My recent thinking about this year’s new emojis, how they are used/abused, and especially the role they play in so much online communication led me eventually to several intriguing discussions of tone indicators, a letter or letters placed after a forward slash at the end of a phrase or sentence to indicate the tone (or feelings) intended. Also known as “tone tags,” such indicators are helpful in written communication, where body language or facial expressions can’t help convey tone and feeling. They have been especially useful for neurodivergent people who may not always understand tone or nuances of meaning. As you might expect (or know), they are widely used on social media like Twitter and TikTok. I was interested to look through a few “master lists” of tone indicators, only a couple of which I knew (my absolute favorite is /c for copypasta—look it up!). Here are some examples: /j = joking /hj = half joking /s or /sarc = sarcastic / sarcasm /srs = serious /nsrs = not serious /lh = light hearted As I thought about these “indicators,” I realized that they are not completely new. I knew, for instance, that Jonathan Swift had used special marks in the margins of his text, and that at one point an upside-down question mark had indicated a rhetorical question. (The illustrious British printer Henry Denham seems to have been the inventor of that one.). And I learned that a 17th century British philosopher, John Wilkins, used upside-down exclamation marks to signal irony. But the number and ubiquity of tone indicators in use today surprised me. While tone indicators are typically used at the end of a sentence, etiquette seems to call for including them at the beginning as well as at the end of a sentence when possible, and for never using them as a joke. Writing in Screen Shot, Malavika Pradeen says that [T]one indicators can be used anywhere over text be it personal chats, social media or even emails—absolutely anywhere the tone is ambiguous and hard to pick up on. But one disclaimer is to avoid using them as a joke. It defeats their entire purpose and strips a safe space from neurodivergent people.  So just what are these tone indicators? They're paralinguistic, certainly, but are they like punctuation marks? Or not just “like” punctuation marks but actual punctuation marks? How do our students understand their use—and how and when do they choose to use them? These sound to me like some very good research questions students might like to take on /srs. Image Credit: "Lighted Keyboard 1" by sfxeric, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... 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 In my classes, I have always recognized the importance of observation and inference as students move back and forth between narration and exposition as they write. This is even more important for digital writers as they learn to read and render situations through multimodal composing. Observation and inference are generally practiced in scientific or social science settings to understand evidence, predict behavior, and generate conclusions, but students benefit from this understanding in composition classes as well. Click to view Observation and Inference Activity slide show.According to Key Differences, observation is “the act of carefully watching a person or object when something is happening.” Observation generally involves the senses and objective perceptions of what is presented. It is hands-on, in-the-present and requires “[attentive] monitoring of the subject under study.” Inference making is “termed as an act of deriving rational conclusion from known facts or circumstances.” It is generally subjective and involves making assumptions based on observations and often involves secondhand information. This is where we theorize, guess, and make connections. Since inference making is subjective, we often find that we can make many inferences based on a single observation. In a common example, we can observe that the grass is wet (senses) but we can make multiple inferences such as: it rained, sprinklers were on, it is in a flood zone, or a dog recently stopped by (among others). Or, we might notice that someone has a lot of food in their refrigerator and make the inference that they are a good cook or preparing for a vacation or that they are really hungry. Basically, these assumptions could all theoretically be true based on what we observe in front of us but could also generate alternate inferences that could be considered true too. In this assignment, I ask students to understand and apply the concepts of observation and inference and immerse themselves in a place where they take images of their observations and generate plausible inferences. They set up a visual, double-entry journal of sorts in which they include their images (observations) along with inferences to make meaningful connections. We then create a collaborative slide show to share their ideas through multimodal examples.   Resources The St. Martin’s Handbook – Ch. 9g, Thinking Critically about Visual Texts The Everyday Writer (also available with Exercises) – Ch.7f, Think Critically about Visual Texts EasyWriter (also available with Exercises) – Ch. 8, Reading and Listening Analytically, Critically, and Respectfully   Steps to the Assignment Help students define the terms observation and inference (see Key Differences article as a starting place). Once I have shared working definitions, I show the class a collection of my own images for an observation and inference making activity in which they call out inferences to practice this cognitive process. I encourage multiple responses to demonstrate the theoretical nature of inference making and ask students to cite evidence from their observations that lead to their conclusions. Next, I challenge students to find a location (outside of class on their own) to collect observations in the form of images (usually around 20). I encourage them to use their senses and get specific as they take pictures of objects, landmarks, people, buildings, landscapes, and other things that involve sensory observation. Then they choose 10 images and create a page in which they include the image (observation) and a short paragraph describing their inferences (meaning, assumption, idea). I also ask them to include an overview statement in which they speak to some of their connections and ideas (observations and inferences).   Once back in class together, each student chooses a strong example from their collection and submits the image and an explanation of their inference to a collaborative Google slide show. (This should just take a few minutes if they are prepared ahead of time.) We share and review them as a class and talk about examples.   Reflections on the Activity A humorous example of how inferences can change with context.I use this activity to get students to understand that the concepts of observation and inference- making are forever present in our lives and in processing our worlds. As digital storytellers, content creators, and writers, we recreate these experiences for our audiences through moving back and forth between observation and inference. I generally have students complete this activity early in the term as it creates a foundation for curation and creation in all the projects throughout the semester and sets the tone for critical reading, writing, and multimodal composition. ... View more

