When Neil Young wrote his edgy tribute to rock-and-roll "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)," the genre was hardly dead, nor really approaching it. A new generation of rockers—the punks—were trying to clear a space for themselves by claiming that rock was dead (Harold Bloom style, one might say), but in fact they were only revising it with a slightly different vibe. Johnnie Rotten, whether he liked it or not, was a descendant of Johnnie B. Good, and Young himself would go on to become an inspiration to the Grunge scene, which, for a rather brief shining moment, revitalized rock-and-roll and helped put an end to the mousse-inflected hair-band era.   But when, in the tumultuous wake of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, I read that Taylor Swift was stepping up to help lead the resistance, I could see that here was a sign that things, finally, had changed, and that the moon was in a new phase indeed. Not that a popular music star leading a political charge for her generation is anything new: heck, that was what the '60s were all about. But Taylor Swift is no rocker, and it is not rock stars who are taking the generational lead these days.   The reasons for this are not hard to find, but they are worth a cultural-semiotic exploration. We can begin with the obvious observation that rock-and-roll is no longer the most popular genre of youth music: rap/hip-hop is, along with rhythm-and-blues and the sort of highly choreographed pop that Madonna pioneered, Britney Spears mainstreamed, and that various divas from Taylor Swift to Lady Gaga to Katy Perry now rule (straddling both pop and rhythm-and-blues, Beyoncé belongs in a category of her own). But to start here rather puts the cart before the horse, because it doesn't explain why rock-and-roll plays a second fiddle these days; it only shows that it does.   So where's, say, Neil Young, the composer of "Ohio" in the immediate aftermath of the Kent State massacre, in this hour of political need? Well, um, he's also the composer of "A Man Needs a Maid." So how about the Rolling Stones, those "street fighting men" of the '60s? I think that the titles "Brown Sugar" and "Under My Thumb" are enough to explain why no one is running to them for leadership right now. And Bob Dylan, the author of "Lay Lady Lay" and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" (about the bitterest putdown of a woman in pop history)? 'Nuff said.   I think the pattern here is quite clear: rock-and-roll is rather hopelessly entangled in a male-centered history that is most charitably describable as patriarchal. It isn't the fact that all the performers that I've mentioned are now firmly entrenched in old age that puts them on the political sidelines today (after all, they are all still active and highly profitable touring acts); it's the rock-and-roll legacy itself. Even today's young rockers (and they do exist), can't escape it.   Which brings up a related point. Rock-and-roll is not only coded as "male"; it is also coded  "white." Yes, Chuck Berry (and a lot of other black musicians) took a leading role in creating it in the '50s, but rock was taken away from them in that era of official segregation and literally color-coded as "rhythm and blues"—a split that even Jimi Hendrix and the Chambers Brothers could not quite fully repair. And when rap began its meteoric rise in the '80s, it was Heavy Metal (one of rock's most popular incarnations in that decade) that became the de facto voice of white audiences (it is interesting to note in this regard how Ted Nugent and Dave Mustaine—two high profile metalists—are also outspoken conservatives today).   Add it all up and it is clear how changes in American demography and gender relations have affected popular music, and, thus, have determined just which performers will be received as voices for their generation. The signs are all there, ready to be read as part of a much larger historical shift. "Rock is dead," sang The Who, who then quickly added, "Long Live Rock," from that land where the passing of one monarch still means the ascendance of another. That was a long time ago, and Roger Daltrey has more recently opined that rock really is dead now and that rap has taken its place. But rock isn't really "dead," of course; it's just been sidelined.  And in the #MeToo era, rap—though still ascendant—isn't alone at the top of the charts (political as well as musical) either.  Just ask Taylor Swift.     Image Source: “IMG_0614” by makaiyla willis on Flickr 2/4/17 via Creative Commons 2.0 License ... View more

I’m just back from a week in London, and what a week it was! Highlights included a massive exhibit on Oceania at the Royal Gallery; a tour of architect Sir John Soane’s amazing house/museum, with its hundreds of paintings and sculptures, including the entirety of Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress; and FIVE plays in six days. I saw Andre Holland in Othello (with the inimitable Mark Rylance as Iago) at the Globe and a modern musical adaptation of Twelfth Night that I’ll never forget, along with Everybody’s Talking about Jamie (look it up!) and a fabulous production of Mrs. Dalloway at a small local theater, with five actors taking all the parts. Food for the mind and the soul.   All this theater got me thinking about my great good fortune in teaching at the Bread Loaf Graduate School of English at the Vermont campus, with its magnificent theatrical productions every summer. Led by Brian McEleney from Trinity Rep, the group includes Equity actors from Trinity as well as students and faculty at Bread Loaf, and together they mount an entire production from start to finish in five weeks: it is miraculous, and I’ve seen some of the best theater of my life there. Last summer, Brian adapted Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities as a play, and the result was galvanizing, as the production spoke directly to the political situation we find ourselves in today. It was, again, something I’ll never forget, and, again, it made me think of how important it is for students to see plays as more than words on a page, as something a playwright has made, crafted, shaped, and gifted us with.   