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

For years – decades maybe!—I taught a course on the history of writing, a subject that has long fascinated me and that I found could be very engaging to undergraduate students as well. When I asked them “where does writing come from,” I was usually greeted with blank stares: writing is so ubiquitous, so all around them, that surely it must have always been with us. That’s more true of speech, which developed from communicating through sounds: unless a particular condition prevent it, we develop speech naturally and socially, without being formally taught. But writing, not so much: we must be taught to write, to make the marks that carry meaning. Writing’s history can be traced back at least 45,000 years ago to cave drawings in Indonesian islands and a bit later in Spain and France. These paintings tell stories about animals and people: they are spellbinding in their vigor and beauty and show how determined people have been to communicate across time and space. But such paintings did not create systems of writing. Those seem to have grown out of token systems for counting, cataloguing, and trading agricultural products used in 4th millennium BCE Mesopotamia–which led to cuneiform, the Sumerian script that is one of, if not the earliest, known system of writing. And cuneiform is the script used circa 2265 BCE by Enheduanna (whose name means “ornament of heaven”), high priestess of the moon god and daughter of Sargon the Great, who helped link the Sumerian goddess Inanna to the Akkadian goddess Ishtar and, in doing so, helped create a common belief system necessary to the founding of what some consider the world’s first empire.   Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad   Enheduanna wrote numerous temple hymns and three long poems dedicated to the all-powerful goddess of love and war, Inanna. But Enheduanna did even more than write poems that were copied out by school children for hundreds of years: she also claimed authorship, the first writer we know of to do so. In her poem “Exaltation of Inanna,” she compares her writing with giving birth:   I have given birth, Oh exalted lady, [to this song] for you. That which I recited to you at midnight May the singer repeat it to you at noon!    And in concluding one of her temple hymns, she says: “The compiler of the tablet [is] Enheduanna. My lord, that which has been created [here] no one has created before.” The translations of Enheduana’s work, completed only in the early twentieth century, reveal her as a gifted poet, with a strong and commanding voice that weaves personal narrative into her praise for Inanna. Enheduanna’s voice echoes down to us some 4500 years later with haunting clarity, marking one moment in the long history of writing: from exterior to interior and back, from recording information to expressing an embodied agent.  This winter, New York’s Morgan Library has mounted an exhibit about Enheduanna and other women who were actively participating in Mesopotamian society of the time. Called “She Who Wrote,” the exhibit presents nearly 100 artefacts, including cuneiform tablets and wall plaques as well as cylinder seals that show the many ways in which women participated in society at this time—as weavers, bakers, brewers, potters, musicians, and more. In a place and time when women were allowed to own property (think of that!), these cylinders show women sitting with men, perhaps as equals. Enheduanna captures much about her own life and times, in writing, a legacy that has survived to the present day, providing a haunting reminder of how long and how intricately writing has been entwined with human development. This short post can barely scratch the surface of writing’s history, or of its relationship to how we see, think, feel, and know. But together with speech, which supesedes it, this technology has profoundly shaped us and our worlds. Amid the current angst over ChatGPT and other advances in Artificial Intelligence, it is wise to recall some of this history, to recall how writing has evolved to meet society’s needs and purposes (often related to business and commerce in the West, to ritual in the East), how It has shifted, changed, and adapted to needs and circumstances, as well as to other technologies. Plato mourned the development of writing, saying it would kill memory and sever connections between speakers and their audiences. In some ways, he was right, though other memory systems stepped in to help (see Mary Carruthers’s riveting account of such systems in her The Book of Memory). And it’s easy to argue that writing did much to bring people together rather than to separate then. But changes to technology have always engendered anxiety and fear, demanding that we attend carefully and thoughtfully to the consequences—both intended and unintended—of such changes.  Today, we are clearly in a period of profound shifts in communication, and it is difficult to see where they will lead. But I am certain that while the capacities and uses (perhaps even the definition) of writing will shift and change, writing will continue to evolve. And writing, we should recall, has been a thoroughly human endeavor throughout its long history. It remains to be seen whether non-human machines can build the same kind of symbiotic relationship—between human mind and written codes—that has brought us into this challenging new territory.     The image used in this post is in the public domain. ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn, a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy, and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition   So... The buzz lately is Open AI language generators and Chat GPT, in particular. It’s got teachers talking, scrambling, and rethinking our roles and pedagogies in the classroom and what it means to write. No doubt, as educators, we have many concerns about the negative implications of these tools. We hear tension in our communities pointing to the major disruptive impact of these language generators, or as Steven Marche writes in the Atlantic article, The College Essay is Dead (December 2022). The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up.  We will experience disruption and this tool does present us with real concerns. It is undoubtedly a major paradigm shift that asks us to rethink much of what we know about the teaching of writing. We wonder how it will challenge issues of plagiarism and intellectual property. We recognize the potential threat to students’ abilities to write and think critically on their own. We worry about a world where creativity is merely an algorithm, and the humanity of our discipline is lost.  The fact of the matter is that... we are here... there IS no turning back. We can choose to enter this conversation from a place of fear where students lose the ability to write and think critically or we can search for opportunities, new definitions, and pedagogical approaches. Theorists and practitioners, such as Professor Mike Sharple urge educators to “rethink teaching and assessment” in light of the technology, which he said, “could become a gift for student cheats, or a powerful teaching assistant, or a tool for creativity” (Marche).   