**Content alerts for racist violence and sexual violence.**    On a recent Saturday in September, I attended a neighborhood street fair in Queens, New York. Since it was the day before the beginning of Banned Books Week, my local bookstore offered a table to support and sell banned books. The table included a selection of the most frequently banned books, postcards to support the authors and publishers of banned books, and a tablet with a link to the  PEN America's Index of School Book Bans (July 1, 2021 - June 30, 2022). There are 2,435 titles on Pen America’s list, beginning with Ace of Spades by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé and ending with Grandpa Cacao: A Tale of Chocolate, from Farm to Family by  Elizabeth Zunon. The books are banned, challenged, and being investigated in schools and libraries across the United States.     In scanning the list, as well as the American Library Association’s lists of Top Ten Most Challenged Books, I found books I remembered very well. There were books I taught in my  first-year writing and literature classes, books I had given as birthday gifts to young relatives assigned by my high school teachers, and books I read for my doctoral comprehensive exams. The list also offered my memories of my first encounters with some of the books in question. At the street fair, I offered my first memory of realizing that book bans existed back in junior high in the early 1970s at my town’s public library in suburban Chicago.   One afternoon, I brought my books to the library’s front desk to be stamped with the due date, only to be met with resistance. “You can’t check those books out,” the librarian said. “Why not?” I asked. “Because these are adult books and children are not allowed to check out books from the adult stacks.” Again I asked why, but the explanation was vague and dismissive. I left without the books. But a few weeks later, I discovered them back on the shelves, and for many visits afterward I found cozy and secluded sections of the adult stacks, and I read the books I wasn’t allowed to read.    I could not stop asking why. Why did the library not allow a tween or young teen to check out books from the adult stacks? The books I wanted to read had no provocative pictures, no offensive language. Mostly I wanted to read history. There were gaps in the school curriculum that needed filling. For instance, there were no lessons about race, class, or gender, and no indication that our textbooks contained contradictory information.    For instance, I learned U.S. history from the perspective of colonizers, not the colonized. After the Civil War, the textbooks said, carpetbaggers and other outsiders from the North tried to change the way of life in the South, but ultimately the carpetbaggers weren’t successful. However, there was no mention that Northerners tried to eliminate a way of life that included lynching, convict leasing, and other forms of de facto slavery. My reading in the adult stacks was a revelation, and having to hide this reading from the librarians was deeply disconcerting.     In high school, there were limited changes, but still more censorship. The sex education classes focused on menstruation (for girls only), reproduction, and sexually transmitted diseases. The complexities of gender, and the basics of sexual assault, rape, consent, birth control, and abortion, if addressed at all, were perfunctory and confusing. But there were other means of discovering information, and this happened through several books that are now on the Pen America list. This discovery begins with Brave New World, an assigned reading for my first-year high school English class. I did not yet have enough background to fully comprehend Aldous Huxley’s dystopia, and the links between the disturbing images in the book, and the disturbances unfolding in the early 1970s. Because of this disconnect, I could not find a way to process the messages of the book.    However, another dystopian world was unraveling below my desk. Someone in the class had procured a copy of another banned book, Go Ask Alice: A Real Diary.  We carefully passed the text back and forth among students, underneath the desks and beneath the teacher’s line of vision. Alice’s diary dealt with sex and sexual violence, drug addiction, and rebelling against parental authority. Even as Alice’s diary turned out to be fake, the topics it addressed were deeply intriguing to me and, before the internet, scant information about them was available to me through my health classes, my family, or the public library. Our Bodies, Ourselves, yet another banned book in print at this time, addressed all these topics and more; . however, I was unaware of its existence until my sophomore year of college.    A few years after Go Ask Alice, I encountered I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in the high school library. I still remember the front cover of that book. Showing through the clear protective plastic against a red-orange background was a blackbird soaring upward from the sun. Finding this book in the library was life changing, as it was the first book I ever encountered that centered Black lives. Angelou was part of the same generation as my parents and many of my teachers. Yet Angelou’s first memoir of racism, poverty, sexual assault, segregation, Black community, and Black joy was never listed as a text or acknowledged throughout the entirety of my schooling. I bought my own paperback copy and reread it often, even as the book is yet another entry on the Pen America list.   Destiny, an orange tabby cat, sits next to a paperback copy of a banned book: Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Photo by Susan Bernstein.   The lesson I learn from the experiences of reading all of these books, then and now, is that I could not rely on school for my education, because the parameters of what was acceptable, or what counted as literature, were narrow and opaque. Even as white privilege shapes my view, the current book bans, although not supported by a majority of people, attempt to replicate perspectives of everyday life that are as insufficient and constricted as the views I encountered in and out of school half a century ago. The banned books that lifted me out of that restricted thinking changed my world, and allowed me to understand two contradictory ideas: First, I was not the first young girl in history to suffer the tribulations of coming of age. Second, I needed and still need to interrogate my own privileges as I continue the lifelong work of building beloved community.   