Just a few weeks ago, Freddie Gray—a young African American man in Baltimore—died after being injured while in police custody, precipitating a rash of protests expressing anger, frustration, and rage. Then just a few days ago, the six officers involved were charged by State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby with crimes ranging from assault to second-degree murder. This series of events is the latest in a string of unnecessary deaths of black men at the hands of police, and it’s one that teachers everywhere need to think carefully about. You have probably been following this case and reading a range of responses and analyses, as I have. But the account I have been most touched by is a Facebook post from Julia Blount, reprinted on April 29 on Salon. Blount is a middle school teacher, educated at Princeton, and as she says in “Dear white Facebook friends: I need you to respect what Black America is feeling right now,” a person of color who has led a privileged life (for which she is grateful). But her privilege has not shielded her from violence or from the feelings engendered by it. So she writes to white America: “To those rushing to judgment about what’s happening in Baltimore: Please stop and listen.” Blount reminds all of us of the importance and power of listening—really listening—listening rhetorically, as Krista Ratcliff describes it. Blount continues: Every comment or post I have read today voicing some version of disdain for the people of Baltimore—“I can’t understand” or “They’re destroying their own community” or “Destruction of Property!” or “Thugs”—tells me that many of you are not listening. I am not asking you to condone or agree with violence. I just need you to listen. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to, but instead of forming an opinion or drawing a conclusion, please let me tell you what I hear: I hear hopelessness. I hear oppression. I hear pain. I hear internalized oppression. I hear despair. I hear anger. I hear poverty. Blount’s challenge is one all teachers, and especially teachers of writing, need to address. We need to teach rhetorical listening as part of what it means to communicate effectively and fairly, and we need to practice that kind of listening in our own classes. As Blount says, If you are not listening, not exposing yourself to unfamiliar perspectives, not watching videos, not engaging in conversation, then you are perpetuating white privilege and white supremacy. It is exactly your ability to not hear, to ignore the situation, that is a mark of your privilege. I spend time in all my classes talking with students about engaging “unfamiliar perspectives” and doing so in an open, invitational way. But actually doing this kind of listening and engaging is far easier said than done. I have often found myself hard-pressed to listen fully to a student who is expressing views with which I deeply disagree. In one of my classes, a young man (white and from a rural area) wrote an essay called “The Little Grey Squirrel,” about a moment in his life that had taught him an important lesson. In the essay, he tells the story of going out to check traps on his father’s property, where he finds a “little grey squirrel” caught in one of them. The squirrel has a broken leg and he describes kneeling down next to it and looking into its eyes. Then he takes out his gun—and shoots the squirrel. The lesson he learns, he says in his conclusion, is how to kill animals: this is his first. To say the very least, this writer had misjudged his audience (he had also built up sympathy for the “little grey squirrel”). This story caused a near riot in my classroom, as students accused the writer of everything from insensitivity to murder. They turned on him so passionately that he quickly fell silent; in this event, everyone else was talking, even shouting: no one was listening. Our class never really recovered from that episode, in spite of my efforts to look for some common ground we could all move forward from. It occurs to me now that I wasn’t really listening either: I was more occupied with calming things down and getting that particular class over with. As a result, I didn’t truly hear either the writer or the protesting students. I have thought about that incident for years now, as we often do when we wish we could replay—and change—past events. I’ve thought about how very differently people see and hear, and about how very difficult it is to see and hear from another person’s point of view. But that’s just what Julia Blount is asking me, as a white woman, to do. Her compelling message is going to stay with me, challenging me to live up to the best of my rhetorical training and always to listen—truly listen—before I draw a conclusion, and to engage my students in doing the same. ... View more

TED Talks are great teaching tools.  Each is visual, engaging, focused, and contemporary.  I think they make excellent supplements to the readings in Emerging, particularly because many of the text’s authors have been TED speakers.  And the interactive transcript is a bonus feature, letting students work with the text of each talk. In this series of posts I want to highlight some particularly useful TED Talks and suggest some of the ways to use them in the classroom. The Talk: Michael Pollan: A Plant’s Eye View​                                                                                                             Why It’s Great: If you like teaching Pollan (and it’s one of the essays in the book that students respond to most) then this is a fantastic talk to use. Pollan discusses Polyface Farm near the end of the talk, but part of what makes it so great is that when he does, he ends up he situating his argument in “The Animals: Practicing Complexity” within his larger intellectual arcs.  