A term that we are starting to see used in reference to COVID-19 in countries like Portugal is the term endemic. A basic definition from the Mayo Clinic suggests at first glance that the difference between pandemic and endemic is the geographic location of outbreaks of the disease. Dr. Pritish Tosh, an infectious disease specialist at the Clinic, explains, “In epidemiologic terms, an outbreak refers to a number of cases that exceeds what would be expected. A pandemic is when there is an outbreak that affects most of the world.” The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Since then, the term has become integrated into the public lexicon.   However, Tosh explains, “We use the term endemic when there is an infection within a geographic area that is existing perpetually.” Unfortunately, there is the prospect that COVID could become endemic in most of the world. A closer look at what Tosh means by the words existing perpetually reveals what the future may hold. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC), “The amount of a particular disease that is usually present in a community is referred to as the baseline or endemic level of the disease. This level is not necessarily the desired level, which may in fact be zero, but rather is the observed level. In the absence of intervention and assuming that the level is not high enough to deplete the pool of susceptible persons, the disease may continue to occur at this level indefinitely. Thus, the baseline level is often regarded as the expected level of the disease.” This definition suggests a level of consistency of infection in a particular area, instead of the spikes in cases involved in an outbreak. Yonatan Grad, Harvard’s Melvin J. and Geraldine L. Glimcher Associate Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, reports, “The expectation that COVID-19 will become endemic essentially means that the pandemic will not end with the virus disappearing; instead, the optimistic view is that enough people will gain immune protection from vaccination and from natural infection such that there will be less transmission and much less COVID-19-related hospitalization and death, even as the virus continues to circulate.” Grad adds that with both the first round of SARS in 2003 and with Ebola in 2014, public health measures stopped the spread and brought the outbreaks to an end. It can be discouraging to think about a level of COVID that is expected. Remember the CDC’s caveats: “In the absence of intervention and assuming that the level is not high enough to deplete the pool of susceptible persons, the disease may continue to occur at this level indefinitely.” Also remember Grad’s report: “the optimistic view is that enough people will gain immune protection from vaccination and from natural infection such that there will be less transmission and much less COVID-19-related hospitalization and death, even as the virus continues to circulate.” We have lived with this reality with the flu for quite some time. Many Americans accept that receiving flu shot each fall is the best protection against the flu, which still kills thousands every year. The flu vaccines do not provide guaranteed protection against the flu because there are different variants of the flu, as there are with COVID. The flu vaccine is formulated annually based on scientists’ best guess as to what variants will be widespread in the coming year. Regardless, both the CDC’s and Grad’s statements remind us that we have some control over how the baseline or endemic level ends up being defined. Communities have the means to intervene through increased vaccination rates, which will affect the extent to which the disease continues to circulate. Historically, Americans have seldom been vocal or argumentative about whether or not they choose to be vaccinated against the flu. Nevertheless, government mandates and peer pressure have made vaccination against COVID a heated political issue. To an extent that many of us never expected, the resistance to a life-saving vaccine is helping to ensure that COVID will exist perpetually.   Image Credit: Health checks in India by Gwydion M. Williams is licensed under CC by 2.0. ... View more

Last week I had an opportunity to join a Zoom conversation with a group of Rhetoric Society of America fellows, organized by Rich Enos and facilitated by Krista Ratcliffe. I almost missed it: one of those days where both phones were ringing at the same time, my doorbell was chiming, and email was pouring in. But at the last minute I made some executive decisions, turned off phones, and clicked “join.” And my, oh, my, I wouldn’t have missed this discussion for anything! As Jackie Royster said as we were signing off, we had enjoyed a solid hour of intellectual stimulation that reminded all of us why we are in this profession in the first place and why we love what we do. For an hour, we listened as Ed Schiappa (MIT) and Ralph Cintron (UIC) talked about their current work, and what a listen it was: I was literally on the edge of my seat as I leaned in to the Zoom screen. Ralph told us about a project he is collaborating on with a colleague in law—one they’re estimating may eventually be a three-volume study. A history of ideas project, it is questioning the very foundations of thinking about life on Earth in general and on what it means to be human in particular. I will write more about this project but simply note now that it seems to me at basis to be a project about definitions and how they shape what we can know (or be, or do). Ed also talked to us about definitions, and in particular the definition of a disputed term today, “transgender.” Calling this his “pandemic project,” Ed spoke of the exigencies surrounding this term and then described the research he has carried out in the last 18 months or so. In short, he has immersed himself in the legal definitions of “transgender” in a number of different sites, from states that regulate bathrooms based on definitions of the term to sports teams, prisons, and same-sex schools. To say that he encountered a wide range and variety of definitions seems like an understatement, and the lack of any kind of coherence or consensus simply underscored how arbitrary the very momentous decisions that are based on these definitions are, decisions that affect real people in real circumstances and often in not just arbitrary but harmful