Today’s guest blogger is Jeanne Law Bohannon (see end of post for bio). This summer I have written about flipped classroom models and dialogic discussion forums in an effort to open up potential for what “doing multimodal” can mean across varied curricula.  In my last summer post, I want to bring this discussion full-circle with a low-stakes assignment about digital copyright that can be tweaked to work at the beginning, middle, or end of a course.  And, like I always advocate, instructors don’t have to be specialists on the subject or experts in multimodal text production to elicit metacognition and rhetorical growth in students. We just have to be willing to explore the subject with them. Context Issues of copyright have long been interrogated in writing classrooms.  As early as 1996, Andrea Lunsford and Susan West challenged writing teachers to re/envision copyright in terms of public, collaborative writing and to reimagine what authorship means in digital writing spaces. Following Andrea’s lead, I think that offering students the opportunity to muddle around in the copyright swamp not only makes them more sensible digital content creators, it also makes them stakeholders in their own writing outside of the classroom, where public, crowd-sourced writing is increasingly common across a diversity of digital platforms. Assignment After reading texts (noted below) and paying special attention to Henry Jenkins responses and current issues with independent artists, think about creative commons and copyright licensing of digital writing.  Draft a digital document (podcast, video, animation, etc.) that synthesizes your argument of each concept and situates you as a scholar within this issue.  Then, view and evaluate what your colleagues have posted. Note: this was an assignment for graduate students but can be modified for undergraduate courses. Goals and Measurable Learning Objectives Articulate arguments for and against creative commons publishing. Create a digital production as an argument for creative commons or copyrighted publication. Evaluate yours and others’ positions on digital copyright issues. Background Reading for Students and Instructors Acts of meaningful, textual performances are ongoing processes for attaining learning goals in democratic, digital writing assignments. Below, I have listed a few foundational texts. You will no doubt have your own to enrich this list. The St. Martin’s Handbook: Ch. 14, “Acknowledging sources and avoiding plagiarism” The Everyday Writer  or Writer’s Help 2.0 for Lunsford: Section 18g, “Uphold your academic integrity and avoid plagiarism” Writing in Action: Ch. 15, “Integrating Sources and Avoiding Plagiarism” EasyWriter: Ch. 39, “Integrating Sources and Avoiding Plagiarism” Everything’s an Argument: Ch. 20, “Plagiarism and Academic Integrity” In Class and Out In addition to reading our handbook’s explanation of academic integrity and discussing what that means for emerging writers, we tackle the hallmark, government text DMCA and several introductory articles about how academic integrity in the classroom transforms into copyright in public writing.  These include Henry Jenkins blogposts on individual copyright issues and the Digital Media Law Project, as well as applications of copyright with Creative Commons and Digital Commons. I prefer to front-load the content, especially in a face-to-face course, and assign it first as a lower-level Bloom's Understanding behavior. At the next class meeting, we perform a dialogic, participatory lecture as a whole group about our content understandings.  Then, we explore our individual content synthesis by creating videos that depict our own “takes” of digital copyright. I have included what students produced here. These are public videos, so please feel free to cross-post and use them in your own classes. Examples of Digital Copyright Synthesis John Mindiola on Born-Digital Documents & Copyright Kris Spadaccia Defends Artists' Rights in Digital Spaces Nathan Atkins on Creative Commons Reflections on the Activity – Students Here are some excerpts from students regarding their experiences with producing low-stakes videos to synthesize the concepts related to digital copyright: My Reflection For me, low-stakes writing opportunities are just that – “no worry” opportunities, where students can flex their rhetorical muscles and create pieces that are both meaningful and evocative. Multimodal productions stretch their creativity even further.  Exploring copyright issues by creating video texts to create metacognition opportunities “counts” for me, in terms of multimodal composition, because it encourages students to use digital tools to become active stakeholders in their own learning and active participants in community-driven, new media conversations. Try out the assignment, use my students’ videos if you want (they’re public), and let me know what you think. Guest blogger Jeanne Law Bohannon is an Assistant Professor in the Digital Writing and Media Arts (DWMA) department at Kennesaw State University. She believes in creating democratic learning spaces, where students become stakeholders in their own rhetorical growth though authentic engagement in class communities. Her research interests include evaluating digital literacies, critical pedagogies, and New Media theory; performing feminist rhetorical recoveries; and growing informed and empowered student scholars at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Reach Jeanne at Jeanne_bohannon@kennesaw.edu and www.rhetoricmatters.org Want to collaborate with Andrea on a Multimodal Monday assignment or be a guest blogger? Send ideas to leah.rang@macmillan.com for possible inclusion in a future post. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? 