A recent wintery visit to my home state Colorado reminded me that, while the cacophony of fall foliage has its delights, the subtlety of winter’s colors can draw a person into deep contemplation. This blue spruce against a clear blue sky stopped me on a frosty walk with my father. The nuanced play of azure on blue-gray-green needles held my gaze, inviting me to consider the array of tones I would have missed with a bolder contrast of colors. Because most of my brain these days is consumed with student drafts (yours, too?), this encounter with nature reminded me of the many conversations I’m having in the margins of my students’ writing about the value of nuance in scholarly arguments. New college writers tend turn the dial to 11 (thanks, This is Spinal Tap!) when it comes to constructing arguments. Perhaps this is because of the bombastic models of “argument” we so often hear on political talk shows, where speakers launch arguments like bombs: absolute, totalizing, and designed to demolish the opposition. So, it can be a challenge for students to see nuance and humility in scholarly arguments as a strength rather than a weakness.  Andrea Lunsford reminds us that humility is essential to listening in academic conversations. I have written before, too, about humility as a strength in scholarly ethos. I understand, though, why nervous students might try to over-perform confidence, and bolster their ethos, with outsized claims. You’ve seen these totalizing claims in drafts, too, I’m sure: “College sports are destructive to students;” “Social media is driving adolescents into despair;” “Students want majors that lead directly to jobs.” Without nuance, qualification, or complexity, all these claims remain fundamentally open to critique. In From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Text and Reader, my co-author Stuart Greene and I offer a chapter on building responsible scholarly arguments. Among the guidelines are: Acknowledging points of view that differ from the writer’s own, reflecting the complexity of an issue and, Demonstrating an awareness of the readers’ assumptions and anticipating possible counterarguments. (164) These practices signal to readers that the writer is taking on an issue with nuance and humility, rather than bludgeoning the reader with simplistic bombast. We also provide steps for students to develop a nuanced ethos in their appeals to readers, since cultivating this presence on the page is essential to making effective academic arguments: Steps to Appealing to Ethos: Establish that you have good judgment. Identify an issue your readers will agree is worth addressing, and demonstrate that you are fair minded and have the best interests of your readers in mind when you address it. Convey to readers that you are knowledgeable. Support your claims with credible evidence that shows you have read widely on, thought about, and understand the issue. Show that you understand the complexity of the issue. Demonstrate that you understand the variety of viewpoints your readers may bring—or may not be able to bring—to the issue. (289) All of these habits of mind and practices on the page take time to establish, of course. I’m still honing these skills, myself. What has worked best in your classes as you guide students toward the nuance and humility we value in scholarly conversations?   Photo by April Lidinsky (2022) ... View more

    Some instructors like to have students debate a controversial issue while others feel that having students defend a position that they do not hold, even as a learning exercise, is too artificial. It is always good, though, for students to see different points of view in order for them to understand a subject fully. You can defend best against a position that you take the time to understand. One subject that you can ask students to examine, which is also close to their own recent experience, is whether the SAT should be dropped as a college admission requirement. The COVID pandemic forced colleges to take a closer look at the necessity of standardized test scores for admission. According to the College Board, “Some 1.5 million students in the high school class of 2021 took the SAT at least once, down from 2.2 million in the class of 2020 due to the pandemic.” Now more than 800 colleges and universities have chosen to no longer require the SAT or the ACT. Current college students may be among the first to enter college without having to meet a standardized test requirement and may have a strong opinion on the subject. If you ask students to brainstorm the pros and cons of dropping the standardized test requirement, perhaps writing them on the board as an initial list of ideas to work with, you will probably hear a number of reasons students are glad the tests are on the way out: They put too much pressure on one test. Some people just don’t test well. Students do not perform well because the test is very stressful. Grades for your whole high school career should count more than a single test. Something as important as college admission shouldn’t be based on a timed test. You might want to push students beyond their own personal experience to think about what they may have read or heard about other limitations of standardized testing. They may then bring up, or you can, complaints that standardized tests are biased against certain groups. There is a wide array of good articles that address gender, racial, and economic bias in college admissions tests. One of the best, by Kim Elsesser, appeared in Forbes in 2019. Some schools thought to avoid the problem of bias by making submitting test scores optional, but a judge in California decided that there was still inherent bias in that option. Is there, then, another side to the issue? Is there a reasonable defense for standardized testing? You might ask students why they think the tests were initiated in the first place. This may draw out their thoughts on the purpose of the SAT and ACT. There has never been an easy way to evaluate the grades of students who come from vastly different high schools with vastly different budgets and vastly different student bodies. Are A’s from an elite prep school equivalent to A’s from a small rural school? Maybe, but grade inflation in secondary schools has made it very difficult to predict college success based on grades alone. Colleges also now have a long history of studying the connection between standardized tests score and success in college. If students go on to write about the issue, they can easily research any and all of these pros and cons. Even if they go no further than brainstorming the subject, they will see beyond their own personal perspective to see some of the complexities of the issue. "Exam"  by Alberto G. is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

 The recent implosion of FTX—Sam Bankman-Fried’s now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange—bears echoes of the collapse of Lehman Brothers at the dawn of the Great Recession as well as the fall of the house of Theranos (which, like FTX, came down due to an insightful journalist’s article). It is also reminiscent of the dot.com stock market crash of the early oughts, whereby investors intoxicated by the apparent weightlessness of the burgeoning world of Internet commerce were rudely brought back to earth when the balloon suddenly burst. And just as the dot.com implosion was preceded by an advertising blitz in such venues as the Super Bowl, so too did FTX rocket into the stratosphere in part due to heavy advertising, along with the endorsement of a number of A-list celebrity endorsers (who are now the subjects of a class-action lawsuit on the part of FTX’s many clients who have lost their shirts). What interests me most in this saga of rampant greed upon Fortuna’s Wheel is the way that it exemplifies the almost absolute trust that people hold today in their favorite celebrities: “Surely Tom Brady wouldn’t give me a bum steer,” many must have been thinking, and “Shaq must have my back;” “Larry David’s no dope, you know, and no one is more authentic