ways. Once again, I thought of the power of definitions to regulate us in all kinds of ways, and of the need to engage students in examining definitional disputes, thinking through them, and considering how definitions impact their lives. As I listened to Ed, I also thought of times I’ve taught “definition essays” as fairly perfunctory, when they should be anything but. I also thought about the depth of research available to students who want to study a term’s definition, tracking it through time and looking at examples of it in various sites, as Ed has done with “transgender.” And I thought of the learning that could happen as a result of such investigations, the deepening understandings that could accrue. What I had learned in just half an hour hearing about Ed’s research made me want not just to read his book (and—wait for it—The Transgender Exigency: Defining Sex and Gender in the 21st Century is coming!) but to ask students to work together to examine the definitions that seem most important and problematic to their own lives. Image Credit: "Dictionary" by greeblie, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Emerging's 5th edition is here,  and it contains some great new readings. One of the key elements of Emerging is finding connections between different points of view. See this video blog for ideas on teaching with a reading that highlights this theme, as well as empathy for opposing viewpoints and working against social polarization.  Want to know more about Emerging? Have questions about how to foster critical thinking and connections in the classroom? Want to discuss how you've used conversation to support empathy in your classroom? Comment on this post, or reach out to bbarios@fau.edu! ... View more

My twenty-something sons have a keen interest in—okay, an obsession with—the history of media. My older son teaches film and is currently teaching a course on the future of film. That requires, of course, looking back at the past and considering how digital media have changed how films are distributed. My younger son is intrigued by the idea that his even younger cousins have never lived in a world in which YouTube didn’t exist. Having been a child when VHS tapes still had to be protected from melting in a hot car, he feels like the “old man” of media who can educate the younger generation about a world they never knew. They both use their iPhones or laptops constantly to research movies. Is it obvious to note, though, that they don’t use Facebook to do research? Or that we don’t expect our students to cite Facebook as a source in a documented essay? My older son uses Facebook to disseminate his opinions about films, just like he uses a blog. Facebook is, after all, a social media or social networking service. How, then, have we reached the point of congressional hearings examining Facebook’s role in disseminating disinformation harmful to America’s youth? Facebook creates communities of users, some much larger than others, who exchange updates on their lives and information they think will be of interest to their online community. However, the information shared is only as reliable as the community member who shares it. Facebook was never meant to be a news source, except as far as personal news was concerned. Then came the Trump administration, telling its followers that the mainstream media were not to be trusted as sources of national and international news. Some people began to put more faith in what a “friend” shared on Facebook than what a major news network reported. All of us have probably been guilty of sharing information on Facebook without thinking too critically about where that information came from. Sometimes we are glad to see someone out there reinforcing what we believe and pass it along without thinking about whether it is even true. Publishers of print media have been, and continue to be aware of the danger of printing libelous content. Now those who allow disinformation in digital form to go unchecked are facing some of the same type of scrutiny. Those who run Facebook have tried to restrict what gets passed along as truth. Frances Haugen, the whistleblower who has released thousands of pages of Facebook documents, has testified about those efforts but argues that they fall far short of what it would take to eliminate the dissemination of misinformation. She points out that Facebook did tighten restrictions about what users could post in the days leading up to the 2020 Presidential election, for example, but relaxed those restrictions once the election was over—even in light of the events of January 6th—because it was profitable to do so. A portion of Haugen’s testimony has been about the lies and conspiracy theories being spread about COVID-19 via Facebook. What is posted on a social media site can seldom be considered a matter of life and death, but lives literally are at stake if readers of a post believe that Ivermectin is a cure for COVID or that vaccinations are a Democratic conspiracy. Mark Zuckerberg and the other higher-ups at Facebook can try to put in place a plan to block disinformation. In their daily lives, as they argue politics in the heated atmosphere that currently exists in our country, Facebook’s users still must bear the responsibility that any person who constructs an argument must bear for checking out the reliability of their sources. In arguments made in the context of their academic or professional lives, the rules of research and documentation haven’t changed. An argument in support of a claim is only as good as its sources and the warrants that build a bridge between claim and warrant, no matter how funny the meme or how convincing the post is on Facebook.   Image Credit: "facebook is dead" by Book Catalog is licensed under CC BY 2.0. ... View more

In my last blog I analyzed the cultural significance of the “The Crown,” this year's toast of the Emmy Awards and a major signifier of America's continuing fascination with upper-class life. So when I read L.A. Times theater critic Charles McNulty's evisceration of the Netflix soon-to-premiere-on-Broadway musical "Diana," I decided that this would be a good opportunity to explore a different angle of the topic. So, as I am prone to say at the start of many of my semiotic analyses on this blog, here goes. To begin with, any critical review that begins by calling its subject "a crassly commercial noise machine," is clearly not going to be a piece of puffery. In fact, McNulty simply loathes the thing, cutting it off at the knees with such pronouncements as "There were lyrics so deranged I felt compelled to jot them down, almost like a psychiatrist keeping a log of a patient’s more unhinged utterances," and "'Diana' clarified for me why some people not only hate musicals but also loathe those who unabashedly do." When reading such jabs one can't help but think, "C'mon Charles, don't hold back, tell us what you really think." I confess to a certain fondness for such directness, but there is a deeper cultural significance to McNulty's takedown of which the critic himself is completely aware, remarking how "During the long pandemic pause, Broadway has been forced to confront not only its dismal record on race but also its checkered history on the rights and dignity of its workers. Cluttering the space with commercial mediocrity sadly suggests a return to business as usual. For this reason, 'Diana' isn’t just bad but dangerous."  