I just wanted to end this year’s posts by thanking all my guest bloggers.  It’s been amazing working with them and hearing their perspectives on Emerging, teaching, and writing programs. I’d love to continue to have guest bloggers next year.  If you’re interested, leave a comment below. To them and to all of you I hope you have a restful and productive summer.  Now that I am deeper into administration, summer is a thing of the past; I’m a 12-month employee now.  Color me jealous of so many of you but trust that I will spend part of the summer thinking out new posts for next year. Enjoy! ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Bettina Caluori. Bettina  is Professor of English at Mercer County Community College in New Jersey. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara. For the past four years she has served as the coordinator for English Composition I (ENG101). Before that she chaired a college-wide committee on assessment for several years. In addition to writing courses she teaches American literature and women’s literature.Barclay: I really enjoyed the opening of our conversation.  It’s had me thinking about “balance” ever since: theory and praxis, consistency and individuality… good things to think about.Anyway, I would love to hear more about the writing program at Mercer.  What sort of pedagogies do you use in your writing program and why?Bettina: Our assumption is that students must read and write with more purpose than merely mastering the information in texts. As a result we approach critical thinking about college-level texts and the writing process (drafting, revision) as inextricably linked endeavors. Toward that end, students must encounter conceptually challenging selections that require them to comprehend and analyze authors’ arguments, and the writing process should help them refine their understanding and synthesize a critical response. The department values students’ independent thinking about the specific facets of authors’ thoughts and therefore requires supporting evidence that quotes and discusses key ideas. Given this emphasis, we do not assign essay topics in the rhetorical modes. We also discourage the five-paragraph essay which usually supplies more of an organizational pattern than an impetus for writers to link, build and develop ideas. We prioritize formative feedback through class activities and comments on papers that will help students develop and support their reasoned arguments.  Feedback on grammar and mechanics remains important, but it should by no means overshadow the intellectual objectives of our writing courses. Barclay: That sounds almost exactly like the goals of the writing program here at Florida Atlantic University.  I love the connections we can make across different kinds of institutions.  So often I feel like Rhet/Comp somehow shouldn’t exist as a field because our answers to common questions are so determined by local context.  It’s reassuring to me then to hear about our commonalities.So how do you enact that philosophy in the classroom?Bettina: Typically we use group work to focus students on the texts and create structure for their active engagement with them. If students are going to need to quote and respond to significant claims in an essay it makes sense that class activities should shift the responsibility to identify important claims to students. Many professors have students exchange drafts and give peer feedback. Some give sample student essays and ask students to grade them using the departmental rubric. I think we all struggle to help students synthesize texts in their essays. As I answer this question, I think an inventory of approaches in this particular area would be helpful. Barclay: For us both!  It’s always a challenge to capture and retain lore and yet if we don’t find ways to do so then each new crop of teachers has to reinvent the wheel.Shifting gears a little, as someone in writing program administration what are the unique challenges of creating, promoting, guiding, generating programmatic change? How do you make it happen? What resistance is there?Bettina: There are many challenges! In my mind they all center on time constraints and communication issues. For example, if I circulate a rubric that emphasizes the importance of quoting and tries to describe levels of success using textual evidence, I might believe I have just communicated with everyone about course outcomes. But I have learned that rubrics don’t always communicate directly and smoothly. Like everything else, they are interpreted in terms of people’s past practice and assumptions. Quoting to add color to an essay and quoting in order to analyze concepts are two different things and only the professor who emphasizes the latter promotes the kind of textual evidence we want to prioritize.  The rubric is a start at communication. What counts as critical thinking? This is another area where a phrase means different things to people and it takes some time and effort to build a common set of assumptions.  So the requirements of effective communication about complex subjects point to the second daunting challenge, which is finding the time and means for effective conversation.  Not surprisingly this is hardest to do with our part-time faculty who work at multiple campuses and are not compensated to contribute to departmental initiatives. The full-time faculty have the time and responsibility to set curricular directions and we can reach agreement, although we also make everything happen only gradually. It took a long time to write department rubrics and it takes time to get back to refining and updating them. Barclay: I know what you mean by gradual change.  I like to say that writing programs have the turning radius of a cruise ship.  We also face problems of getting our teachers to engage in and commit to change.  We mostly have Graduate Teaching Assistants but like your adjuncts they aren’t compensated.  So how do you deal with these communication issues?Bettina: We look for ways to communicate better with adjunct faculty when everyone has full schedules to manage. For me, it is discouraging to arrange meetings for adjunct faculty and have low turnout, and no doubt adjunct faculty are frustrated when the meetings that I can manage in my schedule don’t work with theirs. Now we have an online orientation to teaching ENG101, a website for sharing course materials, but none of this is as good as being able to talk over lunch about our courses. We are having a departmental retreat at the end of this semester and inviting adjunct faculty, and we will be glad to have anyone who is able to attend, but of course it won’t be possible for everyone. Our department envisions a great deal of change at our retreats because this is when, before or after a semester, we set aside six hours for discussion and planning. Barclay: For us, it’s fall orientation.  Everyone is together in one place at one time so we try to make things happen then.  And what about resistance to change? Given the large GTA population I tend to have an easier time with change.  What’s it like working with a largely contingent labor pool?Bettina: There is always some resistance to change because almost by definition it puts new priorities and risks in place. As ENG101 coordinator, I meet new adjunct faculty at the moment when they may be experiencing how our writing program differs from other places. Sometimes there is resistance, or perhaps skepticism, about our emphasis on critical thinking or our use of textbooks that some consider too challenging for our students. While most people have responded positively, there has been some resistance to our new practice of giving peer feedback to faculty on their paper comments and grading. As I see it, the way forward comes back to communication. How can we improve our communication about how to introduce challenging texts? How can we help people understand the rationale for peer feedback (supporting more effective revision in our students’ essays)? Sometimes it feels like a strange Catch-22. For example, if I could devise the ideal communicative setting in which all full-time and part-time ENG101 faculty could reach a detailed, shared consensus on paper comments, we might not need the peer-feedback system we have because its form originates in a need to communicate in a context with impediments. If we proceed without complete consensus with faculty peer feedback because of these impediments, there is resistance to this way of communicating.  One thing is certain, and that is that my colleagues will press for improvements, so we will see where we will go because we can always try adjustments. Barclay: Yes.  That’s just another way of saying that when it comes to writing programs change is one of the few constants we can rely on.  LOL!  Thanks for joining me Bettina and good luck as you continue to develop your program! ... View more

