfiction essays for inclusion in their final portfolios.  I admit, this is a very relaxing time for me.  While many of my colleagues are frantically grading papers and writing exams, I’m showing up to school to listen to students give presentations on their favorite authors and to answer questions during office hours.  I’m thinking about getting a hammock for the office, actually. Of course, portfolios will come in and the days leading up to Christmas will be filled with frantic grading.  But I’m enjoying the peace right now, and am reflecting on all of the good work I have read from my students this semester. Back in August, the students entered the classroom for the first time unsure of what to expect.  Everyone knows what fiction and poetry is, but the idea of a “creative nonfiction” workshop is foreign to most of them.  Some of these students are in my class because someone recommended me to them.  Others are majors who need the course in order to move on to more advanced classes.  Others just need to get an arts elective out of the way.  Most, though, aren’t taking the class because they already have a deep and abiding love for the essay or literary journalism. I hope that, over the course of the year, they have grown to love these forms.  Not just because I love these forms myself, but because I have seen this group of students come together and understand each other better as a result of sharing their own personal narratives.  These 18 and 19 year olds began the semester a little nervous, sometimes reluctant to allow themselves to be too exposed in their writing.  But at this point, I think that we have all become friends—or, if not friends, then very supportive colleagues.  We have shared family secrets, discussed our private anxieties, and revealed truths that we usually keep hidden when we’re in the dorms, at the bar, or in a department meeting.  We’ve established a sense of trust with each other, even though—or, perhaps, because?—we didn’t know each other 14 weeks ago. Some of these students will go on to study English and creative writing.  Some will go on to publish their work.  Most will not.  But I hope that these students will look back on the experience of taking this class fondly, and I hope they feel like they learned useful things during our time together.  Of course, if they find that they’re able to express themselves through writing more effectively, that’s great.  But more importantly, I hope that, through reading and writing creative nonfiction, they’ve come to understand that they’re not alone in the universe.  I hope they realize that their friends, their classmates, and even their professors struggle with private stresses and anxieties.  I hope they have learned that, sometimes, we all feel isolated, or freakish, or terrified.  And I hope that they’re able to take this knowledge with them after they leave my classroom, better equipped to try to understand someone else’s point-of-view.  This, I think, is the most important reason to study creative nonfiction. ... View more

This post first appeared on January 13, 2015. This year, in teaching my Shakespeare course, I used the 450th birthday as an excuse to get students to bring Shakespeare awareness to campus. To that end, I created an assignment that I called “Pop-up Shakespeare,” which I described like this: You will be developing some sort of experience for your fellow Heidelberg students, whether it’s through chalking Shakespearean sonnets onto the sidewalks, developing a Shakespeare film festival, performing flash mob scenes, or creating a Shakespeare-related volunteer project (just to suggest some ideas). For this assignment you can work with a group or alone. You must document the event through pictures; you will also write a brief analysis of your work, explaining why you chose to do what you did. The object of the assignment was to encourage students to have some fun with Shakespeare and to exercise some creativity in doing so. It was ultimately a small part of the final grade, but I wanted something that would make Shakespeare just a bit less intimidating and would make literature a bit more visible on campus. The results were fun — and I heard from a number of colleagues in other departments how much they were enjoying the different things that students were posting around campus. We had some sidewalk chalk, we had a movie night in one of the residence halls, and mostly we had a lot of great signs. ... View more

​This post originally appeared on December 23, 2014. Recently, a colleague in the social sciences asked me how I was getting my students to put together creative presentations for class. My first response? I genuinely don’t know. Not all of my students do things that are out of the ordinary, but sometimes they really do put together presentations that challenge themselves and challenge conventional ways of presenting interpretations of literature.  The best examples from this semester were in my post-1798 survey of British Literature course.  One group, after presenting a bit of background on the work of Lewis Carroll, acted out “The Jabberwocky.”  