One of my favorite class activities is Draw the Argument. On the first day that we discuss a reading, I have students get into groups and “draw” the argument of the essay, locating quotations that support their visual interpretation. The activity is always a success, whether because it switches registers to the visual, draws on the power of groups, or simply feels more like art class than writing class I can’t say. I just know it works. Last semester I created a new version of this activity using furniture assembly instructions from Ikea, the Swedish home furnishings giant. Because of Ikea’s global reach and “assemble it yourself” approach, these instructions are designed to be read by a global, polyglot audience. I begin by showing the class a set of Ikea instructions (usually the ones for the Billy Bookcase).  We “read” them as a class, interpreting the pictograms and the sequence of steps. Then students separate into groups and create a set of global “assembly instructions” for the reading we’re working on. The activity is great for all the reasons that Draw the Argument is great—but it adds more. Students must think about organization and sequence, both within the essay and within their own writing. I’m planning on using this one a lot more in coming semesters. If you give it a try, let me know how it works for you. ... View more

The Conference on College Composition and Communication (4Cs) is just around the corner and I can’t wait. It’s been a few years since I’ve been able to attend (budget cuts have a way of impacting travel), and I am looking forward to connecting with friends and colleagues from around the country. I’m presenting as well, but I have to be honest: for me, the conference is more about networking than presenting (or attending sessions). What do you get out of 4Cs? What do you look forward to the most? If you’re attending, look for me at the Bedford party. I’m no Bedford shill (promise) but let’s face it—it’s always the best party of the conference. ... View more

A student in my semiotics of popular culture class has asked me whether I thought that the largely white, male Academy failed to award an Oscar to Viola Davis because they couldn’t stand to see a sweep of the actress awards by black women. Such a question merits a seriously considered answer, and I think that this blog is a good place to provide one. First, while I do not pretend to be able to read the minds of the Academy voters, I am certainly aware of the growing controversy over their demographic make-up, and while I do not think it impossible that they were influenced in their voting by their own racial instincts, I think it more likely that they turned to Meryl Streep as they have always turned to Meryl Streep: that is, as a symbol of solid acting excellence in an industry largely devoted to action-packed, special-effects driven entertainment aimed mostly at adolescents. In other words, I’m with Neal Gabler of the Los Angeles Times, who recently argued that the candidates for best picture (including The Artist, which, of course, won) reflect a combination of self-loathing (for all of the low cultural stuff that Hollywood usually produces) and nostalgia (for movies that reflect high-art values or high moral purpose) among the Academy voters, who assuage their consciences by voting for the few high-art or high moral purpose movies that come along in a given year. But more importantly for me is the fact that, as is almost always the case in American culture, political controversy swirls around questions of race rather than class. What I find significant is that Billy Crystal quipping, “nothing takes the sting out of the world economic problems like watching millionaires present each other with golden statues” prompted laughter rather than recognition of the class inequalities of this annual ritual,. As the royal figures of entertainment prance up a red carpet in their formal evening attire and designer gowns into a private hall from which members of the public are excluded, no one appears to be disturbed. Crystal’s joke, which really does nail the point, is received the same way as was the quip by Rod Steiger’s character in Doctor Zhivago. That character breaks the tension at a lavish, upper-class banquet when a protest march of impoverished, chanting Russians passes by the windows by joking that maybe the people will sing in tune after the revolution. His fellow aristocrats erupt in laughter and applause in gratitude for this bursting of the bubble of conscience, and go back to their feast. Which is exactly what happened at the Oscars. Meanwhile, we can keep up with what is happening in the “real world” by reading how Susan Naomi Bernstein’s students’ computers are so decrepit that they break down while students are taking their mandated writing exams. Or the fact that increasing numbers of retirement-age Americans are going back to work or moving in with their adult children because they cannot afford to retire independently. Of course, this sort of thing doesn’t make front-page headlines, and won’t, no matter who wins an Oscar in whatever category. Photo: [Oscars Through the Ages, on Flickr] ... View more