than Naomi Osaka.” Such trust was crucial to Bankman-Fried’s more-than-arcane enterprise, which he was able to take to a mass public of potential investors (who probably have no idea of just how cryptocurrency works) simply by fronting it with familiar and much-loved faces. Of course celebrity endorsers are nothing new, not even to financial services companies—like E.F. Hutton, which capitalized on Bill Cosby’s once untarnished image as “America’s Favorite Dad” in the 1980s before its almost overnight collapse in the face of a check-kiting scandal. But I think that the FTX story is special precisely due to the utterly mysterious nature of cryptocurrency to outsiders. It was an act of marketing genius, in its way, for Bankman-Fried to take crypto out of the shadows and shine a pop-culture-powered spotlight upon it in order to pull in more customers. Unfortunately for him and his clients, he appears to have fallen asleep at the wheel when running the company itself, and the rest is likely to be history. My point is not to honor Bankman-Fried, however—far from it. It is simply to point out the power, and danger sometimes, of popular culture. Twitter and the reality series “The Apprentice” come to mind here, but it goes much further than that. In a world of declining trust in anything, especially any form of authority, people often place absolute faith in professional entertainers (and high-profile sports are a form of entertainment too).  By teaching your students to approach popular culture with a critical, rather than a fan’s, eye, you can help them to distinguish between fact and fantasy, reality and illusion. And I can think of no more valuable a skill to impart in these troubling times of disinformation campaigns and alternative “truths.”   Photo by Bastian Riccardi (2022) used under the Unsplash License. ... View more

As the winter approaches, I am thinking of how to reconsider my teaching of the James Baldwin lecture I have often blogged about, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.”  At first, worried about the physical return to the classroom, the absence of mask mandates, and classrooms with compromised ventilation in a city that has elevated covid contagion rates, I thought I might take a break from “Artist’s Struggle.” My brain kareemed back and forth like a ball in an old-fashioned pinball machine, between worries about pedagogy and personal safety.  With pedagogy, I didn’t want “Artist’s Struggle”-- or anything else, for that matter– to become routine in my teaching. Indeed, the burnout from what had become routine last spring was an important reason to take a leave of absence. When I return to the classroom next semester,I don’t want to use the same assignments from Zoom classes, or from before the pandemic. Mostly, I would prefer to  revise old assignments from a new perspective, or switch up the assignments all together. In light of the transition from four and a half semesters online to in-person teaching, how would I possibly find the energy for a fresh approach? But then, there is my favorite quote from “Artist’s Struggle,” a quote that, in fall 2019, the last full semester before the pandemic, students suggested to me was the whole point of Baldwin’s lecture: “All safety is an illusion.”  Detail from James Baldwin Protest Quilt by Susan Bernstein  Photo by Susan Bernstein, January 2022.  My brain slowed down. I took a breath. The physical safety of the classroom and of the city itself cannot be guaranteed. All safety is an illusion not only for the upcoming semester, and not only at the beginning of lockdown in March 2020 and through the waves of Delta and Omicron that kept me teaching on Zoom, but before the pandemic as well. It was what my students three years ago, before the pandemic cataclysm, already knew. Across the country, faculty and administrators expressed ongoing concerns about students’ mental health. I wondered, yet again, what would happen if we publicly acknowledged and remembered that terrible events had happened in our country, and that more than a million of our people are dead from Covid 19. I knew that I had been paralyzed by that thought and wracked by grief. I also knew that the grief was beginning to seem less fraught. Unlike fog in sunshine, the grief had not evaporated. But there was a light that resembled the physics of Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem”: Ring the bells that still can ring There is a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in If I wanted to go back to teaching Baldwin again and his work differently, I would need to find that light. “Artist’s Struggle” is a jeremiad and very often bleak, but it is suffused with light as well. The light comes, at least for me, from Baldwin’s language weighted with the history of the twentieth-century, and his courage in facing “the fact,” as my students understood, “that all safety is an illusion. As Baldwin suggests elsewhere, There’s something wrong, you know, with someone who says he’s in despair who keeps on writing….I’m aware, you know, that I and the people I love may perish in the morning…. But there’s light on our faces now.  I’m perfectly happy, odd as it sounds, and relatively free. At the moment, I am considering the courage to write in the face of despair and discovering how to find the light. For my last post of fall 2022, I hope to offer a draft of the revised Baldwin assignment.    ... 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. Around this time in the semester, I find myself telling students that we’re almost at the finish line. The race metaphor is used by many professors in these final weeks, I think. It’s my way of cheering for my students in addition to cheering for myself, as I’m super tired too. But wanting something to be over doesn’t help anyone embrace the end of the semester. Over the years, I’ve devised some metaphorical energy drinks for students as they approach the end of our time together. One way to promote student engagement at exam time is to create a lot of classroom games. These games are high engagement on the part of students and low prep time for me. This week in my Humanities 101 class, students devised educational games based on what they learned about medieval England and The Canterbury Tales. Students brainstormed themes in The Canterbury Tales, and then I put a variety of objects on a table in the front of the room. Students used the objects to create games based on a theme or themes on the board. Some objects were the usual suspects: index cards, canvas boards (for board game designers), and game pieces (from other games). Others were a bit bizarre (play doh, stickers, some forks, and a toothbrush for comedic effect). Students opted to either read the rules of the game to the class or to have their classmates play the game for a few minutes while the class observed. The point value of this activity existed, but it was low. If students didn’t participate, it did not impact their grade much at all. I also enjoy having students generate jeopardy questions, which they write on index cards and post up with tape on the board. Sometimes I repurpose a game created for preschoolers called Snail’s Pace Race, where players move snail-shaped game pieces across a racetrack gameboard. I ask students to move their assigned snail forward one place when they get a question correct, but they also get to roll a color dice to see which random snail they will have to move forward. This game is funny because one can get nothing correct and somehow still win the game. One of the very important aspects of games played toward the end of the semester is that they must happen completely in the classroom. Imagine being at the end of a race. You are focused and ready to finish, and you approach a detour sign. It turns out that instead of running 26.2 miles, you’re actually going to have to run 30. Your morale might tank. Minimizing new take-home assignments at the end of the semester, while gamifying final in-class study days, helps maintain student energy by keeping up morale. A second way of helping