Such critical passion raises the more dispassionate question: "What do we expect from musicals, anyway? Are they art or mere entertainment?" And this is the question I wish to explore in the rest of this blog. For the musical is a genre which, from its origins in the "light" operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, occupies a liminal space between "popular" culture and "elite" culture, "low" culture and "high," commercial entertainment and art. "Higher" than the proletarian "music hall" and "lower" than, say, the royal opera, Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas defied easy cultural classification, as does the tradition that they inspired. Even the music defies easy classification, with modern composers from Andrew Lloyd Webber to Lin-Manuel Miranda digging deep into contemporary pop music as they cross over from Broadway to Billboard, and back again. McNulty's pronouncement that "Artistically, 'Diana' is soulless. The raison d'être seems to be to make money," reveals what is at stake for proponents of a Broadway tradition that, in their view, should aim high rather than low—a pop cultural standard that has been embraced ever since the Beatles and Bob Dylan raised expectations for rock music as well. So it isn't the fact that "Diana"'s score is rock-oriented that bothers McNulty (it was composed by Bon Jovi's David Bryan); the problem is that it is "composed in the cheesiest Broadway rock."  But the medium, as they say, is the message, and Netflix—a wholly commercial enterprise—is a medium that isn't designed to aim high. Its purpose is to cash in. So what we are seeing here is a repetition of what happened in the very early days of television itself, when hopes that the new medium would bring high culture into the homes of the masses collapsed into a lament that TV had instead devolved into what FCC Chair Newton Minnow famously called a "vast wasteland" in 1961. So as traditional TV comes to be overtaken by the new media, the message remains the same: cultural production within a system of corporate capitalism is guided by the imperatives of the profit motive, not the nebulous and shifting values of "high" art. The result, as I have noted so many times, is the creation of an "entertainment culture" that has transformed cultural capital into just plain capital.   Image Credit: "File:Curtain-939464.jpg" by tommybuddy is marked with CC0 1.0 ... View more

We know from our own experience, and from mountains of research (see Iowa State’s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching to get a sense of what’s out there), that students need to feel like they belong in our classrooms if they are going to succeed. We foster this sense of belonging in everything we do: from the way we greet students on their first day in class to the way say goodbye on their final day.  For me, though, course design is the first area of focus that comes to mind when I think about how to ensure students feel they are an integral part of the class. We can help our students feel at home even before they arrive in our classrooms by carefully planning the fifteen weeks we will share with them so that our time spent together is equitable, clear, relevant, and reflective. The Course Design Equity and Inclusion Rubric available at Stanford’s Teaching Commons offers a helpful way to evaluate one’s own course content. The rubric features categories such as “Personal Connections and Relevance,” “Transparency of Content,” “Diversity of Perspectives” and “Diversity of Media” that will remind instructors—especially those of us who have been around a while—to take a fresh look at not only what material we are assigning but how we expect students to respond to it. The pandemic has reminded us how reliant we have become on technology to enable learning, but also how tentative our connections to that technology sometimes are. It’s vital, therefore, that while we take advantage of the learning resources that are at hand, we make no easy assumptions about students’ access to or competence in the technosphere. As Clint Smith points out in his 2019 Atlantic article “Elite Colleges Constantly Tell Low-Income Students That They Do Not Belong,” it is wrong to treat all students “as homogeneous…, as if they all navigate these schools in the same way.” Naturally, our course homepage and syllabus should be easy to read and easy to navigate. We not only model clear writing for our students in these documents, but we also ensure that our expectations and theirs are in concert. And it is here that we demonstrate—by assigning diverse authors and content-creators in varied genres—that we honor a range of ways of expressing ideas and opinions. Of course, students cannot succeed unless their basic needs are met. Even the most dedicated student will necessarily prioritize shelter and food over a problem-solution essay. Our awareness of our campus’s full resources, and our ability to guide students directly to the resources they need, is a clear sign that we believe all students belong in our classes. Instructors in every discipline take for granted the importance of their own field of study, but those of us in English probably feel that the importance of our subject is self-evident. It’s obvious to us that success in college will depend, to a large extent, on one’s ability to communicate clearly and persuasively. However, our discipline’s relevance may not be immediately apparent to a student planning to study Chemistry or Computer Science, and we need early and often to connect the value of effective written and spoken communication to success across the curriculum. In a study of college students from nonmajor sections of biology, psychology, and English, researchers found that students feel an increased sense of belonging to the course in which they are enrolled when they perceive that “academic tasks are interesting, important, and useful” (Freeman et al 205). Finally, we must plan time throughout the semester for students’ self-reflection. In my experience, these meta-conversations about college that students may initially feel are off-topic, may wind up being as important as any discussion of course content. Maithreyi Gopalan and Shannon Brady recommend creating an environment “that helps students feel connected to each other, to faculty and staff, and to the institution.” Among their suggestions for fostering this sense of belonging is foregrounding the idea that “certain kinds of challenges in the transition to college…are common, shared by many students from diverse backgrounds, and likely to abate over time. Such thoughtful outreach seems to be especially powerful for Black, Latinx, Native, and first-generation students.” Granted, Day One of any class is a crucial one, but “Day Zero”—the planning that takes place before the course even starts—is just as important. ... View more