A brief news item in the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that 89%  of those business leaders polled in a Northeastern University survey believe that "colleges should increase teaching about entrepreneurship".  Given the fact that such corporate thinking has come to dominate current discourse on higher education and its purposes, it is worthy of a semiotic analysis, and I will sketch one out accordingly here. First let's be clear on the meaning of the word "entrepreneurship" itself so there isn't any confusion.  Entrepreneurship is the defining quality of an entrepreneur, and an entrepreneur is someone who founds and directs new business ventures.  Of course, when thinking of such people, names like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg always come to mind, and that, presumably, is what the business leaders surveyed in the Northeastern poll have in mind. Fine, I do not mean to challenge this ethos of corporate creativity.  It is consistent with a number of traditional American mythologies, including our valuing of individualism, self-reliance, and what used to be called the Protestant Work Ethic.  But the problem lies in two major contradictions that the survey does not mention, contradictions that become clear when we look at the larger cultural system within which entrepreneurship functions. The first contradiction lies in the fact that even as the entrepreneur is celebrated in corporate and educational discourse, the reality is that contemporary capitalism is becoming increasingly monopolistic.  For every successful entrepreneur there are countless entrepreneurs whose efforts have been wiped out by the giant companies that have already made it (just consider what Microsoft did to Netscape, or what Facebook did to MySpace, or, for that matter, what Sebastian Thrun once predicted about the fate of American universities in the era of the MOOC).  As the rules that were written in the Progressive Era to stem the monopoly capitalism of the late nineteenth century are loosened ever further (just look at the current controversy over FCC rules for the regulation of Internet ISP providers for an example of this trend), the odds against successful entrepreneurship are lengthening.  So for currently successful business leaders to urge today's students to be more entrepreneurial seems more than a little problematic.  It's like urging students to pursue an information technology education and then sending a significant portion of our IT jobs offshore.  This is a contradiction so deep that it could be called a betrayal. But, as I say, there is a second contradiction.  Let's recall that an entrepreneur is a hard-working, self-reliant individualist.  But at the very same time that American business leaders are calling for more entrepreneurial education, it is they, bolstered by billions of advertising and marketing dollars, who have created a society of passive consumerism and pleasure seeking hedonism.  Those of us in education who would like to see our students work hard and think critically are swimming upstream against an always-on entertainment society wherein instant gratification and 24/7-join-the-crowd social networking are significant obstacles to student success.  You can't work effectively and individually when you are constantly sending selfies to Instagram, listening to music, texting, updating your Facebook page, downloading TV programs, doing some online shopping, tweeting, "following," "friending" and otherwise multitasking on your smart phone.  But that is exactly what American business is working so hard to get our students to do. So what I, as an educator, want to say to the business leaders who want me to teach entrepreneurship is, "please get out of my way."  Stop pushing my students to believe that the instant gratification of every pleasure is far more important than time spent in study and personal effort.  If, as another part of the same Northeastern survey reports, fifty-four percent of the same business leaders believe that "the American higher-education system is falling behind developing and emerging countries in preparing students for the work force," then it is time for those leaders to clean up their own house and stop treating students as consumers. But I have no expectation at all that anything of the sort will happen.  After all, their own entrepreneurial success is grounded in wiping out the competition and treating human beings as markets: in short, in destroying the conditions that foster entrepreneurship. ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Bettina Caluori. Bettina  is Professor of English at Mercer County Community College in New Jersey. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara. For the past four years she has served as the coordinator for English Composition I (ENG101). Before that she chaired a college-wide committee on assessment for several years. In addition to writing courses she teaches American literature and women’s literature.Barclay: Let me start with a rather broad and general question.  What is your history as a teacher?Bettina: My first teaching job stands out in “my history” because it gave me an enduring sense of a teacher’s responsibility to devise approaches that enable as many students as possible to learn.  This first job, when I was fresh out of college, was teaching in a private high school for students with learning disabilities and I learned that if you work to teach a topic so that someone with a learning challenge can succeed, you may develop an approach that is actually better for everybody.  The experience provided me with an early introduction to a student-centered mindset and also shaped the direction of my career.  Having absorbed a vague introduction to deconstruction in my college literature classes in the 1980s, my youthful impression was that language could be cracked open and made to mean nothing. For me, it was not a motivating approach to literary study and when an advisor asked if I wanted to go to graduate school I answered negatively. It turned out that teaching students who struggled to understand main ideas was the antidote because it refocused me again on the practical, personal power in writing. Those students also inspired me because as I watched them work, some of my own self-doubts just seemed lazy, and this experience helped me decide to get my Ph.D. in English. I went to graduate school with a background that made me receptive to Composition Studies and resistant to the notion that it was the basement to the grander house of literary study above. Years later I am an English professor at a community college, a good match for me because teaching writing is at the center of what we do. Barclay: Great answer!  I love the idea of starting from the perspective of students with learning challenges.  I think that’s a great way to think about how we can help all students succeed.  I also identify with your disenchantment with theory.  I went straight into a pretty theory heavy grad program and fell in love with “high theory.”  But like you things changed for me when I started teaching.  I realized that the theory of the time (late 90s mind you) was inevitably circular and a bit navel-gazing-ish.  There’s nothing like teaching writing to force us all to focus on the practical.  I like to say to students now that theory is only useful if it helps us to explain, predict, or change reality.  That’s just another way of saying that theory without praxis isn’t really useful (to me).So you mentioned that you now work at a community college.  