As a teacher, I find the intersection of schools and violence particular shattering. I’ve been thinking about the recent shooting in Ohio and how I might address this type of event in my classroom. Two readings come to mind. The first is “Community and Diversity” by Rebekah Nathan. Nathan (whose real name is Cathy Small) is an anthropologist who enrolled as a freshman at her school to study student life. In this particular selection, she traces the gap between the ideals of community and diversity promoted by universities and the realities of how students relate to one another. Bringing this reading to bear on school violence, I think, would highlight some of the stakes in community and diversity in ways that Nathan doesn’t consider. I’d sequence that assignment with Joan Didion’s “After Life,” an essay about Didion’s grief following the loss of her husband. Didion has a particular concept that always resonates for me: the ordinary instant. One moment life is just going along and in the very next, in that simple and ordinary instant, everything changes forever. I’m all too familiar with these moments, though my students are often too young to have experienced them. But it’s a useful concept to apply to school violence. What’s more, by pairing Nathan and Didion, I could encourage students to think about how communities form around grief. More importantly, I could get them to think about how to form communities before the ordinary instant. ... View more

For the last in this series, I’d like to throw a curve ball: Michael Pollan’s “The Animals: Practicing Complexity.” Unlike Steven Johnson’s “Listening to Feedback” or James Surowiecki’s “Committees, Juries, and Teams: The Columbia Disaster and How Small Groups Can Be Made to Work,” Pollan’s essay, at first glance, has no relation to politics or elections or anything other than organic farming. That’s just why I would use it. I often find that the most unexpected pairing of essays creates a kind of crucible within which students find themselves engaging in original thinking. And Pollan has to be, hands down, one of the most popular readings for students in the entire collection, which doesn’t hurt. Besides, once you look past the surface of his topic, there are rich connections to be made. Yes, Pollan is writing about his time at Polyface Farm. Yes, he’s interested in successful and sustainable organic farming. But, more than anything, what Pollan discovers is the crucial role of integrated systems in both of those topics. Polyface works because it considers the whole, and everything on the farm plays a part in that whole. There’s the connection: as with John and Surowiecki, students would again be thinking about the dynamics of groups in relation to decisions such as an election. But they would have new tools, too—tools that could help them re-envision and re-think the political system as a kind of ecosystem. It’s that kind of new thinking I love to see students discover. It’s what makes them better thinkers and writers. ... View more

Ever since the first edition of Signs of Life in the USA, the Super Bowl has been a lively topic for my semiotic attention. Indeed, in the seventh edition of the book, I analyze the office-theme trend that I found in the advertising for Super Bowls XLIII and XLIV for the introduction to “Brought to You B(u)y: The Signs of Advertising.” (By the way, is there anyone else here who wishes that they would give up that Roman numeral stuff: it's getting very old.) Which takes me to the topic for this blog. [No, not the advertising for Super Bowl XLVI. I found that to be rather undistinguished and semiotically bland. There’s always the Eastwood-for-Chrysler flap, of course, but all I’ll say about that is that its failure to even mention Barack Obama could just as easily been interpreted as a snub to the president in the way that it pretended that all of America came together to save the American auto industry when, in fact, Obama stuck his neck out to save Detroit and was clobbered (by proxy) in the 2010 election for doing so. It’s also true that the vaporizing vampires were cute, but everything I have to say about vampires is in the general Introduction to SOL 7/e.] What struck me this time around appeared in both the advertising and at half-time, which could be summed up by saying that it isn’t only the Roman numerals that are getting old. Between a balding Jerry Seinfeld, a grey Jay Leno, a youthful but clearly middle-aged Matthew Broderick, and fifty-three year-old Madonna still hoofing it as if it was Super Bowl XVIII, I was struck by the way that these Baby Boom entertainers (yes, I checked) still have star power. Oh, I know that the Rolling Stones, the Who, and Sir Paul (all of whom hail from an even earlier generation) have been half-time performers, but that only enhances my point: As the generation who created America’s youth culture ages, not only is it successfully carrying its once-young entertainment heroes along with it as if no time had gone by, but the Boomers are finding that their stars still have drawing power even for today’s youth. I simply cannot imagine anything like that happening during, say, Super Bowl I. That game was played in 1967, the year of Sergeant Pepper and the Summer of Love. The chances that the NFL would have invited the Beatles (or any other popular rock band of the sixties) to perform during the half-time show are nil. When pop music stars were invited back then, they were the likes of Carol Channing and Al Hirt, and they performed with the marching bands that dominated the show. The idea that the half-time show could be used to attract young viewers to watch the game simply didn’t exist. The Super Bowl was for middle America, not for its rebellious children. What is so striking about the parade of oldsters today (no insult here: I’m a Boomer myself) is not the fact that pop stars are being invited to the game in order to attract a youth audience, but that the obviously skittish Super Bowl committee (or whoever makes these decisions) is getting away with inviting superannuated talent, as are the ad agencies who are making the ads.  Clearly it’s working, because Super Bowl 46 (there, I said it) enjoyed a record 111.3 million viewers (try to put that in Roman numerals). It’s as if inviting Frank Sinatra and Perry Como would have attracted my generation in 1969. That’s the difference that marks out a topic worthy of semiotic analysis. What is it that enables pop music performers who are approaching their seventies to attract the youth market? (The Stones are in their seventies, and every time they hit the road they break their previous box-office records). I’m won’t attempt to answer that question at any length here because it’s complicated and would take more space than I have. I'll simply propose this: the entertainers who helped create our youth-centered entertainment culture, and in whose wake all current young performers perform, have become such icons of the youth-and-entertainment society that audiences of all generations can see past the balding heads, lined faces, and slowing dance steps to apprehend what those entertainers signify. They are the god-like symbols of entertainment itself, and the Super Bowl, which once signified the prime ritual of football-centric middle America, is now their cathedral. ... View more