Another group turned the epistolary juvenalia of Jane Austen’s “Lady Susan” into a play, based on everyone texting each other and using hashtags to indicate themes. Not everyone, of course, does such things. I had plenty of student presentations that stuck to a fairly standard formula of background information, overview of the text, then interpretation of the text. These are fine. They do the work of the assignment.  And for the most part, even though they weren’t quite as exciting as watching a student use a toy lightsaber as the vorpal sword to slay the jabberwocky, they made good use of visual aids and were thoughtful in their commentary. (I suppose it helps that I have a list of pretty specific expectations for what not to do with PowerPoint — most importantly, I insist that students cannot just read from the slides.) But to get back to that question: How do I get students to be creative? How do I get them, ultimately, to have fun with what they’re doing? I don’t have a complete answer for those questions, but I think that there are some ways that we can foster creativity in our classrooms and encourage our students to not take themselves too seriously, even as we take the study of literature (or any subject, really) seriously. The first is that I do not take myself particularly seriously, even though I consider literary analysis to be serious work. Some of this has to do with teaching students about audience — and making sure that students begin to recognize the difference between the (relatively) casual conversation about the text in the classroom and the more formal analysis of the text in their written work. But it really isn’t about me.  It’s really about getting students to engage with the texts in front of them, and getting them to work on the texts in a variety of ways. I’ve written before about my own adherence to multimodal methods in the classroom, and I think that this helps foster that creativity.  We draw things in my classroom.  We write group paragraphs that analyze quotations in class. We use analogies to explain major concepts. We do dramatic readings of the literature. Most importantly, and what takes up a lot of my prep time, is the fact that I try to only use each technique once or twice — so whenever we’re doing some sort of group work, it’s different from the  activity that we’ve done before. This is especially true in my 100- and 200-level literature courses, where I’m trying to teach students about the many different ways that we can talk and think about literature. It does, unfortunately, take time to foster this creativity — many of my most creative projects this semester came from students who have taken multiple classes with me, and so know that my classroom is a fairly safe space to try something new and weird. The study of literature is all about ambiguity and the many ways that we can consider a work — and once students become comfortable with that idea, their creativity can really shine through. ... View more

Next month, the book I co-authored with Roy Stamper and Stacey Cochran, An Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing, will be released. The three of us will be blogging in our new Bits blog “Teaching Writing in the Disciplines” about how to teach with a writing in the disciplines (WID) approach in foundational writing courses, which is the approach of the text. We hope this blog can be a space where we explore methods of teaching and practical classroom activities and approaches. When I first arrived at North Carolina State University nine years ago, I joined a First-Year Writing program that was launching a relatively new curriculum that focused on writing in academic disciplines. I had never taught first-year writing as writing in the disciplines (WID), and I was skeptical: how could a teacher with a background in English teach writing in other disciplines? I was no expert in writing in biology or nursing or math or psychology or any other field other than rhetoric and composition. What in the world would I teach my students? We talk about imposter syndrome a lot in academia. I experienced a pretty severe case of it at that moment. Not only did I feel unqualified to teach the first-year writing course, but I was supposed to start directing the program the following year. I began thinking of all of the reasons why a WID approach seemed challenging: Faculty comfort level: Wouldn’t many of the writing faculty feel uncomfortable about teaching writing in other disciplines, just like I did? Challenges of transfer: How would students transfer knowledge into their other classes? Would they be transferring inaccurate knowledge about genres in other disciplines? Stigma as a service course: Would teaching a WID approach make first-year writing even more of a service course with no real rhetorical, disciplinary content of its own? What I didn’t realize at that moment was that the most effective ways of teaching a WID approach in a first-year writing course do not solely emphasize mastery of various disciplinary genres. Rather, they draw on the disciplinary expertise of the writing faculty teaching the courses, focusing on rhetorical principles and understanding the context for writing. The rhetorical context in a WID-focused course just happens to be writing in different academic disciplines. Students are engaged in close, rhetorical reading of writing in different disciplinary areas. They aren’t memorizing formulae for writing across the college or university. They’re