students maintain their energy at the end of the semester is by reassuring them that you have their best interests at heart and desire their success. I let students know well in advance that I’m not trying to trick them. One way to avoid tricking students is not to create traps on exams; I work hard not to make any multiple-choice questions geared toward fooling students into getting the wrong answer. I also let students create some exam questions. It’s also helpful, of course, if the mode of final assessment is similar to the mode or modes of assessment all along. Many of us know this, but when it comes time for exams, I sometimes find myself wanting to do something different! Now is not the time to think wouldn’t it be fun if I asked my students to do an interpretive dance based on Gilgamesh?! I actually do have these ideas from time to time, but what matters is I do not act on them, at least not at the end of the semester. I have also learned to nurture students during exam week by including reflective questions before exams occur and especially as exam questions. I want to know from students how the end of the semester feels for them. What do they wish they had studied? What did they expect to learn in the class, and were those expectations met? What, if anything, did they learn about themselves as human beings through studying ancient cultures or through completing course assignments? When I first started teaching, I saw these forms of reflection as relevant but separate from assessment, and now I see them as more important than any fact-based question; reflection is the ultimate kind of formative assessment—while answering reflective questions, one forms the self. The points I assign reflect how much I value these questions. What we need to remember to keep evolving as human beings is not the social structure of ancient Egypt, but rather the structure of our minds and the meaning only we can make of our experiences. By encouraging students to engage playfully, trust my transparency, and reflect meaningfully as part of their final assessment, I give my students metaphorical Gatorade as they approach the finish line. ... View more

The following interview with professors Jami Blaauw-Hara of North Central Michigan College and Mark Blauuw-Hara of the University of Toronto-Mississauga was conducted via email in August of 2022. This is the fourth of four parts. David Starkey: My wife, Sandy, and I were colleagues for many years at Santa Barbara City College. That wasn’t always great when we brought home the tensions and traumas of the job, but overall I felt having the chance to discuss everything from big-picture pedagogy to the minutiae of a writing prompt really helped me become a better English teacher. What’s been your experience of being a married couple in the same profession? Mark Blaauw-Hara: We loved being colleagues, and one of the things I miss most at my new job is not having her around. It helps that Jami is a top-notch teacher, so if I was struggling with how to address something in my classes, I could just walk down the hall to her office and ask her how she’d do it, and that would help me a lot. Jami’s right that it’s sometimes hard to remind people that we’re not the same person, though, and that colleagues should treat us as individuals rather than asking us what the other person might think or say. Jami Blaauw-Hara: We met at Michigan State University’s Writing Center when I was a brand new graduate student and Mark was at the very end of his undergraduate career. Thus, our relationship started out with a recognition of our interest in writing pedagogy. I even brought an article about hypertext to our first date, which I’m a little embarrassed about now! I would say that it’s mostly been a natural pleasure to work together, and I miss him in my department now. One challenge was convincing the campus community that we were separate individuals with different opinions and strengths. I was often asked if Mark was available to do something or if I knew when or where he was teaching. My response was always “You’ll have to ask him!” DS: I’d like to end our conversation by discussing an issue that I don’t think receives the attention it should at the college level, and that’s teacher burnout. We hear a lot these days about “quiet quitting,” but I think for many of us dedicated to teaching composition students, that’s not really an option. For me, once that first set of essays comes in the job basically becomes seven days a week until after I’ve turned in my final grades. Our long vacations are a blessing, to be sure, but those weeks in the trenches reading and responding to student prose can be really draining, no matter how much we want to help our students become better writers. Any thoughts about how our colleagues deep into their careers, as well as those just beginning, can avoid becoming casualties of too much work? JBH: I struggle with this at this stage in my career, especially when my current institution is going through some administrative changes that are challenging. When I focus on my students and the importance of human relationships, I am buoyed. Human relationships are important to me, and even though they can tire me, as an introvert, they are what ultimately bring me the most satisfaction in my job. I focus on getting to know my classes, to try to reach out and really connect to the humans who spend a semester with me. Specifically, I use grading conferences for essays where I read and grade papers in conversation with students. It has been a game-changer for me. It decreases the dreaded stack of papers to grade, and it helps me stay connected to my students as people. MBH: I can totally relate, David, and I bet a lot of other writing faculty can as well. One thing I’d recommend is cultivating some things outside of the job. For me, one of those major things I did was really dive into the larger scholarly community. Heading off to conferences or working with colleagues at other institutions on ALP not only gave me great ideas, but it buoyed me up. It’s just good to know that other people are in similar situations, in those same trenches. Another thing I did–and I know you share this, David–is lean into other passions that have nothing to do with the classroom, which for me is music. I’ve played live music in various bands for my whole career, and whether it was being in an official band, just jamming, or even going to see live shows, that helped me interact with lots of other people who were outside of education and just kept me fresh. I’m the kind of person who needs lots of different things to be going on–I don’t do too well if I focus too hard on any one thing. (I’m jealous of people who can really dig into one area and be happy for their entire lives!) DS: Well, it’s been an enlightening conversation. Thanks to both of you! MBH: It’s been really fun for us as well, David. Thank you so much for asking us to be a part of this conversation! And good luck with the book! ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn, a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy, and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition Overview This post is the third of 3 posts from the Generation Project Series. Students worked together on this project over the course of many weeks to understand the impact of generational and collaborative research (See the previous posts: 1) Generation Project Series Overview and 2) Popular Culture Artifact for details). Each student did their part to make up the totality of the team generational portraits in which they had to contribute, negotiate, compromise, create and collaborate. They learned how to represent their research through a variety of multimodal components including: interactive timelines, presentation, and a cross-linked interactive feature. The project engaged students in meaningful research and multimodal practices. For this last part of the project, each generational team drew upon their research to create a visual presentation that was delivered to the class to contribute to the larger conversation and understand the characteristics and expansive progression of the 5 living generations. Presentations involve discussion questions along with a think-tank discussion to make connections across the generations. Students complete the following final steps of the project through the Collaborative Presentation, Crosslinked Collaborative overviews and Project Reflection and Evaluation. The Collaborative Presentation Each generational group creates a slide presentation and an oral presentation. We use Google Slides to allow for dynamic creation and the ability to link to their own Google sites, but any presentation platform will do. I offer the following prompts/sections to provide consistency between the presentations but give students the freedom to design the presentation theme on their own terms. I encourage them to include interactive components and discussion questions to engage the audience. The presentations represent the collective team and individual research and include both the historical background and popular culture artifacts. It is their job to tell the story of their generation and substantiate their ideas with multimodal examples. All presentations include the following: Historical Overview of Generation Timeline Popular Culture Artifacts Ideologies, Values and Behaviors Generational Portrait Team Takeaways Interactive discussion questions References Sample Generation Project – Boomers Collaborative Project Overview: Interactive Feature Article For this component each student designs/composes an individual overview article about the project to showcase on their Google sites. They repurpose information from their presentation and organize it into an accompanying page/interactive article on their sites. This should be an engaging and informative overview of their work that can be viewed and understood by an audience outside context of the class. The purpose is to share their ideas, explain and represent the project, connect the parts, and reflect upon learning. Include the following: Overview of the project and Context Statement Explanation of their team’s Generational Portrait Explanation/Overview and links to Historical Context Focus year research from their group members (link to their site pages) Discussion on the impact of popular culture artifacts. Link to group members example pages. Timeline – explain and link to the timeline. Captioned link to the presentation. Reflections on the project – what they learned Include embedded links and multimodal components in the article. Use subheads to divide the topics for easier reading. Sample Collaborative Overview - Interactive Feature Group Process and Evaluation When it comes to evaluation of team projects, it is essential that students themselves are an integral part of the process. Although I can judge the products they produce, only they know what went on inside their group. This final writing 0pportunity asks them to reflect upon and communicate the inner workings of their group and the successes of the project. This reflection serves two purposes: it demonstrates the ways they understand the concepts and it provides a thoughtful evaluation of their work and teammates’ contributions. I am the only audience for these reflections, and they are submitted outside the framework of the team project. The Reflection/Evaluation involves the following components: Evaluation of the project and what they learned. Evaluation and explanation of their team processes, models and points of negotiation and success. Evaluation of their teammates’ contributions and roles (I have students assign a grade to all of their team members – including themselves – along with a justification. Reflections on the Activity The most interesting part of the project is when the students discuss the overarching ideas and takeaways from the generation project. I provide time for a think-tank discussion through which students reflect upon the impact and connections across the projects. Here are some of the comments from that discussion: We learned more than expected We learned about the things we take for granted in our own generations. All generations have this in common: desire for prosperity and improvement. The impact and development of technology. The ways popular culture and material artifacts both shape generations and reveal generational ideologies. Civil rights are not isolated to a particular time period but an ongoing fight. All generations experienced some kind of trauma that shaped their perspectives (911, WW2, School Shootings, etc.). History repeats itself even though the events are different. Trends and ideas weave themselves back in in interesting ways. Each generation affects the progress of the generations before and those to come. Shared experiences and popular culture bring people together to give them a generational identity. Overall, the project gave students a “personal view vs a stereotypical view” of people and helped them to understand similarities along with differences. Students also reported that the project helped them to understand “why they are the way they are” and that they felt less judgmental of other generations. Ultimately, this project promotes a sense of empathy and understanding. ... View more

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the challenges of finding on-ramps for students who have disengaged from our courses. Students disengage for a variety of reasons, most of which we as instructors cannot control. We watch, frustrated, as students disconnect despite often herculean efforts from faculty and support staff. But if I am honest, I know that every now and then, a struggling student steps closer towards withdrawal because of me—because of a careless comment, a look of frustration, a moment of brushing that student aside. In short, for whatever reason, I make a major teaching goof. This semester, it happened on the last day before Thanksgiving break. I had set aside nearly two hours of our class time for students to draft their final project—an argument. We had spent the prior class composing a reflection on the two argument analyses we had written in preparation for the final project, and we had worked collaboratively on bullet point outlines of the final argument. Students had been asked to pull their notes and outlines together so that we could do the heavy drafting work during that final class session before the break. Image of eggs with emotions. Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash On drafting day, I reviewed the assignment and worked with individual students as needed. I reminded students at various intervals about the importance of having at least two pages of the draft done so that I could provide some initial feedback over the break. One of my students—a multilingual writer who has been tenacious in his efforts to stay on top of the process in the course—approached me a few minutes before our class writing session ended. The student had the reflection assignment from the prior class pulled up on his laptop. “Professor, I don’t understand what you want me to do.” For a moment, I stared at him. We had just ten minutes left of a two-hour session. So I asked him if he had started the argument assignment. He shook his head, no. He had been stuck on this short reflection since the prior class. And that’s when I goofed. “You need to be working on the argument! The argument draft is due before you leave for break, and it’s our last major essay. This reflection is just a paragraph, so you really don’t need to be focused on that right now. Why didn’t you ask me about this last class? You really need to get started on the argument assignment.” He mumbled something and went back to the desk where he had been working. I knew immediately that I had answered his “wrong question” with an answer that was even more wrong. But another student approached with a question, and I was distracted. My multilingual student carried my very wrong response with him when he left class for the break. Fifteen minutes later, a cup of strong coffee in hand, I began to berate