American television was born and came of age during a mid-twentieth century economic expansion that—assisted by strong unions, a progressive income tax, and the G. I. Bill—vaulted an unprecedented number of people out of working-class poverty into (relative) middle-class prosperity. Reflecting, and in many ways, ideologically shaping this transformation, the situation comedy (sitcom) emerged as the preeminent TV genre of the era with its comfortable, but never economically extravagant, households idealizing a peculiarly American institution: the suburban middle-class nuclear family. Other prominent genres of the period included variety and game shows, along with the highly mythologized (and now almost entirely extinct) Western, but it is the family sitcom that sticks in our collective memories as most representative of that time, bringing to America's living rooms images of a middle-class idyll in which a man's suburban ranch house might be his castle—but not literally. That is why I was so struck by this year's Emmy Awards, in which The Crown—a Netflix series that dramatizes the post-war history (well, quasi-history as a number of critics have hastened to point out) of the British Royal Family—walked off with most of the top honors. A glance at the Netflix website to find out more about the show further piqued my attention when I saw displayed there old world upper-class soap operas such as Versailles, Reign, Bridgerton, The Cook of Castamar, and The English Game (with its Upstairs, Downstairs-like casting). "Something is definitely going on here," I thought; "the semiotic question is 'what'?" It isn't that soapy costume dramas set in Europe (especially England) are anything new. Indeed, the aforementioned Upstairs, Downstairs headlined a constant stream of such programs on PBS's Masterpiece Theater in the 1970s, and the franchise continues (under the new name Masterpiece) to this day. There has even been a brief effort to bring back Upstairs, Downstairs. But fifty years ago, this was something new, a departure into television fare that was at once popular and somewhat exclusive, with WGBH (the Boston PBS station that introduced Masterpiece Theater to America) enjoying a highbrow reputation as the go-to network for America's cultural elite. And this is the kind of difference upon which semiotic analyses can be built. It is highly significant in this regard, then, that even as PBS was turning towards British imports featuring English high society in the seventies, ABC, NBC, and CBS were producing working-class comedies like All in the Family and Laverne & Shirley, while at the same time American popular culture as a whole was going "country," with truck drivers (Convoy) and country music stars (Coal Miner's Daughter) enjoying a kind of populist moment in the sun. This, after all, was also the era of Hee Haw. But something else was also going on, for the 1970s marks the era during which the American middle class began to fracture, with an emergent upper middle class (spearheaded by the notorious yuppies) drawing further and further away from what can best be called the struggling middle class. The current success of The Crown, and other closely related series like Downton Abbey (am I the only one who wanted the Crawleys to lose their precious estate?) is a plangent signifier of this divide, for here is elite television in more ways than one, a real-life fantasy of the ultimate in power and privilege for an ever-more-prosperous upper-middle-class audience. And what is everyone else watching? According to Variety, the three most viewed television programs (by a wide margin) in 2020-21 were 1. NFL Sunday Night Football, 2. NFL Thursday Night Football, and 3. NFL Monday Night Football—all traditional bastions of middle (and working) class viewership. Interestingly, and perhaps significantly, a show called The Equalizer is tied for number 6.   Image Credit: "Windsor Castle" by Francisco Antunes is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

Tiny Teaching Stories: Launch  Share Your Inspirational, Motivational or Funny Teaching Anecdotes With Us! Hello! I am excited to announce the launch of a new series on Bedford Bits: Tiny Teaching Stories, and to invite your participation.  What are Tiny Teaching Stories, you ask? See our introductory video or view our hub here:   To get us started, I'd like to share my own Tiny Teaching Story with you. We were small zoom squares, remote, distant, across 4 continents. In our online writing class, I talked about the need to create a classroom community; they filled the chatbox talk with fears about the pandemic, who had died, and who was in the hospital. Isabelle, in Vietnam, sprawled on her pink ruffled bedspread; Zara, in Pakistan, turned off her video to leave class for morning prayers. We understood that we would never see each other in person; we would always be at a distance, always in gallery view. And yet, when I missed class on the day my mother died, from across 4 continents they sent me poems of consolation and a bouquet of sunflowers.   Now, we want to hear from you. Send us your Tiny Teaching Story! Submit your Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com. Guidelines for submission: Stories should be no more than 100 words. Include with your submission the attached release form. Tiny Teaching Stories can be published anonymously or with attribution; please indicate your preference in your submission and include a brief one to two-sentence biography for non-anonymous publication. If you would like to, we encourage you to also submit your social media handles and a headshot (optional). Please change identifying names and details of students to protect their privacy.     ... View more

