Morgellons, the controversial disease at the heart of Leslie Jamison’s essay “Devil’s Bait,” differs from COVID-19 in significant ways. And yet Jamison’s central question seems usefully relevant to the current pandemic and its concomitant quarantine measures. She writes: This isn’t an essay about whether or not Morgellons disease is real. That’s probably obvious by now. It’s an essay about what kinds of reality are considered prerequisites for compassion. It’s about this strange sympathetic limbo: Is it wrong to call it empathy when you trust the fact of suffering, but not the source?  I’ve been thinking about empathy quite a bit in relation to social distancing. On the one hand, social distancing is a selfish act: it keeps me safe from infection. On the other hand, though, social distancing is an ethical duty. It’s as much about protecting others—others I may not even know—as it is about protecting myself. Part of what enables me to make the sacrifices required of social distancing is empathy, much like the empathy Jamison comes to feel for the sufferers of Morgellons disease. And empathy hasn’t simply enabled social distancing; it’s also engendered prolific acts of kindness in response to the pandemic.   What I like about using Jamison in this context is that her essay offers a kind of limit case for empathy. With COVID-19, the suffering is all too real, all too visible. But Morgellons is a disease that may not be a disease. As the quotation above makes clear, Jamison works from the reality of suffering to formulate an empathetic response and that’s a useful maneuver for students to consider.   There are, too, some other interesting connections between Jamison’s discussion of Morgellons and the COVID-19 pandemic: Like Morgellons, some still insist that COVID-19 is a hoax or caused by 5G cellular towers. Like Morgellons, there currently is no cure for COVID-19 Like Morgellons, the pandemic has prompted dangerous bogus treatments, including zinc and tonic water, colloidal silver, and, sadly, fish tank cleaner. Jamison’s experience with sufferers of Morgellons, like so many people in the pandemic today, reminds us that fear and desperation are themselves contagious and deadly.   Here are some writing assignments you might consider: Using Jamison and one other reading (from class or that you have located on your own), write an essay about the role of empathy in mitigating epidemics and pandemics. Considering the ambivalent report about Morgellons from the Centers for Disease Control and the self-activism of those with Morgellons, write a paper about the respective responsibilities of governments and individuals in response to disease. What are the best strategies for distributing reliable information about a disease? Use Jamison and any research you might want to do on COVID-19 to support your response. How is the experience of dealing with a chronic disease different from other kinds of disease? Use Jamison, and if you have a chronic disease yourself, your own experience.   Empathy is one of the core concepts in this edition of Emerging. It’s times like these that really demonstrate the value of thinking and writing about it. Emerging Intelligence      Image Credit: Pixabay Image 4939288 by geralt, used under the Pixabay License ... View more

I’ve always been a fan of NPR, and of Scott Simon’s Weekend Edition, but I haven’t usually had time to just sit and listen attentively to it. In this time of sheltering in place and social distancing, however—and on a cold, bleak, and rainy Saturday—I tuned in and followed the entire program. As usual, it was full of stories that intrigued and sometimes alarmed me, like one about the scarcity of clean water on the Navajo nation or one about a group promoting dark humor as a response to the coronavirus. But the day’s show also featured interviews with three authors: Terry McMillan, Julia Alvarez, and C. Pam Zhang. Now I have three new books on my “must read” list: McMillan’s It’s Not All Downhill from Here, Alvarez’s Afterlife, and Zhang’s How Much of these Hills is Gold. So I am ordering these books from my local independent bookstore, which is closed now but fulfilling online orders, and I hope to write about them in future posts. Today, though, I wanted to share parts of the Zhang and Alvarez interviews, which especially captivated me by calling for expanded or re-definitions of writing and reading.   I’ve written in the past about the difficulties of defining writing—and ended up with such a convoluted definition that I had to laugh out loud. I haven’t written for publication about defining reading, but I have thought for a long time about the word’s derivations and its relationship to closely related words that originally meant “to advise.”   So I like thinking about how we define these two words that are so central to the work that we do, and I was fascinated to hear two novelists suggesting expanded ways of thinking about and/or defining writing and reading. Scott Simon asked if Zhang was currently writing and Zhang first responded that she was not, but then went on to expand: I think we have to expand our definition of writing. I’ve taken to saying in recent years that walking is writing. Crying is writing. Talking to your friend is writing. All these experiences help you give shape to what you’re thinking about the world, and that will come back to the page eventually, even if you’re not able to form words right now. I like this expanded view of writing, which certainly fits with my own experience. And doesn’t it seem that such a definition would be reassuring to struggling writers or to multilingual writers trying to coax words in unfamiliar languages? I can imagine students making a list of all the activities they would include in their own definitions of “writing.” I bet cooking would be on those lists. And biking and running and so much more—all activities that free up thinking and lead to writing. So thank you, C. Pam Zhang!   Later in the show, Simon spoke with Julia Alvarez about her new book, which she says is her first written as an “elder.” I’ve had the pleasure of sitting with Alvarez in Vermont and listening to her talk about her commitment to students, to teachers, and to learning, so I leaned in especially close to this interview. Toward the end, she and Simon started talking about the current pandemic and the way it has utterly changed our everyday lives—social distancing; sheltering in place; staying home, often alone—and about reading during this time of forced isolation. Alvarez paused and then said, It’s always been something that reading is about, you know? It’s about being together apart. I’ve thought a lot about that, because that phrase has been bandied about, and I thought, well, now that’s a definition of reading. What a wonderful way to expand our understanding and definition of reading: being together, apart. Perhaps that’s why reading—and writing—are such a comfort to me during this time of national crisis, because they allow me to feel closely connected to others even though I am very much alone, apart. Thank you, Julia Alvarez.   And thanks to every teacher out there who is using writing and reading to connect to students and who is reaching out to assure them that their teachers are there—even when we are apart.   Image Credit: Pixabay Image 690584 by Free-Photos, used under the Pixabay License ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Tanya Rodrigue, an associate professor in English and coordinator of the Writing Intensive Curriculum Program at Salem State University in Massachusetts.   Like thousands of other professors, I am in the process of transitioning my face-to-face courses online. While my teaching and work heavily rely on and are informed by technology, I’ve never taught online. Why? Because I’ve never wanted to. I like to see my students, read their faces, hear their voices, chat with them after class, and say hi to them in the hallways. It was fairly easy for me to re-imagine my curriculum in an online setting, though. Yet I did encounter some unexpected struggles. I faced some logistical issues, namely figuring out how I was going to hold synchronous meetings with two young children screaming “mama” every five seconds in the background. Perhaps more importantly, I struggled with how I was going to redesign my last assignment. I had to stretch out my second assignment in order for it to actually work online, so that left only one week for students to complete something comparable to a final assignment. I didn’t know what that something might be. I thought of not doing anything at all and just reworking the original grade percentages, but then I felt paranoid and insecure. If I assigned nothing, would that still make me a fairly decent teacher?   