In the last post, I suggested using Steven Johnson’s “Listening to Feedback” when addressing the 2012 election so that students could think about the feedback loops that create media frenzies. Specific examples are always abundant during election time. Another great essay for this time of year is James Surowiecki’s “Committees, Juries, and Teams: The Columbia Disaster and How Small Groups Can Be Made to Work.”  Surowiecki’s larger work, The Wisdom of Crowds, focuses on how any given group is smarter than the smartest individual within the group—simply, groups work. But in this chapter he looks at all the ways that groups can go wrong. Many of the concepts he introduced to explain group dynamics—such as group polarization and confirmation bias—are effective in helping students to think about politics on a large scale. How parties operate, how people respond to candidates, how they make decisions in voting… all of these can be pried open using Surowiecki essay. The essay would also sequence well with Johnson, since he looks at the role that groups play in feedback loops. Students should be able to connect the concepts of both authors to look any what’s going on as we near the election. ... View more

With a presidential election looming on the horizon, now is the perfect time to incorporate essays that help students think about the cluster of issues surrounding any election: politics, social values, media, power, and more. One excellent essay to use when teaching the 2012 election is Steven Johnson’s “Listening to Feedback.” Johnson focuses on how feedback loops operate in the news media. His concepts can help students analyze the array of coverage around the election, while also helping them to think about how media functions in an interconnected digital world. ... View more

Well, the Boss is coming out with a new record and embarking upon a national tour to promote it. Though the full album, Wrecking Ball, has not yet been released, a single entitled “We Take Care of Our Own” has just appeared, and it happens to provide a very good topic for semiotic analysis. I heard it on the radio for the first time last night while driving home from teaching a popular culture class. Aesthetically, it sounded like vintage Springsteen to me (same chord patterns and instrumentation, same arrangement, same less-than-clearly-enunciated lyrics), but I could pick out the chorus, which is “Wherever this flag is flown, we take care of our own.” And that surprised me. It sounded so jingoistic, so emptily patriotic, not like the Boss at all. And then I immediately remembered that this happened before, almost thirty years ago, with “Born in the U.S.A.,” a protest song dripping with irony, most of which was lost on Ronald Reagan, who alluded to the song for campaign purposes until he was set straight on the fact that it was hardly Republican campaign material. So I decided to look up the lyrics on the Net. Sure enough, the chorus, when juxtaposed with the rest of the lyrics, which bitterly describe a nation that isn’t taking care of its own, abandoning them “From Chicago to New Orleans, from the muscle to the bone, From the shotgun shack to the Super Dome,” make it clear that the Boss hasn’t gone conservative in his later middle age. He’s still on message. But alas, there’s a hitch, as there always is when popular music assumes the mantle of social protest. A brief search of ticket prices for the upcoming Wrecking Ball tour makes it clear that, excluding what scalpers may be getting, tickets will cost anywhere from $118–$872, depending on location and amenities. (I’m sure other prices can be found, but these figures are representative). Now, who is taking care of whom with such prices? Such a contradiction, of course, is to be expected with an art form (popular music) that is thoroughly embedded in commercial culture. Protest music, in such a context, is virtually ensured to become what Thomas Frank has so usefully called “a commodification of dissent.” I can easily imagine purchasers of those $872 tickets boasting to friends about how they have struck a blow against corporate America by attending the latest Springsteen concert. It’s like wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt (indeed, Che’s iconic image in black beret and beard is a lucrative one for express-your-radicalism-through-commodity-consumption purposes). But the contradiction goes deeper than this. Popular music, even when framed in the form of social protest, is created to be entertaining, and entertainment makes you feel good. People who feel good are not likely to go out and try to change the things that the music they enjoy may criticize. Another way of putting this was offered in a popular song from the 1960s written by Tom Lehrer, called “We Are the Folk Song Army,” which was a spoof of the protest movement of that era. Alluding to the Spanish Civil War, Lehrer sings, “Remember the war against Franco/It’s the one in which each of us belongs/Though they may have won all the battles/We had all the good songs.” Or, as Lehrer acidly noted in an interview given in 2000, “I’m fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin cabarets of the ’30s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War.” Pointing out such things can be dispiriting to students. After all, popular music, from the era of the Beats to the present, has been a cherished medium for the expression of social protest and countercultural vision. But Bruce Springsteen singing about an America that is doing everything it can right now to abandon the social vision of Franklin D. Roosevelt is a powerful signifier of the inability of commercially based popular music to effect social liberalism. Indeed, even the Boss’s new single undercuts its own bite at the end with a feel-good chorus that makes it easy to forget the bitter, but obscurely metaphorical, lyrics with which the song opens. Heck, even I thought, at first listen, that Springsteen had gone soft. ... View more