Students can see how writers’ ideas evolve by listening to the way in which Pollan’s arguments across his books are interconnected.  In doing so, he also reframes his argument in “The Animals” by casting it in light of his prior book, The Botany of Desire. Using It: In the talk, Pollan uses Polyface as an example a non-Cartesian system of growing food, which is “based on this idea that we bend other species to our will and that we are in charge, and that we create these factories and we have these technological inputs and we get the food out of it or the fuel or whatever we want.”  How does what he writes in “The Animals” complicate this notion of Polyface?  Does he suggest that there are Cartesian elements?  Is Joel Salatin in charge? ... View more

Wednesday morning, the Virginia Tech community woke up to find a Crime Alert emailed by the campus police department, giving us these details: Last evening at approximately 11:15 p.m., a statement appeared on Yik Yak which read “Another 4.16 moment is going to happen tomorrow. Just a warning”. For us, this was more than a generic threat, even if the police had indicated that there was no evidence this was “a credible threat.” We marked the eighth anniversary of the April 16 shootings on our campus not quite two weeks earlier. While few of the current undergraduates were on campus that day in 2007, they are all quite aware of what happened and they join in as we mark the anniversary each year. After receiving the Crime Alert, my students were understandably anxious. They chatted nervously, conjecturing that the absences that day were because people were staying away from campus “because of that message.” They weren’t talking about it explicitly. I can only guess they thought that not mentioning the threat might make it go away. Every time the door opened, heads whipped around to check who was coming in. Normally, we leave the door propped open so latecomers can slip in quietly. That day, they wanted the classroom door locked. One student even went outside the back door to double-check that it was locked too. The class seemed to relax a little after the doors were locked. We were busy with project presentations, and students appeared to be paying attention. I admit, though, that I watched the hallway through the window in the door just in case, and I mentally rehearsed what I would say and where I would tell students to hide if something did happen. After class was over, I told students to stay safe, and most of them left. A handful remained since their next class is in the same classroom. Their conversations about the threat started up again. When I left the classroom, they wanted me to leave the doors locked. They said they would let people in as they saw them. Later that afternoon, we received a new Crime Alert that told us the police arrested a student who turned himself in. By Friday, class was back to normal. At the beginning of class, I asked if they wanted the door locked. They answered no, and we went on with class. I have many goals as a teacher. I want to help students become stronger writers and more effective communicators. I hope to help them become more confident about their abilities. Rarely do I think about keeping them safe and calm in times of danger. Last week’s events reminded me that, too, is part of my job. Looking back, I’ve realized that I was trying to give them control. I let them decide about the doors. I asked two students to let people into the classroom who arrived late. Students secured the back door. They decided to keep the door locked after class was over. I wish I could say I made conscious decisions, but I was just going with what felt right in the moment. I’ve always believed that student choice is crucial to good writing assignments. Apparently giving students some choice and control matters when there are scary times in the classroom, too. ... View more

This was originally posted on April 15, 2014. At CCCC last month, I found myself in my room one night, reflecting on all the wonderful sessions I’d attended and ideas I’d heard. In one session, Elisabeth Kramer-Simpson from New Mexico Tech and Elizabeth Tomlinson from West Virginia University inspired me with their discussion of internships and open writing assignments in the technical writing classroom. As I thought about their presentations, I realized that I wasn’t content with the project I was planning to introduce the Monday after I returned from the convention. I had an odd desire to go into the classroom and say, “Let’s scrap the plan for the rest of the term. What do you want to know about technical writing this term?” I knew it wouldn’t be the most responsible plan, but I was tempted. If students would engage, it could lead to a great series of activities. I wasn’t sure that they would engage though, and I feared that the more structured activities we had completed before I went off to CCCC would clash with such a completely open plan. I found myself searching for a middle ground. The next project was to be job-application materials. The assignment I had always used was to ask students to find a job posting and write a cover letter and resume to apply for the job. I wondered, though, what would happen if I asked them all to write their own assignment for the project. I began wondering how opening the assignment to more choice would customize it to what the student truly needed or wanted. If the student was trying to get a summer job, she could write the application materials the job asked for. If she wanted to establish an online portfolio, she could write the texts for