Looking Back  This is not the first time in my career that I was forced to reflect on my practices because of the introduction of new technologies and tools. When we moved from typewriters to writing with computers, we had to rethink how we compose and revise. This shift opened opportunities for writers to see revision as more than correction and connected it to thinking and “Seeing again” (Re-vision). It allowed us to revise sentences during the act of composition, reorganize, and substantiate in ways that were difficult with the typewriter as a tool. It helped us to understand the recursive nature of revision beyond a lock-step process. We wondered how tools like spelling, grammar checkers, and citation generators would affect students’ abilities to spell, research and know how to write grammatically correct sentences on their own.   We were concerned when the internet hit the scene that students would no longer spend time in the library and instead find sources in ways that were much more convenient. We worried that students would no longer gain the research practices necessary to foster strong critical thinking and succeed. We had to shift our teaching to focus less on the location of sources and towards the analysis and evaluation of sources since students faced many available options. We taught them new practices such as how to use online databases, key words, and develop a critical eye towards locating themselves within a range of ideas and perspectives.   I was part of the early wave of teachers embracing multimodal composition in our writing classes. In those days, our work was met with criticism, skepticism, and fear.  Multimodal assignments were seen only as “creative” supplements to the writing of essays rather than a valid form of communication to prepare our student writers for success in college and beyond. Multimodality pushed us to think about how we defined composition and what would happen if we moved students away from alphabetic writing as their primary method of communication. We introduced multimodal texts for analysis and eventually followed with the composition of multimodal texts as a viable and compelling way to understand and express meaning. Our focus moved off the production of texts towards teaching writing as a rhetorical act through which students analyze their purposes, audiences, subjects, and contexts to come up with the best modes of delivery for their messages. We came to value rhetorical agility and new understandings of genre conventions in light of new audiences, purposes, and digital affordances. We had to redefine our definitions of originality and creativity and open our minds to the idea of remixing and recognizing the ways texts, images, sound, and motion work together to communicate meaning. We questioned our ideas on intellectual property and fair use as composition became more collaborative and participatory. We moved towards an integrated curriculum through which we engaged writers in multimodal analysis and composition throughout their writing processes – from invention to production.     Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash   Looking Forward None of us can really say where this is all going and once we get our minds around these tools, things will change again. Some, such as Ian Bogost, in his article, Chat GPT is Dumber than You Think, argue that the tool does not have the ability to, “truly understand the complexity of human language and conversation” suggesting that we will seek out a human component in these texts.  I am not sure how this will play out as we learn more about the limitations and affordances of these tools. However, I do know that I will resist practices that put us in a place of fear and have our primary goal to police student writing. First, that is not a winning game and second, it is not why we teach. Instead, we can bring these ideas into the conversation in ways that will help us learn and grow.   Here are some practical ideas we can consider as we move ahead:  Let students know that we are aware of these technologies and work together with them to understand their potential and limitations. Show the tools to students. Have them play with them, discuss them, challenge them.   Study these tools as cultural artifacts in the digital landscape, including the human factors and ethical frameworks.  Use them for brainstorming and invention. AI’s can be a place for students to try out their ideas, explore sources and generate directions for research and writing. The bots can encourage us to ask thoughtful questions and follow up questions.  Understand and analyze style, tone, and voice as we can guide the tool to emulate these characteristics.  Incorporate what we already know about process approaches and scaffolding and include the tool as part of a series of incremental steps towards more finished projects.    Turn our attention towards teaching revision through thoughtful hybrid texts that recognize both student ideas and the ideas of others.    Keep our attention on teaching writing as a rhetorical act and design assignments that ask students to gain rhetorical agility.  Celebrate multimodal composition and its many possibilities for meaningful work and expand our creative and critical writing practices.   We always say that we don’t “teach tools” because tools change. Instead, we can focus on the processes of composition and develop a sense of digital intuition through which students explore new tools and learn as they go. We serve our students well to allow them to experiment with digital tools and contribute their experiences to classroom conversations and collaborative work. Ultimately, we will be OK if we keep our eyes on the prize – helping students to read, write, and think critically and recognizing the impact of their unique ideas and contributions.     Marche, Stephen. “The College Essay Is Dead.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 16 Dec. 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatgpt-ai-writing-college-student-essays/672371/. Bogost, Ian. “CHATGPT Is Dumber than You Think.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 16 Dec. 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatgpt-openai-artificial-intelligence-writing-ethics/672386/. ... View more

I need to make a confession: I fell into a snit of professional jealousy and self-pity a week or so ago. Why? I did not get to attend the 4Cs in Chicago (Conference on College Composition and Communication).   Instead, I reviewed preliminary bibliographies for students in my Introductory Linguistics class and worked with corequisite writers preparing to write profiles of discourse communities. The students had read and tried (with mixed success) to summarize Dan Melzer’s essay, “Understanding Discourse Communities,” and they were exploring their chosen communities through websites and social media. One of the most engaged writers in my multilingual class was struggling to identify a target community.      I sat down with the student to think through some possibilities:  “What’s your major? “Not sure—I really don’t have a direction in mind.” “Well, what interests you?” “I don’t know. I played football in high school, and I like to watch sports, but I don’t really follow a team or anything.” “How about music?” “Nah.” “Well, how about church—you’re a youth leader, right?” “Yeah, but I don’t really want to write about that.”   Back and forth. I don’t think this student was being purposefully unyielding. He was looking for a purpose for writing this paper—and he couldn’t find one.  