In my FYC with corequisite course this semester, I am experimenting with alternative grading to encourage students to engage with course activities and threshold concepts instead of grades. This past week, we reached the mid-point of the term, and I asked students to reflect on what they are learning about themselves as writers, readers, and language users.    For over half the students in the course, the system seems to be working as I intended: these writers are completing assigned preparation work, meeting with writing fellows, asking questions, contributing to discussions and peer reviews, and experiencing some ah-ha moments. They’ve produced multiple drafts (a literacy narrative, a discourse community profile, summaries, reflections, and a multimodal remix), and their consistent participation has earned them solid process grades. They’ve expressed surprise at the amount of work required, the extent of my feedback, and their own success. In short, they have engaged, fully, in this first-semester college writing course.    But for the remainder of the class, success in the alternative system has been elusive: they have routinely skipped required preparation, failed to share or submit drafts in progress, written cursory responses in peer reviews or asynchronous discussions, neglected my feedback, and overlooked significant instructions (often noted in bold and reiterated via email and our chat group). Their current process grades—which will contribute 60% to their final score—reflect their lack of engagement.    In some cases, I know why they are struggling: sudden changes to work schedules, hospitalization, Covid, a death in the family. Others report being unable to manage their time, lacking (or not understanding) technology, not finding the resources I’ve posted, and just not seeing the point of it all.   A picture of an empty lecture hall. Photo by Changbok Ko on Unsplash Here’s the question: with half the course remaining, how can these students get back on course, get back up to speed? Are there on-ramps by which they can re-engage in the process?    Take the case of a student who missed a couple of classes and returned on a day I had set aside for uninterrupted writing (a 90-minute block of time for composing is a luxury for many of my students). About ten minutes into the session, this student approached and placed her laptop on the table in front of me. “I can’t seem to get started,” she said. I saw a blank Google Doc on the screen. I probed a bit. Had she watched all three assigned videos and completed the related preparatory steps?  No—she had begun with one video and a pre-writing exercise the week prior to her absence, but nothing else. During the week she missed, she had disengaged. It did not matter that all needed materials were posted and easily accessible: she disconnected completely from the course for a week. She had no idea how to proceed.   She needed an on-ramp to re-engage and meet the latest writing target—without losing more process points along the way. Together, we worked through one of the missing preparatory assignments (a planning chart), listed two additional steps to tackle at home, and then set a reasonable completion date (along with an opportunity to work with a Writing Fellow the next week). While she won’t recoup all the points she missed, she can get back into the rhythm of the course within a few days.     But now consider the student who completely disappeared for two and half weeks, during which he did not communicate with me or his classmates, nor did he log into the online repository of course materials and resources. He then emailed to let me know about his planned return.  He knew his situation was precarious, but he did not want to withdraw and lose the 5 weeks he had invested. He was seeking an on-ramp to re-engage and complete the course.      The same week this student contacted me, I received an email from another student, hospitalized and facing a life-changing diagnosis; she would have to miss nearly two weeks of class. The hospital internet was spotty, but she would do her best to catch up once she was discharged. Her life demanded that she disengage, at least for a few days, and she wanted to know where the on-ramp would be when she could return.      Much has been written, researched, and (quite frankly) assumed about abysmal completion rates in developmental and corequisite writing courses. There are certainly times when students need to withdraw or repeat our courses; these occasions, however, carry significant repercussions, from financial aid to degree progress, for the students involved. Early alert systems, intrusive advising, academic coaching, peer mentors—these are all systemic institutional efforts to keep students learning, engaged on a track to completion.     As an individual instructor, I can support these initiatives by designing individualized on-ramps when appropriate and feasible. At the same time, I must admit that these on-ramps require a lot of additional time and effort from me. If I had only one course, only a handful of students, it might be different. My workload, however, is much more extensive, as I suspect most of yours are. So I am wondering if there are ways to build such on-ramps into the syllabus or course design earlier, to create these flex points for re-engagement in advance. In truth, I am not sure what exactly this would look like.     If you teach FYC or corequisite courses, particularly with under-represented populations—or if you have adapted alternative grading (even ungrading)—how do you support students who want to re-engage after a brief break in participation? I would love to hear from you.   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 Lauri Mattenson. Lauri is a Lecturer with UCLA Writing programs.   Holding Zoom Space She’s sitting in her empty bathtub, laptop propped up on a stack of towels, because there’s no room anywhere else in the apartment. He’s in his garage using his neighbor’s wifi. She’s on academic probation and never submitted a draft. They are using a laptop with seven missing keys and a cracked screen. He hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in two weeks. She’s taking care of three little sisters during class. He’s the only Covid-negative person in a household of six. They are working 25 hours a week while going to school full-time. We’re weary, but we’re all here.    Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

  This past summer, I have enjoyed attending some of Shawna Shapiro’s “Salons,” online discussions on topics related to language, language learning, and especially, critical language awareness (CLA), about which Shapiro has recently published an excellent book, Cultivating Critical Language Awareness in the Writing Classroom. I was very glad, then, when I learned that the Salons would continue, and recently I had the opportunity to attend one dedicated to translingual and second language approaches to teaching writing. This Salon, held on October 7, featured Shapiro in conversation with Professors Zhaozhe Wang (from the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy at the University of Toronto) and Qianqian Zhang-Wu (Director of Multilingual Writing at Northeastern University). Shapiro was particularly interested in these scholars’ views on the relationship between translingual and second language approaches to the teaching of writing in general and on how both approaches related to critical language awareness in particular. Underlying the whole discussion was the question facing all teachers of writing today: what should be our major goals in teaching writing to students today? Early in the conversation, Wu—referencing an article on "'Monolingual' Students as Multilingual Writers” (see the