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Cincinnati is on my mind as I write this post. In the spring of 2007, I tutored elementary school students in Cincinnati’s Mount Auburn neighborhood, the same neighborhood where, after a traffic stop, Sam Dubose was shot in the head at point blank range and killed by a University of Cincinnati police officer on Sunday July 19, 2015. The first day of tutoring, I was greeted in Mount Auburn by a laminated sign that announced this neighborhood school as a “failing school,” using the terminology from the No Child Left Behind Act. The sign was displayed prominently at the entrance to the school. The school was nearly 100% Black, and I was the nice white lady who had come to tutor the children for Ohio’s state exams in reading and writing. Later that spring, I entered the school only to discover that the students were working on benchmark practice exams. I was taken to the cafeteria to help supervise children who had arrived late to school and, according to the rules, were not allowed to take the practice exams. A casual observer of that cafeteria scene might have described the students as rowdy and resistant. Yet that picture remains incomplete. The children were not sitting in their usual classrooms and they were not following their usual schedules. When I spoke with the children one-on-one, they shared their anger, their fears, and their passions. In other words, the children and I shared with each other our common humanity. On that spring day in Mount Auburn, I learned what happens when we begin with stereotypes and work through the resulting cognitive dissonance. I also learned the importance of approaching our practice by “[developing] flexible strategies,” and moving forward with an open heart. In preparing for the new term later this month, the children of Mount Auburn remind me of the positive potentials of transformation—not only for our students, but also for our classrooms and ourselves. Below, you’ll find three lists to help prepare for the fall semester’s first new writing project. As detailed in my last post, the first project focuses on “forming and transforming stereotypes” and is based on a TED Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The first list is a set of criteria that presents several course goals that students will undertake for the Writing Project 1. The course goals are taken from the Framework for Success in Post-Secondary Writing. The second list focuses on course actions toward completing the assignment, using Bloom’s Taxonomy. The third list offers foundational assumptions behind course goals and actions. Lists 1. Course Goals Be aware that it usually takes multiple drafts to create and complete a successful text Develop flexible strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proof-reading Understand writing as an open process that permits writers to use later invention and re-thinking to revise their work 2. Course Actions Applying basic disciplinary knowledge in a similar but unfamiliar context Evaluating a theory for the validity of its implications for college students and their instructors Creating a new interpretation 3. Foundational Assumptions The course is not remedial, and all students can learn to build on strengths. If writing leads to thought and action, then all students have basic disciplinary knowledge that can be applied to writing in the college classroom. All students in our courses have thought about matriculating to college and taken action to enroll in the course. The steps that led to those thoughts and actions hold the potential for success. To confront stereotypes and to deal with cognitive dissonance, students and instructors alike need to develop flexibility, re-think our work, and create new interpretations. We can practice these skills through steps in the writing process, and in completing the writing process to create a new essay that has never before existed. This practice is not necessarily easy, and the results may not become visible until long after the process has ended. As we practice editing and proofreading in a classroom community, we learn to read more closely and to pay more careful attention to the world around us. Every person who attempts this process will carry different strengths and discover different struggles. The struggles can become short-term goals for continued practice. This process is equally true for students and instructors. ... View more

Advice on Writing From The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic ... View more

I still remember my first experience with “professional development.” The year was 1966 or 67 and I was a new high school teacher, working with 10 th and 11 th grade students. A couple of years out of undergraduate school, I was thrilled to have a “real job” at last. So there I was, with a string of 30+ classes and tattered hand-me-down Warriner’s books, supposedly teaching “world literature” and “American literature.” I was a reasonably good reader and writer myself (stress on “reasonably”), and I’d been lucky enough to get an NDEA Fellowship to take summer courses on dramatic literature that offered some “development,” but I had very little understanding of how to teach others. In short, if anyone ever needed professional development, I was that person. So I was looking forward to an afternoon program on one of our teacher days—but not for long. Once there, our principal announced that we were going to take up “behavioral objectives” and would learn how to do so that day. There followed an incredibly tedious lecture by an “educational expert” about what in fact turned out to be an incredibly tedious and unrewarding task. For every class, every day, we were to write behavioral objectives (immediately referred to as BOs) describing each expected outcome in learning—in behavioral terms. These were to guide all of our classroom activities. I was too green at the time to understand why this process seemed so counterproductive and completely beside the point to me, and I didn’t yet have the knowledge to know why one might resist a behaviorist approach to learning. So I learned to crank these things out in no time at all—and then set them aside to make my real plans for each day. From that day on, I took a fairly dim view of “professional development.” But times have changed, and sometimes for the better (though not always). I’ve long been associated with the Bread Loaf School of English, which I regard as the best professional development program for teachers in the country. For six and a half weeks for five summers, teachers at Bread Loaf take a series of heavy-duty content courses that focus on helping young people read, write, listen, and speak with growing sophistication and depth. We live together, study together, eat and party together, and spend our time doing pretty much nothing but reading, writing, and talking about learning and teaching. I’ve seen this program change teachers’ lives and ripple out to affect tens of thousands of young people. Of course, not everyone has access to such in-depth professional development; while Bread Loaf has quite a bit of financial aid, it’s still an expense—and it demands being on campus for all those weeks during the summer. Fortunately, teachers have other good opportunities. I think of all the Writing Projects around the country, for example, and of how successful many have been.  Most recently, I have had a chance to meet and talk with teachers who are part of Stanford’s Center to Support Excellence in Teaching’s Hollyhock Fellowship Program: So almost fifty years ( ! ) after I started teaching, I am encouraged to see such programs—and I’d like to hear about others you know of. But in my ideal teacher world, these programs would be ongoing—not just for two weeks during two summers. Rather than being regulated to the nth degree and boxed in with testing, testing, testing, teachers today deserve not only gratitude and a living wage: they deserve opportunities for ongoing and truly professional development. ... View more