I debated about this for a long time. During the messy debate in my overwhelmed, anxiety-ridden brain, I suddenly thought maybe I should just heed the advice of the million people on social media frantically sharing ideas for online teaching: identify the most important goal(s) and outcome(s) of the class, and then design a simple, bare-boned assignment that supports students in achieving those goal(s) and outcome(s).   I called my dear friend, colleague, and experienced online teacher, Dr. Amy Minett, to ask her advice about logistical issues as well as to brainstorm possible ideas for my last assignment. She helped me figure out the synchronous conferences/future screaming child scenarios and graciously brainstormed with me about final assignment possibilities. The classes I’m teaching—two sections of Audio Storytelling—are the second course in a three-course vertical writing model in our general education curriculum. My first idea, informed by common social media advice, was to design an assignment that bridges the second and third writing classes in the vertical writing model, offering students the opportunity to reflect on what they learned in my class and the ways in which the curriculum might have prepared them for work in the third required writing class. After talking through this plan, Amy said something that shifted my entire thinking about what might constitute a meaningful writing assignment in a time of crisis. She reminded me that we are living in a historical moment and that providing students with the opportunity to dwell in the moment--to reflect, to express their thoughts, their feelings, and their experiences—in writing could be helpful and meaningful. I immediately thought a version of an oral history would work perfectly in an audio storytelling class, but I was torn. Do I do the “pedagogically responsible” thing and create an assignment that bridges the two required writing courses? Or do I focus on the here and now, and create an assignment that enables students to use writing as a means to express, to learn, to reflect, and to record and preserve their experiences during an unprecedented crisis that will likely change the world and how we live in it?   I opted for the oral history-like project, and here is why. First, research shows that students find writing assignments that connect to their personal life meaningful. Second, while this assignment may not do all of the work needed to help students transition to their third writing course or reinforce rhetorical principles they’ll find valuable for life, it does support them in strengthening their knowledge and habits of mind that have been associated with success in college: writing is a process and rhetorically situated; it’s a means to learn; and it’s a way to strengthen metacognition and practice flexibility. Yet more than either of those reasons is this: an assignment like this is humane, caring, and compassionate, and all three are desperately needed in a time of crisis. Students are isolated. They’re anxious. They’re scared. Their entire worlds have drastically changed within a week. Some might feel like the Apocalypse is coming at any moment. Some might feel too scared to tell anyone how they feel or may have no one to talk to. Some may be food insecure or housing insecure or returning to homes where they feel unsafe. Some don’t have internet access or computers. Some have never taken an online course or never wanted to. A meaningful reflective assignment provides students space to dwell and reflect, which may be therapeutic or cathartic or it might help them understand something about the world or about themselves in the world. It might be uncomfortable or difficult, and they may even hate me for assigning such a project. But I want them to know that they matter, their voices matter, their experiences matter, and I, and maybe even the world, want to listen to them, support them, connect with them, and care for them.   An audio project, which has potential to be played on the radio or on a podcast, is particularly apropos to our current context: audio stories have historically been known to provide marginalized people the opportunity to be heard, to speak for themselves, and to tell their own story with their own voice. Further, voice, according to Radio Producer Jay Allison, has a unique power in connecting people. He writes, “a voice can sneak in, bypass the brain, and touch the heart…. in hearing your mother’s voice, she becomes, in a way, my mother, and I am drawn back to my own history and to .” (Jay Allison, Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound). The sharing of voices brings humanity, empathy, and compassion to the forefront, and most importantly, has the potential to unite people in a time that demands we stand at least six feet apart from one other. I can only hope that this kind of assignment can make students feel, even if it’s only for one second, that they are not so isolated and alone. And perhaps one day, they might return to their recording and feel grateful that they captured their memories and experiences of this significant moment in history.   The below assignment can be adopted or adapted in any course in any mode of writing.   We are in a historical moment, one that will be discussed, taught, and analyzed for decades to come. It’s a moment that’s confusing and scary; a moment that is understood, felt, and interpreted in different ways and in different pockets of the world.   One way people learn about and remember historical moments like this is through oral histories. Oral histories are audio or video recordings that preserve and capture a person or group of people’s memories, experiences, feelings, personal commentaries, and understandings about a person, an event, an issue, or a life at a particular moment in time. Many oral histories emerge from well-prepared interviews and are often placed in an archive or a library.   For this final project, you will compose a personal oral history-like project that captures your impressions, feelings, commentaries, and/or understanding of what’s happening in a world facing an unprecedented health crisis. This audio recording will be a piece of history that you (and maybe others) can return to in the future to further reflect, understand, analyze or remember how you perceived life during a pandemic and looming economic crisis in 2020. And if you’re willing, it will be a collection of personal oral histories about the pandemic that will be played on the Salem State English department radio show/podcast, Soundplay, at some point in the future.   You can approach this assignment in any number of ways, and you can exert as much time and energy on it as you want. You might make this oral history a combination of personal narrative, media clips, and maybe even interviews with other folks that work to construct a robust telling of the past month or so. (I created an audio piece like this for the Women’s March in 2017.) Or you might record snippets of yourself speaking about your life experience each day over the next several weeks: you might string them together to create an audio remix or a montage. Or, at the end of a particularly difficult or hopeful or even mundane day, you might capture yourself speaking in free form or in verse or in a stream of consciousness about months, weeks, or even a moment of your life. There are many other ways you could approach this project: I encourage you do whatever you think seems most fitting for capturing and audio engraving your perception of this moment in time. The only assignment requirement is that you use your own voice.  ... View more