Our institution is once again facing budget cuts—I’m sure we’re not alone in that. I also imagine we’re not alone in being asked to raise the caps on our first year writing courses. Since I am in the trenches of this battle I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I’ve been thinking, too, about how the same assumptions operating behind those calls for larger class sizes work to impede students in the courses I teach. Everyone seems to think a course is a course—both administrators and students. Perhaps that’s why universities resort so quickly to larger class sizes (“If Bio can have 300 students in a section, why can’t you?”) but it also explains why students in our writing courses struggle with everything from attendance to critical thinking (“I’ll just get the class notes.” “I’ll just do that paper the day it’s due since class is in the evening.”). But, of course, writing courses are fundamentally different because they are process courses and not content courses. You don’t learn to play the violin by reading a book or taking a Scantron exam. You learn to play by practicing. As we know, it’s the same with writing. I try to explain this to students from the first day of class so that they can begin to understand what we’re trying to do in class. It’s also one of the reasons that I like to start the semester with an essay that has clear ideas sitting at the surface: something that students can pick up and start thinking with. Thomas Friedman’s “Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention” is always a safe choice. His concepts—ranging from the Dell Theory itself to global supply chains—are both clearly defined in his text and for his argument while still being completely portable. Students can use them to start thinking and writing, to start practicing the process. As for the administrators, it looks like we’ve won this round. But, hey, for a WPA every day is a battle.  Courage. ... View more

“Of course the Golden Globes are about the awards, but let's face it: You really want to see who wore what.” This is one of the headlines from aol.com’s coverage of the Golden Globe awards. But no, actually: I didn’t really want to see who wore what. This annual cakewalk down the red carpet is obvious enough and does not require the peep-show promises leading up to the event to tempt viewers to watch. The event offers designers and fashion houses a chance for display that is no different than the ubiquitous celebrity photo-op backdrops plastered in corporate logos. I didn’t need to see what these human mannequins were actually wearing to know that. What I did want to see was some sort of political demonstration, an Occupy the Golden Globes to match the Occupy the Rose Parade protest of a few weeks ago. But I didn’t see that. I did see, after an online search using the phrase “Occupy the Golden Globes,” that it occurred to a few other people that such a demonstration would have been an appropriate juxtaposition to the parade of designer dresses, each worth more than an average annual American income (not to mention the jewelry displays). But I didn’t see a demonstration, and therein lies the significance of the Golden Globe awards (or the Oscars, or the Grammys, and so on). Because if you want to find a good chunk of the top 1 percent, you needn’t look any further than into the charmed lives of the stars of what I call the sports-and-entertainment-postindustrial-complex.  But somehow, this cohort of the American upper class enjoys an immunity from popular resentment. Why? First, the indemnification of entertainment stars in times of economic distress is not new. After all, the Golden Age of Hollywood took place during the Great Depression, and then, as now, Americans took to the movie theaters and sports stadiums to seek distraction from the painful realities of everyday life. It’s also useful to point out that Nathanael West’s novelistic prediction in The Day of the Locust that the masses would someday violently turn on the entertainment industry in disillusioned rage never came to pass. No, Americans will scapegoat anyone but entertainers. One explanation for this puzzling phenomenon could lie in that foundational American mythology we call the American Dream. After all, most members of the entertainment pantheon come from modest origins, having been flung practically overnight into the stratosphere of wealth, privilege, and fame. But then, this could also be the case for the corporate portion of the 1 percent as well, so while the American Dream factor cannot be dismissed, it isn’t a sufficient explanation. The key to the matter, I think, lies in fantasy. From the red carpet to the end zone, the silver screen to Netflix, Americans vicariously fantasize that they can be a part of the dazzling world of the entertainer. Advertising, of course, explicitly encourages such fantasies, as does reality television. In the midst of such fantasies, the appalling fact that about a third of the American middle class is on the ropes and going down, is conveniently swept under the (red) carpet. Of course, America’s financial institutions, which are the target of the Occupy movement’s protests, encouraged the American tendency to fantasize as well, promising mortgage and home equity line borrowers alike that housing values could only go up. So now that that particular fantasy has shattered and the lenders are coming for their collateral, bankers are a natural, and appropriate, object of resentment. But it is the proclivity to prefer the fantasy to the reality that is the underlying culprit, and, refusing to give up their fantasies, Americans stick staunchly to their entertainers, whose march down the red carpet is the greatest fantasy of all. ... View more