Since I attended the West Virginia University 2015 Summer Seminar: Access/ibility in Digital Publishing, I have been thinking about what I do to make resources accessible in the classes that I teach. Like most teachers, I include a policy that tells students to visit our campus center for Services for Students with Disabilities for verification of their needs and resources to help them in the class. I’m not doing the best job with that statement, however. Tara Wood and Shannon Madden’s “Suggested Practices for Syllabus Accessibility Statements” on the Kairos PraxisWiki explains how much more can be done to provide students equal access. Go read it. Beyond the syllabus, there is the content of the course itself. I post either PDF or web-based versions (or both) of all the course documents so that students can magnify the text, if they need support for a visual impairment. I think the pages will all work with screen reader software, but I have to admit that I haven’t tested them. I add ALT attributes to all the images that I use on the course website as well, to ensure students who cannot see the images still understand what they are. I use Lynda.com videos, which have high-quality transcripts. That’s about it, and it feels very much like a piecemeal, minimalistic approach. There is more that I could and should do. As I have been developing resources for a more visual syllabus, for instance, I worry about the potential for the visual presentation to fail, whether because of a student’s visual impairment or because of her lack of familiarity with the layout and organizational structures I am using. Even students who will say that they need no special accommodations can have difficulty navigating text that does not conform to traditional paragraphing conventions and syllabus layout structures. So in the coming weeks, I plan to keep bringing up the issue of accessibility as it relates to the course materials that I create and to the classroom activities that students complete. Students need to learn to create accessible texts, too. My first task will be improving accessibility to the information I present on the first day of the course. Time to revise that tired boilerplate I have been using for my equal access policy! How do you address accessibility in the classroom? Please share any strategies or resources that you have found particularly effective. Just leave me a comment below, or drop by my page on Facebook or Google+. [Photo: Handicap Sign by sterlic, on Flickr] ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn. Many teachers are turning to academic blogs in their classrooms to provide productive online writing spaces and places to archive student work.  Writing teachers have defined and redefined what we mean by academic discourse.  Digital formats give us new opportunities to revisit these definitions.  Academic blogs are a great way for students to share ideas with others but they also provide a great place for critical reflection and the incorporation of multimodal components. The availability and ease of student commentary creates opportunities for dialogic discussion and interaction with a live audience of interested peers.  As I have become more comfortable with this form, I have found myself struggling to define these spaces within my classes.  I use student blogs for  different purposes across my classes.   For years, I assigned regular exploratory essays (in most of my classes) and  reflective research journals that encourage writers to try out their ideas and engage with outside sources.   The blog format provides a new space for this kind of academic essay and, once again, has writers moving to explore new rhetorical situations that combine criteria for exploratory and research writing with digital writing for participatory, online contexts.  Objectives To define academic writing for digital contexts To help students organize and draft longer research projects To create dialogic spaces for participatory learning. Background Reading for Students and Instructors Acts of textual and visual design using multimodal elements are on-going learning opportunities for instructors.  Below, I have listed a few foundational texts and helpful links.  I encourage teachers to add to and enrich the list. The St. Martin’s Handbook: Ch. 10, Preparing for a Research Project; Ch. 18, Communicating in Other Media The Everyday Writer  or Writer’s Help 2.0 for Lunsford​: Ch. 3: Multimodal Assignments; Ch. 15: Preparing for a Research Project Writing in Action: Ch. 6, Multimodal Assignments; Ch. 12, Preparing a Research Project EasyWriter: Ch. 4, Multimodal Writing; Ch. 38, Evaluating Research and Taking Notes Exploratory Blog Posts The term blessay, coined by Dan Cohen, describes a form that is longer than a blog post and shorter than an essay. It speaks to some of the conventions of academic discourse such as inclusion of other sources, critical reflection, and establishing authority through substantiation.   Although this type of scholarly essay is generally written through the lens of curiosity and discovery for the writer, it is also shaped for both an academic and general audience.  It blends academic and public writing and often includes images, links, graphics, and other multimodal components.  Students share and comment on one another’s post inviting their ideas into dialectic conversation with others.    