Read banned books, teach them, and absorb what they have to offer. The lessons might not seem immediately clear, but processing them over time and distance can open the heart and the imagination to new possibilities.   ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn, a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy, and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition Overview [Generational] cohorts give researchers a tool to analyze changes in views over time; they can provide a way to understand how different formative experiences interact with the life-cycle and aging process to shape people’s view of the world. (Pew Research 2020) This post is the first in a three-part series through which I detail a rather expansive Generation Project with multimodal components and sub-projects. I broke down the project into concurrent parts that can also be used as stand-alone activities. Stay tuned as I present these assignments over the next couple of posts. In this first post, I present the project overview and the historical context, the second post I detail the popular culture component and the third is the collaborative presentations. These assignments are easily modified for all teaching modalities (online, f2f, and hybrid). Image of timeline between 1962 and 1966 with events placed This series demonstrates that we can integrate multimodal composition in thoughtful ways throughout assignments and processes and is not just about end products. In designing this project, I imagined something that involved students in deep research – both individual and collaborative – on a subject that is interesting and current. I wanted to offer opportunities throughout the project to engage in multimodal work – both the analysis and composition of multimodal artifacts. Students house the project on individual websites created through Google Sites to allow for composing and sharing of interactive and visual content. Generation Project Overview This generation project helps students move beyond their insular views and challenges them to understand the perspectives of others by immersing themselves in generational research. We live in a society with polarized discourse and this project will help students engage with ideas outside of their generational space. These ideas motivated me to design this generation project in which students work together to research one of the five living generations: The Silent Generation (born 1928–1945) Baby Boomers (born 1946–1964) Generation X (born 1965–1980) Millennials (born 1981–1995) Generation Z (born 1996–2010) Students research both primary and secondary sources to define and create a portrait of their assigned generation. The purpose is to understand the historical context, popular culture artifacts, values, and cultural ideologies. Each student will individually research a couple of focus years within the generation and then contribute to a collaborative project in which they overview and interpret the generation. Sources: Students will locate and analyze the following scholarly and popular sources: Historical context (timelines, historical portraits, economy, values, important figures, oral stories, theoretical perspectives, etc.) Media and Popular culture artifacts (images, music, advertisements, literature, film, fashion, food, etc.) Defining Moments (Headlines, Articles) Ideologies, ideas, behaviors, and values of the time Anything else that might be meaningful Steps to the Assignment This first part of the assignment orients students towards generational research and introduces them to definitions of the five living generations. 1. Background Resources: Understanding Generational Research It is important for students to understand the nature of generational research and gain a general overview of the generations. This helps them understand the ways generations are constructed and the trends that affect them. I allow students to choose the generation research group they want to join so these background readings help them make those choices. Generation Research Resources: The Whys and Hows of Generational Research Pew Research Center (2020) Generations Throughout History – Buzzfeed Video (2017) Fast Facts: American Generations – CNN (2022) Baby Boomers, Millennials, Gen X Labels: Necessary or Nonsense The Conversation (2020) 2. Online Discussion - Students engage in an online discussion in which they choose a passage, idea or related ideas from the generation readings. I encourage them to speak about the characteristics they observed along with assumptions and stereotypes they might have about the different generations. I require them to also post one representative image (from Creative Commons or other copyright free sources). 3. Choose a Generation and Focus Years – After the initial background work, students choose the generation that they want to research as part of a team. I try to make sure that the groups are evenly distributed to have the same number of members. Students assemble in their teams (online or f2f) and then choose a couple of focus years within their generations. The focus years give students responsibility for individual research that they will contribute to their research team to create a representative span of their generation years. 4. Research Historical Context: Students compose an Historical Overview of their focus years. They should include events, defining moments, trends, important figures and ideas, observations about politics, economy and values. I encourage them to go beyond just listing facts and interpret and synthesize their findings. They search for academic and popular articles and learn how to attribute their sources. 5. Interactive Feature Article: Students compose their historical overview of their focus years as an interactive document that includes specific references, purposeful embedded links, and captioned multimodal components (images, video clips, etc.) to tell their stories and contextualize their research. They create a page on their site to host the post. 6. Teamwork: Defining Moments: Students get together with their teams and share their research. Each team creates a Google doc in which they list the defining moments and significant events of their focus years. Together, they discuss the overlaps and the ways their focus years fit together to define their generation. 