that. If she was trying to network with people interested in the same discipline, she could write the documents that would help her do that. I imagined that the deliverables for the assignment could include all of the following: a traditional resume and cover letter an application essay a personal website a cleaned up public Facebook profile a Linked In profile a GitHub repository and profile an Academia.edu profile The more that I thought about the options, the more I found myself wondering why I should be the one to define what they need as job application materials. Why not let them tell me what they needed? So I scrapped my original plans and created a new, open assignment that let students choose the project they would work on. The result? Students actually smiled when I explained that they could do whatever job application materials were appropriate for what they wanted to do in the near future. I had students who excitedly told me they never had time to work on GitHub, and that they were so glad that they could do so as homework now.  Other students told me that their academic advisors had been urging them to set up a LinkedIn profile but they hadn’t gotten to it. Now they could. We wrapped up the project last week, and it has been one of the best activities I’ve taught. There was enough overlap in what the different tasks they chose called for that we had plenty to talk about and work on in class. At the same time, they have all had the chance to work on documents they needed and wanted to work on. Why didn’t I choose this option before? [Photo: Jobs Help Wanted by photologue_np, on Flickr] ... View more

This blog was originally posted on May 4th, 2015. Today’s guest blogger is Jason Dockter, who teaches first-year composition at Lincoln Land Community College. He recently completed his Ph.D. in English Studies at Illinois State University, with an emphasis on rhetoric/composition, with a specific interest in multimodal composition. His dissertation is entitled Multimodality, Migration, and Accessibility in Online Writing Instruction. One of my initial goals within my first-year composition course is to expand students’ perception of writing. My students often enter FYC with rigid views of what it means to write, what writing looks like, and how writing composed within a school setting differs from writing they interact with and compose on their own outside of school. Multimodal composition projects provide an opportunity to push against these divisive perceptions of writing while increasing students’ rhetorical knowledge and their ability to transfer that knowledge to new contexts. Text design, especially, is a rhetorical element that is challenging to address in essay-based writing assignments. However, my multimodal interview project, outlined here, provides a prime opportunity to focus on text design by emphasizing the spatial mode, among others. Objectives To increase rhetorical knowledge through the use of purposeful multimodal assets and text design. To expand students’ definition/conception of what ‘writing’ means by developing a text within a genre that differs from writing they’ve often done in previous English or writing classes Context My FYC course is taught online at a community college, and my students range widely in terms of age, rhetorical knowledge, and even computer proficiency. The course is divided into learning modules, with each module focusing on a particular genre of writing, which we study collectively at first and individually later. Within each module, students become acquainted with a specific genre through an exploration into its conventions, by locating and analyzing examples of the genre, and later by developing their own text within the genre. The Assignment Students conduct an interview with a person (or people) associated with a topic they’ve chosen to research. Students use that interview as the content for the multimodal text they’ll design based on the interview genre. Background Reading Ask students to plan for the interview project by reading relevant content from your handbook or rhetoric: The St. Martin’s Handbook, section 11e, “Conducting Field Research”; Ch. 16, “Design for Print and Digital Writing” The Everyday Writer, section 16e, “Conduct Field Research”; Ch. 9, “Making Design Decisions” Writing in Action, section 13e, “Conduct Field Research”; Ch. 8, “Making Design Decisions” EasyWriter, section 37f, “Field Research”; section 2f, “Designing Texts” Writer/Designer (Arola, Sheppard, Ball) Chs. 1, 2, 3, 6, 7 Module Design My approach for genre instruction begins with anexplicit genre pedagogy, then moves to an interactive genre pedagogy (see more discussion of this from Anis Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff, in chapter ten of Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy). I provide students with interviews to review from print publications such as Rolling Stone, TIME, Esquire, and various online sources. After studying those sample texts, students identify and explain conventions of the interview genre that they value. Students post this list to the discussion board, followed by brief explanations of the importance of those conventions. Shortly after students post these lists, I combine them to identify the most agreed-upon conventions, which becomes the basis for a rubric that students use to complete a follow-up discussion board activity. There, students locate an interview of their own choosing in its original context, and explore the rhetorical aspects of the genre with our co-created rubric as their guide. Through a Rhetorical Genre Studies approach – considering the rhetorical and social purposes of the text through the design