Can you tell us about your institution and writing program?Bettina: Mercer County Community College [link to http://www.mccc.edu] has an urban campus in Trenton, New Jersey and a suburban campus in West Windsor. Its students are traditional college age and older, and racially diverse. Many are immigrants or international students. Often they are the first generation in their family attending college. Most students have to complete two required writing courses (still called ENG101 and ENG102). Because we have two campuses and many sections of writing courses, working to insure some consistency of approach is important. Right now full-time faculty receive release time to be coordinators of curricula for writing courses. I am the coordinator for ENG101. As a curriculum coordinator I don’t manage the hiring and scheduling related to this composition course, which is taught mostly by adjunct faculty at this point. My focus is communication about our curriculum, assessment, and management of our department essay that all students must take and pass.  This essay has a history I won’t detail here because it is long and the departmental essay has morphed over the years. This past year we created its latest version when we changed from having a common essay topic for all sections to giving professors the chance to write their own topic according to department guidelines. It provides greater freedom but since the topic must align with key course outcomes, be approved by the department, and graded according to a rubric, there is still consistency in approach. Previously students wrote this high-stakes essay in sixty minutes and it was scored in a big grading session at the end of the semester. This year we tried having students write the essay in class during weeks eight through ten of a 15-week semester, and required all students to revise their pass or fail essays for a letter grade after that (which must end up being a C for a student to pass the course). Instead of having a big grading session, we asked all full- and part-time professors to submit sample scored essays to a committee for peer review. The goal was for faculty to get feedback on applying the rubric and gearing comments toward revision. We undertook these changes hoping to give students a greater sense of motivation and control with respect to the department essay since previously it created anxiety at the end of the semester and may have discouraged some students from persisting in the course. We also wanted to create more faculty-faculty communication around one of the most important ways we composition professors interact with our students: comments on essays. So far the switch seems positive overall, but it is still early. Barclay: I think many of us working as writing program administrators in some capacity face that basic challenge: consistency versus individuality.  I too feel that some consistency is important.  The way I pitch it is that a student’s grade should not depend on which section she or he happened to get into.  At the same time, I also want to offer teachers in my program some freedom.  Those two desires are often in tension and I like the way your program is approaching them.  I especially like the focus on faculty-faculty communication and peer feedback.  It sounds like that allows for a general consistency without being too much like “Big Brother.”  I think the sampled submission is also really smart.  Now that I am doing much more with assessment that’s the kind of approach we talk about all the time.I have some more questions for you but will save those for the next post… ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Erin Giberson, who received her M.A. in English at the University of Alaska Anchorage and who currently teaches literature and composition classes in New Jersey at Mercer County Community College.  She has also taught college composition at the University of Alaska Anchorage and Monmouth University.  Erin specializes in utopian studies and postmodern literature; she is currently researching perceptions and implications of motherhood in contemporary society and fiction.  For the past few semesters, I've taught only evening, weekend, and online classes.  These timeframes have recently worked the best with my schedule, especially because the evening and weekend classes meet once per week on campus.  But this semester is a change of pace: I am teaching a class that meets twice a week in the mornings.  This class is a 10 week session, so the meeting times are longer, but regardless, comparing non-traditional meeting times to traditional confirms my earlier opinions about the former: night classes really are more difficult to teach—because, generally speaking, most people in the class are pretty tired by the time they arrive.  This assessment isn't to say that I haven't had great students in evening classes, but it is to say that long evening classes in particular have unique pedagogical challenges: these challenges are what I want to discuss in order to explore the most effective approaches to class meetings that stretch, for example, from 7 p.m. - 9:45p.m. So let's start with the challenges, which are obvious.  When students show up for this type of class, they are spent.  Many are coming to campus following a day at a full-time job. Many of these same students are heading home to children and families who'll then need their time and attention.  Some of my past students even squeezed in a class between getting off of work and the 7 p.m. class.  Further, while my particular class would only meet once a week, a surprising number of students had more than one late night of classes worked into their schedule.  All of these factors come together to create a group of people who are tired and ready to zone out way before they've shown up to a class where they're expected to talk about academic writing and critical reading for almost three hours. Given this starting point, thinking about the dynamics of evening classes (or any nontraditional class) raises the issue of how to best approach and reach students, especially because non-traditional class times are such an asset for students balancing multiple responsibilities while pursuing a degree. Finding the best way to approach and engage a class is a complicated but important issue.  From my non-traditionally meeting classes, I've generally seen that larger groups are easier than smaller ones because the numbers alone provide better opportunities to engage dialogue, and I think that speaks to the importance of a sense of a community within a class dynamic.  Students really are hesitant to be only one speaking or to sound foolish.  It's amazing how much such fear silences people.  But feeling comfortable in a class does a lot to eradicate this fear and allow an interest in course material, and most importantly, conversations about the course material. For this reason, one thing I've tried is a potluck approach (anyone who wants to bring in food can but it's completely optional, and any food brought in is shared by all during the break).  It might sound simple, but the food recharges energies and the socializing fosters community.  This approach has worked really well with some groups and even turned into a weekly ritual. So, that's a starting point.  Encouraging community.  Challenging the tiredness of the night with carbohydrates, sugars, and more sweets (for the record, I brought a veggie platter only because it was easier, but some students impressively baked and none refused leftover cookies and chips at the end of the night) can't hurt (unless you're in a computer lab, so I relinquish my own and others' responsibility on that front).  But what else? What are other ways to rejuvenate the interests of the class dynamic in a nontraditional meeting time? Or even, what are examples of how you have responded to challenging class dynamics?  I guess, when it comes down to it, we can know what to do with the text, but, in a composition class, the text is flat without people talking about and in response to it.  So how do we best reach students so that they want to respond?   ... View more