And he is just the sort of resourceful student who—absent a compelling reason to write—could easily turn to AI to generate a paper. He knows (because we’ve talked about it), how easily ChatGPT could get this job done. He also knows he would gain nothing by that choice. Yet he has not seen what he could gain by doing the assignment, either. “I like our class.  Could I write about our class?” He selected a topic, but I sense, for the moment, it is a perfunctory choice. If all goes as planned, somewhere during the process, he will discover a purpose and find that the work itself can be energizing, that there is a rush of satisfaction as a text begins to take shape before our eyes.  If all goes as it should, and that’s a big “if.”   Over the past couple of years, the moments where classes go “as they should” seem to be less frequent. I find myself looking for ways to bring energy and joy into classrooms where students (corequisite and multilingual students in particular) are struggling to engage.   So when a colleague began posting pics of tables of friends and presentation titles and plates of amazing food from Chicago, I got jealous.   But then I saw this (https://twitter.com/CCCCSLW)      I would have loved to have been in that room, talking hope with my colleagues. But I thought about my struggling writer—who had decided his writing class, of all things, was a discourse community he could write about. He is indeed a multilingual border crosser and change maker.    I began to watch for the Second Language Writing Standing group tweets, drawing vicarious energy from the insights and questions they posted.     What a lovely thought: we can practice embodying hope—even those of us who did not make it to Chicago.     My colleagues are giving voice to questions that are critical to me, and in doing so, they challenge me to go back into my classroom with hope.     This series of Tweets on February 18 connected me to colleagues—and reminded me that I do not teach in isolation. The sense that I am doing so much but never quite enough is shared.     Indeed.  I am grateful to whoever managed the Second Language Standing Group’s Twitter during the conference, as this non-attender found renewed hope and community through them.  I will go back to class with my struggling writer and his discourse community profile. This work with multilingual writers sustains us—and brings hope.   The CCCC Second Language Writing Standing Group’s Twitter is managed by Analeigh Horton, currently a graduate teaching Associate at the University of Arizona and Outreach Coordinator for the CCCC Second Language Writing Standing Group. ... View more

  In several of the earlier editions of Elements of Argument, we made use of the Stephen Toulmin term warrant. It proved to be a difficult term, even for some of us who were trying to teach it. It was easy enough for students to link the term claim to the term thesis statement and to link support with the term evidence.  The concept is no easier now that we have adopted the term assumption to replace warrant, but at least the word is familiar. Whatever we call it, this link between claim and support is critical to understanding others’ arguments and our own. Every day, millions of headlines are published in response to the events happening around us. These headlines are littered with the writer's assumptions about the outcome of an event. Having students explore assumptions in the headlines can help them to understand how a writer’s beliefs shape their argument. However, students should be aware that as readers, they will also establish their own assumptions about the content of the article based on its headline. Here’s an activity that you can use to have students explore their biases when reading headlines. Collect about 4-5 headlines and share them on the board. Here are a few examples of interesting headlines this week: Retirees lost 23% of their 401(k) savings in 2022, Fidelity says (from CNBC) Ohio train derailment happened moments after crew warned of axle overheating, NTSB says (from USA Today) Chile readies major earthquakes insurance with World Bank (from Reuters) London activists paint Ukraine’s flag in front of Russian Embassy (from The Washington Post) Then as a class, have students list what they assume the articles would address. Next, divide the class into 4-5 groups and assign each group an article. After reading, each group should explore whether their assumptions about the article were correct or incorrect and how their assumptions shaped their reading experience. This activity will help students to understand how their biases contribute to how they approach and navigate articles, which is important for them to keep in consideration when conducting research. Using assumptions to guide their research can cause students to only use articles that support their argument, creating a skewed discussion of a topic. You can use this activity to stress the importance of understanding all sides of an argument to effectively support and validate a thesis. Additionally, this activity can be used to connect with and understand your students. Our classrooms are more diverse now than ever before. Each student has their own intersectionality, experiences, and beliefs that can influence their assumptions. Understanding how students navigate headlines and the media can help you provide research resources for students, create guidance on how to frame their claims and support to bolster their arguments, and discern what motivated students to choose a specific topic to write about. Navigating the assumptions made in the headlines and our assumptions is the first step in finding the heart of a topic. Although arguments in the media are portrayed with a harsh right or wrong binary, as professors we must continue to remind students that argumentation is not about proving yourself right or someone wrong. Argumentation is simply a tool used to impact the people and world around us with the best uses of argumentation being when it is used to advocate for democracy, human rights, and our planet. "Question mark made of puzzle pieces"  by Old Photo Profile is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Christine Cucciarre, Professor of English and Director of Composition at the University of Delaware.   Weight I read the want ads during the pandemic. At the end of each Zoom class, I clicked “Leave Meeting,” and cried. Maybe I could drive a truck. Sling mulch at Home Depot. Stock shelves at Target. Just to go to work. Leave work. Be home. No torment of failing my students, failing myself. Fall semester I returned to the classroom. Walk to work. Teach. Return home. Repeat. Still, no lingering with students, office conferences, chatting with colleagues in the copy room.  The sudden weight of the pandemic was so easy to put on, but it’s so hard to take off.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

