Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin toddlers, Dylan and Escher.   While taking education courses in college, my peers and I were asked to think of metaphors for our pedagogy. At the time, I found inspiration in the idea of being the conductor of an orchestra, using my conductors’ wand to help bring out the creative genius of my students. I imagined my hair getting ruffled by the breeze created by my own motion as my body kept time—the community of it all, the uproarious appreciation of the crowd. But after 15 years of being a college professor, my metaphor for teaching has evolved from “I am a conductor,” to “I am a circle-creator.” It’s a metaphor that reminds me to bring students together (often into the shape of a circle), to constantly renew my commitment to circle back to previous concepts before building on them, and to help students build cyclical routines. My new metaphor is not as glamorous, and in the strict sense of definitions, it’s only metaphor-adjacent, but it works a lot better for me. The circle-creator metaphor speaks to me because I find it valuable to be at the edges of the classroom, alongside my students, where we can encourage each other and learn collaboratively. This allows for insights to come from the voices of students, rather than just my own, resulting in a deeper understanding of the material. However, creating a literal circle in the classroom can be a challenge, as my current Humanities 101 students can confirm. After attempting to arrange desks into a circle, the result often looks more like an octopus having a bad day. Additionally, one or more students may end up sitting outside of the circle (by choice or by chance), and the pace of discussion can make it easy to miss opportunities that help students deepen their analysis. That being said, I like the circle formation precisely because it is not always easy; together in the circle, we strive to make meaning together, and there is always something about the literal or metaphorical configuration to improve upon next time. The circle-creator metaphor also works for me because it reflects the iterative nature of teaching. A student may understand a concept one week and forget it the next. To solidify and deepen our understanding, I remind myself to circle back to previous concepts before moving on to new ones. For example, before discussing the shift to monotheism in Ancient Rome under Constantine, I asked my students to recall what they remembered about the shift to monotheism under Akhenaton in Ancient Egypt. My students and I think about how history repeats itself, and we repeat ourselves too. Thinking about the circle-creator metaphor helps me to slow my teaching down—to offer reminders and opportunities to rethink, instead of just plowing ahead. When teaching study skills in my English 097 class, I also think about the circle-creator metaphor in terms of routines. I encourage my students to make small changes in their study process, such as writing down exactly when they plan to do their homework for the class. We then circle back the next day to see how it went. If a student says that a strategy didn’t work for them, I remind them that it may be useful to try it more than once. We also talk about how good habits, once established, can come and go. I share with them that I, too, constantly slip and have to circle back to my better habits like going to bed on time, and properly managing my grading time. I believe that using metaphors for teaching can clarify our practices and our values and keep us fresh. The circle-creator metaphor works for me because it reflects the power of collaboration and the cyclical nature of learning. Comment below about the metaphor(s) that work for you! ... View more

Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. She also trains graduate student writing teachers in composition theory and pedagogy. 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 Writing in digital spaces asks us to rethink the nature of writing. Our students compose through non-linear writing and interactive formats. Site maps are used in interactive design to help users find our sites and content and enhance SEO (search engine optimization).  Although this is important for those composing in online formats, I use site maps in my classes as part of the planning and revision processes.    It is often difficult for students to get their minds around non-linear writing. They are used to writing in a vertical format, where readers read from top to bottom and left to right. Generally, the author controls where the reader goes through linear progression. With webtexts and interactive writing, the audience takes on a participatory role through which writers and readers work together to understand meaning and readers have choices about where to go next, thus creating documents that are read deep vs from top to bottom. Celia Pearce in the Ins and Outs of Interactive Storytelling, provides a good working definition for these terms: “In the context of interactivity, linear is defined as any body of content (i.e., information) that is meant to be seen or heard in the same order every time it is experienced.” She continues, “Non-linear, on the other hand, is defined as any body of content that is structured such that its final delivery is variable. Each time it is seen or heard, it can be presented in a different order, based on input from the user, or (as I prefer to call it) the player.” Teaching students to write in this way is a challenge as it asks them to include multimedia and multimodal components, embedded links and incorporate design cues that allow readers to move around and participate in the narrative. See my previous post on Foundations for Non-linear Writing for including these components.   I use site maps in my courses to help students see the connection between their ideas and the ways that form and content work together. My students are not web designers and my goal at this point is not to have them understand SEO and other back-end strategies for location and distribution of their work (although this is important down the line if they continue in these areas).  Instead, I use them as planning and revision documents that help them conceptualize the structure of non-linear writing.    Here are two examples of how I use them in my classes:    Sitemaps for Interactive Writing I have students write interactive feature articles that require many branching directions and pathways. For these articles, the site map helps students organize their work and shape the writing through identifying embedded links, exploratory paths, and multimodal components. Here is a sample from a Sense of Place interactive article:  Talia Dodenhoff’s Site map for Sense of Place Interactive Feature Article (2022)   Sitemaps for Organizing Online Portfolios  I use online portfolios in many of my classes. One class in particular encourages students to curate a collection of artifacts that represent their marketable skills. This portfolio assists them on the job market as they shape a professional identity and allows future employers to understand the connections between their work and their abilities.  Students in this context need to understand the connections between their artifacts through categorizing and organizing.    