decisions of the writer – students contemplate why the writer made the rhetorical choices she did in the development of this text and how those rhetorical moves affect the interview and its ability to accomplish its intended purpose. Following these initial genre-familiarization assignments, students shift to brainstorming the development of their own interviews. On the discussion board, students write a brief overview of their thoughts at this point towards their own interview, exploring the media they want to use, the potential questions they’ll ask, what modalities they’ll incorporate into the text, and other design determinations they may have made about how they will create this text. Shortly thereafter, following the interview that students have conducted, they submit a more formal proposal / mock-up of the interview they intend to create. This provides an opportunity for the instructor (or peers) to provide feedback to help students align their design plans and use of modalities and media choices with the collaboratively developed rubric. After students submit the Interview Project, I ask them to complete a reflective writing, intended to provide students with space to explain their vision for their interview. At this stage, I hope to learn how the composing of the interview went, along with how their rhetorical decisions impacted that text design. Specifically, this is where I get to hear from students about why their interview turned out as it did, their purposeful emphasis of specific modalities, and their media use within the text, helping me to better understand why these design decisions were made. Student Projects Here are a couple of my excellent student submissions (used with permission😞 Student Multimodal Interview 1 Student Multimodal Interview 2 Why This Assignment? This project, as my students often interpret it, emphasizes the spatial mode, through the design of the interview on the page. Students become focused on design in ways that they are often unable to do when writing essays, where the format is often rigid. This is one of my favorite assignments within my FYC course because it shifts the emphasis from the content (writing) students will create for the text and emphasizes the design of the text, specifically considering how unique multimodal elements can be used to enhance the (often) alphanumeric text of the interview itself. Want to collaborate with Andrea on a Multimodal Mondays assignment? Send ideas to leah.rang@macmillan.com for possible inclusion in a future post. ... View more

If you’ve been teaching for some time, I wonder if you’ve seen some of your favorite assignments evolve or change over time. I’m realizing that a number of mine have, almost without my noticing. Right now I’m thinking of my much loved “long sentence assignment.” I started giving this assignment to break up the lengthy research project my students all do, and in particular to focus for a bit on syntax and style. It’s a low stakes assignment, much like finger exercises on the piano, meant for fun and practice, though I do assign a few points to it. Here’s how it started out: I asked students to write a “perfectly punctuated, 250-word sentence,” providing some models for them from Martin Luther King, Dylan Thomas, Will and Ariel Durant, and others over the years. We spent some time analyzing the structure of the model long sentences—King’s sentence, for instance, is a periodic sentence, built up of a series of dependent clauses and holding the main clause, “Then you will know why we can’t wait,” until the very end. That gave me a chance to introduce the concepts of paratactic and hypotactic structures and give a brief history of English syntax. Students were horrified at the assignment, saying that it can’t be done. But of course then they found that it can be done and were quite proud of their results, which we also analyzed in class. Then we returned to the research project, looking at some individual sentences and seeing how they could be made more effective. After some years of working with this assignment, I went a step further and asked students to rewrite the 250-word sentence into precisely 25 words. That turned out to be quite a challenge, but fun too, and we worked together to analyze those shorter sentences and to debate which was most effective—and why. Then came Twitter, and I decided to ask students to take another step and turn their sentences into Tweets. Now we had three sentences on the same subject matter but with radical differences that we could explore together. Most interesting to me were discussions about when and where each sentence might be most appropriate: students had strong opinions about that! Best of all, I could see them paying closer attention to all their sentences, realizing that their rhetorical choices mattered and that their sentences were definitely connected to how an audience received their work. And today? I now add a fourth challenge: take either the 25-word sentence or the Tweet and illustrate it. I was inspired to make this addition by the animated sentences on Electric Literature. Some of my students do indeed have the skill to animate their sentences, but those who don’t or who don’t want to do so can illustrate in any other way, using crayons or colored pencils, cutting and pasting, or creating digital illustrations. Now we have an added layer of visual rhetoric to analyze and think about, and I find that students especially like rising to this challenge. So that’s how one of my tried-and-true assignments has morphed over the years, one layer at a time. I’d love to hear how some of your assignments may have changed! ... View more