7. Interactive Timeline: Data Visualization: As a team, students select the most important defining moments from their extensive list and create a multimodal timeline. There are many open-source platforms for creating interactive and visual timelines. I give them some resources but allow them to choose their own. They will include the defining moments along with representative images for each entry on the timeline. They will also use this timeline as part of their collaborative presentation later in the project. Some timeline resources: Best Free Timeline Maker Tools for Students Timelines in Canva Adobe Timeline Creator Reflections on the Activities This generation project gives each student a research role and ways to contribute to the larger community knowledge on the subject. The level of individual responsibility creates genuine research teams that invite strong analysis and synthesis through collaboration. These activities engage students in a range of research, writing, and multimodal composition practices. I find that when students are asked to engage in meaningful curiosity and collaboration, they demonstrate a stronger sense of ownership and motivation. Stay tuned – next post – Part 2: Generations through Popular Culture ... View more

  Semester system schools are already in full swing and quarter system schools are just about to start up. Fall 2022 is here, a new school year—one that brings us students who have been through the pandemic of the last two and a half years. Many haven’t been on campus in some time, haven’t been in classes with other students and teachers. Others have been fairly isolated, or isolated on phones, which is a special kind of isolation. For the last month I have listened to stories—as I’m sure you have—about mental health issues among young people today, and I’ve listened especially to those about college students and the difficulties they are reporting. Just yesterday I heard a first-year college student being interviewed: when asked what she had lost during the last two years, she answered, simply, “myself.” I know you can fill in similar examples from your own experience, maybe even from your own family. This has always been my favorite time of year: the new school year, the new class of students, the excitement of beginning college study, the excitement of meeting, and teaching, first-year students. My favorite. Time. Of. Year. But the last two and a half years have chastened and sobered me, as I’ve spoken with so many college-bound students who are feeling distress and even fear. In such a time, my steadfast belief is that teachers of writing/reading/speaking have a special opportunity and a special obligation. We may be teaching the smallest class our students will take. We almost certainly will be meeting students one-on-one more than other faculty, either in office hour sessions or in writing center sessions. We will absolutely be sharing writing with students, reading and responding to what they have to say and, we hope, establishing a two-way connection with them.  This year, more than ever, we need to make the most of these opportunities. But I think we need to do something more: we need to introduce students to the ludic nature of rhetoric and remind them of the crucial importance of play and playfulness to their learning and to their lives.  In this endeavor, I am guided and inspired by Lynda Barry, whose One! Hundred! Demons! I have taught for eons and whose comics and especially books on creativity (Picture This, What It Is) are always on my desk, along with her brilliant syllabus.  Barry is convinced that there is an artist in each of us and that playing—playing!—is the best way to let that artist emerge. And to release anxieties of all kinds and to become creators rather than recorders or responders only. (If you’ve ever had a chance to participate in one of Barry’s workshops, you’ll have seen the magic happen: if you haven’t, take some time to read about them or find out if she will be giving workshops anywhere near you in the coming months.) Barry says that when she is working with graduate students, almost always uptight and anxious and focused laser-like on one objective—she pairs them with 3 and 4 year olds: she says sixty to ninety minutes playing with these little ones loosens everything up, shifts patterns of thought, and leads to some brilliant problem solving. And when she says playing, she means playing:  down on the floor, making things together, defining things together, even just hanging out. While I don’t have access to a bunch of preschoolers (wish I did!), I can still introduce play into our classroom: activities where I ask students to listen hard for three minutes and then describe what they heard, or hand them objects they must describe and name without opening their eyes–you can probably think of more. And we can be playful with writing: trying for limericks or witty haikus; writing a very long sentence about the process of writing a very long sentence; trying for a sentence with the most double negatives, or the most metaphors or similes. Anything to be playful and to loosen up, to relax, and then to create. I would like to make all our writing projects more fun, with more potential for play—even a research-based argument; even a research project itself. I will write more about these possibilities soon. In the meantime, I am thinking of all writing teachers and students everywhere, and hoping that, together, we can have a healthy—and a healing—year.  Image used under a standard Adobe Stock license.  ... View more