How do you know when an entertainment event is a cultural signifier? Easy: it's when Rush Limbaugh asserts that "it has just declared war on the heartland of America." That, anyway, is what Limbaugh has been widely reported as saying upon word that CBS has hired Stephen Colbert to replace Dave Letterman on CBS's Late Show.  And while Limbaugh's declaration may be the most spectacular of responses to Colbert's hiring, it is but one of a virtually endless stream of comments about what is, from one perspective, merely a corporate personnel decision on the part of CBS.  But when such a decision gets this sort of attention, you can be quite confident that it is more than it appears: it is, in short, a sign, and therefore worthy of a semiotic analysis. In conducting such an analysis, we don't need to judge either Colbert or any particular response to his new television role.  The point is to analyze the significance both of his hiring and of the reaction to it.  And, as always, we need to begin with some contextualization. Let's look first at the system of late-night talk show hosts.  There have been quite a lot of them, but none looms larger than the late Johnnie Carson.  As the now legendary host of The Tonight Show, Carson turned that program—and late night TV in general—into an institution, and what that institution once represented in the Carson era (I'm thinking here of the 1960s) was what I can best describe as a kind of laid-back Eisenhower-Republican ethos: a mild-mannered, good-humored Middle Americanism that, in the current political climate, would probably be denounced as being "socialistic."  Carson himself wasn't political—at least not in any overtly partisan fashion—but in an era when a cultural revolution was convulsing the nation, his cheerfully bland monologues, banter, and let's-kick-everything-off-with-a-golf-swing manner was a kind of haven for Middle American adults: the parents of those hell-raising baby boomers who regarded The Tonight Show as just another "plastic" signifier of an "Establishment" that they wished either to escape or transform. That's why it was so significant that, when Carson retired, such edgier hosts as Jay Leno (who got Carson's job) and David Letterman (who essentially took Carson's place, though on a different channel) took over the late night watch.  These hosts—especially Letterman—were chosen precisely because they appealed to those edgier young baby boomers who, during the 1970s, had ceased to disdain late night talk shows and had become a coveted audience for it.  Though hardly an earth shaking development, the ascendancy of Letterman was but one of many signifiers by the early 1980s of a certain mainstreaming of the cultural revolution.  The conservative backlash to the 1960s may have captured the White House through twelve years of Reagan-Bush, but within popular culture, at least, one of the last bastions of Middle Americanism had fallen, so to speak, to the left. Today's choice of an even edgier entertainer—in fact, America's most wickedly funny satirist of right-wing media—to replace Letterman thus signifies an intensification of the trend.  The Colbert Report is one of the current youth generation's favorite television programs, and CBS's choice of Colbert among so many other powerful contenders (Tina Fey, anyone? Amy Poehler?) most certainly appears intended to capture the millennials as an audience for its post-Letterman Late Show. I think that Limbaugh, then, is wrong to attribute either cultural or political motivations to CBS's choice.  CBS's motivations, like any motivation in a commercial popular culture, are simple: the company wants to make money, and it has judged that by appealing to millennials it will do just that.  In other words, CBS isn't "declaring war" on anyone.  Still, I would agree with Limbaugh (did I just say that?!) that the choice of Colbert has political significance.  After all, Colbert's whole shtick lies in a very partisan (much more partisan than Letterman, and even more so than Jon Stewart) ridiculing of some of the icons of conservative media, and that's political. For me, the fact that CBS apparently feels that it can safely choose as potentially divisive an entertainer as Stephen Colbert is to rule the castle that Carson built (albeit on another station) is what is most significant here.  The cultural revolution has rolled along to a new stage.  In fact, it may well one of the most potent signs today of the changing demography that has been worrying Republican strategists as they seek ways of recapturing the White House.  Whether or not the Colbert-hosted Late Show becomes a popular hit remains to be seen (as I have hinted above, a woman host might have been a better idea, and, after all, there is still a sizable Middle American component to the audience for late night talk TV and it might not take to Colbert), but the significance of this choice will remain.  The Democrats, so to speak, have won this round, and they never even had to enter the ring. So hail to the new satirist-in-chief.  I wonder how long his term will run. ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Barbara Hamilton, an Assistant Professor of English andWorld Literature at Mercer County Community College in West Windsor, New Jersey, where she also serves as Honors Coordinator and Director of the Peer Tutoring Program.  Barbara also teaches upper-level literature courses for William Paterson University and was a past campus coordinator for the Rutgers Writing Program. When I moved to a community college from a university writing program two years ago, I wondered how students would respond to the reading level, essay length, and intellectual challenge of Emerging. Compared to the traditional university student, many of my current students are first-generation learners with more life experience but heavier family and work responsibilities that interfere with their time to read and write. Could they handle it? Happily, though, my performance anxieties ceased by the time I returned the first essay. They may have difficulty finding uninterrupted time to write, but nothing stops my students from thinking, talking to their family and friends about questions raised in the text, or interviewing co-workers about the ideas we discuss in class.  First-year writing is first-year writing, and what my students might lack in terms of cultural capital they make up for in their desire for cultural capital. Because of that desire, no one has complained about the perceived difficulty of Emerging.  For learners engaged in college-level discourse for the first time—who have often made great personal sacrifice to be here—there is a certain rush, a rise in academic confidence that comes from quoting a philosopher like Appiah or a recognized global figure like The Dalai Lama.  For a person who has never had The New York Times or The Atlantic piled casually on a coffee table at home, typing those titles on a Works Cited page becomes a rite of passage, a bridge crossed, a sign that progress is being made and dreams are closer. I remember that rush of accomplishment as a first generation student myself; why would I deny them this chance to grow? There are slight differences, of course. I have modified my practice in two ways recently, and both changes have improved my teaching. For one, I build reading sequences into my syllabus with even more attention than I have in the past.  What my current students demand above all is relevance. I can’t assume they’ll care about what Olsen or Gladwell think unless those issues seem important to them or their families—unless they are worth the time and sacrifice to tackle them. For instance, few care enough about genetic engineering to appreciate The Dalai Lama’s call to develop a global set of ethics.  However, if I link that essay with the Duhigg and Barboza article about unethical factory conditions in China, they immediately relate. They not only love their electronics, but many have family members who have worked in deplorable conditions. Worker safety and consumer responsibility become the venue for considering the feasibility of global ethics. One of the most successful in-class pre-drafting activities has been to have students create and then perform mini-plays in which The Dalai Lama and Apple executives discuss who is responsible for working conditions. Another change is that I must be more attentive to comprehension difficulties, especially in readings without an obvious thesis or with counter-arguments that seem more developed than the main message.  