learning to ask smart, rhetorically-focused questions about what writing conventions are followed in a specific field, how arguments are shaped, what evidence is used, what questions are asked, and what methods of inquiry are most common. Students would leave my first-year writing class better prepared to write in contexts outside of my class because they would know what to pay attention to—even as they encountered contexts we never discussed in my class. And as the icing on the cake, if I could help them understand what they were learning in my class and how it would help them in the future, I could imagine an increased potential for student motivation. Once I realized that I could take what I knew about writing and rhetorical context and apply it to a WID context, my list of reasons not to teach a WID approach were immediately countered by arguments for why it was a great idea: Why not? Why WID? Faculty comfort level > Rich, meaningful application of rhetorical principles Challenges of transfer > Potential for transfer when taught from a rhetorical approach Stigma as a service course > Student buy-in and motivation What I can claim after directing a program for eight years that used this approach is that students understood the potential for transfer of what they were learning. When they saw the curriculum, they understood that they would be learning something different from (but hopefully building on) what they learned in high school. Faculty invented a range of ways to approach teaching WID that emphasized some of their passions and interests. And best of all, our program assessment demonstrated that students were mastering the rhetorically-based student learning outcomes for our first-year writing course. A program director can’t ask for much more than that. What are the biggest questions and concerns that you have about trying a WID approach? If you’ve tried it already, what are some of the strategies you have found to be most effective? Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

This blog was originally posted on November 25, 2014. I have many writing students, and I assign each one of them writing—a lot of writing, both critical and creative pieces—for each class. So, I read a lot of student work.  And this time of the semester all my vows are tested. My vow to keep my daily writing practice going. My vow to sleep and eat well and exercise daily—that’s pretty much over now that it’s late November. My vow to be present for my students, to be a good colleague. My vow to live a life centered around kindness, awareness, and meaning. I have three strategies—which may or may not work for you—to keep from feeling overly stressed about reading so much student work, especially towards the end of the term, when getting behind, getting off track with other projects and neglecting the fun and fulfilling parts of life is most likely. Strategy 1 I read 1/3 of the papers that come in the day they come in.  I stay in my office after each class period and spend at least an hour reading for each class. I get home late, but I get home free. I don’t carry student work around with me. I feel like a pile of student writing, left untended, mushrooms into something larger. [Full disclosure: I am teaching creative writing. I feel very, very lucky to have the job I have. I get to choose the assignments, their length, and schedule the due dates. Most people aren’t in that position, so I want to be careful here.  However, I taught comp for many, many years and always I try to associate, deeply, reading student work with pleasurable things.] I read in my office, and I have made that space beautiful by making sure I always have in my space Fresh flowers A diffuser spewing lavender oil molecules into the air Soft light Soft music. Access to hot tea. Strategy 2 I schedule, in my calendar, blocks of time for doing the rest of the reading and then I don’t talk about grading papers before, during, or after those scheduled blocks of time. Ever. Not one word. Not ever. I simply refuse to talk about this part of my life.  I talk about what my students are up to that’s surprising to me. I talk about what we are reading in class, and what I am learning as a writer from the readings, or from my students. If I talk about grading, I feel like I’m complaining and then I also feel like I am spending time in a negative place—like I’m stretching out the task to be a huge part of my life.  It’s time consuming, and important, but it’s not the center of my life. I like to hear other people’s creative strategies for improving teaching so I try to steer conversations about the tedious parts of teaching toward interesting elements, creative solutions, and, hopefully, humor. Strategy 3 I made friends outside of academia and I hang out with them during my social time. People outside of academia have great strategies for managing workload, increasing efficiency, and approaching the parts of the job that are most challenging and I love to listen to how they talk about work. They are so not interested in my grading woes that, once again, I’m not spending my time in that slough.  I learned a different way of relating to work conversations by listening to those in other fields and it gave me a fresh perspective that I really needed. At first, when I made my vow to not talk about grading papers, I felt a little weird and lonely. I worried my colleagues would think I was lazy or unfocused. When there’d be a gripe session in the halls  and I didn’t join in, at first I felt like I wasn’t really being part of the team. It seems like it would be super annoying to enter the conversation, rubrics in hand, smiling, papers all graded and scores neatly entered in the gradebook.  So, I restrain myself.  But if you want to talk about teaching, and response strategies to creative writing, and what we’re learning from researchers about what happens in peer response groups, my door is open. Please come in. Even during this busy time of year, I’d love to talk! My office is pretty. I did yoga this morning.  End of the semester, and hanging in!  Do come by. ... View more