Boy using computer in classroom. "classroom-laptops-computers-boy" by R. Nial Bradshaw is licensed under CC BY 2.0. When Sonia Maasik and I published the first edition of Signs of Life in the USA in 1994, the Internet was only just emerging as a new medium in American life—one that had not yet significantly affected the way we consume products and entertainment, nor the ways in which goods and services are advertised. As we now know, the exponential growth of the Internet since then has changed all that. Entertainment is increasingly streamed across myriad digital platforms, and marketing has become a highly targeted matter: calculated algorithms match certain advertising to certain consumers, whose profiles have been constructed using data-mined information that has been gathered through what amount to digital spy networks. Gone are the days when advertising professionals (can you spell Mad Men?) cast about for a way of determining what, exactly, their target markets wanted through organic means; and equally gone are the days when there were but three national television networks broadcasting the same content to a relatively undifferentiated mass audience.  As I say, all this is commonly understood, but I think that this paradigm shift has reached a point where those of us who analyze popular culture through the lens of cultural semiotics in order to take the pulse, as it were, of American society, must revise our approach. This blog will be a sketch in that direction.  I was prompted to make this my inaugural topic for the 2022-23 Bits blogging year while visiting some friends over the Labor Day weekend who were watching a baseball game on TV when I dropped by. The game itself was rather dull, which wasn’t much of a surprise, but what really struck me was how dull and repetitious the advertising was. There seemed to be only two or three sponsors (insurance companies of one kind or another) who kept repeating the same uninspired advertisements. “What happened to all the car commercials and fast-food spots?” I wondered, as the same few ads rotated through each commercial break. “Where are the razor blades and after shave lotions?”  Being the incorrigible cultural semiotician that I am, I shared my thoughts with my friends, who weren’t much interested in the game either. They also happen to be very well versed in all things Internet (well, of course! they are millennials), and in the course of our conversation I learned that today’s television sets are essentially big-screen computers that are completely integrated with the Internet—which means that watching TV is no different than surfing the Web insofar as a viewer’s every move is being monitored and mined for data. And at that moment a light flashed on in my head: no wonder the advertising for the game was so half-hearted and so bereft of sponsors! Why bother with the expense of traditional, scatter-shot advertising spots when all you need to do is buy viewer data from the data marketers and then shoot targeted advertising at them on their smart phones?  The implications of all this are profound, because it means that mass culture has now been so sliced and diced into ever more granular consumer markets that attempting to determine the tenor of American life and consciousness simply by interpreting mass media content is doomed to failure. What we must do now is interpret what we don’t see on our TVs, as well as what we do. We must seek out the many sources of information and content that do not get covered in such mainstream media outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Atlantic, Slate, Vogue, and Vox, for example. We must research and analyze what those who still use outmoded technology to discover what they are seeing in the way of television content advertising, and what this tells us. It is apparent that there are now essentially two Americas when it comes to entertainment and marketing: the younger tech-savvy audiences who get their news, entertainment, and advertising exclusively via digital media, and the traditionalists who go under the radar when it comes to cultural analysis. These two groups represent a split that parallels that of the great divide in American political culture, as the latter group has, accordingly, blind-sided the high-tech pundits of political prognostication in election after election in the new millennium. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Pamela Childers, a lifelong secondary, undergraduate and graduate school educator, writer, editor, and consultant. She enjoys collaborating with colleagues and students.   My First Teacher Letitia, my Welsh Grammie, took me at three to the circus in Philadelphia, while Mother worked at a switchboard and Dad was still overseas after the war. She read me poetry and prose long after I had started teaching English and recited Shakespeare for the Princeton Women’s Club in her late seventies, an age I am close to reaching. When I last visited her in the dementia ward of the nursing home, she looked up at me from her wrinkled pillow, smiled and said, “I raised you, didn’t I?” I nodded, and we both shared an unforgotten memory.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Rhona Blaker. Blaker is an adjunct instructor of English at Glendale Community College, where she also serves as the Campus Coordinator for Contexualized Teaching and Learning.   From the Pantry Most mornings I stare at my own face next to twenty-five black squares. One Thursday, desperate for human contact, I begged the students to reveal their faces. Three students complied. Later, a young woman e-mailed to say she never turns her camera on because she takes class on a tablet while sitting in a pantry, trying to escape the ten other people who live in her apartment. I apologized for imagining English 101 was ever about me and rejoiced when she later wrote to say she had been accepted to UCLA after earning a 4.0 GPA in her community college closet.     Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Dr. Meridith Leo. Leo teaches courses in Composition and Rhetoric as well as Creative Non-Fiction at Suffolk County Community College’s Ammerman Campus. Dr. Leo earned her Ph.D. at St. John’s University where she focused on narratives of difference and belonging along with culturally responsive literacy narratives. Her research at St. John’s University led to work in Co-Requisite (ALP) coursework which is detailed in her dissertation “Integrating Emerging Writers into the Post-Remedial College: A Consideration of Accelerated Learning Programs.”   No Sleep, Only Teach Ding. It's 3 am. I should be sleeping but I'm not. That's the 3rd email from Katia. Ding. There goes another email. It's Jeremiah this time. Do I get up? The emails will just keep coming; they're awake. I guess it's time to start the day. Computer on. Login complete. Virtual meeting links sent. Black tiles slowly fade to Katia and Jeremiah. "Good morning. What's going on?" My voice is cracking as it wakes. Simultaneously I hear: "We need help with our essays!" Through a yawn, I manage to say, "Okay let's see what we can work through. Don't worry. We'll figure it out."     Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Carmen Misé, Assistant Professor of English and Communications at Miami Dade College - North Campus. Misé is an insatiable reader and greatly enjoys film. Her favorite genre is horror (mystery, suspense, thrillers, sci-fi). She writes non-fiction and poetry, enjoys being outdoors and spending time with family, friends, and her dog Hamlet. Misé just became a first-time mom. She believes in aliens, and yes, the Earth is round.   Hello! As I logged into Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, using the recommended browser, and triple checking my Internet connection, I instantly dreaded the sea of silence in our “classroom.” The silhouettes of “users.” No faces, no voices. I felt like that one time I shouted, “Hello!,” as I stood at the Grand Canyon's South Rim. My salutation echoed through time and space, but I did not know its end destination or if anyone heard me. That day would be different. We laughed and talked about our favorite local restaurants. I met everyone's cat. We didn't cover thesis statements, but I was OK with that.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines.  ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Dr. Nancy E. Wilson, Associate Professor and Directory of Lower Division Studies at Texas State University. Epiphanies Asked to share an epiphany, Misha mentions that while watching a YouTube video of a KKK grand wizard, she recognized that they had something in common: as an African American, she also wishes to preserve her racial heritage. When the class expresses alarm, Misha clarifies that she knows about the KKK’s hatred of African Americans; however, during quarantine she resolved to stop condemning and canceling others. Doing so made her feel superior but left her ignorant. She suggested that as a class we “run toward” uncomfortable topics and try to understand why people think what they think. Every class needs a Misha.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

    As another school term ends, I think back on what we hope our students have learned about argumentation. Some of that knowledge has to do with analyzing the arguments made by others. I would hope that students leave an argumentation class a little less gullible than when they entered and, yes, a little less gullible than many of the people they will cross paths with in their daily lives. They need to be able to see the flaws in others’ arguments, even when they are tempted to accept those arguments. They need a vocabulary for explaining what is so wrong with so much of what passes for truth these days. As they see new controversies arise in the social and political worlds that they inhabit, they need to be able to read the most recent headlines and the most recent social media posts with a critical eye. They must understand the need for seeking common ground as a starting place for reconciling seemingly irreconcilable differences. Hopefully, they leave us knowing a little more about what sources of information to trust, including blocking out those voices that tell them that no media outlet is to be trusted. Some of that knowledge has to do with backing up their own arguments. As a new teacher, I did what was then popular and assigned one big research paper, and then after seeing the mistakes students made, wished they had another chance to get it right, but the term was over, and it was too late.  As I evolved as a teacher, I learned to teach the use of sources as a skill to be gained through practice. Students can start learning to use sources skillfully from the first time they write about something they have read. They can learn that to use sources is just that—to make use of sources to advance their own ideas. The idea is to avoid a patchwork quilt of quotations from sources that have very little of the student’s own ideas to hold them together. They can learn that a source worth using is worth identifying with more than a name in parenthesis. I would hope that by the end of the term each student can smoothly incorporate sources into his or her writing while providing the claim to authority that makes that source worth drawing on. I would hope that students leave knowing how to find good sources and how to identify which sources are good and reliable. This means learning to sift through all the chaff available online to find the seeds of value. Research is so much more than finding any old source to list on a works cited page. Recognizing and constructing successful arguments are skills that can be learned. Never has there been a greater need for citizens to have those skills. Some of the most basic rights we hold as citizens are under threat. Every time our students decide whom and what to vote for they are using the skills of argumentation. When they stand up in support of that very right to vote they are doing so as well.   Photo: "Dimension"  by KT King is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Jenna Morton-Aiken, Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy.   Voices Day 1: Welcome to Technical Writing. I cultivate tone and words to establish authority with young, mostly male, maritime cadets. Call me Dr. Their body language shouts, Stop trying, your class doesn’t matter to me. Weeks 1-3: Deploy resistance with strong voice and applied expertise as Covid-19’s shadow grows. Maybe this doesn’t suck, white gaps between double-spaced submissions whisper. Week 4: Campus abandoned, we’re all silenced. Week 5+: I’m here, I write with memes and raw emotions, my voice virtually transformed. Theirs, too—Help me, they say. I’m drowning, they say. Your words matter to me, they say. We write.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