As may be apparent from my title, I am writing this blog on the morning of Super Tuesday: that day on the cusp of winter and spring that the major political parties in the United States have chosen to lurch forward into high gear towards their summer nominating conventions after months of slow-motion maneuvering on the roads to Iowa and New Hampshire. I am deliberately not waiting to learn the results because the outcome of this day is not what I am writing about. Rather, I am looking at the process and the ways in which it closely resembles the structure and experience of popular entertainment. To begin with, let's look at the name chosen for the day itself: "Super Tuesday." Actually, that's a bit of a misnomer, because unlike the Super Bowl—whose name it closely resembles and connotes—Super Tuesday doesn't actually decide anything. The game, tomorrow, will still be far from over for the Democrats even after all the votes are counted (and California's final tally may take an entire month to complete), making the day more like one in which multiple playoffs are occurring. So, why, we might ask, has it been given such a grandiose label, a title without an actual title? That's easy. "Super Tuesday" evokes the excitement of "Super Bowl Sunday." It gins up voter interest, making the election that much more like a sporting contest, and, not so very coincidentally, increasing fan—I mean voter—attention to the mass media outlets that profit from the number of viewers of their election coverage. In a similar manner, the long run up to the nominating conventions, which are much like league championship games, resembles all of the elimination mechanisms—playoffs, heats, Olympic trials, and so on and so forth—by which the sporting world builds an ever-narrowing pathway to a prize that only one contestant can win. But if electoral politics are like sports, they are also like movies (or television shows, or novels, or short stories, or plays) in that they tell stories, complete with characters (heroes and villains), drama, and suspense, whose outcomes capture their audiences in a gestaltic grip that leaves them hungering for denouements. In this way, election polling doesn't only provide campaign information to candidates and odds-making guidance to potential donors but also previews to end results that, even when the polls turn out to be completely wrong, feel like glimpses into a real future. And the fact that those polls can create such feelings right up to final Election Day itself on the first Tuesday in November only increases their resemblance to the gestaltic experience of traditional storytelling. I speak from experience. For even when knowing better, I'm checking Real Clear Politics every day to see what the latest polling says. Though the polling numbers are all over the place and patently unreliable, I still get that little surge of satisfaction that comes from the feeling that the future is something that I can see now—which is pretty silly of me, but if entertainment relied on rationality alone, it wouldn't be entertainment. So, I'll wait up until late tonight knowing that today won't resolve anything and that even today's results won't be final for quite a long time, because I'm in too much suspense over the whole thing not to. And I am confident that I won't be the only one. Photo Credit: Pixabay Image 1319435 by amberzen, used under Pixabay License ... View more

It’s now completely official: the august Modern Language Association, for most of a century the maker of writing rules and guidelines, has posted an update on The MLA Style Center website and declared in “The Source,” their newsletter: “Using the singular they is a way to make your language more inclusive and to avoid making assumptions about gender.” MLA acknowledges that this violation of “grammatical agreement” was long frowned upon, but today they argue that it is not just acceptable but preferable. They cite Merriam-Webster, whose online dictionary now includes a new definition for “they” that says the term can be used to refer to persons whose gender identity is non-binary. MLA accepts this definition and adds that “they” should also be used to refer to a person whose gender identity is “unknown or irrelevant to the context,” as the new seventh edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association puts it. MLA stresses that writers should “always follow the personal pronouns of individuals they write about,” and then goes on to give examples of how to use it both for a specific person whose pronoun is “they” and as a generic third-person singular pronoun.   I (and my textbooks) agree with MLA, which declares that singular “they” “has emerged as a tool for making language more inclusive… and the MLA encourages writers to accept its use to avoid making or enabling assumptions about gender.” Can’t get much more clear and direct than that!   To many writers, including me, this usage does not come trippingly off the tongue: it takes consistent practice and attention to take up this new and important convention. So I’m grateful to MLA for this latest update on The MLA Style Center site and for all the detailed examples they offer there. You may want to invite your students to check it out here.   I’m also grateful for our language, which keeps changing and adapting and evolving. It’s one of the reasons it’s so much fun to teach writing and speaking today!   Image Credit: Pixabay Image 2178566 by Pexels, used under the Pixabay License ... View more

Students are experts at seeing through assignments that waste their time. And thank goodness. We are at our best when we live up to students’ expectations for meaningful engagement on topics that matter. This recent social media exchange between two graduate students captures all that goes wrong when we require students to go through the motions of scholarly conversations. A long stream of commiserating comments followed, including this pitch-perfect parody of an online discussion post. This response racked up the most “likes” and made me laugh out loud: Whether or not you teach online, I’ll bet you recognize the requirement behind this performative exchange. The instructor gives points for students to respond to one another, and students perform, right to the word count, even if there’s not much to say. Sometimes, students give us exactly what we deserve. There are plenty of analogous exercises inside the classroom that deserve skewering in this manner, too. For example, sometimes, we ask questions that are thinly veiled checks on whether students have done the reading rather than asking what they think about what they have read. I have gleaned many insights about meaningful exchanges in the classroom from linguistic anthropologist Dr. Susan D. Blum, author of I Love Learning; I Hate School: An Anthropology of College (Cornell University Press, 2016). Following Blum on Twitter (@SusanDebraBlum) is a daily pedagogical delight, as in this recent exchange Blum shared between Danica Savonic and Cathy Davison on what happens when we ask students to set the conversational agenda in the classroom: Now, those questions are worthy of our students’ time and attention, and they promise to deepen the instructor’s understanding, too. We can invite students to participate in rote facsimiles of academic conversations or we can welcome them into the deeper world of significant meaning-making. Both approaches take energy and time. One approach fosters a skill that can last a lifetime. As Stuart Greene and I finalize the details for the 5th edition of From Inquiry to Academic Writing, I am grateful we are including Susan D. Blum’s wise, student-centered writing to inspire students and instructors alike. Who are you following on social media for pedagogical inspiration? What are your favorite insights for meaningful student engagement in class or online? ... View more

Do you remember your first experience with peer review—in high school, college, graduate school, or somewhere else? How do you construct peer review sessions in your classes? How has peer review evolved in your pedagogy? If you’ve recently shifted to a corequisite plus FYC model, how does peer review fit within that model? My first encounter with peer review occurred in an advanced expository writing course my junior year in college; I don’t recall much about the actual in-class sessions, other than the fact that we were working with hard copies (this was the late 1980s) read aloud to a small group. Mostly I remember anxiety: I dreaded the vulnerability I faced while listening to group members critique my writing and argue about whether or not I had overused semicolons. (I actually remember writing a sentence in an observation paper about a child with “tousled” hair. I loved the word and knew exactly why I wanted to use it—having encountered it in my own reading—but I had no clue how to pronounce it. The fear of making a basic pronunciation mistake sent my already entrenched anxiety skyrocketing). A few years later, as a graduate student with very little training in composition pedagogy, I was teaching a sheltered section of first-year composition for international students, and I assigned peer reviews (as I was told to do) regularly. But the students, lacking confidence in their own skills in English and receiving no clear guidance from me, did not find the exercise helpful. I might have abandoned peer review altogether in my second year of teaching, but shortly before the term started, I was asked to join a small group exploring writing pedagogy, led by Dr. Nancy Thompson and Dr. Rhonda Grego. We read Marie Wilson Nelson’s At the Point of Need, kept teaching journals, and conducted personal research into our teaching. Critically, we used Elbow and Belanoff’s A Community of Writers as our class text, and the small companion booklet that came with it, Sharing and Responding, as a guide for peer review. With a tangible set of instructions for peer review, students began to respond much more positively—and I found sufficient reason to try peer review in my classes again (and fell in love with teaching multilingual and so-called “basic” writers at the same time). Although I continually adjust and refine the way I conduct peer review, I generally come back to the principles and techniques in Sharing and Responding every semester, particularly in helping students understand the value of descriptive and “sayback” responding. This sort of non-judgmental listening and describing does much to alleviate the anxiety and panic that some students may feel. (I was reminded of this anxiety at the recent Georgia Association for Developmental Education conference, where I attended a “Writing Marathon” session requiring participants to compose and then read writing aloud to colleagues we did not even know.  