This post first appeared on December 2, 2014. I’ve been a slow adopter of using Google Drive, despite many years of having Google-supported email at the different universities where I’ve worked. But in my late adoption of it, I’ve come to realize how useful it can be in the classroom, particularly when it comes to facilitating a lot of the work that I do to create a student-centered discussion. I realized over the summer that I could use Google Drive for a couple of things. The first was to create journal templates for my students in my 100- and 200-level courses.  In those courses, my students keep daily reading journals — and by having students write in a journal that I can see, I can immediately tell who is doing the work. More importantly, I can draw ideas into the classroom that students write about in their journals. It took some work to set everything up (I created a template, then made copies for all of the students), but it’s been a useful way to keep an eye on what interests the students in what they read. My other major use of Google Drive is to create what are essentially collaborative documents of discussion questions.  I did this initially because I’ve got an assignment that’s always been a bit clunky for me in terms of organization. In my 300- and 400-level courses, I’ve always taught students how to write open-ended discussion questions, and then I’ve had them submit questions daily (in lieu of a quiz).  We use those questions in class to guide our conversation. Previously, I’ve tried having the students just hand the questions to me in class (which really made me work on the fly) or email me either the night before or the hour before class.  With the email, I wound up spend a lot of time collating the work, which also meant the potential for missing some of the questions in the overflowing email inbox.  As I was preparing for my courses over the summer, I remembered an admonition from my student teaching days — if you can let the students do the work for you, have them do the work for you.  Thus, for this, I’ve got the students in my upper division courses writing and collating their discussion questions in Google docs. Here, I simply created forms for each day of class — titled with the name of the text we’re reading and the assigned chapters of acts — and shared an entire folder with the class.  Students submit questions until 30 minutes before class — then I print the entire thing off and use it as we work through the literature. I’ve found that students’ questions are less repetitive when they see what’s been asked before — and I’m even noticing that students will sometimes reference other students’ questions in their own (in which case, I know we have to discuss a certain topic). I went into the semester thinking that this would be all we use shared documents for. Then I decided that the students in my novels course really needed to take a careful look at the chronology of events in Dracula.  I realized that this was not something we could really just do on the blackboard. We’ve been doing chapter-by-chapter breakdowns of plots at the beginning of class, but there are simply too many days and too many different narrators in Dracula for that to be effective. So I created a shared document that simply lists all of the dates in Dracula when a character writes in a diary, sends a letter, or receives a message from a solicitor’s office. On the first day of class, I shared it with all of the students in the class, projected it from the overhead, and set students to the task of sorting things out.  Students worked in groups of two or three, huddled (admittedly) around their phones, laptops, tablets, and the classroom computer, adding to the chronology together. Once we spend the first chunk of class doing that, we take a look at the story in order — and it’s really helped the students find the details of Dracula’s movements (“Oh, wait! That’s what the dog on the ship was!” “Oh, that’s why there was the detail about the escaped wolf!”).  I also color code the document, according to the different characters narrating (i.e. John Seward’s diary is in green, Mina Murray/Harker’s journal is in purple), which allows us to see how the narrative bounces from one character to another, and how the characters themselves have to piece information together over time. In doing this we’ve been able to have an effective discussion of the structure of the novel, which has shown the students that they can, indeed, break down the narrative into its parts and look inside the inner workings of the novel. ... View more