I have written before about DBLAC—Digital Black Lit and Composition—the organization founded by Khirsten L. Scott and Lou Maraj in 2016 as a digital network devoted to the support of Black graduate students and emerging scholars in the fields of literacy, composition, literature, rhetoric, and related areas. In the five years since then, this group has held transformative in-person retreats and sponsored highly successful virtual reading and writing groups. They’ve also sponsored panels at a number of national conferences. Professor Scott wrote recently alerting members and readers to the opening of the Fall 2021 writing sessions, the first of which was held just last week on September 15. DBLAC writing group sessions follow a similar format: participants register in advance and then are invited to join in on any or all of the slated activities, beginning with Pre-Writing Affirmations and Writing Goals, followed by a three-hour writing period (with a break roughly half way through) and then an hour of time for reflection. While I have not been lucky enough to be part of any of these groups yet, I continue to follow report of them and to think of them (and the equally interesting reading group sessions) as one of gifts that kept giving during the pandemic, since they were designed to be virtual. And I am especially interested in the pre-writing affirmations that participants do—a kind of activity I used to use in abbreviated fashion at the beginning of my first-year writing classes to settle us all down and get us focused. Here’s what DBLAC posted on September 15: Before setting our goals and beginning our writing activities, let's share positive affirmations about our writing intentions. Statements can vary in length and quantity. The goal here is to promote positive energy within the group. Pre-Writing Affirmations: Transformation of Silence into Action In the spirit of this theme, I turn to Audre Lorde's words in this chapter of Sister Outsider: “The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.” Lorde’s words seem to me to provide a good starting point for many of our writing classes, especially very early in the term. Reading that first sentence aloud in class, I can imagine looking directly and closely at my students, making eye contact with as many as possible, asking them to think about what it means to say “the fact that we are here” in this mid-pandemic time, and asking about what some of the silences and differences that stand between us are. And about how we might begin not just to recognize and name them but to bridge them. While I and my students wouldn’t have several hours to write, we would have 20 to 30 minutes at our disposal—along with some time for group discussion that could serve as a primer for later reflections written at leisure and brought to class the following day. I am not in the classroom (virtual or in person) this term, to my regret. But if I were, this is a prompt I would want to use—thanks to Audre Lorde and DBLAC. I believe it could well set the reflective, contemplative, interrogative tone I hope would guide our classroom deliberations throughout. If you should use this in your classroom, I’d love to hear about it and its results. And in the meantime, I recommend checking out the DBLAC website and signing up for their highly informational newsletter. Image Credit: "Pen and Paper" by kdinuraj, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

I was finishing revisions of the most recent editions of Elements of Argument and The Structure of Argument as the presidential election of 2020 was nearing its end. As the books went to press, I could make no assumptions about how the election would turn out, but that was not a new struggle for me because throughout the process of writing about argument and selecting examples of argumentation for these and prior editions, I needed to try to not let my political biases show. (I have not always been successful.) On this platform, to a community of instructors in the classroom, I can say with candor that teaching argumentation during the era of former President Donald Trump was not easy. The lasting effects of his administration make it difficult still. We have long known about media bias. We have long talked to our students about how certain networks, certain newspapers, and certain magazines can have a conservative or a liberal bias. But beyond media bias, one thing that gave Trump his surprising power over his followers was his ability to convince them that only he was telling them the truth. He convinced them that everything else was fake news. The media could not be trusted to present balanced news; they could not even be trusted to present the facts accurately. How do you support an argument, or teach your students to, when no one is telling the truth? Only that kind of cult of personality could make it possible for millions of people to refuse to take a vaccine to protect themselves against a disease that has killed over half a million people in America alone. Some people have entered the hospital with COVID still arguing that it can’t be COVID because COVID is a hoax. Only on their deathbed have some accepted the truth and begged their families to be vaccinated. This level of refusal to accept scientific truth is new. What will people from the perspective of the future think about a generation of Americans who in large numbers chose to die rather than take a vaccine advocated by the government? We still have to teach our students the difference between fact and inference. We still have to teach them how to evaluate sources. Doing so remains difficult in today’s politicized environment. The same basic guidelines for evaluation still apply. We just have to get past the emotion, and for some, that is just not possible right now. Sometimes it may be a matter of doing the most we can do under the circumstances. I happen to be in one of the states where the legislature is eager to mirror Texas’s S. B. 8 in essentially taking away women’s right to control their own bodies by making abortion illegal after six weeks and making a woman’s neighbors bounty hunters to be rewarded for turning her in if she has an abortion. I wanted to write a letter to the editor opposing passing a similar law in Arkansas. But what would I have argued in this letter, and how? It would have been pointless to try to argue in favor of abortion in general. In fact, I don’t support abortion in general, but rather under specific circumstances. A letter is hardly enough to present the complexities of my views on abortion. Too often in such discussions, we tend to focus on the most sensational cases, such as when the girl or woman is the victim of rape or incest, but doing so suggests that abortion is acceptable only in the most extreme of cases, which is also not my view. I reflected on what exactly I was advocating. For now, specifically, it was that a similar law to Texas S. B. 8 should not be passed in my state. And it wasn’t even that I was arguing that never in the future should any abortion law be passed in my state. Rather, I was responding to the push from one of our state legislators to pass a law just like Texas’s right now, before the current legislative session ends. My case was strengthened by the fact that the state senator who is advocating the newest restrictive abortion law has sponsored two similar laws that have already been struck down in federal court. Even before the court’s decision on the more recent law, our Governor admitted publicly that he knew the law was unconstitutional. Two of the three dissenting justices who failed to block Texas’s S. B 8 stated bluntly that the law was unconstitutional, and Chief Justice Roberts said the constitutionality of the law could only be considered when a specific case comes before the Court. There are facts that support my contention that it would be unwise to force a law of unclear constitutionality through our state legislation at this time, when a specific case is due to be heard by the Supreme Court in a few weeks. Add to that the fact that some states and companies are already rethinking the wisdom of doing business in Texas, and there are reasons to stop and think and not simply let emotion rule the day. Our legislature, unfortunately, probably will not do that, but what I can do at this point is to know the facts and to know exactly what I want to argue should be done. Other battles will come later, but for now, that may be the most that can be done.   