For the last month or so, it’s been awards season at colleges and universities across the country—and of course I am especially interested in awards for student writing. A week ago, I had the pleasure of joining one such event at Stanford for the annual Oral Presentation of Research Awards, given every year to students in the second-year required writing course. While individual classes in this course are themed so that students can elect a class on a topic that appeals to them, all students prepare an extensive research-based argument—and then “remediate” it into a fifteen-minute oral presentation. Over the years since we first introduced this course and assignment in the early 2000s, this assignment has consistently engaged students’ imaginations—and effort. Over and over again, they tell us that having an opportunity to “boil down” a lengthy written text into a memorable oral presentation is one of their most rewarding challenges. It’s no surprise that this assignment, or some version of it, is now common in writing programs, as students learn the importance of being able to communicate the results of often difficult-to-follow research to public audiences with clarity and verve. Imagine my delight, then, as I listened to these four students describe their research and receive commendations for their work (including a generous cash award as well as several books chosen especially for them by their instructors): Ijeoma Alozie, “What Heartbeats are Worth Listening To,” about medical neglect and “misogynoir” in medical institutions, Liv Jenks, “Charting a Car-Free Point Forward: Addressing Resident Opposition to Green Urbanism,” which featured extensive field-based research on local attitudes, Amantina Rossi, “Pelo Melo: An Exploration of the Dominican Mother-Daughter Dynamics Regarding Hair, Beauty, and Professionalism,” about inter-generational tensions surrounding expectations and desires, and Haley Stafford, “Environmental Equity at Bay: Climate-Driven Evictions in Jakarta, Indonesia,” about causes and effects in a city that is literally sinking. As I listened to these four second-year students, I was struck by the range of their research interests, by their understanding of the methodologies available to them, and especially by their eloquence: while their comments were clearly crafted, they were delivered with such poise, openness, clarity, and audience awareness that they seemed to be in conversation directly with me. That these students have all had their personal and educational lives disrupted during the last two-plus years of a pandemic made their savoir faire all the more remarkable—a celebration truly to be cherished. I hope your school year is winding down as well as possible and that you may have some much-needed R and R during the summer months. I am going to be taking a break from Bedford Bits for a while myself, looking for ways to enjoy life’s good and simple pleasures. As I do so, I will be thinking of writing teachers and students everywhere with admiration. Image Credit: Photo 839 by NappyStock, used under a Public Domain license ... View more

Michael A. Reyes teaches first-year writing and literature of the Americas at Cal Lutheran University and Cal State LA. He specializes in rhetorical genre theory and contemporary Latinx docupoetry. He’s also the Assistant Editor of Poetry at The Offing and a former member of the Bedford New Scholars Advisory Board.   Two years ago, a Cal State LA student petition circulated around social media. It was a petition to grant all students at the university A’s. The reason? The coronavirus pandemic had made any equitable learning, and therefore fair distribution of grades, impossible. The petition was thesis-driven and so well-organized with diverse appeals and sources. It was truly a great demonstration of the critical thinking and writing I hope to inspire in my students! It was this spring 2020 petition that sparked my interest in seeking alternatives to traditional grade and point systems. I agreed with the students’ argument that the difference between a passing and failing grade is less about being apathetic and instead much more to do with resources and accessibility. So, I spent the summer developing my own version of Asao B. Inoue’s course grading contract, which I was assigned to read during my graduate studies. My goal was to introduce to students a new way of being motivated that didn’t include the pressure and standardization of letter grades on their assignments. The outcome would be the same: receive a final course grade. But, how I guided them to that outcome would be extremely different. Instead of receiving a letter grade or point value, all assignments would receive a “Complete” or an “Incomplete.” In doing so, I imagined that I would further open my classrooms to a pluriversality of writing and reading levels, especially when a student’s “best” may look a lot different during the pandemic. I presented the grading contract to my classes on day one of the fall 2020 semester. It included my rationale for the contract: to decentralize my role and instead place students as authorities in their own reading and writing growth; to acknowledge labor over expertise and understand that one semester is not enough to dictate “meeting” or “advanced” reading and writing skills; and to have students be motivated by feedback and collaboration. The grading contract also included the table I’d use to determine their final course grades: Final Course Grade # of Missing or Incomplete Assignments A 0-2 A- 3 B+ 4 B 5 B- 6 C+ 7 C 8 C- 9 No Credit 10 or more   To my surprise, no students protested (and haven’t during my 2 years of using it). They each accepted the terms, and saw it as a chance to, as one first-year student noted in a post-grading contract reflection assignment: “. . . take your time and try to write as well as you can without fear that everything has to be perfect. For this class you will find your writing style and your voice. It sounds cheesy I know but I’m being serious.” My obvious concern was that students would take it for granted and submit haphazard work, but that was never an issue. I credit my use of a TILT framework that clearly communicated what would constitute a “Complete” for each assignment. Additionally, this called on me to revise a few of my weekly reading responses and rhetorical précis assignments to be less frequent but a bit more challenging. For instance, I only assigned one homework assignment per week, which would ideally allow for student comprehension and transformation to sink in. Students would therefore not be punished for taking natural pauses to work through difficulties. The quality of my assignments seemed to also