For both of these examples, students need to create a hierarchy of pages and elements and detail the connections between components. Here is a sample of a site map for an online portfolio: Isabel McNamara’s Sitemap for an online portfolio (2022)   Steps to the assignment:  Give students context through discussing linear and non-linear composition.  Explain the concept of site maps and talk about how they are similar and different from outlines and other processes of linear writing. Students are generally familiar with outlines, so this is a good place to start.  I usually show them a couple of examples to get an idea of the visual sitemap.  Have students to review their work and list the components included in their articles and in their portfolios. Ask them to specifically name their ideas rather than rely on generic naming. Encourage them to talk about hierarchy and to look for categories and connections between their ideas and components.    I introduce a site map generator tool/app that allows them to create the maps in real time and through fluid design that can change as the projects progress. I like Gloomaps because it is simple and free but there are many other free tools and apps for site map design. This app helps you create a map that is available for 14 days unless it is revisited and will renew each time for dynamic interaction as students revise and refer back to it as an organizing document. Students can also save their sitemaps to their computers in PNG or PDF formats. Here is a short instructional video on the site that demonstrates the building process.  Share sitemaps in peer groups or project for the whole class to get feedback.   Have students revisit the sitemap several times during the process and revise it based on new ideas and directions.        Reflection on the Activity  This activity goes far to help students understand that they are not just dropping a paper online and that they must think differently in these contexts. It allows them to engage in dynamic, fluid design that trains them to be strong interactive composers. It emphasizes a visual planning and revising through new conceptual lenses.      Works Cited:  Pearce, C. (1994, May 1). The ins & outs of non-linear storytelling, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics. DeepDyve. Retrieved March 27, 2023, from https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/the-ins-outs-of-non-linear-storytelling-QwtZIQstxb  ... View more

When I read Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, I found myself underlining so much that I started double underlining or even triple underlining passages that I wanted to remember. One triple underlining went to this statement: The word in language is half someone else’s… it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own. Bakhtin was arguing that meaning in language arises through dialogue, through interaction and conversation, and in this sense meaning-making is always a give and take, or a struggle, for whose meaning will gain adherence, whose “mouth” the word will end up in. Similar insights regarding words and meaning can be found in the work of I. A. Richards, Kenneth Burke, and Joseph Bentley—and I have been thinking about these concepts a lot during the last few years as I’ve watched the struggle over whose mouth the word “woke” is going to be in. In The Philosophy of Rhetoric and other works, I. A. Richards explains that in any group of words, what is missing is the meaning—because meaning arises through the interaction of the words: meaning is thus contextual and metaphorical, as well as a function of interpretation. Thus, for Richards, rhetoric becomes “the study of misunderstandings and their remedies.”  Kenneth Burke’s Language as Symbolic Action introduces the concept of “terministic screens” as a metaphor for how we are able to make meaning: language for humans is like a screen that allows us to apprehend the world, yet these screens can differ widely based on each person’s experience and context. Meanings, then, are not inherent or set, but always potentially contested. Joseph Bentley was a scholar of 18th century literature, not a rhetorician, but he developed a theory that fits well into this discussion and is very useful to rhetorical analysis. In “Semantic Gravitation: An Essay on Satiric Reduction” (Modern Language Quarterly, 1969), Bentley develops this theory as part of his analysis of how satire works, but we can see such “gravitation” at work all around us in the ways words attract and repel one another. Bentley was fond of taking a satirical love poem and showing how the startling and unexpected words associated with the woman of the poem work to pull her down, semantically, into the gutter. Other love poems, of course, do just the opposite, raising the subject of the poem to near perfection through the associated words. Jonathan Swift was a master of building such gravitational forces in both poetry and prose. All of which brings me to recent uses of the word “woke.” In “A History of “Wokeness,” Aja Romano writes: Before 2014, the call to “stay woke” was, for many people, unheard of. The idea behind it was common within Black communities at that point — the notion that staying “woke” and alert to the deceptions of other people was a basic survival tactic. But in 2014, following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, “stay woke” suddenly became the cautionary watchword of Black Lives Matter activists on the streets, used in a chilling and specific context: keeping watch for police brutality and unjust police tactics. In the years since Brown’s death, “woke” has evolved into a single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory. This framing of “woke” is bipartisan: It’s used as shorthand for political progressiveness by the left, and as a denigration of leftist culture by the right. (Vox, October 9, 2020) Romano was writing three years ago, and by now through the linguistic moves I have described above, the struggle over how “woke" will be used, interpreted, and remembered is raging. The survival tactic of acute awareness that accompanied the early history of the word has given way to a “new left” view that associates “woke” with recognition of systemic and oppressive hierarchies that characterize American history and American institutions and a focus on reparations and on watchwords of diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice that have led, on some college campuses, to ironically discriminatory policies and practices. Meanwhile, on the (far) right, woke signals those who are overly politically correct; it’s used as a slur or insult and marks an attitude that is so anti-American that it must be avoided--or outlawed, as Governor DeSantis has done in signing the Stop Woke Act that is affecting public schools across Florida and in declaring his state a place “where woke goes to die.”    Marcia Fudge with "Stay Woke Vote" t-shirt in 2018   I could go on and on giving examples of how Burke’s terministic screens, Richards’s theory of contextual meaning making, and Bentley’s semantic gravitation are at work in the struggle over “woke” – and I could speculate about Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic communication and whose “mouth” this contested term will end up in (or what else might happen to it!).  But it seems more productive to bring our students into this discussion, to ask them to discover examples of semantic gravitation at work around “woke,” to gather a body of data to examine and analyze together, and then try making up a “fact sheet” that would trace changes to the meaning of the word across time, to try their hands at writing a definition of the term that they can all accept, or even to do some field research on campus to gather fellow student responses to the word. Most important would be to give students the opportunity to put the theoretical concepts I’ve introduced above into practice and to understand how language—and meaning—shift and change under such forces. In this way, they may succeed in getting the word “woke” into their own mouths and making it their own, if only for a brief time.    Image by Rep. Marcia Fudge. ... View more