My students are often thrown by the time Surowiecki spends describing dysfunctional groups and miss his main message that groups are beneficial. This demands a discussion of the difficulties of excerpting a larger piece or the importance of reading editorial introductions and noticing book titles.  It’s also a great time to use one of my favorite lines:  “If you think that’s confusing, don’t write that way yourself.” Their own writing competence has to be my goal.  If they remember at the end that most development should advance their central project, whether or not they remember what Surowiecki thinks about the wisdom of crowds is secondary. Overall, first-year writing success looks much the same no matter the institution, but it might mean just a little more to community college students. It’s the portal to their dreams. ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Anthony Lioi—an ecocritic, Americanist, and compositionist who works at the Juilliard School, where he also directs the Writing Center. He earned the BA at Brown University and the MA and Ph.D. at Rutgers University and held positions at Rutgers and MIT before taking his current position. His work has been published in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Feminist Studies, MELUS, CrossCurrents, transFormations, ImageText, and other journals. He is working on a book on nerd culture and environmental discourse. I grew up watching The Magic Garden, a groovy television show that aired on WPIX-Channel 11 in the New York Metro region. It was the 1970s, so Miss Paula and Miss Carol [sic] had long hair, guitars, and jeans that hugged their hips. They swung on rope swings, singing songs about friendship and imagination. My favorite bit (besides the songs) was the Chuckle Patch, a group of laughing daisies that grew leaves with jokes on one side and punch lines on the other. When Paula and Carol approached the Chuckle Patch, the flowers would laugh in greeting. To get the daisies to laugh again, however, they had to pluck a leaf and tell a joke. Leaf = laugh. You got one freebie with the Chuckle Patch, and then you had to work for it. I tell this story because, having taught writing at MIT and the Juilliard School for the past decade, I spend a lot of time in the Chuckle Patch, a lot of time with delightful, capable students who are not, in the main, interested in literature, popular culture, or environmental politics—not interested, that is, in the things that interest me. The Chuckle Patch is in it for the laughs, just as MIT students are in it for the science and Juilliard students, the performance. The Chuckle Patch will laugh once out of courtesy, and then you had better make with the jokes. Don't, and the daisies demure, watching as if you are a particularly dull sort of ape. They challenge whatever vestige of writing-student-as-nascent-English-major you still had in your dull ape brain. When I started teaching in graduate school, my writing program used Ways of Reading, which was great for grad students preparing for orals, but which struck me, even then, as a little much. After teaching Foucault's Panopticon for a couple of semesters, I got tired of the de-Foucault-inating necessary afterwards, the process of convincing students that not all power is bad after teaching them laboriously that all power is bad. There is a place for such an approach, especially in a Liberal Arts paradigm in which students will encounter these ideas again. In an institute of technology—and a music conservatory is an institute of technology—you have three or four chances to Reveal the Larger Context before students submerge into specialization. You have to choose the jokes such that no laugh goes unlaughed. The Chuckle Patch has other things to do. This begs the question of the principle of choice. How to choose the jokes when you only get a couple of shots? Predictably, I figured out what not to do first. One does not appeal, I discovered, to a common context in which the subject is Chuckles—students specialties—and the method is Philosophy of Chuckles. This appears as clueless pandering: you, the person who can't run a nuclear reactor or play a Bach partita, are going to instruct them on the Meaning of Chuckles? Not. Defaulting to one's own specialty is also an error. Elective classes are understood to involve the instructor's specialty; required writing classes are not. So no assignments about American climate change novels or the gender politics of postmodernism. (See Point 1: Ways of Reading.) The trick would appear to be: Engage students on issues already in the penumbra of their central interests, then frame that context with tasks of critical reading, writing, and research. Clever, right? In my current context, I teach classes that are evenly split between native speakers of English from the United States and the Commonwealth, and international students for whom English is a second, fourth, and even fifth language. Finding the shadow of their central interests is complicated by the sheer diversity of students. Taking into account only Sinophones, there are students from Macau,  Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, and mainland China, not to mention students from Georgia, the country, and Georgia, the state, sitting right next to each other. So there is no hope of creating coherence through national culture, American or otherwise. This year, using the second edition of Emerging, I managed to annoy my students into engagement with issues of public interest. (I am a little brother, by birth order and inclination, so doing good in the style of evil comes naturally.) They had already taken a placement exam using a New Yorker article about empathy, Paul Bloom's “The Baby in the Well” (May 2013). I paired this essay with Kwame Anthony Appiah's “Making Conversation” by asking students if empathy could be used as an instrument of cosmopolitanism. This question ran into trouble on both ends: students oversimplified Bloom's understanding of empathy as the imagined experience of other people's pain by sticking to a flat version of “walking a mile on someone else's shoes” while denying the important of nationality as a category of identity. In the end, there was less feeling and less nationalism than one might have wished, so the notion of empathy as a bridge between nations fell flat. A thousand flowers had already bloomed in the Republic of Music, so what's the big deal? I pivoted to Arwah Aburawa's essay “Veiled Threat,” about the graffiti of Princess Hijab, a Parisian artist-activist. This got a chuckle out of the Patch. As I had hoped, Hijab's activities offended them because the graffiti involved the defacement of private property. The idea that a destroyer of property might consider herself an artist/activist compelled a controversy. Some students defended her as an activist but not as an artist, some defended her contrariwise, and others attacked on all fronts. The rough drafts required everyone to encounter an argument significantly different than their own. This assignment passed the penumbra test, because everyone was interested in art and property, but no musician was forced to write about music. I doubled-down on this strategy in the next essay by choosing David Foster Wallace's “Consider the Lobster.” I knew from other classes that Wallace's argument drove students to distraction by refusing to preach about the ethics of lobster-eating. I crafted a question about the possibility of empathy across the species boundary: Was it possible to empathize with crustaceans? Is empathizing with crustaceans isomorphic with cosmopolitan fellow-feeling? Do lobsters have a nation? Fortunately, students in the class ranged from Francophone Cartesians to Japanese animists, both of which conflicted with American sentimentalists who felt that one should empathize with pets, but not with prey. At this point, students were ready to step away from “art” and further into “ethics,” uniting students as predators while opposing them across cosmology. At this point—the beginning of the next semester—I decided that the Patch was ready to chuckle at something closer to home, something