Image Credit: "Supreme Court of the United States" by Phil Roeder is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

In the midst of a wave of the COVID Delta variant, I took a fall and ended up in the emergency room of a hospital, where I spent the night waiting for a bed in what turned out to be a closet in the outpatient wing: there was not a single bed available elsewhere. In spite of being overwhelmed with patients, the staff were kind, caring, and attentive, managing x-rays and CT scans and other test with patience and skill and transferring me within three days to a skilled nursing facility nearby. Once settled in the new place, I had a chance to look at the written records that accompanied me, and to remark on the thoroughness and accuracy of the reports, including descriptions of the fractures and notes about my allergies to pain medication: some fine pieces of writing, I thought! I spent the next three weeks in a rehab center, and being the rhetorician that I am, I paid close attention to all the communicating I saw going on around me, both spoken and written. And in this time of almost unbelievable division and hostility in our country, of the avalanche of misinformation descending on us on social media, and of the increasingly bitter attacks and counterattacks regarding the recall of our governor here in California—I learned lessons in kindness, dignity, grace, and forbearance. I’ll share just two of these lessons here. The building I was in was a big rectangle, and once I was in a wheelchair, I could wheel from hall to hall, where I watched staff at work. Other patients did the same, including one woman with advanced dementia, whose soft smile and voice greeted me often. She would wheel slowly by, often talking about things that seemed to deal with numbers, or economics, and addressed, it seemed, primarily to herself. I later learned that she had been a long-time math teacher. She was hardly ever in her room, preferring to roam about the facility—and she had a penchant for going into any door that was open or that she could open: one night I woke to find she had wheeled into my room and was sitting inside the door, singing to herself. So the staff could have trouble keeping track of this patient, and when they located her she would often resist going back to her room. As I watched this pattern repeat, I was impressed (and more than a little humbled) by the staff members’ ability to talk with her quietly, kindly, and always respectfully, suggesting that she might want to share a cup of hot chocolate, to listen to music, or to roll around with one of the assistants as a companion—and eventually, ever so gently accompany her to her room and, at night, help her with washing and undressing and getting into bed. The way the staff spoke—as well as what they said—impressed me deeply: it was a kind of communication, a lot of it nonverbal, that I think characterizes the best teaching, and it has a persuasive power all its own. As I came to know the place better, I realized that some staff were more highly skilled at this kind of communication than others, but oh how I wished that all of us teachers could have a chance to learn from them and to pass on some of their expertise to our students. And then there was a nurses’ assistant that I will refer to as Maria. I met her my first night there, as she was cajoling a patient into eating just a bit more of her dinner, but I didn’t get to talk with her until a few days later, when she came into my room as she said “early, ahead of her schedule, to ask a question.” She had seen two books by my bed—The Everyday Writer, which I’m working on revising, and a book of poems by Rita Dove—and she wanted to ask about writing, specifically about her writing. As her story unfolded, I learned that she had come to this country with her mother and siblings to join her father, then working in the fields, when she was a child. In those days they had all managed to come legally, and they settled in to working in four areas of California, in order of crop rotation. Maria did not go to school until she was 14, and then she found herself in a public classroom, with little English and a lot of anxiety. But she also had a lot of curiosity, which her English teacher noticed. One day, the teacher asked her to stay behind at the end of class and offered a deal: if Maria would work hard, the teacher would stay after school 2 to 3 hours a day to teach her English. Maria did work hard—very, very hard. One day, her teacher said she wanted to take Maria somewhere on the weekend but Maria demurred, saying she didn’t think her father would allow it. He agreed, however, and Maria found herself at a high school graduation, something she had never heard of and could scarcely imagine. She set her sights on such a graduation, and with the ongoing support of her teacher, she graduated with fine grades and got a good job. Eventually, she completed the college work necessary to become a certified nurse’s assistant. But all the while, she told me, she was “telling stories,” writing them in both Spanish and English, and dreaming of doing more. How many Marias have you known in your career? How many times have you met someone who had a teacher like Maria’s? How many times have you been that teacher? Maria’s story has once again taught me that the work we do matters. That writing matters. That language shapes our lives even as we shape it, and that it connects us to one another. I gave Maria The Everyday Writer and another book I had with me, Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera, and I’ve sent a few more books since I got home. She has written that she hopes to visit soon, and that she will bring some of her stories with her. And that she continues to write, every single day. In the wake of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I have felt . . . discouraged. But even on a dark day filled with dark memories and darker grief, I remember the lessons I have learned from Maria, from the remarkable staff of the rehab center, and from so many students: the work we do has meaning, far beyond what we may ever know. Image Credit: "Posters of Muscular and skeletal systems anatomy chart in hospital" by shixart1985, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Emerging's fifth edition is here, and it contains some great new readings to help you encourage students to grow as citizen-actors in the world, who will deal with - and maybe even solve - many of the issues facing the world today. See this video blog about a reading that challenges our conception of the human vs. natural world divide, questioning our notions of human uniqueness and notions of the political sphere.  ... View more