In my last blog post I wrote about Mad Men, a pop cultural sensation that is now winding down.  This time I want to reflect a bit on the Star Wars franchise, a pop culture phenomenon for which the word “sensation” is wholly inadequate, and which, far from winding down, is instead winding up in preparation for the release of its seventh installment (The Force Awakens), with at least two more “episodes” in the works.                                                                               The cultural significance of the Star Wars films cannot be overestimated.  I say this not as a fan (in fact, I more or less share the opinion of Alex Guinness, who, interestingly enough, was no fan of the films that made him very rich for playing the original Obi-Wan Kenobi) but as a cultural semiotician.  Because in the extraordinary success of 1977’s inaugural installment of the Star Wars saga we may find a precise marker of America’s turn to fantasy as its favorite cinematic form and all that that would portend. Of course before Lucas, there was Tolkien and Roddenberry, whose Lord of the Rings and Star Trek paved the way for the transformation of fantasy from a children’s genre to a preferred form of entertainment for adults as well. But Star Wars went much further.  A survey of top box office hits over the years will show that prior to 1977 fantasy filmmaking wasn’t even in the running.   After 1977, between a host of sword-and-sorcery, tossed-in-space, superhero, and general sci-fi scenarios, the situation was reversed, such that the top ten films in any year since 2000 have been overwhelmingly in the fantasy sector (I’m using the term “fantasy” in the broadest sense). So dominant is fantasy today that it is all too easy to take the matter for granted; but it is that crucial difference that a little research can reveal which points to the significance of the current paradigm.  The question becomes, what does that difference signify? Given the historical identification of fantasy with children’s storytelling, we can abductively suggest that the turn to fantasy is, at least in part, a signifier of a fully developed youth culture, one in which youth—rather than age, as in most traditional societies—is the most valued life stage.  Beyond that, there are indications that the appeal of fantasy is especially strong in a drab postindustrial era wherein the realities of everyday life are so unsatisfying that the fantastic landscapes of Pandora, or even the dystopian labyrinths of the Matrix, are desirable distractions from the era of the Cubicle.  And one can’t help but think of Neil Postman’s famous jeremiad Amusing Ourselves to Death in this context either—that is, in an entertainment culture, rational discourse doesn’t really have a chance. These may be fighting words (Postman’s particularly) for some of your students, but rather than presenting the significance of the fantasy era as a given to them, you would do well to explore what they think its significance might be.  (The 8th edition of Signs of Life in the USA provides a lot of material for this.)  The first step is to point out the phenomenon to them, because it is one of those things that are hiding in plain sight even as they loom over us.  After all, Buck Rogers was once kid’s stuff; thanks toStar Wars, fantasy is the dominant discourse of our time. ... View more

In my last blog post I wrote about Mad Men, a pop cultural sensation that is now winding down.  This time I want to reflect a bit on the Star Wars franchise, a pop culture phenomenon for which the word “sensation” is wholly inadequate, and which, far from winding down, is instead winding up in preparation for the release of its seventh installment (The Force Awakens), with at least two more “episodes” in the works. The cultural significance of the Star Wars films cannot be overestimated.  I say this not as a fan (in fact, I more or less share the opinion of Alex Guinness, who, interestingly enough, was no fan of the films that made him very rich for playing the original Obi-Wan Kenobi) but as a cultural semiotician.  Because in the extraordinary success of 1977’s inaugural installment of the Star Wars saga we may find a precise marker of America’s turn to fantasy as its favorite cinematic form and all that that would portend.  Of course before Lucas, there was Tolkien and Roddenberry, whose Lord of the Rings and Star Trek paved the way for the transformation of fantasy from a children’s genre to a preferred form of entertainment for adults as well. But Star Wars went much further.  A survey of top box office hits over the years will show that prior to 1977 fantasy filmmaking wasn't even in the running.  After 1977, between a host of sword-and-sorcery, tossed-in-space, superhero, and general sci-fi scenarios, the situation was reversed, such that the top ten films in any year since 2000 have been overwhelmingly in the fantasy sector (I’m using the term "fantasy" in the broadest sense).  So dominant is fantasy today that it is all too easy to take the matter for granted; but it is that crucial difference that a little research can reveal which points to the significance of the current paradigm.  The question becomes, what does that difference signify? Given the historical identification of fantasy with children's storytelling, we can abductively suggest that the turn to fantasy is, at least in part, a signifier of a fully developed youth culture, one in which youth—rather than age, as in most traditional societies—is the most valued life stage.  Beyond that, there are indications that the appeal of fantasy is especially strong in a drab postindustrial era wherein the realities of everyday life are so unsatisfying that the fantastic landscapes of Pandora, or even the dystopian labyrinths of the Matrix, are desirable distractions from the era of the Cubicle.  