that might offend them across nationality, world-view, and professional ethos. I screened the American documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, about the Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei and his use of conceptual art against the Chinese government. I asked students to consider the role of the artist as a defender of human dignity using Francis Fukuyama's “On Human Dignity” as the frame. Though students realized that I was taunting them, they could not help but react. The Sinophone population united against the offense Ai had given to China's reputation on the world stage, even as some argued that his activism was justified. This led to a better understanding of Fukuyama's “human dignity” as a liberal concept: students elaborated a notion of communitarian or collective dignity fundamentally at odds with the framing text. The non-Sinophones were dragged into the chuckle by their sheer force of their peer's reactions: one student speculated that the film's directors were secretly working for the American government. Even students who didn't care about international politics cared about the work that Ai called “art.” With their thoroughly Romantic aesthetics, focused on virtuosic performance and profound emotion, students from all backgrounds failed to grasp that conceptual art aimed to make a political point at the intersection of art and ideology. So offended was the group as a whole that the research component of the assignment succeeded beyond my expectations, as students struggle to find as many sources as possible to understand Ai as activist even as they denied Ai as artist. This is the most successful writing class I have taught at Juilliard in my seven years there. Nonetheless, it is not clear whether my shadow-strategy is transferable to the community college, four-year college, or university context. The configuration of my Chuckle Patch is quite distinct, even from patches at other arts institutions. This experiment needs to be run on these other contexts to test its general validity. I am going to run the experiment next year to see if my results can replicated in the initial context. The results from this year are still in process, as the Patch struggles to move beyond the motive force of Teacher to an autonomous critical laughter. Though I still exhort students with songs of friendship and imagination, the punch lines on the leaves have changed. The daisies are aware of some differences now, but the show has a long run ahead of it. ... View more

The theme of this blog, as well as Signs of Life in the U.S.A., is, of course, the practice of the semiotic analysis of popular culture in the composition classroom and in any course devoted to popular cultural study.  But it is worth noting that my choice of the word “semiotics,” rather than “semiology,” is grounded in a meaningful distinction.  For while the words “semiotics” and “semiology” are often interchangeable (they both concern the analysis of signs), there is a technical distinction between them that I’d like to explain here. To begin with, “semiology” is the study first proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure, and came to be developed further into what we know today as structuralism.  “Semiotics,” on the other hand, is the term Charles Sanders Peirce coined (based on the existing Greek word “semiotikos”) to label his studies.  But the difference is not simply one of terminology, because the two words refer to significantly different theories of the sign. Semiology, for its part—especially as it evolved into structuralism—is ultimately formalistic, taking signs (linguistic or otherwise) as being the products of formal relationships between the elements of a semiological system.  The key relationship is that of difference, or as Saussure put it, “in a language system there are only differences without positive terms.”   The effect of this principle is to exclude anything outside the system in the formation of signs: signs don’t refer to extra-semiological realities but instead are constituted intra-semiologically through their relations to other signs within a given system.  Often called “the circle of signs” (or even, after Heidegger, ‘the prison house of language”), sign systems, as so conceived, constitute reality rather than discover or signify it.  It is on this basis that poststructuralism—from Derridean deconstruction to Baudrillardian social semiology to Foucaultian social constructivism—approaches reality: that is, as something always already mediated by signs.  Reality, accordingly, effectively evaporates, leaving only the circle of signs. Semiotics, in Peirce’s view, is quite different, because it attempts to bring in an extra-semiotic reality that “grounds” sign systems (indeed, one of Peirce’s terms for this extra-semiotic reality is “ground”).  Peirce was no naïve realist, and he never proposes that we can (to borrow a phrase from J. Hillis Miller) “step barefoot into reality,” but he did believe that our sign systems not only incorporate our ever-growing knowledge of reality but also can give access to reality (he uses the homely example of an apple pie recipe as a sequence of semiotic instructions that, if followed carefully, can produce a real apple pie that is not simply a sign). For me, then, Peircean “semiotics” brings to the table a reality that Saussurean/structuralist/poststructuralist “semiology” does not, and since, in the end, I view the value of practicing popular cultural semiotics as lying precisely in the way that that practice can reveal to us actual realities, I prefer Peirce’s point of view, and, hence, his word.  But that doesn’t mean I throw semiology out the window.  As readers of this blog may note, I always identify the principle of difference as essential to a popular cultural semiotic analysis: that principle comes from semiology.  For me, it is a “blindness and insight” matter.  Saussure had a crucial insight about the role of difference in semiotic analysis, but leaves us blind with respect to reality.  Peirce lets us have reality, but doesn’t note the role of difference as cogently as Saussure.  So, in taking what is most useful from both pioneers of the modern study of signs, we allow the two to complement each other, filling in one’s blindness with the other’s insight, and vice versa. Add to this the fact that Peirce has a much clearer role for history to play in his theory of the sign than Saussure (and his legacy) has, and the need for such complementarity becomes even more urgent.  And finally, when we bring Roland Barthes’ ideological approach to the sign (he called it “mythology”) into the picture, we fill in yet another gap to be found in both Saussure and Peirce.  Put it all together—Peircean reality and history, Saussurean difference, and Barthesian mythology—and you get the semiotic method as I practice it. And it works. ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Erin Giberson, who received her M.A. in English at the University of Alaska Anchorage and who currently teaches literature and composition classes in New Jersey at Mercer County Community College.  She has also taught college composition at the University of Alaska Anchorage and Monmouth University.  Erin specializes in utopian studies and postmodern literature; she is currently researching perceptions and implications of motherhood in contemporary society and fiction.  As a parent with young kids, I often find myself learning from my own children as I answer a plethora of questions about everything from innocent curiosities about life and bodily functions to smart observations about nature and new ideas. Their natural inquiry always surprises me, and it further surprises me that these innocent "why" questions reinforce my appreciation of students asking questions in the classroom: these experiences are connected because questions really are the start of all inquiry, and encouraging children (as well as students) to ask questions teaches them how to practice searching for knowledge and to have confidence in exploring their own ideas and interests. Yet, too often, I experience class settings in which students remain passively silent or question only for the "correct" answer.  