I was asked to read first in my group, and I know my blood pressure was climbing when three other sets of eyes were trained on me and my yellow notebook. But the only response group members were allowed to give after each reading was this: “Thank you for sharing.” We did three iterations, and it was much easier the third time). When it’s time for more directed feedback in class, we do preliminary work first: we discuss the benefits of peer review beyond improving the draft at hand, and we practice offering feedback on drafts that class members did not write. I generally have students do peer review in the first-year composition class, not during the corequisite, although we may use corequisite class time to discuss ways of using and responding to peer feedback. This semester, our first peer review was conducted in a virtual space, and after some training and practice exercises, students responded to the drafts of others in their small group using the comments features on Google Docs. I asked students to focus on content and organization-- saying back what they heard, responding to content, clarifying points of confusion, and asking questions. Since these drafts were still relatively early, I asked them not to focus on grammar or punctuation. Seventeen students participated in the first peer review, and they made a total of 155 comments, most of which focused on personal connections to content, praise for strong wording or support, and suggestions for expansion (requesting definitions or more information). Each draft (which was 2-3 pages in length) received an average of 9 peer comments (in contrast, the papers received on average 13 targeted comments from me).   I saw much to be pleased about as I reviewed the comments: for the most part, students took the exercise seriously and made perceptive comments that relied heavily on modality and suggestion (might, could, would, can, consider, etc.), as well as questions.  But neither the numbers nor a linguistic analysis provides an adequate measure of the success of the review, although both suggest students met the goal of engaging in substantive talk—and metatalk—about writing. Now I want to understand how students value the peer review process and what they will do with the comments they were given; in the past, some students have told me that the only comments worth considering are the ones from me, since I am doing the grading. This week, students will be reflecting on the peer review exercise and their next steps (in a journal exercise). I am eager to see their responses. How do you set up peer review for students in FYC/corequisite courses? How do you assess the effectiveness of those sessions? I would love to hear your strategies. ... View more

As the countdown to the annual Academy Awards ceremony ticks away, I'm seeing more and more articles in the Entertainment section of the Los Angeles Times like this one, whose aim is to predict the outcomes of the votes for the prized categories of individual performance and best picture. What all these columns have in common is the way that they are essentially using a simplified form of predictive analytics in their prognostications, aggregating data from past awards seasons to pronounce what is going to happen this time around. You know the sort of thing: if Brad Pitt wins a SAG, his Oscar's in the bag. Grab a Golden Globe, and your picture's Oscar gold. Even when the statistics aren't all that compelling (as in the seven-out-of-twenty-five correlation between winning an acting SAG and an Oscar as reported in the Times article linked to above), stats are equated with destiny, much in the same way that presidential polls are touted as sure-fire crystal balls upon the future—and you know how well that worked out in 2016. Reliable or not, however, this preference for data over careful analysis of the relative aesthetic merits of the various contenders for the big film prizes bears cultural significance. For this is the era of BIG DATA, an age when crunching numbers fuels vast advertising, educational, and AI enterprises that not only make piles of money for those who run them but which are also, and more significantly, widely believed to hold the key to solving all our problems, including "fixing" our higher education system. (Remember how robo-grading was going to liberate—or perhaps more accurately, eradicate—writing instructors? Or MOOCS?). But no amount of disappointing results seems to dampen what is almost a religious enthusiasm for the power of aggregated data. And now this faith appears to have engulfed the traditional ritual of handicapping the Oscars. Which leads to a second significance. Because even if the big promises of Big Data haven't exactly been met quite yet, there are serious problems that it could address (for example, it sure would be nice if the power of aggregated data could be applied to reversing global warming), but guesstimating the Oscar awards in advance isn't such a problem. So the fact that entertainment writers are employing the techniques of data-driven analytics to prognosticate who's going to win what, indicates that their readers care so much about the outcome of a ritual whereby an ultra-exclusive club celebrates itself through an annual awards ceremony which even includes a royal red-carpet treatment, that they are eager for any glimpse into the future that they can get. And in a data-driven era, it should come as no surprise that data-driven Oscar augury has become, as they say, a "thing." Photo Credit: Pixabay Image 3679610 by analogicus, used under Pixabay License ... View more

(A Brief Homage to Wendy Bishop) I was lucky to learn from and collaborate with the late Wendy Bishop, whose loss—more than sixteen years ago now—is still hard for me to accept. Wendy was a force of nature, a whirlwind of ideas about how to create better writers and better teachers of writing. Her early focus was on employing composition scholarship to inform the teaching of creative writing, but she quickly became just as, if not more, interested in ways that creative writing could bring life to expository writing courses. Wendy’s first book, Released into Language, was published in 1990, the year I began full-time college teaching, so she has been a constant presence in my thinking about pedagogy. Whenever I encounter a new teaching challenge, I wonder how Wendy would face it, and now that nearly all first-semester composition courses in California’s community colleges are accelerated, I’m returning once again to her work for ideas and inspiration. Always ahead of the curve, Wendy seems to have intuited acceleration’s insight that students are ill-served by what Katie Hern calls “layers of remedial coursework.” Wendy writes in Released into Language that it “is no longer effective to remain tied to hierarchical ways of thinking,” arguing: We should not assume that “basic” writing instruction should take place at “lower levels,” while upper-level classes exist merely to sort the “best” writers into smaller and smaller cadres. Instead, teachers need to look at the beliefs, goals, and pedagogy for each of these levels and to dismantle artificial “class” boundaries that have been formed, mainly, by a relatively unstructured historical progression. (xvi-xvii) Wendy’s punning on “‘class’” is particularly appropriate to acceleration, as one of its chief goals is to break down the class (and racial) barriers that keep students entangled in pre-college-level classes. Another aspect of Wendy’s work that is especially germane to acceleration is her persistent turning from the theoretical to the practical. Yes, she was concerned to ground her pedagogy in writing research, but she was never content to leave an idea alone until she could figure out how to apply it