And one can't help but think of Neil Postman's famous jeremiad Amusing Ourselves to Death in this context either—that is, in an entertainment culture, rational discourse doesn't really have a chance.  These may be fighting words (Postman's particularly) for some of your students, but rather than presenting the significance of the fantasy era as a given to them, you would do well to explore what they think its significance might be.  (The 8th edition of Signs of Life in the USA provides a lot of material for this.)  The first step is to point out the phenomenon to them, because it is one of those things that are hiding in plain sight even as they loom over us.  After all, Buck Rogers was once kid's stuff; thanks to Star Wars, fantasy is the dominant discourse of our time. ... View more

In this series we’ve looked at a few ways to make the craft of peer revision more “crafty.”  All of these exercises tend to be a big hit in my classes and I usually end up with stronger papers to grade because of this work. But why?  Why do students do this work so enthusiastically and so well?  I have some theories: Fun Factor.  Most of the students in the writing classes I teach are there because they have to be—the class is required.  Most of them also have a troubled relationship to writing, thinking they’re not very good at it for example.  Introducing craft-based activities introduces an element of fun into something many students find to be very hard work. Nostalgia.  Teetering on the edge of adult responsibilities, students are reminded of a simpler time with these activities, a time filled with nap time and recess instead of exams and papers. Switched Registers.  All of these exercises switch into a new register, allowing students a new perspective on writing, one in which they might see completely different things in their work. Learning Modes.  Similarly, these activities touch on visual and kinesthetic learning in ways that can engage students who tend to learn in those modes. I suspect there are other factors at play here and I will love to hear your thoughts.  Do you have any “crafty” exercises?  Why do you think they tend to work so well? ... View more

In this series we’ve looked at a few ways to make the craft of peer revision more “crafty.”  All of these exercises tend to be a big hit in my classes and I usually end up with stronger papers to grade because of this work. But why?  Why do students do this work so enthusiastically and so well?  I have some theories: Fun Factor.  Most of the students in the writing classes I teach are there because they have to be—the class is required.  Most of them also have a troubled relationship to writing, thinking they’re not very good at it for example.  Introducing craft-based activities introduces an element of fun into something many students find to be very hard work. Nostalgia.  Teetering on the edge of adult responsibilities, students are reminded of a simpler time with these activities, a time filled with nap time and recess instead of exams and papers. Switched Registers.  All of these exercises switch into a new register, allowing students a new perspective on writing, one in which they might see completely different things in their work. Learning Modes.  Similarly, these activities touch on visual and kinesthetic learning in ways that can engage students who tend to learn in those modes. I suspect there are other factors at play here and I will love to hear your thoughts.  Do you have any “crafty” exercises?  Why do you think they tend to work so well? ... View more

This line graph from a student’s final exam shows the progression of forum posts that the student submitted during the term. His goal was to demonstrate his steady progress toward the required number of posts through the entire course. Just a glance at the graph tells me that the student fulfilled that part of the participation assignment for the course. Naturally, I still spot check the forums, and I keep an eye on students’ forum posts during the term. I ask students, however, to do the work of examining their forum participation and assessing how well they have done by writing a completion report for their final exam. Here’s how I frame the assignment: You will review your work in the course and write a completion report that outlines what you have learned and done during the term. In particular, you will review your posts on the Forums and point out some of your best work. In addition to grading your report, I’ll use the information you present to help determine your participation grade for the course. In the workplace, you could think of this report as a self-evaluation for a performance review. The activity is similar to the idea of writing a cover letter to highlight the contents of a portfolio or asking students to highlight their best journal entries for assessment. Since I am teaching professional writing students, though, I frame the activity as similar to workplace documents they will ultimately write. I love these finals because students share their best work, often demonstrating their achievement with post excerpts and screenshots, in addition to graphs like the one above. Further, students frequently comment on ways that their writing has changed during the term, mentioning that if they had not gone back to examine their posts, they would never have noticed. I feel certain that writers know their work far better than I do, and at the end of the term, they are easily able to pick out their best work. Even better for me, the assignment puts the onus on the student. I don’t have to search their posts for the golden gems. They unearth them for me and then tell me why those gems are valuable. I save time, and students gain a better understanding of their learning—this is one assignment that is a definite winner for me! Do you have any tips for encouraging students to reflect on their work at the end of the term? I’d love to hear from you. Just leave me a comment below, or drop by my page on Facebook or Google+. ... View more