September 2021 issue of College English, pp. 121-137)—told the story of one “monolingual” student who drew a memorable picture of herself showing her multiple languages: her brand of “standard English,” her “Buffalo English,” the “language of her heart,” “the language of her lips,” and so on, making the point that we are all in some senses multilingual. This realization allowed this student to engage much more productively in Wu’s class. Wu went on to describe her own approach to teaching writing, saying that critical language awareness is “broader” than either the translingual or the second language approach and arguing that bringing students to full CLA can be the goal of both approaches. Wang opened his remarks with another reference to College English, citing “Clarifying the Relationship between L2 Writing and Translingual Writing: An Open Letter to Writing Studies Editors and Organization Leaders” by Dwight Atkinson, Paul Matsuda, Christina Ortmeier-Hooper, Todd Ruecker, and Steve Simpson and noting that this relationship had been a fraught and contentious one for years. I take the point and importance of these two articles, but I’d like to add a third which, to me, sets the scene for dialogue and collaboration particularly well: Julia Williams and Frankie Condon’s “Translingualism in Composition Studies and Second Language Writing: an Uneasy Alliance,” in the December 2016 issue of the TESL Canada Journal.  Reading—or even skimming—these three articles provides an overview of the “contentious” or “uneasy” relationship these authors document. To oversimplify greatly, translingual and second language approaches have strong advocates. But they also have critics who argue that translingualism verges on the idealistic or pie-in-the-sky at best and “anything goes” at worst (charges hotly debated by numerous scholars, including Suresh Canagarajah and Ofelia Garcia)—and that the second language approach denies students access to a variety of dialects and languages (also hotly debated by Paul Matsuda, Ilona Lecki, and many others).  The discussion in Shawna Shapiro’s CLA Salon touched on these critiques and others, but also made attempts at rapprochement, especially in terms of relating both approaches to critical language awareness as a set of guiding principles in the writing classroom, aiming to raise awareness of issues of power and privilege, to help students understand the history of “standard” languages in the U.S. and elsewhere, and to set themselves and their own learning in the context of this history. And this part of the discussion led back to the question posed earlier: what should be the goal of the writing classroom? Arguing that proficiency in “standard” English is not enough, that “anything goes” is not enough, and that just “awareness” is not enough, Shapiro suggested this formula as a goal:  AWARENESS + ACTION = AGENCY How I wish there could be another Salon devoted to this formula, opening it for debate and discussion and criticism.  To my mind, there is much to like about it, much to admire—especially the end focus on student agency. I would suggest, however, that one key word missing from this formulation is CHOICE. Perhaps you might say that awareness, action, and agency aren’t possible without choice—and I would say “exactly so—that’s the point.” Discussions of rhetorical situations have long held that choice is both sufficient and necessary for a situation to be deemed “rhetorical.” I agree. And so to me, pedagogies, curricula, and teaching that make real choices available and possible are the ones we should be supporting. Toward that end, we can make use of principles and practices drawn from translingualism, from second language writing, and from critical language awareness. All in the service of our students being able to exercise extensive choices.  ... View more

As I continue to ponder the increasing division between Americans along cultural and ideological lines, I am struck by a parallel division within media coverage of what's hot and what's not in contemporary entertainment, especially in television. My own usual sources for information—the Atlantic, the L.A. Times, Slate, Vox, and similar sites—are filled with stories on high-buzz programs like "Better Call Saul," "Squid Game," "House of the Dragon," "Rings of Power," "Yellow Jackets," and so on, while the Emmy Awards continue to highlight such high-profile favorites as "The White Lotus," "Ted Lasso," "Succession," "Ru Paul's Drag Race," "Lizzo's Watch Out for the Big Grrrls," and "Queer Eye." Finding information and commentary on series that lie outside what is largely a "blue state" entertainment universe, however, takes some effort. Sure, I can look at the Netflix lineup; but, even with such popular programs as "Bridgerton," “Peaky Blinders," and "The Empress," nothing from Netflix, as I noted in my blog post "'This is Us": How Television Ratings Reflect Cultural Trends" appears in the top Variety television ratings for 2021. Obviously, if I frequented the kind of social media sites which skew towards a more "red state" user base, I would find a lot more information on what's happening outside of my own cultural silo. But that, I am finding, is going to take some research.  A few days ago, I came across an online discussion concerning the RTV show "Gold Rush," which appeared on a hobby site I visit now and then (the general ideology of the site can be indicated by the fact that any discussion of global warming is forbidden there). I took note of it, beginning with the fact that I had never heard of the aforementioned show.  I then did some quick research. As it turns out, "Gold Rush" is a long-running Discovery Channel series (related to shows like "Ice Road Truckers" and "Deadliest Catch)" that initially premiered in 2010 as "Gold Rush: Alaska." It follows the adventures of a group of unemployed Oregonians who, without any prior experience in mining, go to Alaska to search for gold. Over the years, it appears that some of them have done very well at it. Now, there are two things about "Gold Rush" that particularly interest me: The first is that the original protagonists of the show were victims of the Great Recession, and the second is that the show is wildly popular with its audience. Let's begin with its popularity. As Anna Runa put it on PopCulture.com in 2020, "'Gold Rush' has had a serious surge in ratings, as the Discovery mining franchise has dominated cable ratings with now four of the five top cable series among people ages 25-54 and men 25-54 …driving Discovery to the top 3 most social primetime cable networks, excluding news" ('Gold Rush' Dominates Cable Ratings After 'Parker's Trail' Return, Catch an Exclusive Season Preview). This is quite an accomplishment, garnering a viewership encompassing a particularly coveted viewer demographic, and yet you don't hear about the show if the sources of your information are limited to the usual high-profile national media outlets—at least I haven't. The significance in all of this goes back to a problem that I have been exploring in a number of my Bits blogs recently: the way that a great deal of American popular culture is going under the radar of most professional culture critics, journalists, and academics. This matters, as I have said, because the study of popular culture is one of the best ways available to get a clear understanding of where our society stands as well as where it is going. If we are missing a sizable segment of that culture, then we are not going to get an accurate picture. This takes me back to the first thing that struck me about "Gold Rush," which is that it began as an RTV-style documentary on the lives of working people from the Northwest, who were set adrift by the Great Recession. There are many things that one can say about such a show—the way it celebrates traditional "frontier" values, for example, or its disregard of the environmental havoc that all forms of natural resource extraction inevitably have on the environment. Its attention to the lives of people who were victimized by an economic catastrophe that largely left the upper classes unscathed, in particular, addresses a class-based experience that popular culture in America tends to sweep under the rug. Whoever they are, the protagonists of "Gold Rush" aren't the Kardashians—and that’s significant. It is apparent that "Gold Rush" tells a story that is mostly being heard by those who already know it too well. This story could also be seen as a signifier of the vast wave of political populism that has swept America in the wake of the Great Recession. The misalignment between its loyal base of viewers and the lack of chatter surrounding it in popular media coverage is why it warrants cultural-semiotic attention and analysis.   Photo by Piotr Cichosz (2020) used under the Unsplash License. ... View more