Unfortunately, I think many young students are now trained to participate this way, to just receive and to doubt their own ability to generate and pursue open-ended questions.  As a society, we are familiar and comfortable with turning to Google to get an immediate answer, and, in short, to be told the easiest way to do something.  Certainly, as someone who learned to drive and navigate in Anchorage, Alaska, but who is now in New Jersey, I'll be the first to say that modern technology, such as GPS, is a downright miracle, but it's important to consider the effect of an internet-searching culture on a student's existing hesitancy to ostracize him or herself by asking a (maybe "stupid") question. So, I'm interested in the ways that we teach classes to ask questions (and participate with students in the process): how do we initiate real questioning in composition classes? I think it starts with truly encouraging and modeling questioning and by being receptive to learning from our students—as learners ourselves.  But what are the practices and exercises that help us empower students with a sense of voice? Perhaps it starts simply with reminding them of the value and worth of their individual voices.  After all, writing of all genres is guided by authorial presence, and academic writing is no exception.  Maybe the trouble is that students think that academic writing is and should be the absence of their voices, and further that they have nothing worth contributing.  Certainly many arrive to the classroom believing they don't know how to write "academically", and such a mindset generates silence.  So breaking that silence by hearing and affirming their inquiries is the first step I use to affirming their writing abilities. It's at this point that teachers of composition have the opportunity to get students talking and then questioning in order to lead to making claims (for example, to writing thesis statements that are actually authorial declarations). In terms of the writing process, if we're teaching composition as academic argumentation, then we can't ignore the importance of practicing open-ended questions, or as Paulo Freire says, "problem-posing" questions.  I always return to Freire's work, especially "The 'Banking' Concept of Education" from Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which positions communication, conversation, and critical questioning as imperative to the pursuit of both knowledge and self: "problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming—as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality. [...] The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity" (Chapter 2). If we're joining students in this ongoing process of learning, how might we too practice such affirming and daring questioning?  Again, how do we initiate real questioning in composition classes?  Sometimes, after reviewing a reading, I'll begin with questions but then will sit with the silence until the responses begin.  I'll sit with silence until students fill it.  They eventually do, even if it's the brave person who expresses confusion—another starting point.   In search and appreciation of these starting points, I reiterate my questions now: how do we draw out genuine student voices and student-inspired inquiry?  What are your practices? Where do you start, or where will you now? ... View more

The first year, I just didn’t know. But of course we never know what we don’t know, ya know? My first time teaching ENC 6700 Introduction to Composition Theory and Methodology (the required seminar for our new Graduate Teaching Assistants) I blithely, blissfully, blindly led the class through some classic and foundational essays of the field, only to be blindsided by the final papers, all of which worked from the base assumption that the way we approached the teaching of writing at Florida Atlantic University was the way everyone approached the teaching of writing.I shouldn’t have been surprised. Even I still instinctively feel that the way I first learned to teach writing is somehow the “right” way.  No wonder these GTAs thought the same. So, the second time I taught the class I started with a simple assignment: research the writing program at another school, looking for philosophies, pedagogies, and syllabi.  It worked.  People brought in information from other local schools, from their alma maters, and even from big and heavy hitters.  And we all discovered something—things are different, writing programs are different, pedagogies are different, and there is no “right” way. It’s time for this blog to learn that lesson.  I’ve been writing from a very specific, very localized point of view.  It’s time to learn some new lessons through some new voices.  The next few posts will be authored by some stellar guest bloggers.  For me, it’s a chance to learn something new.  For you, I hope it’s that and a refreshing break from my particular voice. With that said, let the guest blogging begin! Erm… next week, that is… ... View more

Back in December 2013 I wrote a complete Bits blog entry on the then just released Disney animated film “Frozen.”  Briefly touching upon the fact that, like the Marvel superhero Thor, here was another popular cultural phenomenon featuring archetypally  “white” characters—look at those gigantic blue eyes, those tiny pointed noses, the long ash blonde hair of one of the princesses (the other is a redhead) and the blonde mountain man .  .  . you get the picture—I focused on the continuing phenomenon of a bourgeois culture producing feudal popular art: you know, princesses in their kingdoms, princes, that sort of thing. But I never posted it, and wrote something else instead. Why?  Well, it's always possible to overdo a good thing.  I figured that perhaps, as Christmas was approaching, whatever readers I may have here would not be thrilled with a political analysis of a seasonal fairy tale film.  While, semiotically speaking, nothing is ever just an entertainment, sometimes a semiotic analysis can feel just a bit heavy handed—or rather more than a bit.  So I let it go. So picture my surprise when I encountered a national news story that is circulating in the wake of the recent Academy Awards ceremony.  It appears that “Frozen” is not only an Oscar winner; no, according to a blogger and at least one conservative radio host, “Frozen” is a devious example of a “gay agenda” to turn American children into homosexuals.  Worse yet, it also promotes bestiality. Say what? Let’s start with the bestiality part.  You see, concerned Americans don’t like the friendship between Kristoff (the mountain man) and Sven (his reindeer).  Well, um, OK, but if you think that that is coded bestiality, then you’re going have to give up on America’s most red-blooded story type of all: the Western.  I mean the old joke used to go that at the end of the typical Western the cowboy hero kissed his horse and not the girl, but we weren’t supposed to take that literally. But what about the “gay agenda” thing?  Well, it goes something like this: Elsa, the princess with secret powers, isn’t very popular, and she doesn’t have a boy friend.  Obviously, then, her powers are a metaphor for her homosexuality.  Then, the fact that her sister princess (the redhead) is forced into a marriage she doesn’t want, is clearly an attack on heterosexual marriage.  And, finally, the popularity of Elsa in the happy ending of the movie is blatantly a message to America to embrace its erstwhile ostracized homosexuals. [Insert forehead slap here]. I’m sorry, but this is not a good semiotic analysis.  Semiotic analyses do not seek out hidden allegories without textual support.  They begin with a precise sense of the denotation of the sign, what exactly one is observing, and move to what such denotations may signify.  In this sense, if I was to pursue my earlier analysis of the film, the princesses are white; their features are stylizations of characteristically northern European appearance.  They are princesses; they do live in a “kingdom.”  These are medieval phenomena, and the question then becomes what do such manifest facts culturally connote in what is a bourgeois society transitioning away from having a Caucasian majority?  