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been re-evaluating the power of digital technologies. But not, as you might expect, AI tools like ChatGPT. Actually, I’ve been pondering Google Translate.   Ten or twelve years ago, I recall discussions among ESL and FYC colleagues in which Google Translate was censured as an impediment to both language acquisition and writing development.  But within a few years, the tone had softened considerably, and many of us working with multilingual writers recognized the benefits of this Google tool for academic readers and writers trying to deal with unfamiliar vocabulary. There was a  particular value in classes with students from many language backgrounds: students with shared linguistic resources could rely on each other, but others—such as speakers of Nepali or Korean or Lingala in the class—often felt left out.  Google Translate was a resource for them, and it seemed to level the playing field. For translations of words and short sentences, this tool made sense.   Still, 1o years ago, I would not have encouraged a student to write a complete piece in a different language and produce the English version through Google Translate.     This spring, however, one of my students submitted the first draft of his literacy narrative in both Spanish and English. He had added an annotation:  the English version came from Google Translate.     My first instinct was to invite the student to my office and make it clear that he should not do this again.  But I hesitated. After all, it was not a final piece, and it was clear the student was engaged in the assignment. When I asked about his process, he explained that he just “felt more comfortable” beginning in Spanish.     So I let the process stand, and I provided feedback as I normally would, asking questions about the content, organization, word choice. The student began revising the English version. To my surprise, however, he did not delete the Spanish original on his working draft. It was a touchstone for him, a point of assessment and reflection.  The student asked questions of his own, met with our writing fellows, and discussed the piece with classmates.     He has since completed two additional assignment drafts using the compose/translate/revise method.  He recognizes the potential difficulties and risks inherent in this method, and he does not use it for every assignment. He knows he has to assess meaning, word choice, paragraph structure, and syntax.   I am not sure this process would be effective for all students, but for this student in particular, the use of Google Translate in the composing process engages him in metalinguistic and meta-rhetorical talk. As Myhill and Newman have suggested:   “Learners’ capacity to think metalinguistically about writing and to enact that thinking in the composing of text is enabled through high-quality classroom talk. . . . Potentially, classroom talk can be the cultural tool which supports the construction of shared declarative metalinguistic knowledge and the psychological tool which supports writers’ cognitive capacities to use that knowledge procedurally in the shaping of their own written texts.”  (Myhill and Newman, 2016, p. 178).    My student is certainly developing “declarative metalinguistic knowledge” and using that knowledge to shape his own written texts.   In a sense, my student is deploying all the tools and resources (community, digital, and linguistic) available to him to compose, revise, and transform meaningful texts.  His process, in fact, reminds me of my son’s artwork; my son uses a host of digital tools to transform photos into abstract works of art, as in the example below.      The initial inspiration is no longer recognizable or even recoverable: each choice my son makes takes the piece further from its original source.  But those choices are thoughtful and purposeful, made according to his initial vision of the piece. We can even see the process of composition and transformation condensed in a time-lapse video of his work.         I would love to have a time-lapse video of my student’s composing process—from his freewriting and revision in Spanish, to the first iteration of an English translation, to the interactions and edits which will ultimately lead to an essay in his final portfolio. Through notes and annotations, he has already documented at least part of his process.     Ten years ago, I might have told this student that his extensive use of Google Translate wasn’t really “writing in English.”  But like my student’s narrative or my son’s artwork, I have seen my teaching transformed through disciplinary communities, interactions with students and colleagues, and a host of digital, rhetorical, and linguistic resources.  Such transformation is certainly a good thing.   Image credit: Murray Moore ... View more

  Logical fallacies can be the source of humor or the source of the most successful acts of deceit ever pulled off. To learn to avoid fallacies in their own writing, students need to practice recognizing and understanding the fallacies in what they read and hear. They will be less susceptible to flawed logic if they practice spotting it in everyday rhetoric. Commercials and ads provide plenty of examples for practice. You can ask your students to bring in or jot down examples of fallacies they find in ads and then can discuss in class what fallacies they illustrate. Here are a few examples: Faulty Use of Authority: Mila Kunis endorsing Jim Beam. False Dilemma: “Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline.” Ad Populum: “Lipton Ice Tea. Join the Dance.” Appeal to Tradition: For lemonade (or almost anything else) — "Just like grandma used to make.” It’s not always easy to categorize logical fallacies, but the important thing is for students to recognize what is wrong with the logic even if the line between types of fallacies is sometimes blurry. Remember also that the fact that an advertising strategy is not logical does not mean that it is not effective. You may want to move from such an exercise to consider logical fallacies drawn from the news, perhaps bringing in some examples and asking the students to find others.  False Analogy: The most infamous example this month has been Fox News’ Tucker Carlson’s editing 44,000 hours of January 6th footage and characterizing the remaining brief clip as the actions of innocent sightseers being escorted through the Capitol. Post Hoc or Doubtful Cause: Because some childhood inoculations are given around the same age as parents often become aware of the first symptoms of autism in their children, a group of anti-vaxxers now object to having their children inoculated. It has been proven that the inoculations do not cause autism, but the misguided belief of a few has led to a rise in the number of cases of some diseases once virtually eliminated in the U. S. Ad Hominem: It is common in politics to attack an opponent, and in this age of a decisive split between parties, those attacks are as heated as ever. An ad hominem fallacy occurs when the person making an argument is attacked instead of his or her argument. It is an attempt to distract from the issue at hand. For example, critics have been using Biden’s age to argue that he is not fit to be president of the U.S. Slippery Slope: This sort of poor reasoning is exactly why a bank failure such as the recent one in California sends shock waves through the financial community. Unfortunately, it has happened before that the failure of one or a few banks caused a panic, which caused people to pull their money out of other banks, which caused more banks to fail. It’s not hard to find examples of bad logic, but it takes practice. Students generally enjoy these exercises. The challenge comes in seeing their own flaws in logic as they draft their essays. "I must be a cat"  by Nattiebug is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