It is important for teachers to clearly define criteria for this kind of writing that takes the idea of a traditional paper essay and places it in this new rhetorical context. I have incorporated Cohen’s criteria for the blessay with my own work with exploratory writing to establish and define clear criteria for students so they understand the expectations of writing in digital contexts.  I have included Exploratory Writing for Multimodal Blog Posts   in which I explain the purposes, features and guidelines for this kind of academic writing in my classes.   Becca Tuck’s blog posts  from January 2015 show several strong examples of this kind exploratory blog post.  She does a good job of referring to the original reading from our textbook and successfully integrates it with outside sources through embedded links and multimodal components. Her writing is engaging and invites conversation. They demonstrate curiosity, understanding and the testing of intellectual ideas along with her own experiential connections to her subjects.  They are interesting to read and they reflect a visual, rhetorical awareness. Research Blogs  Many of us work with students on long-term projects that involve research, reflection and drafting towards larger academic projects such as theses, dissertations, or extended capstone projects.  For example, I worked with Liz Melendez, an Honors student completing her interdisciplinary thesis, Math as Text: Rhetoric As Reason, created a research blog for invention, inquiry and drafting. Although Liz’s research blog is password protected you can view the opening video (a multimodal treatment of her proposal and abstract; see below), her digital identity and her categories and sections. This digital format  creates a dynamic space in which the project is broken down into categories on the blog that include a collection of stand-alone essays (blessays) on particular ideas, archives for collected work, sources, and multimodal artifacts.  I respond to the students’ developing ideas in this format both in writing and in face to face discussions.  Eventually, we will go back to these essays and revise and expand them into the more traditional thesis format or other academic projects such as this Undergraduate Symposium handout she created for a symposium for student scholars on our campus or other academic conferences and scholarly presentations.   She is simultaneously creating multiple documents and artifacts for different rhetorical contexts and purposes.  As one of our digital writing students, she will also revise the blog itself and to act as a multimodal representation of the thesis that will accompany the more traditional library bound copy.  The purpose of this particular academic blog is for students to create a reflective research and curation space for the project.  I ask them to shape a digital identity so the page establishes itself textually and visually and speaks to the overall purposes of their research project. It serves as an academic research blog in which students write and reflect upon their ideas, connections, sources, and a place to post their work.  This format also provides an informal space for students to invent and discuss (with their professor or classmates) emerging issues and developing ideas that they eventually revise (or parts of it) into their final projects.  Many students resist the feeling of the looming, large, high-stakes academic projects.  This approach takes some of the pressure off and gives them an intellectual sandbox in which they can experiment, risk, and explore their ideas before they revise them for the more formal contexts. I ask students to include at least the following categories (add more based on individual project guidelines): Research Proposal – Here students post their proposal for their projects.  This portion can include research questions, timeline, possible sources and approaches.  Students eventually revise this portion into their abstracts. Annotated Bibliography – Students can create lists of references or annotated bibliographies in which they review sources and connect them to the larger purposes of their projects. Exploratory Research Journal/Log/Entries – This is the place where students include a series of exploratory writings in which they synthesize sources material, analyze their results, and hypothesize and speculate on their ideas and conclusions.  These writings are eventually revised into chapters for their final projects. These entries should include embedded links that connect to their sources.  Multimodal Components – This area is a storehouse for related multimodal components of their projects.  Students can remix versions of their research into contextualized projects that speak to their research in different ways (videos, infographics, illustrations, charts and graphs). Reflections on the Activities Once I shifted to academic blogs for exploratory writing and research projects, I found that students took on a strong sense of ownership and a strong desire to keep their audience engaged. They enjoyed reading each other’s posts and having their posts seen by others.  Like everything I do with multimodal composition, I had to return to what I believe as a teacher and see it through these new lenses.  One of the best parts of these kinds of projects is that they allow students to share and analyze different artifacts that represent ideas in the class I have enjoyed seeing strong examples of the class concepts substantiated through digital examples and cultural connections.  I have added many of their thoughtful examples to my own storehouse of digital resources for future students.  The response components allow for engaged conversations in which students are placed in real rhetorical contexts and bear the responsibility of speaking to and engaging their audiences in intellectual ways.  This kind of participatory communication is redefining academic discourse and the ways we interact with and present ideas. Guest blogger Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor in the Digital Writing and Media Arts (DWMA) Department at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning, 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.  Want to collaborate with Andrea on a Multimodal Monday assignment or be a guest blogger? Send ideas to leah.rang@macmillan.com for possible inclusion in a future post. ... View more