  I wrote last week about Jillian Hess’s new book on Romantic and Victorian authors’ use of commonplace books and about how they organized information in them. Reading that book got me thinking about note-taking in general, about my own process of taking notes, and about whether and how to engage students in productive note-taking. I don’t remember being a serious note-taker until my college years, when I had some (particularly English and history) classes that alerted me to the fact that I had no clue about who did what when (not to mention why) in Western history. I knew a lot of facts but if asked to place them in historical context, I couldn’t really do it. I remember being especially irritated that I couldn’t connect what little I knew about classical music with what was happening in art or literature or history at the same time. I got so irritated that I embarked on what I now think of as my “great timeline” project. I got a long roll of paper and started at one end with what I knew then (or thought I knew) about as early Western literature: the Iliad and the Odyssey. I located them in time and the below them tried to fill in other information about their periods. And I went from there –from ancient Greece and Rome and the Roman Empire, marching through the “Dark Ages” and the Renaissance and right up to the 20th century. This was in the early sixties—no internet available, and I had only a manual portable typewriter—so I spent hours and hours in the library reference section, just searching for basic information. What I ended up with seems lame in retrospect—almost all white, almost all male, almost all Western European, not even all that much American. I think I somehow knew about the Bhagavad Gita, but my knowledge of other cultural traditions was, well, pathetic. Still, I’d give a lot to see this old “great timeline” again, if only because it represented my attempt to teach myself something, to learn to make connections, to synthesize information, and to do what I now think was a nascent kind of rhetorical thinking—that is, seeing events and texts always in context, always in conversation with other events and texts. And because it made me an inveterate note-taker. I’d start each term with a notebook for each class, later making marginal notes in a kind of meta-commentary that helped me prepare for exams and papers. And grad school was just one long session of note-taking! During the year that I spent preparing for qualifying exams, I filled two loose-leaf spiral notebooks to bulging capacity, with sections for works read, for “connections,” and for “dissertation material.” And I kept these two fraying and fading notebooks for fifty years! So, note-taking has been beneficial to me, and it’s a habit I continue still, though I use digital folders now for a lot of these notes. And I have encouraged my students to experiment with note-taking (and to explore with their relatives, especially grandparents and great-grandparents, who might have kept commonplace books or other forms or notes). Of course, students today have tools I could not even have imagined (the Xerox machine wasn’t even invented until l was well into college). One of my students carefully explained to me how he uses Twitter to take and share notes on things he wants to remember from his classes, saying that doing so helps him retain information—and connects him to friends, too. In my graphic narrative classes, I met students who kept visual notes, filling notebooks or computer files with drawings and sketches that served partially as mnemonic devices for them. And in another class, a group of students began using hashtags to organize and share information, reminding me that Lou Maraj deems “hashtagging” a form of commonplacing in his recent book, Black or Right. The times seem ripe, then, for a renewed look at note-taking, for asking students to describe and to share their own practices—perhaps even to mount a class research project on contemporary forms of note-taking. In the meantime, I think your students might enjoy seeing one terrific note-taker, Professor Amanda Watson, at work in an interview with Professor Jillian Hess.    ... View more

In the article “These College Students Don’t Like the System They’re In,” New York Times journalists Patrick Healy and Adrian J. Rivera convened a panel of twelve college students from diverse locations, political opinions, and race and class backgrounds to discuss and “describe how it feels to be in college right now.” Three out of twelve students offered tentatively optimistic responses. The remaining nine students gave pessimistic responses. Four of the students used words that suggested they felt invisible. The breakdown looks like this:   Tentatively Optimistic: Just fine.  Grateful but doubtful. Excited but new to this Generally Pessimistic (Invisibility highlighted in cyan) Unheard.  Disassociated. I don’t really know another word to say it, but kind of “effed over,” I guess. Small.  Overwhelmed.  Excessive stress.  Unlooked at.  Too necessary.    As a writing teacher, I find the students’ feelings of invisibility very concerning. Whether literal in virtual spaces, or figurative in face-to-face classrooms, feelings of invisibility expressed by students in the Times article seem to become an impediment to learning and growing, as seen in these statements:   Obstacle to Learning and Growing (specific learning issues highlighted in light red) “And no matter how much you say. …I need help [professors] don’t offer it.”   “The administration said [offering new signage] was too much money, and they don’t want to do it.” “I’m taking so many useless classes that I’m paying for that have zero effect on what I want to do in life.” “We made it very evident that we were unhappy, uncomfortable [with the professor expressing his opinion]. And yet he continued.” If I say something that might disagree with [the professor], she would get offended and treat me differently.” “When somebody of a minority is standing right in front of your face and waiting for you to say something so you can actually have a conversation — let’s have a conversation about it — it’s crickets.” “You’re always kind of wary of what that open discussion might come up to be.” “Everyone just stuck with kind of the same idea. …no one really branched out.”   