This post was originally published on September 9, 2013. Small, low-stakes multimodal activities are great for reinforcing many of the concepts covered in your handbook. Best of all, you and your students don’t have to learn sophisticated software or have access to advanced equipment in order to work on multimodal assignments. Goal Explore a topic with Storify Background reading before class Broaden students’ ideas of what it means to explore a topic by having them read the relevant chapter or section in their handbook before your class session: The St. Martin’s Handbook, section 3a, "Exploring a Topic" The Everyday Writer, Ch. 6, "Exploring Ideas" Writing in Action, section 5a, "Explore and narrow a topic." EasyWriter, section 2a, "Exploring a Topic" Ask students to be ready to discuss the methods of exploration they have used successfully or that they would like to try. In class For students who aren’t familiar with Storify, explain that it’s a Web site that allows users to pull disparate pieces of information from social media—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, YouTube, and more—and collect them to tell a single story. Users may then publish these stories and embed them on their own social media sites, personal blogs, or in e-portfolios. Some stories link elements with original text, but many don’t. Storify makes it easy to search for snippets of information on a topic and pull all the pieces together to see what results.You may want to walk through the tour of Storify in class. Look at one or two examples with your students; you can search for current topics of interest on Storify, or consider these: This story, “Hipster beards blamed for poor razor sales,” uses news stories, Instagram, Twitter, and more to explore a reported drop in sales of men’s razors. The story “The rise and fall of the CNE’s cronut burger” tracks a food craze at Toronto’s Canadian National Exhibition—and the food-poisoning outbreak that followed. The story includes background on the cronut as well as reactions to the cronut burger posted before and after the outbreak. As a class, you can develop some guidelines for what makes a good Storify post based on the examples you explore together. Consider discussing the following: How does Storify compare with other exploration methods discussed in the background reading? How might methods such as freewriting or clustering work in conjunction with Storify? Does the Storify format allow you to see the full scope of an issue? Why or why not? What elements appear in these stories? How does including them enhance the story being told? What else might have been included? How can Storify help you explore a topic you’re interested in? Assignment For homework, ask your students to select a topic that interests them or a topic about which they will be writing for class, and then have them create a Storify post in which they explore the issue using pieces of information drawn from social media. Ask students to share their Storify posts with the class either by presenting them or by posting them to a shared space on your course management system or e-portfolio. Reflection on the activity                  Ask students to reflect on the activity, using questions like these as prompts for discussion or writing. How did you approach finding the different elements that you included in your Storify post? What keywords, hashtags, or other methods did you use to narrow or expand your search? Why did you decide to include the elements you did? What were the criteria you used in order to decide an element was worth including? Do you think your post gives a “full picture” of your issue? Why or why not? Do you think you could use your Storify post as a starting point for writing a longer academic essay? If so, how? If not, why not? ... View more

This blog was originally posted on November 4, 2014. It had long been my contention that playwriting is more practical than screenwriting because it leads more directly to a finished product.  In other words, whereas an ambitious playwright could organize his or her friends and stage a piece on a weekend, the screenwriter was dependent on the whims of Hollywood producers to obtain the resources to get their films made.  This assessment of practicality, though, seems to apply less and less to today’s world in which there are so many opportunities through the internet.  If a screenwriter uses the production and distribution means available through the web—for example, if a writer creates scripts for short Youtube films—then screenwriting can be every bit as practical as playwriting. Besides screenwriting, the internet has enhanced the practicality of another field—radio drama.  The format, which dwindled in the U.S. with the rise of television, is now reemerging under the aegis of podcasting and audiobooks.  Teachers of dramatic writing are wise to embrace audio theatre for the following reasons: It stands to become more and more important in our Internet Age. It provides easy production opportunities for emerging writers—requiring no sets, costumes, or even line memorization, as required by film and the stage. Digital recordings, the product of audio theatre endeavors, are easy to disseminate to a wide audience. My university, Arkansas Tech, has been leading the way in audio theatre ventures for seven years now.  