For our 2nd writing project this semester, we are working on creating multimedia projects. The intention is to create a deeper understanding of our class’s key source, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” by James Baldwin. We are returning to this source with 3 central goals in mind: To practice part-to-whole analysis, students will find a section from “Artist’s Struggle “ that caught their attention while composing Writing Project 1. They will analyze how and why this part of the text caught their attention, and explain how this section exemplifies  Baldwin’s overall message.  To prepare for Writing Project 3, the researched essay, students will engage with deeper reading of “Artist’s Struggle.” For WP 3, students will use the section from WP 2 to find an additional source by James Baldwin that speaks to connected or similar concerns. “Artist’s Struggle” presents many of the germinal themes that Baldwin revisited throughout his life, including the idea of artists bearing witness to and recording cataclysmic events in order to move audiences to action. In investigating Baldwin’s work in more depth, the hope is that students will explore and synthesize questions and concerns from across the semester. To understand Baldwin’s work more fully, students will engage with the artistic process of writing for discovery. For facilitating this part of the assignment, I will offer examples of projects that students have created in the last several years, including videos, drawings, and collages. In reconsidering the third goal, I wondered how to introduce poetry as an additional possibility for a multimedia project. Then I remembered the concept of cross out, or erasure, poems. To create an erasure poem, the Poetry Foundation suggests the following process: “Cross out words or entire phrases to make a new poem ‘within’ or ‘underneath’ the real one.”  My thought was that, using their selected section from “Artist’s Struggle,” students use Baldwin’s original words to create their own cross out poem. I tried out this process myself  to see how it might work and what it might look like.   First, in order to have a clear reference point, I copied a sample section into a Google Doc: If I spend weeks and months avoiding my typewriter—and I do, sharpening pencils, trying to avoid going where I know I’ve got to go—then one has got to use this to learn humility. After all, there is a kind of saving egotism too, a cruel and dangerous but also saving egotism, about the artist’s condition, which is this: I know that if I survive it, when the tears have stopped flowing or when the blood has dried, when the storm has settled, I do have a typewriter which is my torment but is also my work. If I can survive it, I can always go back there, and if I’ve not turned into a total liar, then I can use it and prepare myself in this way for the next inevitable and possibly fatal disaster. But if I find that hard to do—and I have a weapon which most people don’t have—then one must understand how hard it is for almost anybody else to do it at all. (Baldwin 68) Next, I recopied the section and added cross outs using strikethrough formatting. This was not an easy process, and I spent some time figuring out what words to keep to make meaning (and a poem!) from the original section.  If I spend weeks and months avoiding my typewriter—and I do, sharpening pencils, trying to avoid going where I know I’ve got to go—then one has got to use this to learn humility. After all, there is a kind of saving egotism too, a cruel and dangerous but also saving egotism, about the artist’s condition, which is this: I know that if I survive it, when the tears have stopped flowing or when the blood has dried, when the storm has settled, I do have a typewriter which is my torment but is also my work. If I can survive it, I can always go back there, and if I’ve not turned into a total liar, then I can use it and prepare myself in this way for the next inevitable and possibly fatal disaster. But if i find that hard to do—and I have a weapon which most people don’t have—then one must understand how hard it is for almost anybody else to do it at all.  In the process of choosing the cross outs, I found myself slowing down and reading more deeply to discover how Baldwin used language to make meaning. I noticed, as if for the first time, how Baldwin used verbs, conjunctions, and punctuation to create meaning. Even though I regularly teach these stylistic features, I realized that I was creating something new from something seemingly very familiar. I looked more closely at sentences and key words to figure out how the component parts could work together as a reimagined whole. What I discovered was that erasing words and punctuation allowed me to better understand the heart of Baldwin’s message—a condensed version, in a sense. In other words, the erasure of words helped me to concretize meaning in a text where meaning can seem abstract and elusive.  I wished I had thought of this for WP 1, I noted to myself. Perhaps it would have helped with the initial struggles with the text. On the other hand, those initial struggles seem like an important part of the process. In and out of the classroom any of us might struggle to make sense of a complicated world. The hope is that having struggled with a difficult text there will be a transfer of skills that is applicable to other situations in which students find it difficult to make meaning from a first encounter.  The final step in my process was to put my strikethrough formatted text into a Word document and to use the drawing function to cross out the words in digital purple marker. Here is a screenshot of the poem:   Cross Out Poem using a section of “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” by James Baldwin Poem and Photo by Susan Bernstein March 15, 2023. It is perhaps an interesting way to teach paraphrase, as well as a different approach to the writing process and close reading and analysis. Indeed, as with any form of interpretation based on existing evidence, I imagine that the same passage would yield many different cross out poems. But for the moment, the hope is that students will experience for themselves what it means, as artists writing for discovery, to struggle with their integrity. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Xinqiang Li, a writing instructor at Michigan State University. Class as People It’s the students who have inspired me to bring out the best in my teaching. Their eager questions, timely submissions, and even the smiley faces at the end of their emails remove my nervousness and tiredness at the beginning of the semester. They remind me to teach the class as people. Gradually, I’ve learned to imagine the class as a tea house conversation. I step off the platform, walk among the students, and change the sentence “Writing is an epistemic and recursive process” into “How many drafts do you usually write?” Then, I see eyes light up in the class. Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Neil Young’s celebrated anthem “My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue)” of 1979 was a response to the punk-inspired insistence at the time that rock music was passé, at best, or dead at worst. There could be little doubt that reports of the death of rock-and-roll were highly exaggerated, as New Wave, Heavy Metal, Grunge, Alt-Rock, Post-Punk, and other new sub-genres revitalized music through the 1980s and into the ‘90s.  But as time subtracts one rock legend after another (the death of Gary Rossington being the most recent as I write these words), it may not be so premature any longer to wonder whether the once mighty House of Rock is falling into musical irrelevance. The most obvious place to start in an evaluation of the decline of rock-and-roll is with its generational history: Rock emerged in the 1950-60s as the musical voice of the Baby Boom generation, replacing jazz and swing in the pantheon of popular culture.  It evolved rapidly, producing new styles and sub-genres even as the Boomers gave way to Gen X. The sky, to borrow a line from Tom Petty, seemed to be the limit.  But a look at the most recent Grammy Awards reveals just how things have changed as the Millennials and Gen Z have settled into their place as the successors of today’s popular music.  Among the 66 awards categories this year, five were devoted to rhythm-and-blues, three to rap, and three to blues.  Lizzo won Record of the Year, and Beyoncé broke the record for Grammy awards.  For its part, Pop, as a genre in and of itself, loomed large, as it does throughout the world of contemporary popular music.  Meanwhile, there were just four categories devoted to rock, with Brandi Carlile—an alt-country star with rock-and-roll chops—taking two of them, while Ozzy Osbourne—a flash from the past if there ever was one—garnering the other two.  Adam Granduciel and The Black Keys, two more recent representatives of the rock tradition, were in the running but failed to bring home any trophies. It is evident that rock-and-roll, as we used to say, is no longer where it’s at, with such scant attention being paid to the most current bearers of the torch.  But there is more to the matter than the simple inevitabilities of generational change; after all, Gen X carried the rock tradition forward—it didn’t bury it.  To see what deeper causes are behind the decline of rock we have to examine its racial rather than generational history. As I note in the introduction to the eighth chapter of the 10th edition of Signs of Life in the USA, “Tangled Roots: The Cultural Politics of Popular Music,” the history of American pop music is marked by racial co-creativity combined with racial marginalization and suppression, and the history of rock-and-roll is no exception.  Co-created by such pioneers as Rosetta Tharpe, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddly, and Little Richard, along with Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly, early rock-and-roll was very quickly segregated and stratified. Black performers were shunted to the side (often re-categorized into rhythm-and-blues), while white performers, most strikingly by way of the British Invasion, became the face and future of rock-and-roll.  Rock, in short, became coded as White. The ongoing waxing of such genres as rhythm-and-blues, soul, and rap, when seen against the waning of rock, perhaps suggests a cultural shift away from this history of racial repression in music, as well as the emergence of a new social dynamic in the world of contemporary music.   Photo by Mick Haupt (2020), used under the Unsplash License. ... View more

The work I have done on listening—inspired by Krista Ratcliff’s groundbreaking Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness (2005), and by long talks about “soundscapes” with a good friend who is blind—led me to stumble onto sound studies, which focuses on the concept of “sound” in modern times and most recently on technologies of sound. And then when I read Nicole Furlonge’s magical Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature (2018), I started trying hard to hear the voices in books—and to hear, really hear, the voices of those around me, particularly students. So, you can imagine that when I ran across a book called Permission to Speak: How to Change What Power Sounds Like (2023), I was instantly intrigued. This book, by speech coach and linguist Samara Bey, grew out of Bey’s experience of literally losing her voice during her grad school years, and her discovery that the troublesome nodules growing on her vocal cords and impeding her speech were caused by: her lowering her voice, mostly unconsciously, to a tone not comfortable for her. In attempts to sound a certain way—a powerful way—she had come close to silencing herself. This experience led, eventually, to her career as a speech coach and consultant, working with professionals ranging from Pierce Brosnan to Gal Gadot, and others who want help finding or reclaiming their voice. What does power sound like to you?   What intrigued Bey in her studies of voices was the “authoritative voice” she heard so much about. How did one acquire such a voice? She discusses this at some length in her introduction, but it turns out the voice of authority sounds like “straight, white, rich, remarkably large men… They are who we tend to believe. They are out experts and anchors and leaders and heroes.” Take a look at courses on “executive presence” or “how to sound like a leader,” she says, and you’ll find advice to speak slowly, keeping your voice low and steady and avoiding emotion. Hence the subtitle of her book: How to Change What Power Sounds Like. In eight chapters, she guides readers (speakers!) through discussions of breathing, vocal tics and habits, pitch and tone, the use of emotion, liking your own voice, and owning the words you choose to use. She asks, “How could we be seen and heard when we’re scrambling to hide the parts of ourselves that don’t fit the standard and squeezing our voices into the mold that was never meant to fit us?” —and goes on to argue that we can resist that “standard” and, indeed, even change it. Bey provides lots and lots of concrete examples of learning to hear and to really like your own voice, and how to inhabit it in ways that will connect you to other people. It’s her belief (and her experience) that learning about and embodying your own voice is the path toward “fundamental human coexistence” and to the “promise of belonging and the pleasure of community. It’s saying Let’s care about things together. Public speaking is just caring about things together, bigger.” Bey invites readers to join her in figuring out how they sound when they “actually believe that”—and to join her in a movement to change what power sounds like. I haven’t finished reading this book yet, but I can already see excellent applications for teaching, and for learning to listen not only to our students’ attempts to emulate the standard “voice of authority” but to the voices that carry their deepest sense of self.   Photo by Bogomil Mihaylov on Unsplash. ... View more