For the past few weeks, American mass media outlets have been transfixed by the recent detection of a series of balloons floating over North American airspace. Even the BBC (U.S. edition) replaced the ongoing earthquake disaster in Turkey and Syria as its top headline with updates on the balloons, their destruction, the continuing attempts to determine just what they were, and the subsequent defense of having shot them down in the first place. Since none of these objects were at any time identified to be existential threats, the expensive scrambling of American fighter jets to blast them out of the sky raises an interesting question: why all the fuss? After all, the sky is filled with all sorts of flying objects, and it is hardly news that some of them are spying on us. Heck, so are Google, Facebook, Siri, Alexa, and our smartphones. What made these balloons so special? On the surface, the whole matter might not appear to be particularly relevant to a popular cultural semiotics analysis. However, the way that it has played out on both social media and the news, not to mention the entertaining theatricality of all those videos of exploding balloons, does have a cultural resonance. An analysis of that resonance can lead us to some conclusions that are worth noting. As always, with a semiotic analysis, we can begin with the construction of a system of associated and differential phenomena in order to define an interpretable context. It starts with the intense distrust of President Joe Biden on the part of the American conservatives, especially in the wake of his handling of America’s pullout from Afghanistan early in his presidency. This alone has put a great deal of pressure on the President to act decisively in the face of any perceived threat to national security, especially as America gears up for the 2024 presidential election. Given this, why hasn’t there been even more intense pressure on the president to act with military decisiveness in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which surely presents a threat to our, and the world’s, security? Here, we find a striking difference in the way conservatives regard Russia with respect to China, their support for a former KGB chief, and their opposition to American intervention in Ukraine’s fight for survival. Suffice to say that the “Chinese spy balloon” has instigated far more national security fervor among conservatives than anything that Putin has done (thus taking its place alongside what former president Trump insisted on calling the “China virus”), leading to their demand for governmental action. All in all, we can see that the PRC, which Richard Nixon began to play off against the USSR in the days of “ping-pong diplomacy" (turning it into the "good" communist country in conservative eyes), is being restored to "enemy" status in right-wing circles. In such an environment, President Biden, whose re-election campaign announcement is expected at any moment, cannot afford to appear to be “soft” on China. Therefore, balloons (three of them turning out to be completely harmless), get expensively shot down in an environment that is, metaphorically and literally, filled with a lot of hot air.   Photo by Tobias Tullius (2020), used under the Unsplash License. ... View more

  A few months ago, I wrote in this space about the rise of AI chatbots like ChatGPT. Since then—like you, I imagine—I have been inundated with articles and YouTube videos and tweets about the still fairly new Open AI chatbot. We are seeing an understandable amount of handwringing among the academic community as administrators and teachers everywhere worry about academic integrity, about “the end of writing,” and even about their jobs. As with every sudden technological innovation, this one is unsettling at best and perhaps terrifying at worst. I have read a lot of the jeremiads and the end-of-the-world-as-we-have-known-it scenarios, and while I am sympathetic, I am at least for the time being inclined less to a “the sky is falling” stance and more to a cautious, careful look at how we and our students can work productively, and ethically, with this new tool. If the slide rule and the calculator didn’t bring the world to a halt, if television did not destroy education, then it seems unlikely that ChatGPT will do so. A recent New York Times piece takes this position. Author Kevin Roose recognizes legitimate fears about plagiarism and other ethical issues but goes on argue that “schools should thoughtfully embrace ChatGPT as a teaching aid—one that could unlock student creativity, offer personalized tutoring, and better prepare students to work alongside A.I. systems as adults.” He makes this argument for three main reasons: 1) that ignoring or trying to keep such AI tools away from students simply will not work: they are here and here to stay; 2) that ChatGPT can be an “effective teaching tool,” giving the example of a teacher whose students use the chatbot to create outlines for essays they are working on—and then go on to write stronger and more engaging essays as a result, or using the tool as an out of class tutor or a debate sparring partner or “starting point for in-class exercises"; and 3) that ChatGPT helps teach students about the world they live in, one full to bursting with AI technologies they will need to “know their way around . . . their strengths and weaknesses, their hallmarks and blind spots—in order to work alongside them.” I found Roose’s argument thoughtful and even-handed and his examples compelling. Still for me, in these fairly early days, I find that ChatGPT and tools like it seem most perfectly suited for play, for the ludic possibilities of rhetoric—as the example of students using ChatGPT to compose satiric love notes and poems demonstrates. But play, remember, is not “mere” play but a crucial part of learning and cognitive development. “Playing around” with language and other symbols is fundamental to growth. So my inclination is to encourage students to play with this new tool, pushing it to its limits, using it to entertain and amuse, all the while using such activities to learn about its strengths and weaknesses, the “blind spots” Roose mentions, and always testing it against their own creativity, ingenuity, and knowledge. We teachers of writing will have a lot to learn from such play!   Image by Jonathan Kemper reproduced under the Unsplash license.   ... View more

As my eight-month leave of absence began to wane, I wondered about what processes from my own writing practice might be useful for students. Then, a week before the beginning of school, I made ephemeral art. Ephemeral art does not last a long time and disappears shortly after the artist creates it. The best definition I found online was from the Tate Modern website, “a work that occurs only once…and cannot be embodied in a museum or gallery.” Recently I took a sculpture class offered for free in a joint project with our local center for older adults and a nearby museum. We worked with clay and plaster, but one of the most memorable activities was the day we were introduced to ephemeral art.  First, our group looked at ephemeral art in the museum’s outdoor sculpture garden. It was raining hard, and the group looked at the garden through the windows. The teaching artist invited the group to reflect on changes in the weather and the cycle of season might create changes in the garden, and to especially consider the ephemerality of shadow and light provided by the trees, their leaves growing and shedding.  Nothing lasts forever, and the trees serve as a reminder of ephemerality and transformation. At times, the changes are subtle and barely perceptible; in other moments, the changes can be dramatic and even frightening, like a tree split by a tornado.   