Through an organization called the Arkansas Radio Theatre, we have created more than forty broadcasts which play on the local radio station, are made available to the visually impaired throughout the state, and are available on-line  (click Public, then Radio Theatre).  The Arkansas Radio Theatre is dedicated to new plays and adaptations of classic literature.  An audio theatre company like the Arkansas Radio Theatre is easy to establish because free recording software is easily available.  An interested instructor simply needs some microphones in order to record voices.  Apart from that, an audio theatre company simply requires a means for broadcast—or some server space, which is readily available at most universities. However, just because a production opportunity exists, that does not mean that student writers are prepared to take advantage of it.  Because audio theatre is a unique form, writers must be trained with relevant coursework.  In order to build the Radio Theatre into the curricular structures of my university, I am teaching (in Fall 2014) an upper-division topics course focusing on Radio Theatre Writing.  Some of the assignments explore audio theatre as a genre:  for example, listening to broadcasts from the Golden Age of Radio and comparing them to the audio drama available today.  Students will eventually work toward hour-long original scripts.  Hopefully, the insights learned in teaching this class will help others who attempt to engage in audio theatre projects.  I will report on the progress of the course in later posts. ... View more

I’m a big fan of multi-modal approaches to reading comprehension — I’ve written before about having students draw a poem, and I’ve adapted Barclay Barrios’s idea about IKEA directions for my freshman orientation group. Most recently, I borrowed an idea from my colleague — a Germanist who teaches a course on fairy tales — for my day on Charles Dickens in my survey course: create a comic highlighting the main points of the story. On this particular day, my students read “The Story of Little Dombey” and “Sikes and Nancy,” which are Dickens’ own adaptations of his work for his public speaking tour — essentially, they are selections from two novels that he performed for his audience, giving only the central parts of these two particular episodes. So, to prep my students, I showed them a few examples from Hark, a vagrant. If you’re unfamiliar with it, the artist takes literature and history as a subject matter for 6 or 9 paneled comics.  They’re funny, they’re spot on, and they can show students how it’s important — even in making jokes — that we have something to hang on to from the literature. (My favorite is “Dude Watching With the Brontes”.)  For me it established a tone for the class — we’re serious here in our study of literature, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. This is supposed to be fun — but reflective of the text in front of us. From here, I provided groups of three a sheet with six panels on it, and had students select one of the two stories. The directions from this point on were to pick the 6 most important moments, and illustrate them as best as they could. This work got students talking about the plots, and particularly identifying the plots that didn’t quite work out of the context of their respective novels. But they also talked a great deal about the central themes of the stories. What the students came up with was amazing. In general, students approached the topic differently. We had lol-speak. We had serious attempts at illustrating the important moments. We had references to contemporary pop-culture — and one group even explained that the last moment of “Sikes and Nancy” would be saved for the post-credit sequence. After students worked on their comics, I had the groups explain their choices, which allowed us to look at what they saw as not only central moments in the stories, but also the themes of the stories. What was remarkable about the effort was that students gravitated towards similar moments in the two stories. For example, the groups that chose “Little Dombey” all focused on the little boy’s complaint that money (his father’s highest concern) could not bring back his dead mother. In all, the students were able to sort out the plot, the characters, the themes without my intervention — and that goal is certainly a huge part of working on their ability to read literature. ... View more