Eric D. BrownEric D. Brown (recommended by Kyle Jensen), Bedford New Scholar 2021, is pursuing his PhD in Arizona State University’s Writing, Rhetorics and Literacies PhD program, where he studies writing technologies, writing pedagogy, and writing program administration. He has taught First-Year Composition, Persuasive Writing and Public Issues, Writing for the Professions, and Business Writing. Eric is also Assistant Director (AD) of Writing Programs, where he aids the director in growing the scope of Writing Programs and creating professional development for faculty. As Assistant Director, he also co-runs the National Day on Writing, ASU’s annual Composition Conference, and is an editor of Writing Programs’ bi-annual newsletter, Writing Notes.   How do you engage students in your course? I’ve found that one of the best ways to engage students in my courses is to show them that the writing process doesn’t have to be a lonely endeavor and that writing is hard, even for those of us who are “good” at it. I enact this approach by positioning myself as an expert on writing (what it is and how it works) but one that fails and stumbles through the writing process, just like they do. And I’ve found that students are particularly engaged with this idea when I write “live” for/with them. For example, I’ll write an email or an assignment sheet with them, talking through my thinking/rhetorical strategies and asking for advice and ideas from them. Regardless of what writing task I take on for/with them, they see me struggle to get started, stumble with wording, sidestep through typos/spelling mistakes, and go back and rework the text. In sum, they can see that “the struggle is real” when it comes to writing, showing students (who are often fearful of college writing) that even experts struggle with writing, that writing is collaborative, and that revision is essential to any writing situation.  What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? In sum, it’s pretty awesome. As a Bedford New Scholar, I get opportunities to work with Bedford/St. Martin’s on a variety of projects: feedback on textbooks, input about developing technologies, and opinions on readings for students, to name a few. It’s really great to not only get some insight into the higher ed publishing world but to contribute to that world. Meeting and interacting with the other Bedford New Scholars is also a notable highlight of the program. The virtual summit this summer gave me the chance to not only meet and interact with other new scholars, but I was able to work on projects with them and talk about what is most important to me with them: teaching. Sharing my work and sitting in on presentations for the Assignments that Work part of the summer summit was generative, as well as fun. I got a ton of great ideas for assignments to try out, and I was able to see my fellow New Scholars’ unique approaches to teaching and writing. What do you think instructors don’t know about higher ed publishing but should? I don’t think instructors know how willing and excited publishers like Bedford/St. Martin’s are to work with them, and I think this “not knowing” can lead to a view of higher ed publishing as “The Man.” While this was certainly a perception I  held in my early days as a graduate student (and before that as an adjunct), I have become persuaded otherwise. I have found higher ed publishers like Bedford/St.Martin’s to be highly invested in instructor input, experience, and in the workings/makeup of the writing programs instructors teach in. Before working with Bedford/St. Martin’s, I would not have imagined that my ideas, feedback, and support would be important to higher ed publishers, but I’ve found the opposite to be true. Furthermore, I have found that higher ed publishers like Bedford/St. Martin’s are more often than not pedagogically focused--they want to know what research is influencing our teaching, what we are doing in the classroom, why we are doing things the way we are, and how they can support that work.  What projects or course materials from Bedford/St. Martin's most pique your interest, and why? My writing program just shifted to using a common textbook (which we created with Bedford/St. Martin’s), and Achieve is offered with the textbook. I’m excited to learn more about Achieve and use it with my students. I was able to use some of Achieve’s peer review functions this summer during the virtual summit, and I really liked many of its affordances. My institution’s current LMS has a very clunky peer review system, and I’m particularly looking forward to switching to one that allows me to shape and tweak peer review goals and that has an interface I think will be intuitive for my students. I also know that Achieve has some annotation functions, and I’m excited to use them with my students, as well.   Eric's Assignment that Works During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Eric’s assignment. For the full activity, see Remediation. One of the goals of my 101 courses is to expand for students what writing is and how it works. My “Remediation” assignment works toward this goal, as it asks students to reshape their writing for new audiences and to funnel their ideas through a new medium or genre. In sum, students are asked to take an already completed written project (usually the first major project, which asks them to explore a literacy) and funnel its ideas through another medium/“translate” it into another genre. For example, students might take their project and (re)shape it into a podcast or blog post. Remediation gets students thinking about the ever-shifting relationship among writer, audience, and text (i.e., the rhetorical situation), but also asks them to focus on how the mediums/genres in which we communicate our ideas to others consist of different kinds of media that very much are “writing.” Students are excited to expand their notions of what “counts” as writing, and one of the assignment’s selling points is in how it asks students to not only consider how certain mediums/genres appeal to certain audiences, and not others, but to consider how their writing does so as well. ... View more