in the classroom. For all its cutting-edge scholarship, Released into Language is also a goldmine of specific ways that teachers can help their students become better writers. Wendy emphasizes the importance of course design and generative writing, which, are crucial in acceleration, where students benefit from clearly articulated goals and lots of help early in the writing process, when the blank page or screen can look so forbidding. Accelerated composition instructors often teach Carol Dweck’s work on growth and fixed mindsets and Angela Duckworth’s ideas about grit, but Wendy was there much earlier, letting writers know that failure is not only okay, it’s inevitable—and temporary. “‘Take Risks Yourself’” was the title of an interview I published with her, and she was forever pushing herself, and the writers around her—both student and professional—to experiment and expand their repertoire of rhetorical moves, even if it meant falling on our faces. Wendy loathed the Old School workshop model, with the bored professor fixated on taking down his—almost always his—students a peg or two, but she loved to create settings in which students could share their work with one another. Above all, she was keen to shift the focus “from the production of texts to the development of students as writers” (Bishop and Starkey 38). Accelerating students are often underconfident because they don’t yet have a language for talking about when and where their writing is, or isn’t, working. In The Subject Is Writing, Wendy maintains that “a well taught composition or creative writing class should allow you to explore writing beliefs, writing types (genres) and their attributes and your own writing process. You will be successful to the degree that you become invested in your own work” (251). Metacognition, which is so essential to acceleration, was second nature to Wendy: a writing task was never complete until the writer had examined and learned from it. Most importantly, she though writing was fun, an insight I am always trying to convey to my students. Wendy wrote all the time, and sometimes seemed to put as much passion into her emails as she did into her poems, essays and books. I received my last email shortly before she died on November 21, 2003, at the age of 50 from complications caused by acute lymphoblastic leukemia. She talked briefly about her illness, but her focus, as always, was on the work ahead of her. Afterwards, I remember thinking, How she loved to write! As an epitaph, I think that would have made her smile.   Works Cited Bishop, Wendy. Released into Language: Options for Teaching Creative Writing. NCTE, 1990. ---. “When All Writing Is Creative and Student Writing Is Literature.” The Subject Is Writing, edited by Wendy Bishop, Boynton/Cook, 1993, pp. 249-260. Bishop, Wendy, and David Starkey. Keywords in Creative Writing. Utah State UP, 2006. Hern, Katie. “Some College Students More Prepared than Placement Tests Indicate.” EdSource, 12 Nov. 2015, edsource.org/2015/some-college-students-more-prepared-than-placement-tests- indicate/90418. Starkey, David. “Take Risks Yourself: An Interview with Wendy Bishop and Gerald Locklin.” Writing on the Edge, vol. 7, no. 1, 1995, pp. 100-110. ... View more

In my last blog, I presented a semiotic interpretation explaining how the movie Ford vs. Ferrari reflects a larger cultural signification that goes well beyond the history of Formula 1 racecars and their driver/designers. I wish to do something like that in this analysis by looking at the current release of Clint Eastwood's biopic Richard Jewell, a film that, on the face of it, would appear to focus on a rather unlikely subject for mass-market cinematic appeal. But, as we will see, the time is just as ripe for Richard Jewell as it is for Ford vs. Ferrari, and what the two movies have in common says a great deal about the current state of American consciousness.   To begin, then, when I first started seeing promotional billboards for Richard Jewell while driving to work, I had no idea who Richard Jewell was and why there should be a movie about him. It isn't that I have forgotten the bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, nor Jewell's ordeal when he went practically overnight from hero to suspect; I simply hadn't remembered the name. And I’m probably not alone in that.   But this is what makes the appearance of this film so semiotically interesting. Biopics are usually about household names, and "Richard Jewell" is not exactly a household name. We can (as I do), deeply sympathize for what he had to go through, but his experience doesn't rise to the historical level of, say, the infamous railroading of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. So why, I wondered, was this film made at all? Who was its intended audience?   A clue to the matter can be found in a description of the movie that appears on the main page when you perform a Google search on Richard Jewell. Here's what I've read: "American security guard, Richard Jewell, heroically saves thousands of lives from an exploding bomb at the 1996 Olympics, but is unjustly vilified by journalists and the press who falsely report that he was a terrorist."   Note the emphasis in this plot description on "journalists and the press," which ignores the role of the FBI, whose leaks brought Jewell into the glare of the public spotlight in the first place. Note also how the movie has already raised a good deal of controversy for the way that it treats the Atlantic Journal-Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs, who first broke the story. Put it all together and an explanation for what Richard Jewell semiotically signifies begins to emerge.   For Richard Jewell tells the story of an ordinary lower-middle-class man who was nearly destroyed by the actions of what are widely regarded as "media elites" by those who comprise the current populist political movement in America. Such a movie is tailor-made for such viewers, who will identify with the "ordinary Joe" figure of Richard Jewell and see in his suffering a proof of their suspicions. And it may be no accident that the release of the film was timed for the run up to a presidential election that will pit a populist favorite against the "elites" that they fear.   These same viewers, on a more positive but related note, tend to regard people like Carroll Shelby as cultural heroes and identify with them. Muscle cars, NASCAR, automobiles cherished as signs of freedom and prosperity: all these phenomena are touchstones for an America where Shelby's triumph over the elites at Ferrari are the dream version of Richard Jewell's personal nightmare. Ford vs. Farrari, one might say, is simply the sunny inverse of Richard Jewell.   Further evidence for my interpretation lies in the fact that Clint Eastwood made the movie. This is not an attack on Eastwood: my point is that his films particularly appeal to populist audiences (consider the success of Sully, and, more strikingly, American Sniper). Please also note that I am not saying that making movies with populist appeal is a bad thing. After all, Michael Moore has made a career out of his own sort of populist vision, albeit one that is diametrically opposed to the kind of populists I am writing about here. The key point to keep in mind when teaching cultural semiotics is that semiotic analyses are not political judgments. They simply try to explain what things mean. Photo Credit: Pixabay Image 1608127 by YazanMRihan, used under Pixabay License ... 