Whatever answers one gives to such questions must be abductive:  that is, in C.S. Peirce’s sense of the term, they must constitute the most likely interpretations of the signs. When an interpretation gets into wildly unlikely interpretations of what isn’t remotely denotatively present, there’s bound to be trouble.  And when one piece of "evidence" offered in support of the "gay agenda" thesis is that “the Devil” may have purchased the Disney Corporation in order to corrupt America’s children, um (I know I am using this pseudo-word a lot here, but, um, well, what else can one say in this overly sensitive world?), you really know that you've got semiotic Trouble with a capital "T". I know that we have been here before, that Fredric Wertham’s 1954 Seduction of the Innocent accused America’s comic book writers of trying to turn American boys into homosexuals (Batman and Robin, get it?), but to see this in 2014 .  .  .  ? Wait a minute: here is our cultural signifier for the day.  When people are, with apparent seriousness, reviving Cold War style, McCarthyite attacks on popular culture (that’s the denotation of the sign here), it is a reasonable interpretation that such people are, well, reviving Cold War era McCarthyite politics.  When you situate this "gay agenda" interpretation of “Frozen” into a cultural system that includes Arizona’s recent attempt to make discrimination against gays legal on “religious” grounds, not to mention the Chick-fil-A controversy, the Duck Dynasty controversy, and all the anti-gay marriage referenda that have been passed, this is quite a likely abduction.  After all, in such a world gays are the new "communists". Maybe it’s time to start playing Bob Dylan’s “Talkin John Birch Paranoid Blues” again.  I need some comic relief. ... View more

Learn all my students’ names on the very first day.   ... View more

My latest service burden opportunity is working on an institution-wide task force on student success.  My particular subcommittee had its first meeting yesterday.  Quite revealing Early in the meeting someone raised the obvious question: what do we mean by student “success”? Unfortunately, part of the answer to that question has been predetermined by the state, which has moved to a performance-based funding model in which one of the key measures is 4-6 year graduation rate.  For the state at least, success means graduation.  It’s not the definition we would choose (as a committee, as a task force, as an institution) but we ignore it at the peril of our budget. What was encouraging for me, though, was the fact that we—a diverse group representing staff, faculty, and administrators—all thought to raise the question and all wanted to answer it in a way that didn’t translate to dollars but did translate to students.  I guess what I’m saying is that it was nice to be reminded that people at my school really care about students. Of course, these kinds of meetings have a way of turning me back to my classroom, too.  I’ve been thinking about what student success means to me as well as what it might mean to my students.  I think for many students success in my FYC course means just getting out.  I can live with that though it’s not how I would have it.  For me though student success means that my students end the course different than when they started—perhaps as better writers, hopefully as better thinkers, maybe as savvier readers, but above all as something more than when they started. What does student success look like to you? ... View more

I’ve recently had occasion to participate in some classroom discussions of two famous dystopian stories: Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy.  Well of course, how could one not discuss Jackson’s classic in a contemporary literature class without invoking Collins’ work, and, conversely, how could one not discuss Collins without citing Jackson’s chilling predecessor?  But as I contemplated these two stories I realized that in spite of all that they have in common—after all, they are both visions of societies that, in effect, practice human sacrifice—there is a crucial difference between them, a difference that can help us, tentatively and incompletely, identify at least one distinction between “high art” and “popular art". I’m not referring here to the fact that the Hunger Games trilogy is an infinitely more complex tale than is “The Lottery,” written in the tradition of fantasy story telling while unfolding a vast allegory of a socioeconomically unequal America that is devouring its own children, though of course there are those differences.  I am referring instead to something very simple, very basic, something that is so obvious than when I asked students to identify that difference they seemed puzzled and couldn’t seem to grasp what I was getting at.  So here it is: the endings of the two stories, how they come out.  Now, those of us who have been trained in the close reading of literature may forget sometimes just how crucial the ending of a story is, but for the ordinary, mass reader, as it were, it is essential, and it is the difference in the endings of  "The Lottery” and the Hunger Games trilogy that I want to explore here. Let’s begin with the Hunger Games trilogy.  Though it takes three large novels to do so, and there is much suffering, death, and destruction along the way (not to mention betrayal and moral ambiguity), in the end the tyrannical society of Panem is overthrown in a popular rebellion.  Not only that, but Katniss, the heroine of the trilogy, lives to marry Peeta and look back on the triumphant (if traumatizing) life that she has led.  It hasn’t been easy, and there has been some collateral damage, but the bad guys lose, the good guys win, and, all in all, there’s a happy ending. Compare this to “The Lottery.”  It has a female protagonist (sort of), too: Tessie Hutchinson.  But while Tessie is certainly to be pitied, she is hardly someone to identify with, and even less a heroine who can bring hope to a hopeless situation.  Content to go along with the hideous ritual of her society until she becomes its victim, Tessie isn’t even a good martyr, and her death at the end does not lead to a rebellion.  With the chilling conclusion of the tale we can be certain that next year “the lottery” will be held again. And there you have it: while I would not presume to explicate all of the potential readings of this magnificent story, I dare say that we can say that it is a story that presents us with something horrible not only in the human condition but within human nature itself.  Written in 1948, “The Lottery” had behind it the only-too-true history of the Holocaust, which makes it far more than an allegorical critique of mere social “conformity”.  And, not too surprisingly, the original response to the story was rather negative, because, unlike the Hunger Games trilogy,” there is nothing to cling to here: no plucky heroine, no rebellion, no victory in the end over evil, no happy ending .  .  .  nothing but pure bleakness.   Which takes me to my point.  For while the difference between “high art” literature and popular literature is historically contingent, fluid, and indeterminate, whenever I am asked for (or feel the need to propose) a way of distinguishing between "high art" and "popular art", I suggest that high art gives what we need, while popular art gives us what we want.  A commodity for sale, popular art must offer its purchaser something desired, and pleasure is usually what is wanted.  It is a pleasure to see Katniss survive (along with the boy who will become her husband in the end); it is a pleasure to see the tyrants of Panem fall; it is a pleasure to identify with Katniss (or Frodo, or Harry Potter, or Batman, or any fantasy hero who, one way or another, defeats evil in the end).  But reality doesn’t work out that way, and, corny as this may sound, we need artists to tell us that.  Because when we succumb to the fantasy that we have paid for, the vision of the happy ending that makes us feel good, we are all the less likely to try do anything about the evils that make us feel bad.  This is why it matters that "high art" literature is being pushed aside in favor of popular literature in the literary marketplace, because while we all need to be entertained, we need to see the truth some time as well. ... View more