My hostess and friend in London, Julia Rowntree, is famous for making things, and especially things in clay. She is passionate about the need for all of us to connect to the world through our hands and sees claymaking as one crucial way to do so. She’s been at this work for decades, and her Clayground Collective has been highly influential in Britain’s cultural landscape, bringing claymaking projects into schools all over the UK and sponsoring innumerable community projects. For example, in 2015 the Collective’s canal-based project, Clay Cargo, sponsored a weekend during which 3,000 people built A Monument to the City and its Anonymous Makers using 5 tons of clay and erected it beside the Regent’s Canal at Granary Square in King’s Cross. 3,000 people doing claymaking! (You can see a film about this project here, and you can find out much more about the Collective in a recently-published book of Julia’s, Clay in Common, available on Amazon.)   I share Julia’s enthusiasm for making and for the makers’ movement, which is associated in this country with the participatory culture that Henry Jenkins and others have documented so extensively. More to the point of this blog, however, I believe that writing is an important form of making. In fact, we used to write on clay—and artists, of course, still do. Whatever we write on, we are shaping, crafting, forming ideas, concepts, arguments, dreams: we are part of those anonymous makers Julia and her colleagues celebrate.   I don’t think our students often think of writing in this way, however, and to that end we have work to do. In our classes, in our tutoring, and in our mentoring we need to present and represent writing in this light: as something we make with our hands and our brains, and as something we set out in the world for others to engage with, respond to, and enjoy. Maybe it’s time to bring some clay tablets to our classrooms and see what happens!   Image Credit: Pixabay Image 690404 by Free-Photos, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

A Discussion with Ashanka Kumari, University of Louisville, in Preparation for the Watson Conference Community is a fraught term in our field. It is used for all manner of purposes. We speak of our classrooms as communities, attempt to foster inclusive communal practices in our graduate programs, and establish equitable community partnerships. It is less clear, however, that we enable either our undergraduate or graduate students to possess the skills required to actually build communities – the nuts and bolts of organizing strategies and practices that turn community from a noun to an existing space.   At least, this is what I have learned through my discussions with Ashanka Kumari, a doctoral student at University of Louisville and an Assistant Director of the Thomas R. Watson Conference, which will be held this October. Our conversation began when I came to campus to share a draft of my Watson essay, then extended into my revision of that essay, and eventually resulted in multi-authored piece. The talk itself initially focused on my efforts to build Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ), a human rights documentation center based in Istanbul. (Bassam Alahmad, Director of STJ is also an author in the piece.) STJ stood as an example of the conference theme of what it meant to engage in “producing truth.” In our discussion, Ashanka highlighted how graduate education often did not provide the requisite skills for such community building – whether something large, like STJ, or small, like a community gathering. The assumption of graduate education seemed to be that everyone would end up working in the academy as a researcher, teacher, or both. She noted that for first-generation students like ourselves, with few safety nets, such an assumption could be alienating – what if no academic job was found? Why not, we came to ask, imagine graduate education as preparing students to engage in the meaning of “community” through a multiplicity of skills, through a multiplicity of career paths? In several weeks, Ashanka and I will present our essay, which includes just a small audio segment of our extended discussion. My sense, however, is that this discussion with Ashanka not only enunciates a new way to imagine graduate education, but also a nuanced way to imagine the students in our seminars as possessing a diversity of heritages and ambitions. It is a conversation that points to what a “community-based” graduate education might require. For that reason, in a blog focused on the intersection of community and the academy, I am happy to provide the full discussion here with a transcript of the discussion here. Finally, if you are at the Watson talk or joining us virtually on Twitter (#WatsCon18) at 10:30 AM EST on Saturday, October 27, I hope you will come to our session and share your thoughts on how graduate education can be infused with “community-building” strategies/skills that are useful not only in our “field” but in the neighborhoods in which it exists. ... View more

With the appearance of Michael Moore's latest foray into the arena of American conflict and controversy, Farenheit ll/9, I find myself contemplating the significance of the documentary form itself in contemporary American culture. And as is always the case in the conduct of a semiotic cultural analysis, my aim is not to form a partisan opinion but, rather, to find a signification, something that may not be obvious at an initial glance but may well be hiding in plain sight. So here goes.   To begin with, we need to construct a historicized system in which today's popular documentaries can be situated, and I can think of no better place to begin than with Edward R. Murrow's legendary exposé of America's migrant labor morass, Harvest of Shame. First broadcast on CBS in 1960 immediately after Thanksgiving, Harvest of Shame joined such classic works of muck-raking journalism as the photographs of Dorothea Lange and Jacob Riis, and the writing of Upton Sinclair, in revealing to the American middle and upper classes what was really going on behind the scenes of the pleasant panoramas of the American dream.   