myself and imagine all the right answers I could have given, how I could have answered his question (legitimately) and used that answer as a transition to the argument assignment. I ticked off the potential concepts or skills we could have strengthened—reading assignments, understanding vocabulary, prioritizing work, identifying and overcoming roadblocks. I thought of the questions I could have asked to help the student articulate the specific aspects of the assignment that did not make sense to him. I could have walked through the first few sentences of the reflection with him. I could have given a sample, created a visual—I could have (and should have) done any number of things other than what I actually did. Shortly after I got back to my office later that day, I drafted an email: a short apology, some additional questions, and then a description of how I would approach a reflection assignment such as the one which had stumped him. I offered an appointment and reminded him about my office hours—and hit “send.” He did not respond to my email, but he did add drafts of both the reflection and the argument to our shared folder for my feedback. I look forward to reaching out to him again in class. If all goes well, he will finish strong and engaged—despite my mistake. How do you recover from professorial goofs? Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Kelle Alden, an Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at the University of Tennessee at Martin.   Every Year, I Flunk a Decent Person During our conference, I showed my student the math. Regardless of his excellent attendance and participation, without his missing homework and essays, he would fail English. My student looked sheepish, gave excuses, promised to catch up. I no longer take it personally when students lie to me. I try to teach in the moment, to appreciate how my student smiles and greets me every day. Seeing the whole of him will help after finals, when I have to deliver my most difficult lesson. I will still smile for him next semester, even if he cannot return the gesture right away.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Recently, I had the good fortune to attend a symposium in honor of Jacqueline Jones Royster and her book Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women, published in 2000. The symposium, organized by Professors Carmen Kynard and Eric Pritchard, featured panels devoted to Royster’s work and particularly to the deep significance of Traces and to the influence it continues to have across a range of fields. Speaker after speaker related their own experiences with the text, sharing what it has meant to them and to their careers. And those of us in the audience were invited to add comments in the chat with thoughts of our own. If you do not know Traces of a Stream, or Royster’s Feminist Rhetorical Practices (co-authored with Gesa Kirsch), or her edition of Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, not to mention her award-winning and often-reprinted CCCC Chair’s Address, “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own,” I recommend them highly. Certainly, Jackie Royster’s work has guided and influenced my thinking and my teaching for decades. In the eighties, I had the great good fortune to be colleagues with Jackie at Ohio State and later to team-teach a class with her at the Bread Loaf School of English. I remember the team teaching as if it were yesterday and in fact often open my own classes by sharing the first day of that class with my students. The students all introduced themselves and explained why they were taking our course (on the power of public rhetorics). Then Jackie and I introduced ourselves, and Jackie said something that became a mantra for me: “My goal for this class is to make sure that every person learns that they have something to teach everyone else—and that they have something to learn from every other single person here.” And then I watched as Jackie made sure we accomplished that goal—and that we were aware of it and of how important it was. Confidence, humility, and gratitude—those were lessons we all learned and treasured. So, did I want to participate in this symposium in Jackie’s honor? You bet I did, and I attended every session I could, including a blockbuster keynote delivered by Jackie herself, called “Tracing the Stream: A Personal Retrospective on Learning to Think Sideways.” Calling Traces her “soul book,” Jackie recounted her goal of talking seriously, carefully, lovingly about people who had been deemed “inconsequential,” and showing how remarkable they and their lives were. In doing this work, she called on Octavia Butler (I have long known that Butler was one of Jackie’s favorite authors but did not know why until this symposium!), whom she credits for the concept of “thinking sideways,” saying that her ability to think outside the box enabled her to understand the human condition and to develop an Afro-Feminist vision expressed in a combination of fiction and fantasy that changes the way careful readers think. Butler is “emblazoned” Jackie says, in her heart, soul, and backbone, and it’s Butler who helped her form new ways and means of remembering and to “think sideways” like Butler does. Such thinking involves “acknowledging the passions we hold,” rather than striving for some kind of false objectivity or distanced assessment, then “thinking about HOW we are thinking and perceiving.” Then, use this passionate thinking to identify and write about people who might have seemed inconsequential but who were “really there” and “really consequential” in their contexts. This kind of thinking makes way for revisioning and reimagining texts and people. It also demonstrates that, without doubt that those doing “Black feminist rhetorical scholarship” are here, that they are “sane,” and that they are hard at work in the archives and well beyond. Her own archival work grows out of her long-held desire to know and understand the work of the women around her, her spiritual and intellectual forbearers and the obligation she feels to show and honor the strength of the “ancestors.” Over the decades, I have learned a great deal by heeding Jackie’s admonition to acknowledge and honor our own passions rather than trying to keep them somewhere in a box, while we produce “valid” work. This concept helped me understand not only the work that Jackie has done or why she spends time and effort remembering people like her ninth-grade history teacher, Miss Katie Johnson, who taught African American history out of her own personal library—and opened up a new world of scholarship as well as way of thinking for ger young pupil. Such lessons eventually led Jackie, in graduate school, to question all old paradigms of research and to begin rethinking—well, everything—about what constitutes research, about who and what are legitimate objects of research, about what “counts” as a source, about what is “anointed” as knowledge, and what is not. These insights have led me to broaden my own understanding of research, of its goals and processes. And to try to introduce students to this broader and more compelling understanding of research. As a result, I have seen students adopt a whole new attitude toward “research,” now seeing it as something close to them and to their lives and goals. And wanting to pursue it, in their own ways and using their own means. I hope, fervently, that I am helping students learn at least a little about “thinking sideways.” If so, I have Jacqueline Jones Royster to thank for that—and for so much more. ... View more