This blog was originally posted on April 27th, 2015. Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn. She continues her series on Radical Revision – and includes assignments and examples of student projects that you don’t want to miss! In my last post, Radically Revising the Composition Classroom​, I challenged others to hack their traditional, tried and true assignments.  I decided to enact this advice in one of my own classes this semester and gave the same challenge to my students, asking them to Radically Revise a collaborative class project through a multimodal lens. Objective(s): To ask students to recast their rhetorical situation through revising for new purposes, audiences, and contexts. To engage students in qualitative research practices and writing. To demonstrate the relationship between collaborative and individual perspectives. To give students practice and agency in multimodal composition. Background reading before class Ask students to plan for the assignment by reading relevant content from your handbook or rhetoric: The St. Martin’s Handbook: Ch. 16, “Design for Print and Digital Writing”; Ch. 18, Communicating in Other Media; Ch. 2, “Rhetorical Situations” The Everyday Writer: Section 3a, “Plan Online Assignmnets”; Ch. 5, “Rhetorical Situations” Writer’s Help 2.0 for Lunsford Handbooks: section 3a, “Multimodal Assignments”; section 5a, “Rhetorical Situations” Writing in Action: Ch. 6, “Multimodal Assignments”; Ch. 4, “A Writer’s Choices” EasyWriter: Ch. 4, “Multimodal Writing”; Ch. 1, “A Writer’s Choices” The Original Assignment Students in my Writing in Collaborative Spaces class radically revised a mini-ethnography and cultural critique on a public, collaborative space.  In the original Cultural Observation assignment, as teams, students observed and applied ethnographic methods and communication theory to better understand interaction, communication, and structure of their team’s chosen public space.  The student groups in my class chose three cultural spaces: an independent coffee shop, the Mall, and a Super-Department Store.  Students originally prepared a collaborative presentation and team report document that described their findings, observations, analysis and synthesis for an academic audience.  They were asked to apply the theories of the course, design an observation rubric and look for evidence such as group structure, roles, organization, verbal and non-verbal behavior, background factors, physical environment and communication patterns to support their claims.  They conducted field research, collected images, and worked together to create a presentation and team report in their online space through Google Drive.   Setting up their teams in the Google Drive space allowed them to understand virtual collaboration and organize their projects through recorded minutes, field-note synthesis, online meetings, and collaborative revision of their deliverable products. This project is interesting in and of itself.  It gets students looking deeply at the ways communication behavior shapes our culture and introduces them to the ways that varied collaborative models, language, and experiences are integrated throughout society and in their everyday lives.  It teaches them to read the cultural space as a text, and to research and support their claims through particular examples – all through the lens of qualitative research.  This is a tried and true, successful project that I have run for years. The New Assignment: Switching It Up and Taking It Multimodal Once students completed the originalCultural Observation Project as a team, I asked them to re-see this project individually and reframe it as a multimodal cultural critique for a general audience (to embed in their blog).   The Multimodal Guidelines asked them to recast the project in a different form, use multimodal components, and change the perspective and the audience – radically shifting the text in several rhetorical ways. I encourage them to play, experiment, and get creative with the piece and incorporate humor, cultural critique, music, movement, collage, images, text, and outside sources (with citation, of course).  Using sources was one of the requirements and they all had access to the original primary research, data, and images from the team project to remix in this version.   It was also important that they communicate a perspective that captured their individual view of the space and the project in ways that were different from the collaborative perspective of the team.  This means that they might emphasize something different, look at a related issue, or generalize to universal experiences – all part of the kinds of rhetorical choices writers make as they compose. Peer Responding and Multimodal Response Criteria Like any assignment in my writing classes, I usually have students work together in collaborative peer response workshops for final revisions.  Multimodal compositions are no exception.  It is as we shape the criteria and get students to discuss these composing strategies and rhetorical choices that they can come to realize the ways these “acts of composition” transcend purposes, audiences, genres, and contexts.   