Last year I traumatized my MFA students by inventing this thing I called the Originality Scale.  At the bottom were stories we’d heard before told in familiar ways, and at the top—well, there was no top, because whatever would go at the top is so original we can’t even imagine it (yet).  The middle, however, was filled with variations—old stories told in a new way, new stories told in an old way, new forms, new technology, history told with a new perspective, etc.  For the rest of the semester, the students seemed troubled, taunted, tortured by where their writing would fit on the Originality Scale.  I became so alarmed that I presented to the class the notion that human beings need to learn the same things over and over again, and that is perhaps why the same stories work over and over again.  And could they please forget the Originality Scale. Except I don’t really think they should forget the Originality Scale.  The problem was not the Scale, the problem was the fear and paralysis induced by the Scale. I think what my graduate students were really afraid of was that I might be telling them they shouldn’t be writers; that they weren’t original enough.  But what I was really trying to say was they needed to work harder at it.  To be conscious of it. Originality matters. So how can we teach it? For me, quite simply, originality often boils down to the sensation that I haven’t read a piece before—but I’ve read a lot, too much. Beginning writers often have no idea what is unoriginal because they have not read enough. They struggle to recognize clichés and often seek out writing that is comfortable and familiar.  And yet because they are often young, they are frequently early adopters of using new technology in writing.  Texting, Facebook, 3D-printing all turned up in my students’ work long before I ever saw them in published pieces, and this is one of the things my students are better about bringing to their work than I am my own.  And it is one way to encourage originality. Technology, after all, is the one thing that has changed writing time and time again. Beginning writers can also be very brave about breaking the rules (they don’t know the rules!).  And so it can be important to not “correct” them and bully them into a standard Freytag’s pyramid formation, but rather to talk about a writer’s intentions versus a reader’s response, and what readers look for when they don’t get what they expect.  Surprising is not the same thing as original and neither is weird.  What is original must still make the reader feel or think or see.  But it doesn’t have to follow the exact format of inciting incident, obstacles, climax, resolution. During workshops, students can be encouraged to choose more unusual or unexpected points of view, to set a story in a less predictable location, to embrace…drum roll, please…what they know (which in my (students’) experience has included the secret tunnels of Disneyland, roller derby, cattle ranching, and the behind-the-scenes life of pretty much any low-wage job you can imagine). And, of course, they can be asked to read…to read and read and read until they know what is out there. The final irony is the thing that makes a piece of writing original may not actually be the thing that makes it great, and yet if a piece doesn’t have some unexpected, previously unseen something, it probably won’t be great. Good maybe, but not great.  And sometimes students just need to know that. ... View more

PRESENTED BY Amy Braziller Elizabeth Kleinfeld ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM Amy Braziller (Red Rocks Community College) and Liz Kleinfeld (Metropolitan State University of Denver) are the authors of The Bedford Book of Genres. In this webinar, Amy and Liz will debunk the assumptions surrounding teaching with genres and share examples of writing from their own students. Learn more about how teaching with multigenre and multimodalties increases student engagement, helps students compose in real life/rhetorical situations, gives students flexibility in their writing choices, and encourages students to complete more in-depth research. Learn how Amy and Liz’s own interests in rhetorical theory, 21st century literacies, and teaching genres helped shape The Bedford Book of Genres. Receive teaching tips on how to incorporate the strategies suggested in the text into your classroom. ABOUT THE PRESENTERS Amy Braziller is an English faculty member and former department chair at Red Rocks Community College. She received her B.A. from Empire State College and her M.A. from New York University. Amy has presented on teaching writing and new media at numerous national and regional conferences. Her research focuses on the intersections between classroom and personal writing. Amy, who is at work on a series of personal essays related to her punk rock days in NYC, blogs about food, film, music, GLBT issues, and social media distractions at amybraziller.com.  She is co-author (with Elizabeth Kleinfeld) of The Bedford Book of Genres. Elizabeth Kleinfeld is the Writing Center Director and an Associate Professor of English at Metropolitan State College of Denver. She received her B.S. from Bradley University, and her M.S. in English and Ph.D. in Composition and Rhetoric from Illinois State University. Liz is a contributing researcher on The Citation Project and has published essays on new media, writing centers, and student source use in various journals and collections, including Computers & Composition Online. She is co-PI on a grant to develop a program on academic literacy for at-risk students, particularly migrants. Her current research focuses on how writing centers can intervene in students’ research processes. Liz is co-author (with Amy Braziller) of The Bedford Book of Genres. ... View more