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 I recently attended the Conference on Community Writing in Philadelphia. This wonderful conference recognized many community engaged projects in which students move beyond the walls of the classroom to contribute to the greater good of their communities through writing. The vision of the Coalition for Community Writing supports: Writing as a mindful, creative, and social practice, forged in community partnerships, to promote socially, economically, and environmentally resilient communities. We are reimagining how communities write themselves; how writing is used as a tool for public awareness and expression, for dialogue across difference, and for community building; and how higher education and communities can collaborate toward these ends. We envision a transformation of higher education to encourage impactful curricula and research as essential outputs of institutions that serve as a vital part of their communities. I attended many thoughtful, passionate sessions in which teachers from a variety of institutions presented on writing projects that focused on immigration, homelessness, social justice and other important community partnerships. I was moved by understanding the impact we can make through including these kinds of hands-on learning opportunities in our writing classes. Many universities now include community engagement and service learning to promote this kind of involvement for their students as part of their institutional missions. Digital writing and multimodal composition provide many opportunities for students to create artifacts that contribute to awareness campaigns for all kinds of community engagement. Students can work with their campus communities, community partners, and participate in online conversations through social media campaigns and participatory journalism. Some of these projects are ongoing and supported by our institutions and others are one time, limited projects that support an immediate community need. I have included examples in the resources section below for consideration and brainstorming. I have worked with many types of community-engaged projects (large and small) throughout my career that focused on different populations, organizations and community issues. Sometimes I have students come up with projects on their own and other times I come to them with established partnerships. Here is one example of an ongoing partnership in which, over the past couple of years, my students have worked with an organization, Rescue Dog Games that brings awareness to the importance of pet adoption: Rescue Dog Games brings these strong pet rescues and organizations together to bring awareness to the need in the Atlanta area “to adopt—not shop.” This group works together with local and national rescue organizations to create partnerships and promote awareness for pet adoption along with an annual festival that “shines a light on the importance of pet adoption and encourages people to get outside and PLAY more with their dogs.” For this project, my students collaborated with Rescue Dog Games and 20 of their community partners for a rescue dog event to promote awareness and create community connections between rescue organizations. Students created digital content for each organization to tell the stories of the organizations and to promote the festival. Each student created an interactive feature article and a digital story. The students worked in content design teams to organize, edit, and manage project components. These stories now appear on the Rescue Dog Games website story page and are used by the partner organizations to showcase their stories and to promote their goals. This relationship with this organization has gone beyond this single class and semester as subsequent classes created digital stories of the event day and have started a digital story archive for adoption stories that feature individual dogs that have found their “fur-ever homes” in new families. Background Readings and Resources Students Doing Good: Top 10 College Service Projects Do Something Change.org CCC Statement on Community Engaged Learning   The St. Martin’s Handbook: Ch 11e: Conducting Field Research – Conducting Interviews, Part 7- Ch 32: Documenting Sources- MLA Style The Everyday Writer(also available with Exercises😞 Ch 10h: Conducting Field Research Appropriately, Ch 54: The Basics of MLA Style Easywriter (also available with Exercises): Ch 11f: Doing Field Research, Ch. 15: MLA Style Assignment Overview: Goal: To work with a community partner to create a human/dog interest digital story and interactive feature article written and produced to be used on the Rescue Dog Games website and in the Rescue Dog Games social media and other media outlets.   Interview and Visual Content Curation: Each student coordinates an interview with the community partner to research the group and curate visual content for the story.   Compose, Revise and Edit feature articles and digital stories   Content Design Teams will work together to give feedback, revise and edit the content to deliver to the client. Teams responsible for organizing communication, tasks, goals and deadlines. Teams create a Google drive team space to keep minutes of their meetings, curate images, storyboards, scripts, peer response and final deliverables.   Note: All content must adhere to professional communication practices including citation and attribution, sourcing of images (that are not original) and the use of copyright free music. Reflections on the Activities I have found that when students work with real-world community partners, their sense of engagement and ownership is increased. Not only are they contributing to larger conversations about important issues, they also get the opportunity to work in real professional settings that require them to shape strong professional communication and work ethics. They learn about deadlines, client feedback, style guides and professional collaboration. This kind of work also moves their classroom work into public spaces and allows them to create showcase pieces in their developing writing portfolios. More than ever, employers are looking for the kinds of skills students gain from these kinds of projects. What better use of our classroom time than engaging students to use their writing skills to contribute to the greater good? ... View more

KAREN TRUJILLO (recommended by Lauren Rosenberg) is pursuing her PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Professional Communication at New Mexico State University. She teaches Rhetoric and Composition, Business and Professional Communication, Technical and Scientific Communication, and the Rhetoric of the Horror Story. Karen also serves as a Writing Program Coordinator, Writing Program Mentor, and she has spent three years as a Writing Center Coordinator. She has taught both face-to-face and online in English and Education Leadership and Administration Departments. Her research interests include feminist theory, pedagogy, dissident literature, expressions of emotion, and enactments of resilience in the composition classroom. She expects to graduate in December 2019. What is your greatest teaching challenge? The challenge of knowing that a handful of students in my English 111 – Rhetoric and Composition won’t return after their first year of college is one of my greatest. New Mexico grants new graduates with a Lottery Scholarship that requires 2.5 GPA while taking 15 credit hours (5 classes). These requirements can be stressful for first-year students who have outside obligations and struggles that are unseen by teachers. Each move I make begins with the knowledge that each writing prompt, essay, and project is an opportunity to give students resources they can take with them, whether they stay in college or not.    I often think about Pegeen Reichert Powell’s Retention and Resistance: Writing Instruction and Students Who Leave and the recognition that there is not one single thing that universities can do to reduce attrition rates. Powell further asks that administration and faculty focus on the students who are enrolled at present, rather than working to try to assure that they do not leave. Keeping this in mind, I consistently work to create and maintain a space in which students are given opportunities to write often, and to write about present interests, experiences, and what they feel are relevant topics, rather than preparing them to transfer learning to the next courses leading to graduation.   How does the next generation of students inspire you? The next generation of students inspires me in a way that speaks to my position as a nontraditional student. While I recognize that there is not an ideal classroom, my students bring behaviors and perspectives that I didn’t often see when I first attended college in the early 1990s. The classroom was a quiet place for me. I did not choose a rhetorical silence but chose not to speak because I didn’t feel included. I am inspired by the next generation of students who I believe are and will become more accustomed to actions that are inclusive and to choosing words that unite with the efforts of dedicated composition teachers. If the next generation of students that becomes more accustomed to conflict, the composition classroom can be a place where students learn to share experiences of difference in ways that I don’t feel would have been comfortable when I took first-year composition. With time, practice, and facilitation of thoughtful composition teachers, the next generation gives me hope that we will spend less time searching for things we have in common, and spend more time acting as listeners, thoughtful speakers, and those who choose to and are comfortable with others’ silences.   What's it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program?   