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There’s been a lot of buzz lately about Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle’s edited collection, Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies (Utah State UP, 2015), and with good reason.  In this timely and fascinating volume, the editors define “threshold concepts” as those that are “critical for continued learning and participation in an area or within a community of practice.” As Linda and Elizabeth make clear in their thoroughly useful introduction, this concept grows out of research in the UK on effective teaching and learning. Ray Land (who contributed the preface to this volume) and Jan H. F. Mayer used the notion to study what economists reported was essential knowledge in their field. What they learned led them to establish “threshold concepts” as central to learning in any field and provided an impetus for the present volume. Following Land’s preface and a lively introduction by Kathi Yancey, Linda and Elizabeth lay out the project, explaining when and how they came up with the idea and the fairly elaborate process they followed in identifying and categorizing writing studies’s threshold concepts. Since I had the privilege of contributing three of the entries in the volume (1.2: “Writing Addresses, Invokes, and/or Creates Audiences”; 2.5 “Writing is Performative”; and 3.3 “Writing is Informed by Prior Experience”), I went through much of this process with the other authors, reading and responding to drafts and groupings, and honing my entries with the helpful responses of other authors. As Linda and Elizabeth say, in the beginning it felt like a big “crowd sourcing” effort, as some 45 people pitched ideas and responded to the ideas of others. And it was certainly collaborative through and through, a model, in fact, for one of the principal ways that “written knowledge” gets produced. Beginning with a discussion of a “metaconcept,” that “writing is an activity and a subject of study,” written by Linda and Elizabeth, the volume continues with five threshold concepts: Writing is a Social and Rhetorical Activity (10 essays) Writing Speaks to Situations through Recognizable Forms (7 essays) Writing Enacts and Creates Identities and Ideologies (6 essays) All Writers Have More to Learn (7 essays) Writing is (Also Always) a Cognitive Activity (5 essays) Following the discussions of threshold concepts—which to my mind are succinct and to the point, presented in just the right tone and register for those entering the field—is a second part on “Using Threshold Concepts,” showing how the concepts could interact productively with writing across the curriculum, writing centers, professional development, graduate education, first-year writing, and so on. The introduction (written by the editors) and the six essays that follow provide sound advice that I’m sure will be put to good use by writing teachers and administrators, as well as by those coming to writing studies for the first time. Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle I’ve read bits and pieces of this book—some of them many times. But not until I received a copy did I have an opportunity to really take in its thematic structure. So I am starting at the beginning and intending to read straight through, keeping a log as I go of how my understanding of “threshold concepts” grows as I engage each contribution to this volume. Especially read in relation to a few other volumes, such as Key Words in Composition (1990), Key Words in Writing Studies (2015), and the older Teaching Composition: Twelve Bibliographic Essays (1987), Threshold Concepts provides a clear, cogent, and compelling introduction to writing studies. Brava, Linda and Elizabeth—and all contributors! ... View more

Grab a cold beverage or a frozen treat. Press play to begin or pause to resume. Hear and watch our lineup of authors present innovative ways to teach writing. ... View more

Writing teachers today have good reason to concentrate on punctuation, as new possibilities appear (think emoticons) and combinations like ?! pop up every day. The semicolon, however, seems to get no respect, or very little. Some have long predicted its demise in English, arguing that it isn’t necessary to meaning and that English notoriously drops such items with regularity. Kurt Vonnegut famously said that the only use of a semicolon was that it showed that the writer had been to college. People seem so unused to seeing the little winking mark that its use caused a stir when it appeared in a New York City Transit public service placard urging passengers not to leave their newspapers behind: “Please put it in a trash can; that’s good news for everyone.” Pundits rushed to comment, calling the writer—Neil Neches, of the New York City Transit Authority’s service information department—“erudite” and “eloquent.” This use of the semicolon, opined Harvard’s Louis Menand, was “impeccable.” In “The Secret History of the Semicolon,” Thomas Westland chronicles the rise and fall of this punctuation mark: This divisive piece of punctuation has been around in something like its current form for about 500 years. Its use grew rapidly over the seventeenth century, before peaking around the turn of the 19th century, from which time it has suffered a sad, controversy-flecked decline in popularity. Over the years, it has been the subject of violent disagreement. And the word “violent” is no mere rhetorical flourish: this thing has human blood on its hands. Well-known and oft-cited examples include a duel in 1837 between two French professors over a colon/semicolon disagreement, and the execution of the New Jersey murderer Salvatorre Merra in 1927 despite his counsel’s claim that a semicolon in the jury’s verdict should have spared his life. . . So which is it? Useful, elegant way to syntactical clarity, or the tattoo of a sententious show-off? The problem is that the semicolon is the substitute teacher of punctuation: although it can serve in almost every role when the usual candidates aren’t available, it isn’t really purpose-designed for anything. Although the defenders of the semicolon argue passionately for its ability to convey nuance, it can, oftentimes, be replaced with a full stop, a comma, a dash or a full-blown colon without changing much of anything. But not so, say those involved with the Semicolon Tattoo Project, a movement “dedicated to presenting hope and love to those who are struggling with depression, suicide, addiction, and self-injury. Project Semicolon exists to encourage, love, and inspire.” On the organization’s website, they go on to draw an