Don’t take anything for granted. Perhaps this is the most important lesson I learned from teaching online for four and a half semesters. In other words, this post addresses my own experiences with basic technology and also with ADHD incompatible classrooms. No one should have to teach without basic technology--and no one should take basic technology for granted, either. By basic technology, I mean a smart classroom equipped with a computer, a projector, speakers, a screen/smart board, and internet access. Nothing fancy. Or so I thought. In contemplating in-person teaching, the possibility of returning to dysfunctional technology felt daunting and frustrating. The good thing about remote learning was that I could rely on my own technological setup on Zoom, Google Docs, and the course management system to keep the course organized. Returning to the under-funded public university where I would teach as an adjunct in spring 2023 meant precarious access to the basic classroom technology I took for granted when I taught in the southwest. The public university system to which I am returning to in the northeast is touted for its low tuition, as having “more bang for your buck”—and it’s true that tuition is generally much lower than most other post-secondary institutions in our region. But what if the bang is more like an explosion? What if a bang for your buck means classrooms without basic technology and buildings with 30-year-old ventilation systems that don’t work—before and during a global pandemic. I have spent a lot of time and a lot of free writing in the last several weeks trying to figure out if I really wanted to step back into this situation and what it would take to be able to do it. There are a limited number of smart classrooms at the campus where I would teach, and those classrooms are generally poorly ventilated with little-to-no space for social distancing. The remaining classrooms offered limited promise of better ventilation, and also used portable technology incompatible with accessibility for teachers with ADHD. By portable, I mean classrooms that are not equipped with basic technology. The instructor must make reservations with IT so that technology can be brought into the classroom, and set up by IT and/or the instructor, all semester every day that the course meets. This system is perhaps a relic of an era when technology was needed only occasionally, for example, if the instructor planned to show a film. For instructors who need basic technology every day of the semester, this arrangement is not serendipitous. Here’s a short list of classrooms with portable technology that must be set up by IT and/or the instructor that, in my experience, are NOT reasonable accommodations for ADHD: Rooms where the key to a technology cabinet is provided and I must set up the technology myself and/or with IT support every day at the beginning of class. Rooms that require me to bring my own laptop to campus as part of a 1-2 hour commute (each way) on public transit, only to find out that my laptop often did not work correctly with the available technology. Rooms with no or broken window shades. In these rooms, sunlight interferes with projection and students cannot see the screen. This makes technology unusable. Before the pandemic lockdown, I was sometimes able to switch from the incompatible classroom to a smart classroom. If a smart classroom wasn't available, I struggled with inaccessible portable technology for the entire semester. In the past, because of my disabilities, I spent multiple hours attempting to find workarounds to an untenable situation. In particular, I remember that broken window shade and the piercing sunlight that rendered the screen nearly invisible. When we switched classrooms, the students and I were stuck in a space in one of the buildings desperately in need of renovation. That classroom had basic technology, but the temperature was often as high as 85 degrees. That was spring 2020, nearly three years ago. Lockdown moved all of us out of that classroom to remote learning, and the catastrophes that followed. By fall 2022, I learned, nothing had changed. That classroom was still overheated, and ventilation remained a seemingly insoluble problem across campus. Contemplating a return to a stultifying normal seemed out of the question. Preparing to teach from my bedroom during lockdown in March 2020 Photo by Susan Bernstein. March 16, 2020 Remote learning, with strong asynchronous components, greatly supports ADHD learning in sustainable ways. For instance, before the pandemic, I relied on the setup of the course management system to set up my class, supplemented by hard copies of assignments and supplements to support the assignment. When we moved online, I quickly learned that we would need workarounds for students who had difficulty accessing the course management system on mobile devices, including students with disabilities. The most significant workaround was the liquid syllabus, which operates outside the structure of the course management system and offers students a more comprehensive layout of the structure of the course (see this sample liquid syllabus for English 102 by Professor Jennifer Ortiz at West Los Angeles College). The liquid syllabus, as its name suggests, is a living document that more readily follows the flow of the course without the constraint of the course management system. I could make better use of the students’ formative and summative feedback and my field notes to make needed and more visible changes that could be explained in synchronous time, and easily accessed in asynchronous time, amplified by email and group chat. Additionally, because the liquid syllabus is more fluid that the linear structure of the course management system, I found that I struggled less with organization and time management, two issues that are often challenging for people with ADHD. If I had been wary of online courses before the pandemic, I now understand how the unlimited access to technology and asynchronous learning components are incredibly helpful for access to higher education for disabled students, and disabled teachers. Yet, throughout my leave of absence this fall, I also began to understand the contradictions of not returning to campus. While I needed access to the basic technology that remote teaching provides, I miss face-to-face encounters with students, including the spontaneity that happens when, together in the same room, technologically equipped or not, we grapple with the challenges and satisfactions of writing and learning together, even as those memories were tinged with reminders of the consequences of the lack of basic technology and poor ventilation. Even so, isolation was beginning to feel counterproductive. Teaching from my bedroom was steadily losing its novelty. In the throes of these contradictions, I worked remotely with my colleagues to attempt to find a smart classroom. Since the poor ventilation could not be ameliorated, I would have to base my decision to return on receiving reasonable accommodations, the basic technology that I have come to rely on and that offers accessibility as per ADA law. Knowing that I will have these accommodations for those with ADHD eases the way back to the classroom, as does the privilege of being able to make the choice to return to a difficult and contradictory situation. I have struggled to write what seems like a very personal post, as I struggle with the difficulties of returning to a situation with many unknown factors. What was the main point of the many drafts I attempted, then relegated to my info dump Google Doc file? In writing, breaking down the component parts of making a decision felt like a constant struggle, and the writing became as difficult as deciding whether or not to return to in-person teaching. In the end, however, I realized that writing about the struggle cannot be removed from struggling with the decision itself. So this post arrives at many conclusions. Basic technology must be a reasonable accommodation for every worker in higher education–and must be readily available for every student and every classroom. Poor ventilation and inaccessible technology are not merely metaphors–they are material consequences of the ongoing defunding of public higher education. Writing helps and writing reminds me that teaching also helps, even as the struggle continues. Reader, I am returning to an in-person classroom after nearly three years–and as fraught as it seems, also, in unexpected moments, the thought of returning fills me with joy. ... View more