I have linked to a copy of my Multimodal Peer Response Workshop criteria. Student’s Multimodal Radical Revisions Below you will find just a few of many great examples that students produced through their radical revisions to this assignment.  Although it was hard (I wanted to include them all!), I tried to choose multimodal hacks that represent a variety of approaches and perspectives for the three different cultural spaces they observed. Students took on the challenge and created projects such as Zack’s graphic comic Becca’s memes Olivia’s Buzzfeed style  article Gwynneth’s Cafe-Noir Jiaxin’s infographic Di’s short video Jordan’s slide show and Steve’s  animation. Although all based on similar data and research, each one of the students’ projects is different from the last.  The assignment demonstrates how we construct meaning both collaboratively and individually.  It asks students to critically read, research, and compose in multiple perspectives and through multiple lenses, allowing for deeper critical thinking and rhetorical awareness. 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: actsofcomposition.khaimesk.org Want to collaborate with Andrea on a Multimodal Monday assignment? Send ideas to leah.rang@macmillan.com for possible inclusion in a future post. ... View more

When Susan Miera—who did her MA degree at the Bread Loaf School of English and is a leader in the Bread Loaf Teacher Network—invited me to join her and colleagues and students in Santa Fe, I jumped at the chance.  I’ve known “Ms. Miera,” as she is lovingly known by legions of high schoolers, for many years, and I’ve worked with a number of Native American students she has mentored—and sent to Stanford.  She’s a whirlwind of energy, and I know that I will always learn something new from her.  This visit was no exception. With support from Santa Fe Indian School (SFIS), the Bread Loaf School of English, and Write to Change, Susan, who directs the writing center at SFIS, and her colleague Alicia Fritz put together a day-long workshop on Writing and Teaching Writing in the Digital Age.  The workshop brought together middle and high school students and teachers from SFIS as well as from Pecos (public) and Monte del Sol (charter) high schools, so bright and early on Friday morning about 30 of us gathered on the gorgeous SFIS campus to begin our day. This eight-and-a-half foot bronze statue, by artist Estella Loretto, welcomed us to SFIS Colleagues at SFIS describe it as a “grant” school, meaning that they receive some federal funds.  But they are also supported by the nineteen pueblos of New Mexico, along with other local and state sources.  What I sensed immediately was a strong sense of ownership among the students and faculty at SFIS, captured in what they said about their relationship to the school as well as in many posters and art works throughout the school that stressed commitment and pride: After introductions and greetings, I talked about the necessity of collaboration for learning and for writing, enumerating four challenges I think we need to address:  the individualistic premises on which most institutions of education rest; the fact that our classrooms are now public spaces; alternatives to the “lecture mode” still common in many schools; and the need to retain the best of the “old literacy” while embracing the best parts of the “new literacies.”  Then we divided into groups, making sure to have students and teachers from all three schools in each group, and we got to work designing activities and assignments and policies we thought could address these issues. The day went by in a flash, as groups presented their ideas and plans:  everything from designing a Think-a-Tron machine that would allow people working in groups to immediately access each other’s thoughts (!), to presenting PARCC (State test) WARS, in which the students designed a movie trailer to parody the test, to designing a unit on Romeo and Juliet that is thoroughly interactive, participatory, and performative—and a whole lot more.  Watchword for the day came from Steven Johnson, who in his “Where Good Ideas Come From” talk says “chance favors the connectedmind.”  Once again, I had the privilege of spending a day with insightful, thoughtful, witty, and wise young people.  And once again I came away convinced that today’s youth are prepared to use literacy—together—to reimagine classrooms, schools, and themselves. Susan, Alicia, and me ... View more

So far in this series, we’ve looked at coloring (essentially that’s what they’re doing with highlighters), cutting, and taping.  In this part we’re going to move into drawing. “Drawing the Argument” is one of my favorite class activities when discussing a new reading.  Working in groups, students draw the argument of the essay, locating quotations that support their visual interpretation. It’s a great way to open up discussion about the meaning of a reading since it forces students to condense the argument into a form that can be drawn. I sometimes use this same exercise for peer revision.  In some ways it’s more challenging for the peers since there’s less “stuff” to draw but as part of a class with a couple of peer revision exercises it offers authors a completely new view of their writing. It also occurs to me that in early stages of drafting it might be interesting to invert this exercise, asking students to draw the argument they want to make in a paper and then share that drawing with peers (or maybe a photo collage they prepared before class).  Peers would then write out the argument they see.  Student authors might get new insights on their own thinking, not only by making the drawing in the first place but also through any suggestions, deviations, or variations offered by their peers. ... View more