analogy, saying “A semicolon is used when an author could've chosen to end their sentence, but chose not to. The author is you and the sentence is your life.” Commenting on an Upworthy article, writer Parker Molloy sums up what the little symbol means to her: I recently decided to get a semicolon tattoo. Not because it's trendy (though, it certainly seems to be at the moment), but because it's a reminder of the things I've overcome in my life. I've dealt with anxiety, depression, and gender dysphoria for the better part of my life, and at times, that led me down a path that included self-harm and suicide attempts. But here I am, years later, finally fitting the pieces of my life together in a way I never thought they could before. The semicolon (and the message that goes along with it) is a reminder that I've faced dark times, but I'm still here. I can imagine the Semicolon Tattoo Project and its website making for strong classroom discussion, especially if paired with a good reading about the relationship between writing and mental health. It would certainly provide a new approach to punctuation and its potential relationship to our emotional and our writerly lives. So hats off to the Semicolon Tattoo Project—and to the much maligned punctuation mark. ... View more

In drafting the assignment sequence for the fall semester basic writing course, Introduction to Academic Writing, I keep in mind one of Shaughnessy’s key questions from her essay, “Some Needed Research on Writing”: “What goes on and ought to go on in the composition classroom?” (Also see Teaching Developmental Writing 4e.) My response to that question always returns to the needs of the students and the primary goal of the course: to grow and develop as academic writers.  With this goal in mind, the assignment sequence focuses on introducing students to two primary concerns in writing for academic growth and development: coping with cognitive dissonance and learning resilience.  Focusing on these concerns offers students an opportunity to move outside their comfort zones while practicing the processes and creating the products of academic writing. This draft of the assignment sequence includes the three major writing projects required for Introduction to Academic Writing, and all of these writing projects ask students to concentrate on close reading to develop writing. The assignment sequence, with links to the major readings, is listed below. In a future post, I will address more incremental process work for invention, drafting, and revision. Writing Project 1: Forming and Transforming Stereotypes For Writing Project 1, you are invited to read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story.” Then you are asked to write an essay that considers the following questions, based on Adichie’s talk: How and why are stereotypes formed and transformed? Does Adichie’s theory of single or multiple stories hold implications for college students? Are you persuaded by her theory? Why or why not?  Writing Project 2: Education as Problem/Solution In Writing Project 1, you considered stories and stereotypes. Build on this knowledge and learn new theories for Writing Project 2 as you read and write about problems and solutions associated with education. In doing so, you will take part in a conversation that has engaged and concerned our country for generations. To being the discussion read “Our Universities, the Outrageous Reality” by Andrew DelBanco. Then, based on the article, consider an issue that poses a potential problem in education for your generation. Why would your generation consider this issue a potential problem in education? What practices, experiences, or solutions would you suggest to ameliorate this issue so that future students do not encounter the same potential problem? Why would this solution work to address the problem? Writing Project 3: Define and Foster Resilience This semester we have considered forming and transforming stereotypes, and solutions to potential problems in education. Writing Project 3 invites you to create a policy or program designed to build resilience for first-year year students nearing the end of their first semester in college. First, read the suggestions offered in the two articles from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, “The Science of Resilience” and “Public Policy and Resilience.” Then, based on the articles, write an essay that offers your own definition of resilience and creates a program or policy to foster resilience for first-year college students nearing the end of their first semester in college. ... View more

As I grade multimodal projects, I’m always frustrated when I find errors that demonstrate that a concept didn’t stick with students. I ultimately spend about half my grading time wondering if the errors I find are my fault. Even though everything is explained repeatedly in assignments, course blog posts, and in the classroom, I fail to communicate some ideas to every student.   As an example, consider the multimodal course that I teach, Writing and Digital Media. Most of the students in course are English majors or minors. They enjoy writing and are usually fairly good at it, as the screenshot on the right from one student's final project shows. When I begin talking about multimodal composing however, they can struggle to follow the concepts, even though they are well explained in the textbook that we use, Writer/Designer, and we go over them repeatedly in class.   As I am planning the course for the fall term, I am thinking of directly addressing these ten issues that I hear students ask questions about most often:   Multimodal does not mean digital technology. Multimodal texts engage multiple modes of communication. You don’t need digital technology to do that. An illuminated medieval manuscript is just as much a multimodal text as a YouTube video is. It doesn’t mean multimedia either. A multimodal text may use multimedia (multiple media, like photos, animation, words, sounds), but it doesn’t have to. Everything in the composition classroom is multimodal composing. It’s impossible to write a text that engages only one mode. Take a traditional essay, printed out and stapled in the upper left corner. That text includes the linguistic, spatial, and visual modes of communication at a minimum. People have been learning about multimodal composition for centuries. Since everything in the writing classroom is multimodal