What with the sequel to the sequel to the sequel to the cinematic remake of the revival of the original Mission Impossible series currently leading in the American box office sweepstakes, perhaps it would be more profitable to turn to the cultural semiotics of a much larger contest right now: the American presidential primary season, a quadrennial media extravaganza that presents us with a lively combination of the unlikely, the improbable, and the downright preposterous. I am not referring to the political outcomes of the primaries but, rather, to the way they are structured by the mass media. It all begins with the notorious fact that Iowa—a state with around 1 percent of the American population, and that is roughly 92 percent white—is allowed by disproportionate media attention to be, if not the party kingmaker in the primary season, at least the party wanna-be-king-unmaker. And the Iowa primary isn’t even a primary: its caucus votes are nonbinding and elect no delegates. To compound this apparent anomaly in what purports to be a democratic process, it is New Hampshire—a state that has a good deal less than 1 percent of the American population and is around 94 percent white—that is allowed, election after election, to be the first and most influential presidential primary, practically disenfranchising the voters of such states as California and New York. These facts about our primary electoral rituals are very well known. The question is what they signify. While entire volumes could be written on the matter, I’d like to focus on a few fundamental cultural-semiotic principles that are explored much further in the now-published seventh edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A. The first is that of cultural mythologies—that is, those underlying beliefs, world views, or ideologies that govern cultural consciousness and behavior. In this case, the relevant mythology is that of an agrarian America whose “heart” lies in its rural regions. This mythology is so well engrained that even years after America’s transformation to an urban/suburban/exurban society (wherein the Jeffersonian/Jacksonian family farmer has long since been driven off the land by corporate agribusiness conglomerates), states like Iowa and New Hampshire (whose image in the American imagination continues to be rural and agricultural) are allowed a grotesquely disproportionate voice in the making and unmaking of presidential candidates. The second relevant cultural semiotic point is that of America’s cultural contradictions—that is, its simultaneous cherishing of diametrically opposing mythologies—that are most prominently signified in the red state/blue state cultural divide that is still very evident in American politics. So hardened has this division become that the three most populous and racially diverse states in the nation—California, New York, and Texas—are disproportionately undervalued in the primary electoral process, and are virtually ignored (except for campaign contribution purposes) by both parties in the actual presidential election—the reason being that everyone knows how they are going to vote anyway (New York and California being firmly in the blue column, and Texas in the red). Beyond mythologies and contradictions, there is the way that the mass media cover the primary season as a kind of combination soap opera/WWE smackdown. This should not be surprising. The American mass media are part of a culture industry whose purpose is not to inform but to sell advertising space (or otherwise profit) through the entertainment of a mass audience. Elections, accordingly, are treated as entertainments, and because having to wait for months for the outcome of something is not entertaining, Iowa and New Hampshire are useful; their elections offer instant gratification by allowing these tiny states to determine, right away in the very beginning of January, who the nominees are going to be. The fact that the eventual nominees are not always the winners in Iowa and New Hampshire has no effect on this media illusion. All that matters is that huge audiences can be attracted by broadcasting the Iowa and New Hampshire caucus/primaries as if they were equivalent to election night in November, complete with live blogging and Twitter feeds, raising plenty of excitement and advertising dollars. And now that the dust has settled on Iowa, we can look forward to New Hampshire, and afterward to the Super Bowl—I mean Super Tuesday. Finally, there is a new element in the game this time around, which is the fact that the election “markets” are now an integral part of campaign reporting. Yes, the American electoral system is now more or less officially joined at the hip to a kind of stock market: gambling. When Las Vegas meets Wall Street in the race to the White House, you really know that you are living in a hypercapitalist society, a world in which the only measure of anything any longer is money. ... View more