I want to suggest that these words, highlighted for impact, are not unique to this generation of students, and are not necessarily or completely caused by the learning conditions of the pandemic. As a struggling undergraduate student in a very different time and place, I remember those feelings of invisibility keenly and painfully. For example:   My Undergraduate Experiences of Invisibility (students’ contemporary voices in light red) “I need help.” As a humanities major, I did not understand why I was required to take introductory courses designed for science majors. Advanced preparation in math was assumed in these courses, and there was no help available for humanities majors like me who struggled with algebra and geometry, and were not required to take either calculus or chemistry in high school. “...something that might disagree with [the professor].” In English, for which I did have advanced preparation, it appeared that I did not have the appropriate preparation for respecting the (at the time) white, male literary canon. I was given permission to write a paper linking The Canterbury Tales to popular culture, and received, as a first-year student, a very low grade for not focusing on medieval texts. “...no one really branched out.” I felt frustrated when the professor’s grading system was so unclear that the professor, more than once, spent half a class period answering students’ questions. This discussion took place in a humanities class that was important for my major, a class that I had dearly wanted to take. But the extended discussion of grades left little time to focus on the course material, and I often felt bored and frustrated.   Decades later, I can now view these examples from a teacher’s perspective. Speaking to my younger self I would reply:   Students challenges–Professor responses “I need help.” Make better use of the professor’s office hours “...something that might disagree with [the professor].” Follow the instructions to the assignment “...no one really branched out.”  Understand that other students needed information about grading to best complete the course materials    However, I recognize that none of these responses would have been satisfying. I was an undergraduate far from home accruing debt with every passing day. The explanations from an instructional perspective might have been helpful, but they would not have solved the immediate problem I was having–that learning in conventional college classrooms limited to lectures and assessments did not work for my hands-on learning processes. I could have withstood a healthy mixture of traditional and nontraditional learning, but that is not what I ended up paying for. In fact, I often felt invisible.   My hope as a teacher is to become mindful of how easy it can be for students to feel invisible, and to try to recalibrate my teaching as necessary. This is challenging and necessary work in difficult times. My ongoing goal, which is always in process, is to remain open to learning and growing with my students.       I came here to build the future. Inscription on a rectangular light-colored stone surrounded by red flagstones.  Tempe, Arizona, September 2014. Photo by Susan Bernstein   ... View more

 As instructors, we may often think of summer as the ideal time to recharge our pedagogical batteries. However, I have always found myself more inspired to re-examine my teaching (or at least to try some new practices) in the thick of the semester, when I have real students — with their particular quirks and curiosity and challenges — right in front of me. In my conversations with new students nowadays, it is clear that many are struggling to decide if college is “worth it.” The stakes feel especially high for both instructors and students at the moment, when there’s so much bad news about the slow recovery from learning losses and social disconnections students experienced during the pandemic. The New York Times recently featured a focus group of 12 college students who reflect on pressures they are feeling right now. It’s a sobering read, with students feeling “unheard” and “overworked.” Some responses were positive, but overwhelmingly, the students’ affect is gloomy. That’s why I’m glad our university teaching center is currently hosting a book group on Kevin M. Gannon’s 2020 Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto. Gannon historicizes his call for “a pedagogy of radical hope” in the tradition of 19th century Dutch educational reformer Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, who was part of the democratizing “folk school” movement. Gannon also draws on insights from Paolo Freire and bell hooks about the liberatory potential of education that might be more familiar to North American instructors. In his book, Gannon proposes concrete practices (and includes useful reflective exercises in each chapter) that are “life-affirming,” flexible, inclusive practices that center student agency. The book is appealingly slim, provocative, and timely if your campus is also engaged in discussions about the value of higher education (in one way or another, aren’t we all?). On our campus, we try to inspire Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset” in our new students, with first year seminars designed to spark excitement and intellectual risk-taking, often bolstered by “ungrading" practices that I have written about in earlier posts. I suspect Gannon would consider our practices examples of a pedagogy of radical hope. Additionally, we work to build community and connections through strategies I describe in my last post, and which Madhu Nadarajah writes about compellingly in this space.  But pedagogical efforts in just one class are not necessarily enough to mitigate the challenges of this overwhelming moment. I was curious to hear my own students’ responses to the New York Times’ focus group’s question, “How does it feel to be a college student today?” So, I asked my first-semester students to write one- or two-word answers anonymously on note cards that our peer mentor collected. The word cloud of their responses is the image on this post, and it is alarming. “Stressful” looms large, as do words like “disconnected,” “overwhelming” and “exhausting.” I take heart from some of the positive words (“exciting,” “safe,” “refreshing”), but look forward to listening to my students as we consider how our classroom, at least, might offer strategies to address some of their negative experiences of college. I am going to emphasize with my students what Gannon calls the “not-yetness” of learning, a term coined by Amy Collier and Jess Ross to describe the forward-looking pull of transformative education, in contrast to the deficit model (characterized by the grumpy colleague who grouses, “Why can’t students these days write?”). I am heartened to see the word “trying” in my class’s word cloud, as a signal that some students see themselves as people in process, still learning and growing—in response, I plan to share with them my own sense of not-yetness as an instructor, who, after over 30 years in the classroom, continues to try to do better.   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.     Last week, my Humanities 101 students were presenting drawings and reflections about The Epic of Gilgamesh. During presentations, students began communicating with their group members instead of paying attention to the presenter at the front of the classroom. Sound familiar? In the past I used to get frustrated about this behavior. I gave them plenty of time in their groups to prepare! I’d think. This is disrespectful.  