improve since I had to design them for productive difficulties. I anticipated that the less frequent and more manageable the assignments were, while still promoting productive struggle, the more students had a real chance to think about their thinking and then submit. It’s been two years since first implementing a course grading contract in all my classes, from developmental to advanced composition, and even in inter-American literature courses. Summer breaks seem to be my reflection periods. So, as a new one approaches, I’m committing to working through a few realizations I’ve made—some good, some not so good: In an access-oriented institution with no corequisites, this allowed for students to be comfortable with where they were at—truly living up to the age-old motto of meeting students where they’re at. My grading anxiety reduced so much. I no longer worried about the high stakes implications of giving a student one point more or one point less on an assignment. Students were more encouraged to read the feedback to see how I and their peers were interpreting their choices. I also saw a lot more risks! Although I tried, not all assignments required the same amount of “labor,” so some missed assignments were higher stakes than others. To be honest, I’m still unsure about how to address this. Can and should a final draft of an essay carry the same weight as a 200-word reading response? I concluded that students, particularly in my composition classes, should check in more frequently with the grading contract (not just at the beginning and end) via journal reflections to build a more thorough understanding about the value of this system. In other words, I want to build more feedback loops for me to see how students are processing their growth and not associating this with the discourse of grades. I wondered how a course grading contract’s value changes depending on the course. I found it valuable for creativity and risk-taking in my upper-division courses where students already had a stronger grasp of university rhetorical genres and had less confusion about “hidden curriculum.” However, I found it valuable for inspiring affective approaches to my first-year composition classes. These students could freely unlearn and learn academic assumptions and writing conventions. In other words, learn academic conventions through play. The grading contract did not interfere with course outlines nor department common reading and writing assignments, which was always my leading pitch to my department chairs and program directors. My approach, after presenting it at an end-of-semester English department showcase, was adopted in the Graduate Teaching Associate’s Program at Cal State LA and moved tenured faculty to have informal and formal conversations about assessments. The talks, however, have slowed down. I imagine next steps would be the chair forming a committee. This entire move was DEIJ-motivated—a desire to move away from the arbitrariness of grades and points. However, how can I better rationalize my final course grade table? At the moment, to be honest, it does read a bit arbitrarily – the line between three missing assignments and four, between an A and a B, can be a thin one. Achieving equity can’t happen in one semester. Equity is urgent, but I’m finding it okay to be slow-paced to allow for deeper reflections along the way. And, to allow for more energy into making one strong and detailed contribution, as opposed to many mediocre ones during a semester. ... View more

An article I wrote in 2021 explores the value of using concordancing software as a tool for pedagogical reflection. The practice is simple: faculty collect a set of assignments, reflections, or open-ended evaluations from students into a single document, and the resulting file is analyzed via word cloud software (such as this free version) or a concordancing program (such as AntConc) to discover patterns of lexical use that point to dominant themes in the data.    In May, as I am wrapping up my first semester as coordinator of a Writing Fellows program (tied closely this past year to our first-year composition and corequisite courses), I have decided to look at the second-semester reflections of the student fellows through the lens of lexical analysis. As might be expected, the most common noun mentioned was students; after all, the fellows program is student-centered, and tutoring reflections understandably center on the fellows’ interactions with students. But among the many other words that were highlighted in my analysis, one in particular stood out:  wait. When I looked more closely, it was clear that students used this word only when conjoined to another: time. Wait-time was a concept that one of the fellows had encountered as part of training she had received as a supplemental instructor for our university; she later chose an article about wait-time in second-language instruction as a basis for a seminar discussion she led. The fellows group as a whole latched onto this idea as a critical factor—not just for tutoring, but for writing, learning, and thinking in general.    Wait-time—for processing, exploring, testing ideas, playing with language—underlies much of the learning process. (And as I pointed out in a post a couple of weeks ago, our time-bound schedules for classes and semesters often militate against wait-time, both on a macro and micro scale.) When wait-time is offered, learners move forward at a pace that suits them, and they can (perhaps) carry ideas forward as well, ideas that might otherwise have been abandoned in the effort to keep up with the instructor or the tutor or the clock.   After two intense semesters of collaborative learning with these student writing fellows, we are facing a long summer break. Fortunately, all but one of the fellows will be returning to the program in the fall; in fact, I considered this past week giving the fellows some sort of summer assignment—reading a book, journaling, revising their “philosophy of tutoring” statements, mapping out personal goals for the fall, or doing some thematic coding of data we collected during the past year. But I think, instead, I am going to consider this summer an extended form of wait-time—just to see what happens, both for the fellows and for myself. Many of them will be doing what I would assign anyway, as part of their normal routines. But I don’t want to determine what that practice looks like for any of them; I’d like to see where this wait-time takes them—as writers, tutors, readers, and whatever else they are becoming.   Our work in first-year composition programs—and with other undergraduate programs—is always going to be constrained by institutional schedules and timeframes. But having seen the results of wait-time across semesters (as well as across months or years in creative and collaborative projects), I am wondering how we might invite extended wait-time in spite of those institutional constraints.  Any thoughts? I’ll be considering that question this summer—and waiting to see what possibilities emerge. ... View more