I have found necessary community this year in the pedagogical reading groups offered through our University Center for Excellence in Teaching. I was notably inspired by Kevin M. Gannon’s bold book Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto, which I have written about before. And while I’m still reading James M. Lang’s thought-provoking Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It, I have also written about his helpful reminder that “dis-traction” means “to drag something apart.” Taken together, I’ve come to realize that when we hold our students’ attention, we are holding the classroom community together, too. I’d been feeling like this semester had a pre-pandemic zhuzh to it, but now that midterms are hitting and spring break isn’t yet here, students are noticeably dragging and less engaged in discussion. Christine Cucciarre’s recent “Tiny Teaching Story” about the lingering weight of the pandemic is a sorrowful snapshot of this strange moment. This past week, all these threads twined together as I attended a webinar by Gannon on “A Pedagogy of Hope During the Time of Monsters,” hosted by IUPUI’s Center for Teaching and Learning. According to Gannon, the “monsters” of today are the anti-democratic and anti-education forces at work in the U.S., but the “hope” comes from remembering that we can inspire agency in our students. Writing classrooms are a good place for that work. Gannon noted that learning is a social act that has both cognitive and affective components. Successful instructors give students opportunities to connect thinking and feeling, and to connect with one another. Those connections, Lang argues, are what hold students’ attention in the classroom. Similarly, Lang encourages instructors to make time in a class for students to reflect on their deeply-felt core values, citing studies which show that values-affirmation exercises can help students better articulate and access their pro-social beliefs. With both Gannon and Lang in mind, I zhuzhed my usual mid-semester student self-reflection  by asking my students to list their core values in their notes at the start of class. After a few minutes, I asked them to share what they wished to with peers around them.  After some uncertainty, a buzz slowly rose in the room. Students were smiling, nodding heads, affirming one another. After a few more minutes, we listed what they’d been talking about on the board, and students seemed to find the overlap in their values revelatory. Their list included: kindness, truthfulness, generosity, humility, open-mindedness, respect for diversity, honesty (and more). Almost poetically, the sun poked through Indiana’s winter perma-cloud at this moment, flooding our classroom with warmth just as I chalked the last inspirational word. That got a laugh. With that valued conversation warming the room, I asked students to reflect for me on their progress in the course so far. How are they challenging themselves? What are they happiest with? How are they hoping to grow by the semester’s end? Since I will be handing these reflections back to them at the semester’s end for their summative reflections, I also urged them to write an encouraging note to their future selves. I was initially met with some nervous chuckles, but when I collected the papers, I was touched to see how many students were as kind and encouraging to themselves as they had been in many discussions with one another. In his talk, Gannon quoted abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba: “Hope is a discipline—an action, a practice.” In those sunshine-washed moments in our classroom this week, that’s what I witnessed. To me, and to my students, I believe, this practice felt necessary.   Photo by April Lidinsky (2023) ... View more

  Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin toddlers, Dylan and Escher.   Many times in my teaching career, I've found myself hovering over students to make sure I can help them if they need it. There is nothing innately wrong with my desire to help; it’s just that many of us have this desire to help so ingrained in us that we can go overboard. I will never forget when a student said "Professor, please step away from my computer. I've got this. Also, you scared the crap out of me." I often have to remind myself to step back (literally!) and trust students. In contemplating my propensity for hovering, I’ve thought about how my late grandmother, Mabel, would send her four children out the door to explore nature, fully trusting their ability to play and learn independently. As part of my commitment to be more like Grandmom Mabel and not be a helicopter professor, I’ve made a commitment to incorporate in each unit of study at least one self-directed student activity that takes place during the class timeframe but outside of the walls of the classroom. Recently, I designed a photography activity for my Humanities 101 class that was based on Ancient Chinese philosophy and aesthetics: specifically, Taoism, ancient Chinese landscape painting, and Confucianism. I asked students to pair up and take twenty-five minutes in the halls of the college or outside on nearby Spring Garden Street to take a photo with a smartphone (or make a drawing) that represented an element of one of the spiritual or aesthetic philosophies. Afterward, students answered questions about their photograph, what the composition represented, and how contemporary American culture was present in their photo. Students’ responses were rich; they identified spaces on campus meant for collaboration that wound up being devoid of students. They talked about how architecture communicates feelings of stability even if that stability might not exist, and they mentioned some of their thoughts about why our college’s new learning commons might mirror a more collectivist ideology, despite the fact that we are living in an individualistic culture. A few students who had been shy about participating in class showed their creativity in this activity by turning Wawa coffee cups into timber-frame-inspired ancient Chinese architecture and photographing the results. Without my hovering over and actively surveilling them, my students could breathe, think, and engage with each other more freely, all in service of our class’s learning goals. Because the activity happened during class time, we were able to debrief and look at the photos together once they returned to our classroom, while the energy of their discoveries was still alive in the students. Be like Grandmom Mabel: open the door and send students through it. And with a lesson plan that invites students back at the end of class to share and synthesize their discoveries as a group, you can confirm, as I have, that students make important discoveries and take insight-producing creative risks when freed from the distracting noise of a helicopter hovering nearby. ... View more