When this happened, I would pause the speaker and urge students to focus. I would implore them to give their classmates the attention they would like to be given. However, it finally struck me that my students’ behavior was both emotionally motivated and completely normal. Students were feeling anxious about their presentations. They wanted to do well, and something had occurred to them, maybe during someone else’s presentation, that might even help make their work stronger if they could only reconnect with each other. They weren’t being given what they needed, so they took matters into their own hands. For the first time, I decided to handle the situation differently. “It sounds like everyone needs a bit more time to check in with each other,” I said. “This is great. Right after this presentation, we are going to take a five-minute pause so everyone who needs to check in with their group members can do so. Those who have already presented can take a moment of rest. For now, your attention should be placed at the front of the classroom.” Surprisingly, this worked. Attention returned to the presenter and people took their five-minute check-ins between presentations very seriously. The rest of the presentations turned out to be very strong. This was an instance where instead of judging my students’ behavior, I decided to read it. What did they need? How could I help?  Sometimes a strategy for deeper awareness of student emotion emerges on its own, as in the example above. However, over the years, I have implemented two additional strategies to gain a clear understanding of what students need--especially emotionally--and how I might help. The first strategy is to do quick mindfulness exercises at the start of each class. An example of is what I like to call a “contextual meditation.” I create a meditation for students so that they can center and connect with what is going on for them that day. Since I teach Humanities, I can also incorporate details from our studies. As you breathe in, think of what you are grateful for. Has the bull of heaven destroyed any metaphorical crops in your life? Breathe out that chaos. Mindfulness, or awareness, activities can be playful, like this one, or more serious. They can be as simple as asking students to count to ten and feel their feet planted on the floor. To learn more about some mindfulness practices that my colleague Kate Sanchez and I like to complete with our students, click here: https://www.c19toolkit.com/mindfulness.html.  After a mindfulness activity, I ask any willing students to speak about what they learned about where they are emotionally. It gives me insights about whether it might benefit us to have more physical movement in class, to do more mindfulness work or whether students are indeed focused, centered, and ready to move forward with course content in a more traditional way. Student reflections about how they are doing also allow me to read between the lines of my own behavior and consider what I might need emotionally to be the best professor I can be. If I am doing my job well, students learn more, and if they are engaging with their own feelings, they are more likely to connect to what they need as learners. Additionally, as a result of this directed work on emotions, students often feel safer reaching out for help with assignments or reaching out for help in other areas of their life that need attention.  Another strategy that I have learned that helps me understand student emotions is finding ways to make course content about emotional engagement itself. In Humanities 101 we use the lens of human emotion to read our texts. For example, students are thinking about their anger right along with considering anger in the ancient Egyptian story, “The Contendings of Horace and Seth.”  Classroom activities also involve identifying emotions. For example, students recently brainstormed emotion words; each person shared what they were feeling in that very moment if they felt comfortable doing so. We now use our emotion list when reading texts in class to remind us of the emotions that might have been present for those in ancient civilizations. This particular activity was intense. The students in front of me were full of sadness, anxiety, and stress as well as joy, elation, awareness of the bittersweet, and so much more. I wasn’t going to get to know what brought anyone to feel as they did, but it was a deep reminder of how much we carry our whole lives, experiences and emotions with us. It made me much more empathetic to the fellow human beings in front of me. It made students more empathetic to each other—a form of connection that translates well to group work and helping each other. After this activity, a student reported that she spent the rest of the day with the person who had been sitting next to her; they got coffee, worked on assignments and talked more about their anxiety. These days, I listen for emotion even when it’s not being shared and, when possible, I open space for sharing feelings. My students get better grades than they used to when I first started teaching, which I attribute in part to some of this work. However, the real success, in my opinion, is helping students develop comfort with what they are experiencing inside themselves. Emotional literacy is a translatable skill as well as a survival skill, making classrooms beautiful places to share and learn from our humanity. ... 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 second of four parts.   David Starkey: Mark, you’ve been involved a lot in writing program administration. You were the WPA at North Central Michigan and you’re a past President of the Council of Writing Program Administrators. What have you learned from being a WPA that’s made you a better classroom teacher?   Mark Blaauw-Hara: Being a WPA and teaching definitely feed into one another. One key area that I’ve focused on, based on the interplay between the two roles, is the tension between instructor autonomy and departmental consistency. As an instructor, I’d like to be able to do whatever I want in my classes, and I think most instructors feel like that. However, as a WPA, I understand that there absolutely must be strong consistency between sections, or the course ceases to have any real meaning. If writing courses are required to graduate, and if they are required for specific academic programs and degrees, the writing program has a responsibility to ensure some amount of consistency across sections–otherwise we lose our justification for requiring those courses. Another thing I’ve learned from working in the two contexts is the value of transparency and communication–if you’re asking someone to do something, whether that’s a student or a colleague, it’s really important to have good lines of communication open and to be trustworthy and honest. And finally, being connected with the WPA community outside my school really helped to bring back cutting-edge scholarship and pedagogy to the program and my own classes.   DS: Jami, can you talk about how you and a colleague brought the corequisite model of developmental writing to North Central, where the resultant program won the 2019 Diana Hacker TYCA Outstanding Program Award? Were there certain elements of the traditional ALP model that you foregrounded that made your program excel?   Jami Blaauw-Hara: We have always been a small department, and when we were all unified in our esteem for, and understanding of, writing scholarship, it was easy to make changes. My colleague and I discovered the ALP model from a conference in Baltimore and were persuaded because we had long been tweaking content to improve our success rates for developmental writing. It was a game changer to consider that the model was the problem, not the content. At the time, Mark was our WPA, and he was supportive of the model and helped scale it up with administration. Our college had been chosen as an Achieving the Dream institution, so we were new and eager for data-driven experiments. The pilots of ALP showed that students not only passed developmental courses at higher rates but also that they persisted in subsequent semesters. This was a great motivator for administration. Soon after, we experimented with textbooks and another colleague found that a writing about writing approach was working really well in her classroom. After a pilot, we scaled that up as well. I would say that we were in a sweet spot of having confident, experimental colleagues following the research at a college needing to prove that it made data-driven decisions.  ... View more