I just returned from the exhilarating National Women’s Studies Association conference in Minneapolis, the first time we’ve met in person since the pandemic began. The keynote address this year was by Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E Richie, whose book, Abolition. Feminism. Now. is making waves, and not just for feminist scholars. I attended pedagogically focused panels that , which invites us to think about the ways in which institutions—including universities—prop up the carceral state and also how they might work toward dismantling it. I was grateful for the community of caring instructors who invited me to consider the book in light of writing-focused classrooms. In this cultural moment, “abolition” refers to the movement to end state violence, writ large. The core argument of Davis et al’s text is that “the movement to end gender and sexual violence … can never be isolated from the work to end state violence” (2). Whether or not you subscribe to that perspective, you might agree that core aspects of “abolition” describe what we do in writing classrooms, which is to help students analyze power structures, mindsets, cultures of knowledge, and ways of being. A few of these proposed “abolitionist pedagogy” practices seem particularly useful to writing classrooms: Practicing capacity building, in which we help students name and value the expertise they bring to our classrooms; Building relationships in our classrooms that foster trust and vulnerability, often with the help of “community agreements” about dealing respectfully with conflict that students co-write in the first week. Repeated check-ins with the class are a good idea: “How are these working for us?” Do we want to revise them?” Creating an environment in which everyone (including the instructor) can take risks, fail, support one another with generosity, and try again; Understanding that our students are whole, embodied humans, and that we can value not just what they think, but also acknowledge how they feel; Practicing slowing down, (as I have written about in an earlier post) and reflecting with students on the process of reading, interpretation, and changing our minds; Envisioning writing classroom versions of “mutual aid”—people working to meet each other’s needs—with resource-sharing, pooling expertise, and modeling collaboration; Trying “ungrading” practices that address the punitive power dynamics of traditional grading. Contract grading is one approach, explained by Michael A. Reyes in a recent Bits post, but there are many other “ungrading” practices informed by social justice goals, some of which I explain here. Valuing curiosity, imagination, experimentation, and even dreaming, perhaps by teaching speculative fiction, such as the short stories in Octavia’s Brood. After all, shouldn’t our writing classrooms be a space where students begin to articulate the world they want to work toward? If none of those approaches speak to you, perhaps the “abolitionist pedagogy” panel’s simple but profound final suggestion might: consider asking your students on the final day of class, “What have we learned? What have we un-learned?” When we—and our students—understand the significance of the second question, we will fully understand why the writing classroom feels like such a revolutionary (and perhaps even an abolitionist) space. Photo by April Lidinsky, 2022 ... 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 have found that many of the lessons that students enjoy the most have a healthy blend of choice and surprise. I enjoy the paradox; a core aspect of choice is control and a core aspect of surprise is releasing control. One example of an engaging activity that involves choice and surprise for students is essay-tagging. Here’s how I came to it. I used to spend a lot of time grouping students for writing workshops. I’d write down observations about individual students’ writing. Then I’d try to create heterogeneous groupings with mixed skill levels and mixed interest levels. I’d also group students based on my perceptions about how they would feel interacting with groupmates at an interpersonal level: Would they like their group mates enough to work with them? For those of you who teach writing, you know that the writing workshop can be inherently fraught. Even with meticulous scaffolding, outcomes can be uneven, and the experience can be unpleasant for students for a variety of reasons, from students not showing up to students not wanting to talk to their peers about their writing. Add to that a teacher-driven workshop-group makeup, and you can get an exhausted teacher and cynical students before the writing workshop even begins. For a while, emboldened with the idea that choice matters, I started telling students to pick their own groups. There were some benefits to this, but engagement was still not at its highest, and suddenly I was getting flashbacks about being picked last for every sports game in middle school gym class. I needed another plan. Unfortunately, a plan did not emerge. For years, I just vacillated between doing writing workshops and not doing them and grouping intentionally and randomly. I had no pedagogical consistency—and no good plan in sight. Then, in 2018, when my twins were born, I started cartooning about parenting and posting my cartoons on Instagram @singlemomtwins. It was my first real foray into Instagram, and I got a bit hashtag happy. I loved how people could find what they were looking for by searching how you’d labeled your work, so I decided to see if I could apply this to my writing workshops. The idea was simple. Students would write some hashtags at the top of their essays that would identify the themes and examples in their work. I told students that their hashtags could represent big ideas or even small points that came up, and they could be playful. Give an example about your time in Australia in one of your paragraphs? That would be #Australia. Talk about persistence? #dontgiveup. Focus on the gods in ancient Greece? #Greekgoddramallamas. I didn’t limit the number of hashtags. Then, I posted each essay title (without its author) on a LMS page with the hashtags next to it. Each essay title was hyperlinked so that when students clicked on it, it would open the full essay along with its author. The essay they selected is the essay they would critique. Students picked the essay they wanted to workshop based on the hashtags that interested them and put their name next to their selection after they picked it so that everyone was chosen! (In our LMS, all I had to do was give students editing power for the page.) This activity created choice—students could pick an essay with topics that intrigued them. It also created surprise. They had no idea who wrote the essay or what it would actually be about when they clicked on it. Students loved being able to pick what they were going to read. It helped get them invested in the work. Students also appreciated that they were chosen not by randomness or personality but by what they chose to write about. I assigned students four key questions or prompts to answer about the essay they were workshopping: Usually two prompts would be technical, such as “identify the thesis statement and explain whether it contains the required components” or “select the paragraph that has the clearest sentences and explain why you think so.” The other two questions would be about engagement, such as “did this essay live up to its hashtags?” or “what might make this essay more interesting to you?” Students submitted their feedback to me for credit, and then I gave the feedback to the students whose work they critiqued, along with my comments. And that was it. That constituted the workshop. Some students talked with each other about their feedback outside of class, and it certainly would work to group students up for a debrief after this activity, but I found that the written feedback was enough to motivate students to write compelling future drafts. And now … tag, you’re it! I’d love to know what you’ve done to engage students in the essay workshop (or similar pedagogical activity). Share your thoughts by commenting below! ... View more