Have you ever heard anyone use the “flight attendant speech” as a rationale for self-care? First put on your own oxygen mask, and then assist those around you.      That illustration—which has nearly attained the status of cliché—came to my mind this weekend as I attended a conference focused on student success: students are more likely to succeed in our classrooms when we attend to the needs of those who teach and support them. I learned, for example, about resources related to ADHD and autism (such as Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman), not only because they would illuminate the struggles of my students, but also because I have co-workers with autism or ADHD.  It was a subtle shift, to be sure, but I heard this refrain again and again: the support and accommodations we design for students should extend to instructors, tutors, success coaches, counselors, and testing coordinators—these needs don’t “expire” when the diploma is earned.     Work in higher education may abound with insecurities: “I couldn’t afford the conference hotel—we had to find a cheaper place.” “Our co-presenter made a video—she lost her funding for the conference.” “These are great ideas, but I am not allowed to make any changes to the online course assignments or prompts.  Even if it’s not working for my students, I can’t alter any course components.” “I was diagnosed with autism as an adult—and I was not sure what would happen if the people I work with found out.” “The room is so bright—and I can’t dim the lights. I am always on the verge of a migraine.”  “I can’t tell them about my chronic pain or request accommodations. I am lucky to have a job, and I can’t risk it.” “I can’t say no to the overload, even though the pay barely covers my extra child-care and travel.” “I generally pack a bag with toilet paper, paper towels, and a ream of printing paper—I can’t count on there being any when I get to campus.” “They tell me I must teach online to keep the job, but I don’t have reliable internet at home.” “They said our restrooms are ADA compliant, but only about a few of them actually are.  I have to take an elevator up two floors to get to the restroom that I can use with my wheelchair—and someone is constantly putting signs and boxes in the hallway outside that restroom.” Photo by youssef naddam on Unsplash And of course, there are the realities of political scrutiny in higher education, efforts to undermine academic freedom or tenure protections, and added burdens for faculty to ensure student success or achieve metrics of productivity.  Moreover, policy decisions about developmental education and corequisite instruction are often made in accordance with narratives (even false narratives, as Alexandros Goudas has carefully documented over the past decade) that are far removed from our daily work with students. After over 15 years in community colleges, I know the feeling of being at the tail end of a very long chain, with no voice to speak truth—the reality of our classrooms—to those in power.     I am sure most of you do not need me to point out the precarious conditions of our labor—conditions some of you may be dealing with daily. You well know how these conditions affect our students’ learning. But I needed the reminder this past weekend.     How are you addressing insecurities facing colleagues at your institution? ... View more

  When we ask our students to read and analyze arguments, we may ask them to locate the one sentence that best sums up the claim being made in the reading. When there is not a single sentence that does so, we can ask them to try to sum up what they think the claim is in one sentence. It is useful to point out that in a longer piece of writing, there may be claims within that claim that are developed in a paragraph or a part of the larger piece. A topic sentence may serve as the claim that an individual paragraph is making. All of these smaller claims, which may also serve as topic sentences, work together to support the larger claim of the whole piece. Providing support for any claim is crucial to the success of an argument. Our students need to be able to identify the different types of support offered in support of claims. When it is their turn to write an argument, they can check through the types of support to determine if they have used all available means of support for their particular topic. Logos, or a logical appeal, generally depends on inductive or deductive reasoning or the relationship between specifics and generalizations. Many arguments require the support of specific examples to convince a reader of the truth of a claim. For a short in-class assignment, you can ask students to find an article that uses logos appeals as examples and bring them to class for further discussion about how this appeal is used. Then, have students write a paragraph in which they support the claim using information from the article as their support.     Here’s another short exercise you can use to have students consider the link between claim and support. Display the results of a survey,  presented in a graph or chart form (you may have to remove the headline or summarizing statements).  Next, ask students to write a topic sentence they could support using the information in the survey. Then instruct students to actually use the information in the survey to write a paragraph supporting their topic sentence. It is important to note that usually a variety of different topic sentences could be supported with a graphic that is rich in data. Pathos, or emotional appeal, maybe a bit more difficult to pinpoint but can also be crucial to the success of an argument, depending on the topic. It may be easy to argue that new laws that restrict voter access are being passed, a claim of fact. It may take an additional emotional appeal to argue that they should not be, a claim of policy. The emotional appeal can come from explaining the effects these restrictions will have on individual Americans. One article that appears in both Elements of Argument and The Structure of Argument that illustrates the emotional appeal well is “An Unjust Sacrifice” by Father Robert A. Sirico. This article is based on a true case in which a judge had ordered that eight-week-old conjoined twins be separated. If they were not separated, both twins would inevitably die. The surgery to separate them would mean that the weaker of the twins would not survive, but the stronger one would. The matter was in court because the parents were not willing to sacrifice one of their children even if it was the only way for the other to survive. Sirico, a Catholic priest, defends the parents’ point of view. The headlines are full of stories that illustrate the relationship between claim and support. The arguments that should be viewed with skepticism are those that provide little or no support for the claim—or that depend on faulty information. Articles on these controversial issues can complement the examples provided in the textbook and keep the study of argument up to date. "Scales of Justice Law Dictionary Gavel USA Flag"  by Allen Allen is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