To practice ephemeral art, our group worked with calligraphy practice paper, black bottled ink, and calligraphy brushes. Shortly after we made our pictures, the pictures began to fade away. At 1:31 pm, I made a short video of the process of painting the word “trees” (see link). When I watch the video now, I can see that my brush was saturated with ink. As a result, I was constantly revising how I painted the letters, especially the two “e”s. By 1:34 pm, the least saturated parts of the letters were beginning to disappear. The word “trees” painted on gray calligraphy practice paper with black ink. The top of the T, the top of the second E, and the  top of the S are beginning to fade away. Photo by Susan Bernstein, January 19, 2023. I was fascinated by the disappearing ink. Creating ephemeral art felt so much like the writing process: I write a lot, but not all of the drafts survive, and pieces of the draft are deleted and disappear into the ether.  Less than a month later, I was reading exit slips on the homebound train and it seemed that the opportunity to teach ephemerality had arrived. While ephemeral art seemed more about the process than the product, the students were rightly concerned about the product. The exit slips mentioned the need for soft deadlines and sample student papers. These tools were buried in the original slideshow explaining the assignment for Writing Project 1. I knew that I would need to condense the slideshow so that these tools would be more accessible for the students. I also considered how the class could spend more time freewriting about the reading for the first writing project. If writing is a recursive process, so is, according to two CCCC position statements, the process of reading and “the process of acquiring academic literacies” for second language and multilingual writers. Nevertheless, often these processes are presented as linear steps to be completed one at a time. I had tried to do this with the assignment, and soon realized the problem. The steps themselves were overlapping. Students would need to reread the material and respond to questions in their journals not just once or twice, but throughout the process of creating Writing Project 1. How to explain this? I assumed that students asked for steps because the linear process was familiar, and I respect the students’ comfort with familiarity. The issue was how to offer students more ephemeral experiences with writing, to create writing they might or might not include in completed writing projects. I suspected that freewriting on questions generated in class would help, and that creating an opening to move off-topic also would help. Going off-topic is the ephemeral art of the writing process. It allows for imagination even if writers don’t end up saving what they write. At the same time, I needed to know if students were okay with in-class freewriting as a means of approaching the writing process for WP 1. I invited students to participate in a Google doc anonymous Q&A to respond to the following question: What do you think about doing so much free writing and journaling before beginning rough drafts? Before discussing Introduction/body/conclusion? Does it make sense to do it this way? Why or why not? Another way to frame this question is– why you think I might be approaching this writing process this way? Using the immediate feedback from the Q&A, I responded to questions about going off-topic and using creativity as part of freewriting. I said, “Imagination is important, and necessary outside this classroom. If you are an engineer or a computer scientist, what happens if you follow the usual steps of a process, but the process stops working? Do you still follow the same steps? Or do you think outside the box to solve the problem?” I, too, need to think outside the box to figure out what steps are no longer relevant, and to work with students to address their needs. This process is both the challenge and the benefit of coming back to in-person classes. The work is constantly changing because nothing lasts forever. At times the changes are imperceptible, and at other times are as dramatic as returning to a classroom in the wake of a global pandemic and pushing through the discomforts of anxiety. Because of these never-ending transformations, teaching and learning remain the most ephemeral of arts. ... View more

I write this sentence tentatively: This semester, finally, my in-person classrooms have started to hum with a pre-pandemic vibrancy. I bet yours are bouncing back too. It’s not just that our classroom numbers have started to rebound; more significantly, many students (not all, certainly) have emerged from the pandemic anxiety that seemed to be their default setting, even last fall. I’m making the most of the energy from in-class conversations. I want students to understand how much we can learn from one another in real time, when our body language and tone of voice can move us in unexpected directions. This sometimes means changing our minds about big ideas—and this is not easy. Writing classrooms are a perfect place for instructors to model what this looks like, and show that empathy can make change possible. Andrea Lunsford’s recent post recognizes the work that writing teachers do “to build an ethos of trust and empathy in their classrooms in order to support respectful listening and openness to learning, even from those with differing perspectives—perhaps especially from those with differing perspectives.” Teaching writing is about teaching critical thinking, about slowing down our judgments and spending time to work out respectfully the significance of different perspectives. Consequently, critical thinking requires humility, recognizing what we don’t yet know, and changing our minds when we learn more. What does this look like in writing classrooms? My students have been tackling challenging texts: Ibram X Kendi’s work on anti-racism and Robin DiAngelo’s analysis of perceptions of race. In early class conversations, it was clear some students were struggling, understandably, with how these writers’ ideas challenged what they were accustomed to thinking about race as a biological category and success as a matter mainly of personal gumption. You could feel the tension in some conversations as students described contrasting and difficult experiences based on perceptions of their race. I could read in the body language—tightly crossed arms, pressed lips—that this was hard for some students to take in. So, I redesigned a class period to make generous space for a class brainstorm on why it can be so difficult to change our minds about big ideas. Students chalked up the board with an instructive list that included: Influence of family (respect for elders); Religion (longtime beliefs, held in faith/feeling rather than logic); Unfamiliarity with a topic; Never considered the consequences/effects of an idea; Not meeting many people with different life experiences; and, Ego (hard to admit when we learn we were wrong). That final one, ego, is a biggie, and one that Carol Dweck helps us understand with her insights on “fixed” and “growth” mindsets. Education, after all, should change us, and that means recognizing that we need humility if we hope to grow. I have written before about the power of modeling “slow thinking” with our students. This includes being ready to say, “Thank you; I hadn’t thought of that before.” Or even, “I’ll have to think about that some more.” Our classrooms are places students can learn to listen to people with different life experiences, and to practice being open to changing their minds. However, this practice is reciprocal: students need to see us making those moves, too. When was the last time you changed your mind right in front of your own students? What words do you offer when a student’s perspective moves you in a fresh direction? Your humility, empathy, and enthusiasm for continued growth models skills your students will need their whole lives. February’s Black History Month programming on your campus or in sources such as the New York Times offers an opportunity to practice empathy, humility, and active listening in your writing classroom. While we all have “student learning outcomes” for our class, what are your “instructor learning outcomes”? I certainly expect that I will change something about my understanding of our shared world, based on what I learn from my students, by the time tulips bloom in Indiana.   Photo by Shane Rounce (2018), used under the Unsplash License. ... View more

Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin toddlers, Dylan and Escher.   I am learning that I make my best pedagogical discoveries through forgetting things—this time, it was my copy of Gilgamesh. I had hoped to do a dramatic reading of part of Tablet 6, and I wanted all my students to be able to follow along with their own copies, so I couldn’t ask to borrow one of theirs. Luckily, I had an idea. For my online, asynchronous classes, I pre-record lectures for students to watch. On that day, the fateful day I forgot my copy of Gilgamesh, I chose to play my pre-recorded reading of Tablet 6 for my in-person students. Once I got over the uncanniness of there being two of me at the front of the classroom, I realized that I had stumbled upon something of value. I have found that it is, in fact, useful to play short, pre-recorded video lectures even (and especially) in in-person classroom spaces. The first benefit of this practice is closed-captioning. Having a multisensory lecture experience is helpful for students with auditory impairments, and multisensory input (closed captioning, instructors’ facial language and audio) can help all students understand the content of lecture. This is the reason why some of us watch Netflix in English with English subtitles, even if we are native English speakers. It certainly helps keep my brain focused! I know what you may be thinking. A flipped classroom model would have students watch the pre-recorded video in advance so that the classroom can convert to a critical thinking space. Why not do that? I contend that teacher presence for short pre-recorded video lectures actually can be very helpful to students. In my experience, students have been much more likely to say “can you pause that for a second?” or “can you go back”? It’s lower stakes than “can you say what you just said all over again?” Not only can I pause or rewind, I can clarify right on the spot with greater ease. Furthermore, I can pause my own face when I notice I’ve said something bizarre. Maybe I’ve said Hatshepsut rather than Nefertiti. Maybe I’ve said Isis when I meant Ishtar. These mistakes don’t happen often, but when they do, they can throw a student off, and I may not even know about it. I am a firm believer that these mistakes happen because there is a lot to juggle when a professor is at the front of the classroom (or anyone is in front of an audience, for that matter). Maybe I need to talk about something and write something on the board simultaneously. Maybe I need to think about what I’m saying next but get distracted by giving a handout to a late student. Maybe I notice that students are looking at their phones, and I am trying to shift to a group activity for greater engagement while also finishing the explanation of a complicated lecture idea. The layer of performance is removed when watching the pre-recorded lecture with students. In a sense, I become my own TA, guiding students through what the professor was talking about. The only difference is I’m also the professor. A final benefit of the short, pre-recorded lecture in class is that it’s very easy to assign group activities as the need arises and pause the video for this group work. I no longer feel exhausted by pivoting from the type of focus needed to deliver a lecture to the type of focus required to facilitate group work. Sharing pre-recorded video lectures with in-person students requires time to record the lecture, and the ability to be vulnerable, but ultimately it has helped me connect more with students; it has facilitated meaningful student connections through group work, and it has helped students better understand the content of my courses. ... View more

  We can spend days analyzing President Joe Biden’s January 7, 2023, State of the Union address to the joint houses of Congress. Given the response the speech has received, students of speech and rhetoric will likely be studying it for years to come. Although this State of the Union address has been rated as the most confrontational address ever, this address also illustrates the importance of audience awareness and the pursuit of common ground.  The key example of audience awareness that no one can stop talking about is how President Biden got the two parties to come to a consensus, right there on the floor of the chamber, on Social Security and Medicare. He was cautious in how he broached the subject. He referred to how some of his Republican colleagues have proposed sunsetting Social Security. Knowing that Republicans would oppose this statement, President Biden came prepared to support his statement by promising to send Rick Scott a copy of his written proposal which outlined the facts.   It was a guessing game throughout the speech at what points Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy would signal to his Republican colleagues that they should stand by standing himself. They were actually in the embarrassing position of NOT standing in support of such generally popular ideas as better pay for teachers and aid to Ukraine. When it came to Social Security and Medicare, the majority of Republicans were eager to distance themselves from Rick Scott in his desire to cut these popular entitlement programs. They leaped to their feet to applaud America’s seniors, and once they were there, Biden pointed out that it seemed everyone agreed that we cannot do away with Social Security and Medicare. Common ground is often the starting point for moving two opposing sides toward agreement. By getting Democrats and Republicans to agree to support what is best for the elderly he seemed to decrease by a tiny degree the schism in the room. Presidents have long brought into the chamber for the State of the Union special guests who like, in this case, Tyree Nichols’s mother and stepfather, have experienced terrible and widely publicized tragedy. Biden was respectful of the couple’s loss and actually used the difference between their experience and that of his family to illustrate the racism that still exists in America. Biden recalled that he never had to warn his sons that if they were pulled over by the police, they should turn on the inside car light, put both hands on the wheel, and make no sudden moves. The common ground, of course, is that no parent should have to. When addressing an audience with polarizing views, speakers need to be aware of how easily their message can be skewed, be strategic about how they get their message across, and bolster their supporting data against loopholes. As President Biden demonstrated in his State of the Union address, sometimes finding common ground is the simplest way to ensure that the purpose of the message is heard.    "Joe Biden"  by GPA Photo Archive is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