composing, it’s not surprising that teachers have always taught about more than one mode of communication. When you learn how to use layout and design to make the words stand out on a page, for example, you’re learning multimodal composing techniques. What’s important isn’t how, but when and why. How to use multiple modes of communication when you compose is the easy part. What’s important is learning when to engage the different modes of communication and why they bring meaning to the text. Using every mode doesn’t necessarily make a text better. Use all five modes if they help you communicate your message, but don’t add modes just because you can. Make sure that they add to the meaning of the text. Communicating with the visual mode isn’t limited to using photos. Sure photos can be part of it, but you’re also using the visual mode when you add bold text or change the size and color of a font. The gestural mode includes both body language and movement. The word gestural does make you think of gesture, but gestural mode isn’t limited to things that people can do, like smile or wave their arms about. Any kind of movement that communicates with a reader uses the gestural mode. It’s easy to compose a multimodal text. It’s actually impossible not to create a multimodal text. When we add words to a word processing document, for example, we may not think about the multimodal communication we are using. We add visual elements when we choose specific fonts, when we add emphasis by changing a font to bold or increasing its size, and when we indent the words to signal the start of a paragraph or a blocked quotation. It can be challenging, however, to compose a rhetorically effective multimodal text. It is easy to compose a text that uses multiple modes of communication, but it takes work to make sure that the different modes contribute the intended meaning to the text. As you compose multimodal texts, think constantly about your intentions and make sure that the different elements that you add to the text help you say what you intend to.   I am thinking of sharing the list itself, creating an accompanying infographic, or maybe making some memes and posters. If I can convince students of those ten concepts during the first weeks of class, I think they will have an easier time as they work on their projects. I hope so anyway.   What are the ten things that you most wish students knew about the topics you teach? How do you communicate those issues to the class? Share a strategy with me by commenting below or connect with me on Facebook and share your experience. ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Jeanne Bohannon. I am teaching a five-week late summer composition class right now, which as my readers already know, is a break-neck race to the finish.  For classes like this one, I am on a continual search for innovative (i.e. quick and dirty) ways to engender students’ metacognition and rhetorical growth. In today’s post, I will describe how I take the concept of a flipped classroom and model it to fit a low-stakes, high cognition learning activity in creating deep understandings of classical rhetorical concepts. Context My five-week English 1102 class is populated by a diverse group of students, as summer courses usually are. I share my course with first-year early adopters, transient enrollees from other universities, and a few non-traditional students who are returning to school after varying degrees of hiatus. We meet face-to-face twice a week, with online homework another two days per week.  Together, we had to figure a way to maximize critical reading and writing opportunities, while utilizing the hybrid course model of f2f and online. Assignment Flipped classroom model, using digital discussion forums and new media visual rhetorics to encourage students’ metacognition of logos, pathos, ethos, and kairos. Goals and Measurable Learning Objectives Create rhetorical digital responses to peers Demonstrate content understanding through community-driven, flipped content model Apply understandings of kairos, ethos, pathos, and logos Background Reading for Students and Instructors Acts of reading and viewing visual texts are ongoing processes for attaining learning goals in democratic, digital writing assignments. Below, I have listed a few foundational texts. You will no doubt have your own to enrich this list. In addition to using Lunsford’s The Everyday Writer this semester, I am using Liz Losh and Jonathan Alexander’s Understanding Rhetoric. The St. Martin’s Handbook: Ch. 2, “Rhetorical Situations”; Section 6a, “Collaborating in College”; Ch. 7, “Reading Critically” The Everyday Writer  or Writer’s Help 2.0 for Lunsford: Chs. 5-11, “The Writing Process;” Ch. 20, “Writing to the World” Writing in Action: Ch. 4, “A Writer’s Choices”; Ch. 9, “Reading Critically” EasyWriter: Sections 1c-1h in Ch.1, “A Writer’s Choices”; Section 3a, “Reading Critically” Before Class: Student and Instructor Preparation Creating an academic dialogic requires some front-loaded preparation and design by instructors. For example, if the class meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays face-to-face, we need to frontload content into discussion forums prior to the first weekly meeting to create the chance for independent content meaning-making and a post-forum to reflect on the week’s learning. For their part in the flipped model, students should be briefed at the beginning of the semester, and reminded frequently, of how to meet expectations of reading and posting. I have listed resources at the end of this post to help clarify the model for students. In Class and Out Chapter Two in Understanding Rhetoric asks students to strategically read and explore the foundational classical terms, logos, pathos, ethos, and kairos. I want students to be able to also synthesize these concepts and apply meaning to personal and professional experiences to encourage a deeper knowledge.  Here’s what we do: I post the keywords and the reading assignment from the chapter in the week’s first discussion forum. Students define the keywords and use examples from their life experiences to demonstrate deep understandings.  Students also post visuals (such as ads) that demonstrate good or poor use of the four keywords. Students respond to each other in the forum, bouncing meanings and guiding peers, who may need extra community support. We use a course model of 300/100X2Q, which means that a student’s initial response in a forum should be around 300 words, and also that students should respond to at least TWO coursemates in 100 words or more, asking a question each time.  