I’ve recently noticed an offer that appears at the top of the Yahoo! News page: “Your News,” Yahoo! promises me. “Now with Friends. Discover News based on what your friends are reading, publish your own reading activity and retain full control.” Obviously, this is an attempt to compete with the wildly successful Facebook paradigm, but it also reminds me of a recent story in the New York Times about the way more and more elite rock climbers and mountaineers are broadcasting their climbs on Facebook, via their iPhones. Such signifiers, and there are legions of them today, belong to a system of signs that bears upon an emerging variation in one of America’s most fundamental cultural mythologies: of the emphasis we place on the value of individualism, as most notably reflected in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essay, “Self-Reliance.” The desire to share everything that you are doing with others, reflected in the Yahoo! offer that allows you to share with your friends what you are reading, and vice versa (or in the elite climber’s real-time broadcasting of his climbing experiences!), seems to be anything but a reflection of self-reliance. Rather, it appears to be an expression of what in classical sociological terms is called “hetero-directedness”, that is, living one’s life in relation to the acceptance and approval of others. Hetero-directed societies tend to be communalist in orientation, but there are indications that the kind of “sharing” that is characteristic in an era of interactive digital media may not be so communal after all. However, when seen in the context of a celebrity-worshipping culture, whereby ordinary people can be transformed overnight into celebrities when something they post on the Internet goes viral, digital sharing begins to look more like personal broadcasting: a public relations system available to everyone. And that sounds less like communalism than like ambitious individualism. Twitter and Facebook and YouTube around, you don’t need paparazzi or tabloids. The Internet makes for one vast People magazine, and so what might appear to be a populist signifier (the sharing of experience) could just as well be an elitist one (the broadcasting of the self in the hopes of becoming rich and famous). That both significations are simultaneously present is yet another instance of the contradictory nature of American culture, with populist egalitarianism ever vying with elitist exclusiveness. The question is, then, which tendency is in the ascendancy when news readers want others to know what they are reading and want to read what others are reading? I am not quite certain yet. We could be looking at the emergence of a cooperationalist ethos in America, or at a ramping up of competitiveness. Either tendency would have profound implications for our political system, and so the whole matter bears close attention. ... View more

I try not to think about all the work still to be done on Emerging, particularly in terms of the apparatus. Speaking solely in terms of numbers, the revised edition is about double the size of the previous one. That is, we’re adding in so much that it’s almost like doing a whole new book. I’m adopting a strategy I used the first time around: enlisting graduate students to help. All of these students are also teachers in the program; they’ve also all been a part of this revision project from the start by helping me to find, evaluate, and test new readings. For these graduate students, this is all valuable CV experience (and when possible it’s also a little extra cash); for me, it’s the collaborative help I need to get everything done in time. But in spite of all their help, everything still needs to pass by my eyes so the work load, while lightened, remains. But I know I couldn’t do it at all without those students. In a grad program with only a two-year MA or three-year MFA, we don’t often have opportunities for students to fill out their CVs. I wonder, how do you offer students professional and professionalizing opportunities at either the grad or undergrad level? ... View more

The revised introduction for Emerging is finally completed. And the missing pieces—sample student work from my class this semester—have been eased into place. There are a number of challenges with using student work, even setting aside the intellectual property questions (for the record, students get an honorarium if their work appears in the reader). The greatest challenge for me is finding the right kind of student work. On the one hand, I want student work that truly demonstrates the topic at hand—a response to a reading or a sample argument, for example. On the other hand, student works that’s too good can seem completely out of reach for someone picking up the text for the first time at the start of a semester. The trick is to find that balance: work that is solid and shows what might be done but that also needs some improvement (as all writing always does) so that it feels achievable to a spectrum of students. I think we’ve found the right pieces this time, and thankfully the students have all agreed to let us use their work. One more item to check off the punch list! ... View more