The last time I remember technology and composition in such apparent conflict was in the early 1990s, when my colleagues and I wondered if the grammar and spell check tools provided by Word and WordPerfect gave students with access to these programs an unfair advantage over their less tech-savvy peers. Of course, using software to correct subject-verb agreement errors seems positively quaint in comparison with what students can accomplish using Open AI’s ChatGPT, and the many AI-driven programs that are sure to follow in its wake. Not surprisingly, the response to artificial intelligence as a generator of text—among both teachers and media commentators—has been overwhelming. In December, novelist Stephen Marche declared “The College Essay Is Dead,” while high school teacher Daniel Herman concluded that ChapGPT signaled “The End of High-School English.” Some Twitter users were downright apocalyptic, and even Open AI’s own CEO, Sam Altman, acknowledged, “The bad case—and I think this is important to say—is, like, lights out for all of us.” Initially, I didn’t think these doomsayers were far from wrong. One evening, a colleague and I sat down with our computers and tried to stump ChatGPT. Could AI perform a rhetorical analysis on an article she assigns each semester? It could. The grade? “This is an early assignment in the semester, so I’d say at least a ‘B.’” But how would AI do when faced with personal writing? After all, a computer program doesn’t have any life experiences to draw on, so I asked ChatGPT to write a thousand-word essay on the biggest challenge it had ever faced and what it had learned from that challenge. A couple of minutes later, I learned that AI’s biggest challenge had been the death of its mother from cancer when AI was a young teenager. The lessons learned were hardly earth-shattering—the preciousness of life, the need to stand on one’s own two (virtual) feet—but they were the sort of responses one might expect from the prompt I had posed. Right away, my friend and I wondered: If a computer program can respond effectively to assignments like those we gave it, should those assignments be changed? Maybe our first attempts were flawed. However, as we worked variations on standard first-year essay prompts, ChatGPT kept responding in what we admitted was an “acceptable” fashion. Granted, AI was lousy when it came to documentation, and it tended to come up with the most obvious responses to our questions, but the reasoning was sound more often than not, and sentence-level errors were generally absent.  Clearly, we didn’t want to dive headlong into what a special session at CCCC calls “crisis-speak.” Philosophy professor Lawrence Shapiro argues that “the cheaters are only hurting themselves—unless we respond to them by removing writing assignments from the syllabus.” Focusing solely on plagiarism runs the risk of depriving students of the writing practice many of them so desperately need. Moreover, as Chris Gilliard and Peter Rorabaugh write in Slate: Although plagiarism is an easy target and certainly on the minds of teachers and professors when thinking about this technology, there are deeper questions we need to engage, questions that are erased when the focus is on branding students as cheaters and urging on an A.I. bakeoff between students and teachers. Questions like: What are the implications of using a technology trained on some of the worst texts on the internet? And: What does it mean when we cede creation and creativity to a machine? Nevertheless, pretending that AI doesn’t exist and carrying on as before is not a realistic option. Therefore, in the months to come, I’ll be looking at some of the many ways instructors are responding to one of the biggest pedagogical curveballs most writing teachers have ever faced. ... View more

“New forms of media have always caused moral panics.” So begins a 2010 op-ed Steven Pinker wrote in response to concerns about potential negative impacts of digital technologies on habits of reading and thinking.  I began assigning that essay, along with Nicholas Carr’s point-by-point response, in my FYC courses in 2011, but by 2017, their argument appeared to have lost its relevance. My students engaged, instead, in discussions of influencers, fake news, fact checkers, Tik Tok, social media regulations, Elon Musk, and Twitter.   But this past fall, I started to hear rumors of something new, something different, and something that might herald the demise of writing instruction (or even higher education) as we know it. This apocalyptic AI tool is called ChatGPT.  Since it was made publicly available in November of 2022, we have seen a steady stream of essays, blogs, Tweets, chats, webinars, and podcasts addressing the perils and possibilities of the chatbot (as in the growing collection of resources here).  At my department’s faculty meeting last month, we got a quick demonstration, followed by suggestions for policies and syllabus statements.      At that January meeting, with deadlines looming and a new semester about to begin, some of us were thinking, “What is this? I do not have time to deal with yet another disruption to my syllabus and pedagogy! Is it really such a big deal?”     And as I looked at my blog schedule for this semester, I considered asking ChatGPT to compose this post for me—knowing I could then meet the deadline and make a point (even though I wasn’t sure what the point should be).  Instead, I asked for a title. Here’s what it generated: "Navigating the Boundaries: The Perils and Promise of ChatGPT in College Writing Classrooms.” It sounds catchy enough.     The best way to learn about ChatGPT is to try it for yourself.  Take just a few minutes (it’s fast!) and give it one or more of your writing prompts or exam questions. Query the program about a research project or request a title for your next blog post. Or you can just ask it how it works:     Once you’ve played with the program a bit, compare experiences with colleagues and friends.  I’ve found colleagues and family members using ChatGPT as search engines (“How can I teach semicolons creatively?” “What’s a good sermon illustration on overcoming anxiety?”), study and preparation (“What sorts of job interview questions should I expect based on this job description?” “Give me some practice sentences to transcribe in IPA, along with the answers”), or writing models (“Write a thank-you note as a follow-up to my job interview”).  I’ve had colleagues who have asked for definitions, outlines, or group activities.       Within a short time of exploration, you will probably encounter the program’s accuracy problem. AI experts call this hallucination:  at times, the program will simply make things up—sources, quotes, or statistics.  I recently gave the program a discussion board prompt I use in my FYC class.  Here’s what it generated:       Unfortunately, the quoted sentence does not actually appear in Alexie’s essay.  So, I pointed this out to ChatGPT:       Yet again, the quoted sentence does not actually appear in the essay, although it is certainly related to the theme of the essay.   After a second “confrontation,” ChatGPT stated that it had “misunderstood the prompt,” something my students have said before, too!   With that in mind, I’ve invited students to explore the technology with me this semester. They will find the “hallucinations,” and we’ll discuss privacy and integrity. My students will be assessing an essay generated by the chatbot, and they will experiment with ChatGPT as a brainstorming tool (considering if and how to cite the results). We will also ask the program to provide feedback on a draft and compare its feedback with our own. We’ll ask some tough questions: how does the technology support our thinking—and how might it limit our thinking?     And perhaps I’ll ask students to re-visit the Pinker/Carr debate. After all, our technological tools can exert a profound influence on the way we interact with the world and the way we think. Pinker closed his celebration of digital technologies this way:   The new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.   In the age of ChatGPT, I wonder if my colleagues and students will agree.  I’m still thinking about it.    What about you?  If you have insights or classroom ideas, please share! ... View more