  Dilara Avci (recommended by Dev Bose) is pursuing her MA in Teaching English as a Second Language at the University of Arizona. She has taught writing and literacy across diverse backgrounds and age levels, from elementary school to college. She is currently teaching First-Year Composition. Her research interests are the role of individual learner differences such as language aptitude and anxiety in writing and material design with a focus on digital literacies and critical pedagogy. She believes in the importance of sharing experiences and creating an inclusive learning environment and has been involved in a variety of Teaching-as-Research Projects, Faculty Learning Communities and conferences on writing and teaching practices.   How do you engage students in your course, whether f2f, online, or hybrid? I am a writing instructor and act as a choreographer at the same time. I perform on stage every day when I am in front of my students by grabbing their attention and energizing them for learning. Like a choreographer composing the sequence of steps and moves for a performance of dance, I compose my lesson plan and activities step by step. While doing so, there are many factors I need to consider such as the learner profile, several identities, diversity in the classroom, my students’ needs, individual learner differences, student learning objectives, and teaching during pandemic. To embrace all these varieties and engage my students, I try to integrate a number of activities and differentiated instruction by conducting a station-rotation model of learning in class activities, giving students options as part of assignments and creating opportunities for informal and formal reflection on students’ learning. Similar to a choreographer, I ensure that all the movements and steps in a performance (lesson) are systematically related to each other so that the activities are not in isolation but in a sweet harmony. Therefore, I benefit a lot from workshopping, genre-based instruction, one-on-one conferences, and technology-enhanced learning by integrating discussions, group work, and interactive slides with Nearpod, Padlet and Kahoot activities.  What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students? I care mostly about teaching my students a growing mindset, the importance of practicing and building confidence in themselves and in their skills. If my students learned only one thing from my course, it would be the knowledge of how to set goals and work to reach them. In the beginning of my courses, what I usually realized is that my students were quite stressed about whether they would pass or fail the course and focused too much on the grades. Throughout my courses, however, they learned that there is always room for improvement in writing and in life. In my opinion, this is necessary and it aligns well with the notion of “All writers have more to learn” stated by Adler-Kassner and Wardle (2015) in Naming What We Know. In that way, students may perceive “failure” as an opportunity to improve more, and instead of “viewing feedback or revisions as a punishment,” they embrace “writing as an ongoing process” (Adler-Kassner & Wardle, 2015). As a consequence of this growing mindset and rhetorical awareness, they know how to analyze a sample work, draft, revise, and create a better version of their writing/assignment in a planned way without giving up after a messy first draft.  What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? I have participated in several professional development opportunities but the Bedford New Scholars program has been distinct among those. In other professional development opportunities, we mostly talk about what amazing things we do in our classes and how we can even achieve better teaching and learning outcomes in future, which in a way pushes us to put ourselves “in the best shape.” However, the Bedford New Scholars program encouraged us to be who we are with our strengths and weaknesses, show our vulnerable sides in teaching and learning, and create sincere discussions on what we are challenged by and how we can work toward those issues. It is an inspiring learning community in which we have a great opportunity to meet other instructors in the writing program all over the United States, have conversations on teaching and learning without the fear of being judged or evaluated, and realize that we are not the only ones who sometimes struggle with planning, teaching, and giving feedback. We share similar concerns and face many challenges. How will the Bedford New Scholars program affect your professional development or your classroom practice? The Bedford New Scholars program helped me gain new perspectives in teaching writing, rhetoric, and argumentation. The summer Summit was especially helpful with mind-opening guest speakers, presentations by the Macmillan team and Assignments that Work sessions by other scholars. To illustrate how the program added new methods and perspectives into my teaching repertoire, I would like to share the following example: I was quite hesitant to bring sensitive issues into the classroom setting due to my learner background and the learning system I grew up in before attending the summer Summit. Dr. Wonderful Faison initiated a welcoming discussion on this topic and shared exhilarating readings that can be used as teaching materials. She was able to spark new ideas that we can experiment with regarding critical pedagogy with our students. I know that I will be using many things like this one I learned from being a part of this amazing learning community. Dilara’s Assignment that Works During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Dilara’s assignment. For the full activity, see Visual Literacy & Analysis. The second major project that my students complete in the ENGL 101 course is to design a digital poster or infographic. The unit focuses on multimodal elements, visual literacy, and how meaning is created through images, text, audio, illustrations, and design in a digital poster or infographic. In this in-class interactive assignment, the students are asked to choose a visual/image of an advertisement to analyze and explain its purpose, the target audience, what makes it a powerful visual, how certain visual strategies or techniques are used, and their reason for choosing the image. While implementing the activity in class, I benefited from Padlet, a technological tool that allows note-taking and sharing in the form of a post-it. Padlet allows students to add a visual and text and to read, like, and comment on their peers’ posts in a convenient way. I find this tool quite useful in creating student engagement and interaction in the class setting. Find Dilara on Instagram @dilaratunaliavci. References Adler-Kassner, L., & Wardle, E. (2015). Naming what we know: Threshold concepts of writing studies. University Press of Colorado. ... View more