For a recent assignment in my corequisite class, I distributed an assignment sheet, posted it online, and made in-class and online announcements to remind students of the due date, also listed in the syllabus. I sent an email as well, along with a reminder to our GroupMe chat. When I introduced the assignment in class, I wrote the assignment targets and due dates on the white board in our classroom. At the end of that session, a student stopped me from erasing the board: “Could you wait a minute?” He pulled out his phone and snapped a picture. That moment—coupled with a number of assignments not submitted on time this semester—prompted me to pay more attention to HOW my students were taking notes, or more accurately, NOT taking notes. Following best practices for accessibility, I post outlines for most class sessions online prior to class, and this semester, I have made short videos with accompanying handouts for students to watch prior to class and review after class. In the videos, I add annotations to notes and remind students to make a note of certain points. Yet consistently, students in my corequisite composition courses do not take notes: I can see that they have not opened the online notes that accompany videos. I printed one set of notes and offered bonus credit for completing annotations as students watched the online videos. No one took me up on that offer. Most come to class without pens or pencils; they sometimes open my posted outlines on laptops or phones, but with few exceptions, they neither type nor handwrite notes during class.  As I mentioned in my last post, much of the key information for my courses is available in multiple locations and multiple modalities. Corequisite students, however, are not engaging with that material. An example of note taking   In stark contrast are students in my upper division courses, who have taken all the materials offered and adapted it to their own needs, clearly engaged. When I asked them about their note-taking habits, here’s a sample of what they described: Several students talked about the value of listening—one student, for example, said she takes minimal notes in class, using just a bulleted list of key words and concepts. She struggles with writing speed and spelling, and by noting just keywords and concepts, she can keep pace with listening and fill in the details afterwards.  Another student noted that she likes taking notes by hand; it forces her to think about what is important and what she needs to write. A couple of students in my advanced grammar course create a copy of posted notes in Google Docs, and both add comments and examples during class. They can discuss the notes as they prepare for class, and they compare their understanding of the material afterwards. The shared notes become the basis of their review materials and their questions for me. Several students make copies of my handouts and use note-taking apps on tablets to annotate them during class. I have watched these students take pictures of illustrations or sentence analyses from class to insert into their digital notes. An example of a sentence diagram One of the students who takes notes by hand said she almost always re-writes them later, re-organizing and making sure things make sense while the ideas are still relatively fresh. Another student who takes notes by hand pointed out that she uses multiple colors to annotate and organize various headers and examples, and she often adds her own comments, ideas, and examples in a different color. She described the satisfaction of “3D spatial awareness” as she locates information in the pages of her notebook.  An example of a sentence diagram   The strategies differ, but each one suggests intentional engagement with the content—multimodal, personalized, and very often writing-based. These same students have emailed me, responded to my emails, and shown up in my office to talk about their learning.   Like many schools, we offer a student success course for first-year students, a course in which study strategies and note-taking skills are explicitly addressed. Yet 13 weeks into our first semester, most of these corequisite students have not engaged with the content through note-taking or taken advantage of numerous opportunities to do so. When the students meet with me in conference, I generally prod them to make notes, to bullet suggestions and then prioritize what they want to do next. But the advice is not sinking in. Our writing fellows have volunteered to put together some note-taking and online success hacks for the corequisite classes next spring, and if the corequisite students are willing, the fellows will do some one-on-one mentoring. Still, I wonder what else might work for this group. How are you encouraging your corequisite students to take notes? Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

An example of "dark academia" aesthetic Right before Halloween this year, Pamela Paul published an op-ed in The New York Times, “The Season of Dark Academia,” leveling some justified criticism at the “dark academia” aesthetic of social media fame, noting that far from the romanticized view popularized in the aesthetic, “real” academia these days is indeed dark, with 62 percent of the faculty “contingent” workers, with food insecurity rampant on college campuses, and with mental health issues skyrocketing. Paul, who is the author of eight books and former editor of the Times Book Review, says she can easily understand the appeal of an aesthetic like Dark Academia, which can offer a particular version of a “dream life” lived within the walls of ancient libraries. But she suggests there can be a pretty steep price to pay for this particular form of escapism, as her references to “real” academia make clear. Paul’s discussion of dark academia got me thinking about internet aesthetics in general, which spread like kudzu during the 2010s and 2020s on social media sites like Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok—from Cottagecore to Weirdcore, from Indie Kid to bisexual lightning, and many, many more. Linked to visual style/couture as personal style, internet aesthetics were so ubiquitous that Paul didn’t feel the need to spend much time identifying them and that the word “aesthetic” has morphed into an all-purpose adjective (as in “that’s so aesthetic”). My students have, with great good humor, tried to match me to one or more aesthetics—always, I must say, to my surprise. It is always interesting to get a glimpse of how they see me, what they assume about my “style” and my likes and dislikes. As a result, I’ve sometimes spent time asking them to do some freewriting about their relationship and reaction to internet aesthetics in general—and to how they understand their own personal styles in particular. Once they begin to write—and then to discuss—they often begin to point out the stereotyping inherent in such “aesthetics” and to mount criticisms of them as such. These discussions always lead us to consider the degree to which any kind of label attached to people can work to stereotype them, often in hurtful, harmful ways that don’t come close to capturing the “real” person so labeled. But students also point out that such aesthetics and labels can help create group identity, a kind of solidarity and togetherness that they found so sorely lacking during the pandemsic. In so many words, they tell me to “lighten up and have some fun.” But I don’t give up so easily: so I remind them that it can be fun to try on a label—or an aesthetic—if you are the one doing the choosing, but a lot less fun when others are imposing them on you. Let’s think about that for a while and then think twice (at least!) before we make assumptions about people based on what we perceive their “style” to be or to say about them. I wonder if your students are still using such aesthetics and, if so, what they see as their good—and bad—aims and uses. Photo by Ricardo Esquivel from Pexels. ... View more