Anyone who has written a dissertation, prepared for, or joined the academic job market search knows that it can be a scary time. Although committees and peers are reassuring, it can be a lonely process. Being part of Bedford New Scholars reassured me that there are others who not only understand the struggles, but are also there to listen, give advice, and become cheerleaders. I have to say that, undoubtedly, each of us is from unique learning and teaching experiences, which I think ended up being what drew us together. With each new activity, I found that it was our differences that encouraged unpacking of new ideas and provided opportunities to step outside our usual line of thinking and onto a new track. Being part of Bedford New Scholars is like having someone hand select a support system for you and give you the gift of new friends at a time when you had no idea you needed it most.    What did you learn from other Bedford New Scholars? I sometimes need to be reminded that teaching is what I am called to and I can’t imagine doing anything else. The Summit at Bedford St. Martin came on the heels of a trying semester during which I had just completed the first chapters of my dissertation. At the risk of drenching you in sap, receiving responses such as, “I totally get that,” or “Ugh, I’ve felt that way too,” renewed my energy and hope. I gained a reading list from Nina Feng, a reading response assignment from Misty Fuller (that I used this semester), love for Canva (and hopes for creativity) from Caitlin Martin, and a new approach to rhetorical analysis from Marissa McKinley. Along with these contributions, I learned that no matter where we are coming from, we all share the experience of being a “Border” university of some type. I learned that while my experiences are unique and valuable, I have a diverse support system who will do their best to listen and give meaningful, well considered feedback. The Summit was the best possible place I could have taken time out to learn that the loving energy of my peers is only a few clicks away.     Karen’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 Karen’s assignment. You can view the full details here: Advocacy Project  My Assignment that Works is a four-part assignment titled, The Advocacy Project. Originally, this project was created by Dr. Christopher Burnham. After working as a research and teaching assistant using this assignment for six years, I modified this project for my own use in first-year Rhetoric and Composition. This is a social justice project that can be scaffolded over the course of a 15-week semester, culminating in a final exam in the form of a project. The final project consists of a written portion, a handout, and a presentation using the media that best serves the aims of the project. The assignment itself is broken into an exploration, local research, global research, and numerous other considerations such as stasis, and concessions and rebuttals on one’s position. The big idea is that the student will find something that they are passionate about, will research, and will advocate action or policy to further the passion. Each semester, I find myself re-writing this assignment in small ways in response to my teaching reflections and student responses. I love that it’s a living document that seems to be growing up alongside me on my journey toward completion of doctoral studies. Learn more about the Bedford New Scholars advisory board on the Bedford New Scholars Community page. ... View more

This blog series is written by Julia Domenicucci, an editor at Macmillan Learning, in conjunction with Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.  For many people, the fall and winter months are full of holidays--complete with traveling, gifts, family gatherings, and catching up with friends. They’re also known for their potential for stressful conversations. We hope these suggested podcasts and assignments--about misinformation and disinformation, evidence, redundancy, and apology--can help your students go into the holidays stress-free!    Podcasts have been around for a while, but their popularity seems to increase every day—and for good reason! They are engaging and creative, and they cover every topic imaginable. They are also great for the classroom: you can use them to maintain student engagement, accommodate different learning styles, and introduce multimodality.    LaunchPad and Achieve products include collections of assignable, ad-free Grammar Girl podcasts, which you can use to support your lessons. You can assign one (or all!) of these suggested podcasts for students to listen to before class. Each podcast also comes with a complete transcript, which is perfect for students who aren’t audio learners or otherwise prefer to read the content. To learn more about digital products and purchasing options, please visit Macmillan's English catalog or speak with your sales representative.  If you are using LaunchPad, refer to the unit “Grammar Girl Podcasts” for instructions on assigning podcasts. You can also find the same information on the support page "Assign Grammar Girl Podcasts." If you are using Achieve, you can find information on assigning Grammar Girl in Achieve on the support page "Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course." If your English Achieve product is copyright year 2021 or later, you are able to use a folder of suggested Grammar Girl podcasts in your course; please see “Using Suggested Grammar Girl Podcasts in Achieve for English Products” for more information.   Podcasts about Evidence, Redundancy, and Apology The Difference Between Disinformation and Misinformation [3:50] What Does It Mean to "Have the Receipts"? [5:22] Are You Annoyingly Redundant? [5:30] When Is It OK to Be Redundant? [6:40] How to Write an Apology [8:55]   Assignment A: In class, discuss the words “disinformation” and “misinformation.” Ask students what they think each word means or what they think the difference between the two words is. As part of this, the class might list other words they know that start with the same prefixes--”mistake,” “misfortune,” “dishonor,” “discriminate.” Then, listen to the Grammar Girl podcast “The Difference Between Disinformation and Misinformation” and talk about any new facts they’ve learned. Ask students if they’ve seen any examples of disinformation or misinformation in the news or in discussions with friends.   To follow up, explore how sources can be used to support claims. Listen to “What Does It Mean to ‘Have the Receipts’?” and discuss how this newer usage of “receipts” is similar to and different from academic use of sources.   Assignment B: Everyone will need to apologize at some point. Whether it’s eating the cookie you didn’t know your roommate was saving or realizing you were wrong in an argument, knowing how to apologize is a great skill to have.    Ask students to listen to “How to Write an Apology” and the two podcasts about redundancy for homework. Then, using the advice from Grammar Girl, they should write a letter apologizing to a roommate for walking over the new living room rug in muddy shoes. In class, have students peer review their apologies, keeping an eye out for any elements of the “nopology,” “unpology,” or “fauxpology,” as well as appropriate and inappropriate use of redundant language.   Credit: Pixabay Image 581753 by vivienviv0, used under a Pixaby License ... View more

No, this blog is not going to be about that wildly popular video game and movie franchise; it’s about Twitter and some very distinct signs of life in the USA that may be found there in some rather unexpected places. So here goes.   Actually, I almost wrote on this very topic last year during the horrendous Woolsey fire outbreak in Southern California, when Sonia and I faced a mandatory evacuation from our home—along with a lengthy power outage—during which we received most of our emergency information from a battery-powered laptop computer. Since I was already aware then that in the digital age the most up-to-date and accurate news in an emergency situation is likely to be found on such social media sites as Twitter, rather than from the traditional mass media news outlets, I stayed tuned-in to Twitter during the entire ordeal, following a string of hashtags as an endless stream of postings flooded the site. But even as I pored through post after post to get the latest information on the fire, I noticed a lot of things that set off a number of semiotic sirens that I planned to write about when the smoke, quite literally, settled.   