I’m just reading a new and fascinating book by Jillian Hess: How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information. In it, Hess examines the tradition of commonplace books—“a system of collecting quotations and other bits of information for personal use”—arguing that the tradition “continued to structure literary practice throughout the nineteenth century [and] facilitated engagement among commonplacing and associated traditions, especially the scrapbook and album” (3).  I hope to write more about this book when I have been able to absorb it carefully. But for now I want to suggest that writing classes might well introduce students to this tradition (it’s quite possible that some of their grandparents kept commonplace books of their own, perhaps with another name). Some students may already be keeping such collections—in diaries or journals, for instance. In Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics, Louis Maraj writes extensively about hashtagging, relating it to the commonplace tradition and making a strong case for including it in our writing curricula. Hess comments on the commonplace tradition’s ability to evolve “to fit new epistemic virtues and technological capabilities”—so, not much of a stretch from commonplacing to hashtagging after all! In a time of information overload, when students are overwhelmed with what amounts to an onslaught of data every day of their lives, an act like commonplacing (or hashtagging) calls on them to be carefully selective, to choose pieces or bits of information that are worthy of being remembered and perhaps studied—or perhaps simply enjoyed for their inspiration or consolation. So, here's an assignment idea: begin with engaging students in discussion of what topics, ideas, or questions they see as important enough to devote a collection to, then ask them to brainstorm criteria for selection together. Then, ask them to spend a week looking for and collecting quotations, images, snippets of podcasts or videos, pieces of music—whatever they find that brings their topic or idea to life. Finally, ask students to present their collections, explaining how and where they found the entries and how the entries, taken together, illuminate the topic or idea. The presentations should be wide open in terms of language and style, inviting students to connect to their audience in the way that seems most suited to who they are and how they want to represent themselves—and their ideas. I’d surely like to be in class to listen to and enjoy their work, and I hope that at least some students may choose to continue commonplacing; it turns out to be a very good way to learn and to transfer learning from one situation to another. ... View more

  From the time students start learning the terminology of argumentation, they can start seeing examples in the headlines they see every day, starting with the claim of an argument. This can keep class discussions timely and relevant. The term thesis may be more familiar to first-year students than the term claim that we draw from Stephen Toulmin. A simple way for students to discover the claim of an argument is to ask, “What is the author (or speaker) trying to prove?” Answering that statement in a single sentence will usually reveal the claim. More often than not, the claim of an argument is explicitly stated, and in a single sentence. It can be useful to ask students to find the sentence that most succinctly sums up the argument an author is making or, if there is not one, to sum up what that single sentence would be.   There are three types of claims: claim of policy, claim of fact, and claim of value. The differences among the types of claims can at times be subtle. Actually, the type of claim that is most difficult to support is the one that is easiest to recognize. That is the claim of policy, which states or implies that something should or should not be done. Students can easily locate examples of these any day in the headlines: Abortion laws should be decided by the states. The growing and selling of non-medical marijuana should be legal in Arkansas. Books about non-traditional families should not be allowed in elementary school libraries. The popular vote should decide who wins the presidency. Remember, the classification of a claim has nothing to do with its validity, but rather with the form the claim takes. The opposite of each of these examples would also be a claim of policy. The difference between the other two types of claims, the claim of fact and the claim of value, is suggested by their titles. It may seem strange to think that an argument would have to be made for a claim of fact. It would seem that simply stating a fact is enough. There will be times, however, when the goal is to prove a fact, but one that is not immediately apparent to all readers without support. We are not talking about the simple statement of fact such as the average annual amount of rainfall in Alaska per year, but statements such as these: Growing non-medicinal marijuana would revitalize the economies of some small Arkansas towns that are struggling financially. Some states’ abortion laws are putting the lives of expectant mothers in jeopardy. A smaller percentage of residents in Arkansas are registered to vote than in any other state. Actions by Russian citizens reveal widespread discontent with their government's policies in Ukraine. On the other hand, a claim of value makes a judgment. Students can recognize these by the presence of evaluative language in the claim. Many of these will have to do with arts or aesthetics since the value of art is a matter of subjective taste, but evaluative statements about other issues would also fall into this category. The conflicts during the filming of Don’t Worry, Darling are more interesting than the plot of the movie. The book Where the Crawdads Sing is better than the movie. Protestors in both Russia and Iran have shown tremendous courage in recent weeks. Flying refugees from Florida to Martha’s Vineyard was a cheap political stunt. Asking students to apply what they are learning about argumentation to the headlines should help them see the relevance of what could otherwise be viewed as a mere academic exercise. Our hope, of course, is that it will also make them better critical thinkers and citizens.   Photo: "Newspaper Collection, Three Headlines, July 2016"  by Daniel X. O'Neil is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Jennifer Smith Daniel, Director of Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum Programs at Queens University of Charlotte.   Restoring Your Tongue... Earlier in the Center, you’d encouraged a first-year with her assignment. Then sat in the comfy red chair of my office as essential oils penetrated our masks to cry out your anger at the professor who commented on your writing with his elitist, prescriptive perspective. He never learned the story of how your family stopped speaking Spanish at home because you didn’t get registered for preschool after migrating from Mexico. Later, I stood in the front our class as another white women teacher and offered you Anzaldúa. You found restoration in the new word - Chicana.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