A few weeks ago I climbed the steps at 100 East End Avenue in New York, which the independent Chapin school calls home. I was there to celebrate teachers, the mission driving The Academy for Teachers, a nonprofit dedicated to honoring and supporting teachers “as valued professionals in need of the latest knowledge and inspiration.” Conceived of and directed by teacher and writer Sam Swope (see his The Araboolies of Liberty Street and I am a Pencil, for example), the Academy urges all of us to give teachers the R E S P E C T that Aretha sings about, along with “the support they need to keep them where they belong—in the classroom inspiring our children for years to come.” In pursuit of this goal, Sam and his team at the Academy offer “master classes” for teachers from public, private, and charter schools to attend three ninety-minute sessions led by artists and thinkers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Gloria Steinem, Jane Goodall, Julia Alvarez, Robert Battle, and others. The intense workshops and conversations led by these experts continue to enrich and inspire the teachers who get to spend time with them, so much so that these teachers are four times more likely than others to stay in the classroom, often against the great odds that all of us know about. The faculty for these master classes come from across the disciplines and artistic fields. On this particular evening, we are gathering to hear The Kronos Quartet perform “A Teacher’s Suite,” commissioned by the Academy to honor teachers and featuring the voices of many of the Academy fellows who have participated in master classes. Kronos had led transformative master classes for the Academy, working with teachers of music to bring new ways of thinking and experiencing music into their classrooms, and this concert followed up on those classes and showcased Kronos’s own interest in and dedication to teaching and to learning.     A teacher teaches a classroom of students   I was sitting with a large group of teachers that evening as we experienced the magic that Kronos so often produces: I could actually feel the room expand with hope and pride as the music cascading around us, could feel what it means for teachers to feel honored and respected. Such a small thing, giving respect. And yet it can change lives and, perhaps, the world. In addition to master classes and special performances, the Academy publishes small chapbooks, written by master class teachers—about a teacher who was important to them. I have a collection of these gems, and looking through them now I’m drawn to one by Jacqueline Woodson, author of Brown Girl Dreaming. She remembers “Ms. Pat,” who “taught me most about what it meant to move through the world as an empath, as a philanthropist, as a thinker, as a doer, as a truly good human being.” Ms. Pat, she goes on, “rarely stepped into our classrooms. Instead, she invited us into her office—and she guided us. She truly guided us.” A teacher like that, Woodson concludes, “stays with you for a lifetime.”   I hope that each of us has a “Ms. Pat” held close in our memories, and I hope that our students will all encounter such teachers, those who will be with them for a lifetime. In the meantime, if you are reading this and have a few spare moments, check out the Academy for Teachers, and consider contributing to their mission. Director Sam Swope dreams of similar academies springing up in cities across the country, all dedicated to supporting and honoring teachers. That’s a dream I can believe in.    Image by Kenny Eliason.    ... View more

At midterm, I wondered about creating a space for imagination to take hold—away, if only for a moment, from the stressors students and teachers alike experience at mid-semester in and out of school. So I decided to do midterm icebreaker questions using the learning management system’s discussion board.  My hope is that icebreakers will allow students an interactive and alternative space for writing that would also be outside the box of working on rough drafts and revisions for their first writing project. After searching the web, I found several helpful resources for questions, such as Roommate Icebreakers | Roommate Relationships from Dickinson College, Icebreaker Activities from Ohio State Teaching and Learning Center, and Online Icebreaker Ideas from the University of Washington, Bothell.  First, the questions would not require students to disclose any personal information about themselves, their families, or friends. The questions would not make assumptions about students’ class backgrounds by asking about their childhood, travel experiences, food preferences, or living arrangements. There are so many reasons that students might feel uncomfortable about disclosing such personal details, including immigration status, food and housing insecurity, funding their own education or taking care of family responsibilities that precluded leisure time for extensive travel, or even for summer vacations.  Next, taking inspiration from the live streamed HopePunk session that I attended remotely at 4C23, I wanted students to focus on imagination and to reflect on potentially positive aspects of their lives. The presenters for the HopePunk session, Jennie Vaughn, Cynthia Mwenja, and Erin Chandler, emphasized teaching with radical kindness toward students in a student-centered classroom. The hope is that students, in the wake of the pandemic, would extend the same kindness toward themselves.  After much consideration, I composed the following questions: What five words describe you best and why did you choose those words? What do you value in your life? How does that value inspire your world in and out of school? What is your dream writing space and why would you want to write there? If you could meet any historical figure, who would you choose and why? What would be your superhero name and your superpower? Why? If you had to create a slogan for your life, what would it be and why? What is the strangest ice-breaker question you have been asked? I wanted to test out the questions by attempting to respond to a question myself. The question I chose was number five: What would be your superhero name and your superpower? Why? As a neurodivergent teacher and learner, I identified my superpower as hyper focus. Hyper focus allows me to write and plan lessons anywhere, especially on my long commutes on public transit to and from campus. I keep a small journal in my bag and write to keep track of my thoughts coming and going to class.   There’s something about the kinesthetic work of handwriting and the intentionality of keeping a specific journal book for these purposes that doesn’t usually happen on electronic devices, even as I compose my blog digitally. The journal is an open space for free writing (in other words, perfect for hyper focus), and sometimes I can repurpose parts of the journal for more formal writing.  Nevertheless, I struggled with creating a superhero name. But then my transfer stop came and I had to switch from the train to the bus.  Walking delicately through the slushy remains of the previous evening snowstorm, I had a flash of insight. My superhero name would be the Masked Commuter. There are still a fair amount of commuters in my city who mask on public transit and I am one of them. I mask to fight the evils of coronavirus, and as a buffer for residual anxiety in public spaces. Anxiety, of course, is the kryptonite of hyper focus, the shadow side. Anxiety is hyper focusing on the triggers that activate anxiety.  Flow, the superpower, is the hyper focus needed for working for a better world, fighting Coronavirus, planning lessons, teaching, and writing. Hyper focus in flow is what opens public transit as a writing space and allows me to tap into the imagination needed for teaching in person in the wake of this pandemic. Imagination then builds on the flow of hyper focus, and serves as an additional superpower for the Masked Commuter. Flow, and any superpower, can be used  to reflect and act on alternative approaches to persistent problems. The purpose, as ever, is to offer opportunities for students, and ourselves, to learn and grow as writers.    What is your superpower?   Photo  by Susan Bernstein January 26, 2023     ... View more