When it was all over, however, I decided that maybe writing about my observations was premature, and that it would be better to wait and see what further signs I might detect that could be entered into the semiotic system within which they could be interpreted. Frankly, I rather hoped that I wouldn’t experience such an opportunity again and that I could just let the topic go. But now, exactly a year later, with fires breaking out all around me and Twitter, once again, being my best source of information, I find that everything I noticed last year is being repeated, only more so. Hence this blog.   I first want to make it clear that my analysis to follow is not a critique of Twitter. Twitter is just the medium here; the message lies in the human use of that medium—what I referred to in my last blog as the behavior that cultural semiotics interprets. And here’s what that behavior reveals:   First: even in an emergency situation, when lives and property are at stake, people are going to take to social media to promote their own personal agendas. I’ll call the phenomenon “hashtag spamming,” and it runs the gamut from people who have something sell (and this includes sex workers) to people with a political axe to grind (which during the current fire emergency has included someone who could most charitably be described as an Armenian Genocide-denier).   Beyond the hashtag spammers are those who view a natural disaster as a good time to start or get into a fight about Donald Trump, or global climate change, or any other particularly divisive topic. One sees this, of course, everywhere on the web, where America’s ideological divisions are continuously on display in an ever-escalating fashion, but it is striking to find it going on in the midst of a natural disaster.   The way that some people keep retweeting information both from official emergency services sources and conventional news media is something that is also worth noting. In almost every case, such re-tweeters evidently mean well, but what they do is repeat information that can be dangerously misleading because it is completely out of date during a fast-developing fire outbreak. Thus, one finds the same dramatic fire images that commercial news sources feature in order to fan the flames, if you will, of viewer attention, repeated again and again, when those images are no longer accurate representations of the most current conditions—this sort of thing, of course, is exacerbated by television news reporters who use Twitter to promote their stations.   There is also a sentimental set of signifiers to consider. These are the posts from people who also mean well, but who clutter up the page with expressions of their emotional responses to the catastrophe. When one is in a hurry to find out exactly what is happening in a fast-moving situation, such posts are actually counter-productive, and can get in the way of the truly informative posts in which individuals supplement the official information about emergency services (including evacuation center locations and assistance with moving pets and large animals out of the fire zone) with tips and offers of help of their own.   You put all of this together and a very profound signification emerges about the power of interactive media. Quite simply, we find here the enormous desire of ordinary people to have a voice in a world where wealth and power are otherwise being consolidated in ever-shrinking enclaves of geopolitical privilege. Sometimes that voice is used for selfish, and even pernicious, purposes, and sometimes it reflects genuine altruistic, and even heroic, ends. To paraphrase Dickens' famous opening to A Tale of Two Cities, Twitter, like the Internet at large, presents us with the best of times and the worst of times. It is at once of essential utility and plagued with behaviors that—to cite Nietzsche this time—can best be described as "human, all too human."   It is easy to take the new realities of the digital era for granted, but the ability to participate directly in the world of mass media is still a very new thing in human history. The hierarchical, top-down structures of the past have been deconstructed, and people from all over the world are rushing in to fill the spaces that were once denied to them. The effects of this new capability are beginning to appear in the form of an increasing political polarization that can be found worldwide, for the moderating influence of the traditional commercial news media, which skew to the center in order to promote optimal audience share, is being lost. It was once assumed that this change of affairs would most benefit left-of-center politics, but so far the evidence is that politics-by-Twitter has been more effectively employed by the right. The pendulum may swing back as we look to the 2020 election, but either way (and here comes my last literary allusion) it is the center that cannot hold. Photo Credit: Pixabay Image 1917737 by geralt, used under Pixabay License ... View more

I just spent a weekend with high school and college students from seven sites in the U.S.: Lawrence, MA; Santa Fe, NM; Middlebury, VT; Aiken, SC; Atlanta, GA; Window Rock, AZ (on the Navajo Nation); and Louisville, KY. These students were gathered as part of the Next Generation Leadership Network, a project sponsored by the Bread Loaf Teachers’ Network and Andover/Bread Loaf, a program with a thirty-year history of working with community leaders and public school teachers. We talked together, performed together, and wrote together to “invitations” (the word FEBO, a hip-hop/rap artist who led us in a fabulous workshop, much prefers over the more sterile and regimented “prompts”). We were invited to continue this sentence: “I am ____,” and later to continue “I do it for ____.” Here’s what one teacher from the Santa Fe Indian School had to say: I do it for my students, who have changed my life more than I could ever express. So at least once a day, during a project, a lesson, a field trip, a simple assignment, they know they are loved, appreciated, and able to create beautiful and powerful writing. Listening to teachers and students talk about what motivates them and gets them out of bed every morning gave me a lot to think about, and a lot to be grateful for. I wrote “I do it for myself, to stay alive, to stay sane, to make the connections that keep me going, to learn more about who I am through what students teach me.”   During one long afternoon, the students and teachers met in their home groups to discuss/brainstorm about the problems facing their communities and their ideas for addressing them. What followed was one of the most intense listening experiences I’ve had, as group after group described the challenges facing them. There were differences, to be sure, but what struck me most forcefully were the similarities. Over and over, they identified the same problems: food insecurity, water and air pollution, physical and mental health issues—diabetes, depression, anxiety, alcoholism, opioid addiction, smoking, obesity, trauma associated with abuse—and lack of resources, lack of access to health care.   These young people present a microcosm of the country and of the issues that are facing students today, issues that are, as these students told us, worrying them a great deal. What kept me from feeling the deepest despair, however, were the young people themselves: they were, as I later told them, clear-eyed, realistic, compassionate, resourceful, imaginative, and DETERMINED. Seldom have I met a more determined lot. And they have plans to address these issues—from forming community coalitions to carrying out tests of local water sources, to building community gardens to supplement and improve diets (we learned that in the 27,000-square mile Navajo Nation there are only a dozen grocery stores—think about it), to developing tutor programs (that’s my word—they refer to “writing leaders,” which is much better!) and so much more.   The problems identified by these young people are not unique to their communities. Today we know that colleges and universities include a number of students who are homeless and food insecure; in my area of California, food pantries are springing up exponentially. So I am once again reminded of something the inimitable Maxine Greene used to say: when you look at the students in your class, they may all look just fine. But they aren’t just fine, you just cannot see the burdens they are carrying, the problems they are struggling with, the challenges that bear down on them.   No time like the present then to listen—and listen hard—to the students we are privileged to work with. Ask them to write about what they are most worried about. Ask them to complete this sentence: “I feel ____.” Or “I need ____.” Or “I do it for ____.” These are trying times, but especially for young people and students. We need to listen and to help them discover ways to find agency and to take action.   Photo Credit: Pixabay Image 1879453 by quinntheislander, used under the Pixabay License ... View more