 This image was generated by OpenAI's DALL-E.   In the September 14, 2022 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeff Schatten asks “Will Artificial Intelligence Kill College Writing?” He then goes on to describe GPT3, a software program developed by an Elon Musk-supported nonprofit that offers writers a kind of Siri-for-writing: give it a task and it will come up with a written response to it—an often impressive response, as Schatten discovers: I asked the AI to “discuss how free speech threatens a dictatorship, by drawing on free speech battles in China and Russia and how these relate to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.” The resulting text begins, “Free speech is vital to the success of any democracy, but it can also be a thorn in the side of autocrats who seek to control the flow of information and quash dissent. There are lapses and drawbacks, of course: the program will write about anything, even nonsensical requests, and it isn’t capable of generating text about questions for which it has no access to data that would help it create a response. Nor can it deal with highly complex topics—yet. Plus, it is free, and can’t be detected by anti-plagiarism programs. And it is certainly robust enough to suggest to Schatten and lots of others that that the need for instruction in writing may soon be obsolete. As Schatten puts it: Given the rapid development of AI, what percent of college freshmen today will have jobs that require writing at all by the time they graduate? Some who would once have pursued writing-focused careers will find themselves instead managing the inputs and outputs of AI. And once AI can automate that, even those employees may become redundant. I take these warnings seriously, and teachers of writing should be at the forefront of grappling with them. I also take seriously the fact that writing (not to mention writing instruction) changes as its circumstances change, and that we need to be carefully observing such changes and, if at all possible, staying at least a little ahead of them. In that regard, I was deeply encouraged when I attended what the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford calls “September Sessions,” the days before classes begin when the staff meets together to prepare for the coming year. Marvin Diogenes, who along with Adam Banks directs PWR, gave the sessions’ concluding remarks, a tradition I have come to look forward to every year. And with good reason. This year, Marvin began by recalling a new name he had proposed for PWR: the Program in World-Building and Relationship, “with world-building in place of writing and relationship in place of rhetoric.” This view imagines the work we do as aspirational, as a path or a journey. As such, our classrooms are alive with the vibration and burgeoning force of language always moving into more language… every language moment matters. It may seem to stay still on the page, on the screen, on the slide, but language lives beyond. We teach assignments, skills, practices, and habits: more than that, we teach a way of being in the world with language, open to all its possibilities for making sense, making meaning, making connections. Marvin went on to describe how writing can be, must be world-building in addition to being about reporting information, performing intelligence, or expressing opinions. In addition, we create opportunities for students to experience world-building, teach them how to become world-builders, “with that purpose becoming an organizing foundation for all the other purposes they’ve encountered and absorbed in their lives.” So: writing as world-building. In suggesting that we define rhetoric in relational terms, Marvin pointed to the inherent give-and-take, the dialogism, the conversational nature of rhetoric, which posits audience not as an abstraction but as living people we invite into a relationship and rhetorical strategies become ways not of manipulating or even persuading but of connecting. “We demonstrate intelligence,” he concludes, “not as an abstraction set forth for admiration but as a guide or light revealing the written world in the spirit of sharing ourselves and with the hope that readers/listeners will do sharing of their own.” Rhetoric, one of the three original disciplines in the ancient Western world, has always been a plastic, supple art, adapting to changes in modes and methods and means communication. And writing has been similarly supple, developing to meet the needs of different cultures, languages, and times. We live in such a time, when our modes and methods and means—and purposes—of communication are changing, often so fast it leaves us gasping. Into this mix steps AI, with all that it offers, and all that it threatens. As teachers of writing and rhetoric, we have a front row seat: I see reason to be observing and listening and learning everything we possibly can about the changes taking place around us. But I see no reason to expect that such changes will “kill” writing or rhetoric. Or the need for their teaching.     ... View more

Alt: iPhone emanating "Like" and "Love" social media reactions. There is a daft scene in “A Hard Day’s Night,” the Beatles’ groundbreaking music-video-turned-feature-film, where George Harrison opens the wrong door and winds up in the office suite of an arrogant advertising executive. Mistaking Harrison for a random teenager who has been invited in for a kind of market-test interview (the whole joke of the scene is that the exec doesn’t know who Harrison is), the ad mogul quizzes him on some teen fashion that his firm is marketing at the moment, as well as on his opinion of the young woman who is currently serving as the “face” for the advertising blitz that he is directing. Harrison bluntly responds that he and his pals think she’s a joke and proceeds to make rude comments about her when she appears on the telly. Today, almost sixty years later, we can easily recognize who this (albeit fictional) young woman was supposed to be: she was an “influencer,” someone who convinces consumers to buy something not on its merits but instead capitalizes on their desire to be just like the influencer. In the past, such figures were chosen in accordance with the results of extensive market research campaigns conducted in order to discover just what the target market wanted and desired. But, as the scene from “A Hard Day’s Night” illustrates, this could be a rather hit-and-miss affair, with plenty of misses. Now, as I discussed in my last blog entry, the world of mass-market advertising is changing rapidly due to lightning-fast developments in digital technology. One of these developments has been the emergence of an ever-growing legion of home-grown influencers who are leveraging their YouTube and TikTok accounts as lucrative personal enterprises. Importantly, they exist independent of the giant mass marketing corporations who once ruled the air waves. So the semiotic question is: what might this shift signify? A good place to begin such an analysis would be the rise of the internet influencer, which has upended the semiological theses of the late Jean Baudrillard. He described what he called the “era of the sign” as a world of top-down semiotic bombardments imposed upon a passively receptive mass audience by corporate media masters. The famous television commercial that introduced the Macintosh computer to the world at the 1984 Super Bowl offers an ironic illustration of Baudrillard’s vision (ironic because, after all, it was a corporately created advertisement aimed at passive television viewers). The message of the ad has turned out to be largely true, however, because the era of the personal computer has upset the era of the sign, disrupting the traditional monopoly on mass communications once held by governments and media moguls. But as is so often the case in cultural-semiotic analyses, our interrogation reveals a significant paradox: the inversion of the old media order, which has placed so much power in the hands of private individuals, has turned out to be an enormous boon to corporate marketers and advertisers, who no longer have to rely on guesswork to read the mass consumer mind. These days, all they have to do is purchase data-mined information describing the online behavior of the followers of the most popular influencer sites that they want to advertise to. It is evident that today’s influencers are ultimately still a part of a corporate net; or, to put this another way, the liberation that Apple’s “1984” commercial heralded has only resulted in a more efficient way for marketing moguls, like the hapless character in “A Hard Day’s Night,” to get you to buy what they want you to buy. Meet the new influencer, same as the old influencer.   Image: "Checking social media account statistics" by Marco Verch is licensed under CC BY 2.0. ... View more