  Lately I have been spending a lot of time in Malibu Creek State Park, a spectacular setting popular with deer, coyotes, skunks, mallards, geese, herons, hikers, runners, rock climbers, mountain bikers, and movie/TV buffs—the latter due to the many productions whose outdoor scenes have been filmed here over the years on what used to be land owned by 20th Century Fox. Visitors may recognize scenic backdrops from cinematic classics such as How Green Was My Valley, Planet of the Apes, and (most famously) M*A*S*H—both the movie and television spinoff. While I am tempted to write here about the tricky passage from the park's Century Lake to the M*A*S*H filming site (tricky, at least, for a sixty-something man on a mountain bike), that topic isn't really pertinent to a cultural-semiotic analysis. The M*A*S*H franchise, on the other hand, most certainly is. So here goes. As with most semiotic analyses, the key to the analysis begins in a difference, in this case, the difference between the popular movie of 1970 and the even more popular television series of 1972-1983 (for the sake of brevity, I am not including the 1968 novel upon which both the movie and the series were based). To begin with, then, in the days before subscription networks like HBO broke through the limitations placed upon commercial television, M*A*S*H the movie could be much raunchier, and gorier, than the TV series ever could be. The differences between the two in that respect signify just how much things have changed since the 1970s, with TV fare like The Sopranos and Game of Thrones pushing boundaries that not even the movies dared to explore fifty years ago. Much more significantly, the blatant sexism of M*A*S*H the movie was considerably toned down in the television version, reflecting (especially as the series developed) the growing influence of the women's movement on American popular culture through the course of the decade. Any extended analysis of the M*A*S*H franchise would accordingly need to take both of these differences into account. But my focus here will be upon another difference, the difference, that is to say, between the way that the movie and the series mediated America's experience of the Vietnam War, for while both were clearly understood as metaphors for that war, their takes on it were quite distinct from one another. The movie presented a sharp satirical attack on the conduct of an increasingly unpopular war as U.S. Army officials led their unwilling conscripts into harm’s way. The series, on the other hand, softened that attack considerably (the development of the character of Colonel Sherman T. Potter—who does not appear in the film—is particularly striking in this respect) to focus instead on a more generic anti-war sentiment. This gentling down of the film's biting satire is probably what most accounts for the immense success of the TV series, a success reflected in the fact that 105.9 million viewers (almost half of the U.S. population at the time) tuned in for its final episode, even though, unlike television series such as The X-Files and Lost, it had no tangled webs to unweave, nor, unlike shows such as Game of Thrones, did it have a complex, series-long plot line to bring to a conclusion. In the series finale, the Korean War simply ends and the characters head home. But the broad sweep of its final audience shows how M*A*S*H managed to bring together tens of millions of Americans who, not so very long before, had been bitterly divided by a failed war—and the larger cultural conflicts that accompanied that failure. This achievement was not accomplished by accident, for the M*A*S*H series went out of its way to give something to almost everyone. For those who had opposed the Vietnam War, it maintained the anti-war vibe of the movie, along with a gentler version of its sixties-style attacks on military authority. But for those who resented the anti-Vietnam War movement, there was that far less caustic, much more simply comedic, take on the armed services, with a fatherly Colonel Potter and a buffoonish Major Frank Burns (face it, Larry Linville was no Robert Duvall) to soothe them. And, probably most important of all, there was Alan Alda (no Donald Sutherland was he) as Hawkeye Pierce, irreverent and full of mischief but ultimately a sentimental and even reassuring emotional anchor through eleven seasons. The role that would establish Alda as the face of a new kind of masculinity: the so-called “sensitive man of the 1970s.”  Thus M*A*S*H the TV show mediated and reflected the social movement of a decade when America pulled back from the tumults of the sixties, softening many of the sharp edges of that more revolutionary time (those now-ridiculed male hairstyles were long-hair lite, while seventies-style "soft rock" speaks for itself) as the counter-culture came of age and joined the Establishment—a process that would find its own reflection in 1983's The Big Chill. But there were other historical processes at work, because even as Americans gathered around the small screen for the final episode of M*A*S*H, a counter-revolution was already underway. The Reagan era had begun, and with it a continuation of the culture wars that had pulled America apart in the sixties, and which continue to divide the country into ever-more-hostile camps. And it is highly unlikely—if not flat out impossible—that any television series today (or, for that matter, any artifact of popular culture), could ever achieve what M*A*S*H managed to achieve: a brief moment of cultural concord.     Image Credit: "M*A*S*H Jeep" by contraption is marked with CC BY 2.0. ... View more