PRESENTED BY Kristin Arola Jennifer Sheppard Cheryl E. Ball ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM Teachers of writing are conscientious evaluators of their students' written work, and the strategies for creating those grades vary widely, from providing formative or summative feedback and using heuristics or rubrics, among other methods. These assessment strategies can happen in many media, such as handwritten comments, typed summative and in-line comments, oral feedback (including audio recordings), and even screencast talk-throughs of student papers. But we are often asked, how does grading change when teachers are evaluating more than just the written content? With the spreading use of multimodal assignments in writing classes, this webinar will offer participants multiple perspectives and strategies for responding to multimodal student work, based in current writing studies research and combined-decades of experience teaching multimodal texts. ABOUT THE PRESENTERS Kristin L. Arola is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and Technology at Washington State University, where she directs the Digital Technology and Culture program. Her work　brings together composition theory, digital rhetoric, and American Indian rhetorics so as to understand digital composing practices within larger social and cultural contexts. Her most recent book,　Composing (Media) = Composing (Embodiment) [with Anne Frances Wysocki, Utah State UP, 2012] is an edited collection that explores how the media we produce and consume embody us in a two-way process. She is also the co-editor of the third edition of CrossTalk in Comp Theory: A Reader [with Victor Villanueva, NCTE, 2011]. Her work has appeared in Computers and Composition, Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion, and the Journal of Literacy and Technology. She resides in Pullman, WA, with her amazing husband and charming dog. Jennifer Sheppard is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Communication at New Mexico State University, where she directs the Design Center, a space supporting students’ hands-on development of communication projects for clients. She regularly teaches courses in document design, multimedia theory and production, technical and professional communication, and online pedagogy. Her research interests include new media, information design, professional communication and pedagogy for face-to-face and online instruction. She has published on these issues in Computers and Composition, the Journal of Literacy and Technology, and several edited collections, including Designing Texts: Teaching Visual Communication and RAW: Reading and Writing New Media. She lives in Las Cruces, NM with her partner and their very busy toddler, Eli. Cheryl E Ball is an Associate Professor of Digital Publishing Studies in the English Department at West Virginia University. Her areas of specialization include multimodal composition and editing practices, digital media scholarship, and digital publishing. Since 2006, Ball has been editor of the online, peer-reviewed, open-access journal Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, which exclusively publishes digital media scholarship and is read in 180 countries. She has published articles in a range of rhetoric/composition, technical communication, and media studies journals including Computers and Composition, C&C Online, Fibreculture, Convergence, Programmatic Perspectives, and Technical Communication Quarterly. Her recent books include a scholarly multimedia collection The New Work of Composing　(co-edited with Debra Journet and Ryan Trauman, C&C Digital Press) and the print-based　RAW: Reading and Writing New Media　(co-edited with Jim Kalmbach, Hampton Press). ... View more

PRESENTED BY Lonni Pearce ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM How do you help students to help themselves develop as writers? Consider the ways that today's students search for and access information--online, through dynamic searches. Writer's Help meets students where they are by offering accurate and useful information through dynamic search capabilities, as well as through model papers and writing exercises. But how can teachers best introduce students to Writer's Help and use it as a helpful pedagogical strategy for teaching writing? In this webinar, we'll explore four methods for effectively integrating Writer's Help into a first-year writing class. We'll look at ways to encourage students to seek out information that they need independently, as well as activities for in-class workshops. For new Writer's Help users, the webinar will offer ideas for choosing one of the four methods to try and then will suggest some paths for integrating Writer's Help more fully. Our goal will be to consider which methods might work best in different classroom contexts. ... View more

PRESENTED BY Johndan Johnson-Eilola ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM Although most of us have moved beyond simply teaching to the five-paragraph essay into richer, more diverse types of texts, we often still focus on relatively limited texts that focus on the academic classroom rather than the broader world in which students live. In this webinar, we’ll discus how teaching writing using scenarios or cases. Scenarios—composition’s version of a mathematical story problem—provide students with realistic rhetorical situations that provide a richer set of possibilities than traditional, academic assignments but still bounded enough to focus on specific pedagogical goals. ... View more