 First-day selfie   Note: These journal entries are adapted from my teaching journal. The original entries are handwritten on the blank pages of my lesson plan book.   Day 1: January 26, 2023 writing on the train after class.  Today was my first day of teaching in person since March 10, 2020, and I am thinking of IT glitches and how they were solved. At the time, those glitches seemed significant because our face-to-face class was paperless. Until the glitches were fixed, I wondered how to find alternative access to the twenty-first century tech I used throughout the long months of remote learning, and had intended to use in person, too.  Yes, I thought, it would be possible to teach without a monitor and a smartboard. We could all just use our personal electronic devices to log into the course management system and walk through the syllabus that way, just like we did on Zoom. As I said, the glitch was soon fixed, and we returned to our post-remote world. “This is not how I intended to begin,” I told the students. The room was small and the desks were crowded closely together. I covered the key points of the syllabus, and showed the welcome video and the video to introduce our reading from James Baldwin. On the way home, on the train, I am taking notes that skim the surface. Although we made nameplates with crayons, name tags, and paper, and although we introduced ourselves to each other, the class felt too much like teaching on Zoom. This feeling is hard to admit, but I need to consider not so much why it felt that way, but what I can do to take advantage of in-person affordances. In-person affordances included the arrangement of the physical objects in the room (desks crowded together, monitor, smartboard) and the room temperature (too warm). Those were the most obvious features. The emotions gathered together in that room were less obvious. How did the students feel about being in this room and what did they think about taking this writing class? We were using the tools of remote learning in an in-person classroom. We were face-to-face and literally elbow-to-elbow in a room filled with people who were strangers to each other, and who had, perhaps, become accustomed to engaging more with devices than with people. At least this is my perception after the first day. I feel exhilarated as well, nevermind the glitches. Or, perhaps the glitches are exactly the point. What would I have done if I could not access the monitor and the smartboard? What did I do before monitors, smartboards, and functional wifi?   Day 2: January 31, 2023 writing in class while students work on their journals.  On the way to school on the train, I had an idea for how to explain an early-term assignment. I found two sticky notes and a pen and scratched down my thoughts. The train was nearing a transfer point and I would have to move quickly. When I arrived on campus, I wrote the explanation on the board while simultaneously revising. I revised for a third time when I composed an announcement for the students on the course management system. I remembered that I used to revise lesson plans like this all the time–kinesthetically, on the go, from brain to handwriting, to catching trains and buses to campus, to writing on the board, to transferring ideas to make them visible online. I remembered that I learned best kinesthetically, and that staying still could be very difficult. I remembered the tactile impressions of fingers against pen, and pen against paper. So I decided to reverse the lesson plan. Rather than beginning with the newly revised assignment, we would begin and end with handwriting. I would use Ask Me Anything (a beginning-of-semester activity I learned about and implemented long before the pandemic) to unpack the syllabus and the course, and exit tickets to help plan the lesson for the next class. I blogged about these activities years ago. Ask Me Anything invited students to ask anonymous questions for me to answer in front of the class. Often students asked different versions of the same question, and I could respond in more depth as needed. Exit tickets, adapted from Stephen Brookfield, offered students an opportunity to write about what was most helpful in class, and what was most confusing. The exit tickets also were anonymous, and I promised that I would not read them until I was on the train. The questions for Ask Me Anything, I explained, help me understand more about where students need to grow as writers. If more than one student asks the same question, then I know I need to clarify my intentions and our coursework. In an environment where students are rightly concerned about speaking in front of class, both activities create opportunities for conversation and feedback about the course, and also to participate in shaping subsequent lessons. My responses can be long, and, in that case, a best practice is to check in with students to see if my answer fits what they are asking. On day two, I received an Ask-Me-Anything question that appeared to require a longer response, and also seemed more personal. The question on the slip of paper asked: What are your pet peeves?  This room, I thought. That it's so small and that we’re all crammed together. That we don’t have HVAC ventilation, and that the room is overheated with a window that barely opens. That adults were unprepared for remote learning during quarantine, and that students, then and now, have to deal with the consequences. As adults, we need to do better. Then, after a quick realization, I paused for a moment. “Oh wait,” I said. “Do you mean my pet peeves as an English teacher? It’s five-paragraph essays. It’s hard to fully grow your ideas in five paragraphs, and important ideas might get lost in the process. We'll practice writing to expand on ideas and to create a longer essay. But that’s my English teacher pet peeve, five paragraph essays.” Growing as a writer, for students and teachers alike, can be immensely challenging, and transitions are never easy. As a neurodivergent teacher away from in-person teaching for nearly three years, I considered the costs and benefits of returning. Anxiety became a language without words, and the feelings were difficult to communicate. At the same time, experiencing the difficulties of communicating also draws me back to the classroom. In unexpected moments, the classroom can become a place to bear witness to  people attempting to communicate in circumstances that would seem to mitigate against communication.  Writing remains one means of bearing witness to journeys toward teaching and learning, with  many detours encountered on those journeys. Back in the classroom, the journey continues, and the journey is just beginning. ... View more