I have found that this model keeps the online conversations moving. In the next F2F class, students take turns leading our community talk of the keywords, using their textual posts, the visuals they posted, and the keywords themselves in their discussions. Reflections on the Activity – Students Here are some excerpts from students regarding their experiences with flipping: “The flipped class exercise we did with the ads was very interesting. I enjoyed hearing people explain why they chose the images they did and how they interpreted different forms of rhetorical technique, because I saw different examples than those people pointed out. It was more interactive than just reading a post online and replying to it.” – Roberta Bansah, Biology Major “Well at first it was a shocker. Coming into this class I was thinking: English was one of my worst subjects, writing a lot of essays, which I was dreading… But the flipped class made me change how I actually saw English and how it could be different. I actually want to participate in class. This approach changed my attitude towards writing. I can see myself doing assignments in other classes.” – Eriol Saavedra, Engineering Major My Reflection Flipping a class and flipping authority to create metacognition opportunities “count” for me, in terms of multimodal composition, because they encourage students to use digital tools to become active stakeholders in their own learning and active participants in community-driven, new media conversations. For more resources on flipping your classroom, check out Michele Houston and Lin Lin’s 2012 article, this Edutopia video, and an Educause White Paper.   Guest blogger Jeanne Law Bohannon is an Assistant Professor in the Digital Writing and Media Arts (DWMA) department at Kennesaw State University. She believes in creating democratic learning spaces, where students become stakeholders in their own rhetorical growth though authentic engagement in class communities. Her research interests include evaluating digital literacies, critical pedagogies, and New Media theory; performing feminist rhetorical recoveries; and growing informed and empowered student scholars. Reach Jeanne at:Jeanne_bohannon@kennesaw.edu and www.rhetoricmatters.org. Want to collaborate with Andrea on a Multimodal Monday assignment or be a guest blogger? Send ideas to leah.rang@macmillan.com for possible inclusion in a future post. ... View more

The English department at Bedford/St. Martin's is searching for something new. We're coming out with a new edition of The Bedford Reader and we want the very best examples of writing your students have to offer! If we accept a piece for publication, you and your student will receive $100 each. We hope to celebrate academic success and provide future learners with attainable models. We're very interested in researched student essays and essays written in response to one of the readings in the book. To submit work or to learn more, shoot us an email at compositionmktg@macmillan.com​. Long one of the most popular composition readers on the market, The Bedford Reader provides compelling readings by excellent writers. It takes a practical and flexible approach to the rhetorical methods, focusing on their uses in varied writing situations. The popular "Writers on Writing" feature illustrates the many ways writers create meaning from what they read and experience, and the Kennedys' instruction helps students connect critical reading to academic writing. Free exam copies are available on request. (Cross-post from Gillian Daniels' blog.) ... View more

Aristotle, the ancient Greek teacher, philosopher, and mapper of human knowledge, handed down to us many remarkable insights about how people think, remember, and communicate. But in one respect (at least) he was not quite on the mark. Defining humans as “rational” animals and positing logos or appeals to logic as most important to rhetorical persuasion, Aristotle relegated emotional appeals to the sidelines, wishing for a state in which people did not need such appeals to elicit agreement. Today we know that emotions are central to how people make decisions and think about/interact with the world. From the work of cognitive scientists Luiz Pessoa, Antonio Demasio, and Steven Pinker to affective scientists like Giovanna Colombetti or Constance Pert, we are learning how deeply intertwined cognition and emotion are in the human brain and how emotions are distributed throughout the body. Now Pixar director Pete Docter brings us Inside Out, a stunning animated film that explores some of these scientific findings. Docter apparently consulted scientists widely in developing the film, which is based on his observations and memories of his daughter’s emotional states when she was 11 years old. Two of these scientists—Dacher Keltner from Berkeley and Paul Ekman from UC San Francisco—recently wrote about their experiences with the film and its take on the five emotions (anger, joy, sadness, fear, and disgust) that vie for control of Riley, the main character: They go on to say that emotions organize rather than disrupt the social lives of people as well, illustrating how the five animated emotions in Inside Out interact and direct Riley’s thinking and her relations with others. In another article, Professor Keltner says in terms of accuracy the film earns “a nine out of ten.” Riley's emotions in Pixar's Inside Out (Source: Pixar/Disney-Pixar, via Associated Press) In commenting on the chaotic emotions Riley grapples with, scientists also have pointed out that the brains of people her age are still actively developing; indeed, parts of the brain aren’t fully connected until the mid to late 20s, especially the prefrontal cortex, which is the home of deliberation, planning, and decision making. At this point, I can’t help but think of writing and its role in cognitive and emotional development. Because writing enables us to articulate, synthesize, and reflect on our own thoughts, it is often connected to mental and emotional health. Writing, it turns out, is literally good for you. What if Riley took up extensive journal keeping, getting all those voices in her head onto the page? Might she find ways for her emotions to “speak” to and through her differently? ... View more