Michael Moore's work fits into this tradition, but with some significant differences, differences that will be important to my interpretation to follow. These lie in the way that Moore openly presents himself as a participant not only in his muck-raking documentaries but in the political controversies that he courts as well. Very much an in-your-face documentarian, Moore presents a striking contrast to Ken Burns, who must be ranked as America's currently most popular (not to mention prolific) documentary filmmaker, in large part due to his propensity to smooth over the rough edges of American cultural conflict in his attempts to appeal to everyone (who else but Burns, for example, would have included footage of historian Shelby Foote describing Abraham Lincoln and Nathan Bedford Forrest together as the two "geniuses" that the Civil War produced?).   But Michael Moore's "shockumentary" style looks like something out of the Hallmark Channel compared to Sacha Baron Cohen's "mockumentaries." Having laid low for a few years (to lull his intended victims into a false sense of security?), Cohen is back with his Showtime series, Who Is America? A weird amalgamation of Candid Camera, reality television, and, well, "Weird Al" Yankovic, Who Is America? managed to snag a cross section of American political celebrity—from Sarah Palin and Roy Moore to Bernie Sanders and Barney Frank—in his take-no-prisoners approach to political satire in the guise of documentary-style programming (see Laura Bradley's "Sacha Baron Cohen’s Victims: All the People Who Fell for His New Prank Show" in Vanity Fair for a complete rundown of Cohen's hapless marks).   Now, aside from my rather unsemiotic curiosity about how such a list of prominent people—who must surely have personal staffs employed precisely to keep their employers insulated from such things—got so taken in by Cohen, I find a number of signifiers at work here. The first might be called "Poe's Law Comes to Comedy." Poe's Law is a label for the ambiguity that surrounds so much of the content on the Internet due to the general weirdness of what people say there. "Does he really mean that, or is he pulling my leg?" pretty much sums up the situation, and it helps explain how Cohen got such current and former politicians as Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina and ex-Senator Trent Lott to endorse a fake PSA for a "Kinderguardians" program designed to put guns in the hands of little children—Lott, for example, is quoted as saying, "It’s something that we should think about America, about putting guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens . . . whether they be teachers, or whether they actually be talented children or highly trained pre-schoolers.” I will leave it to my readers to deduce just which organization Cohen was targeting here.   Beyond the Poe's Law signification, I find myself especially struck by the distinct trajectory here that runs from Murrow to Cohen, the stunning difference. The best way to put it is that Murrow found nothing funny in what he wanted to expose in Harvest of Shame, and had no intention of entertaining anyone. Moore, for his part, has been quite open about his opinion that even documentaries with serious purposes should be entertaining. But Cohen is basically all about entertainment. What he does is make people look stupid for other people to laugh at with extreme derision. The approach is not unlike that of Jersey Shore and My Sweet Sixteen, video train wrecks whose purpose is to make their audiences feel superior to the people on the shows. Satire, with its ancient office of encouraging good behavior by ridiculing bad, thus becomes sheer snark.   And here the system opens out to a much larger system in America today, one in which all codes of civility (and "civility," remember, is rooted in the Latin "civitas": a society of shared citizenry) are falling before the imperatives of the profit motive. Snark sells: it's no accident that Who Is America? is a comedy series on Showtime. In such a system politics is repackaged as entertainment, and derision takes the place of anything like an authentic debate. And that just may well be the answer to the question of "Who Is America?" these days. ... View more

This week's guest blogger is Pamela Arlov, Associate Professor of English at Middle Georgia State University. This summer, teaching a hybrid literature and composition class, I developed a lesson in carpe diem poetry that was close to pedagogical perfection. Because it worked (and because not everything does), I share it with you. The lesson incorporates poetry and song lyrics and requires students to read, watch, listen, and write. The first part of the lesson presents a definition of carpe diem along with a clip from the film Dead Poets Society. Mr. Keating (Robin Williams) shows his students pictures of long-dead students and advises his own students to “Seize the day, boys . . . make your lives extraordinary.”  After viewing the introductory film clip, students move to two classic carpe diem poems: Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” and Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.” I ask students to look at the formal structure of the speaker’s argument in Marvell’s poem and to contrast the formal structure with the intimate nature of the poem, in which the speaker argues that a specific “coy mistress” should make love to him. I also point out the more general, advice-giving nature of Herrick’s poem, in which the speaker cautions young women (“virgins”) to marry before they are past their expiration date. Next, students listen to four contemporary songs and decide which two are carpe diem songs. I specify that a carpe diem song (1) alludes to the idea that life is short, and (2) names a specific thing that should be done because life is short. The songs students choose should contain both elements. For the lesson, I chose songs I had heard in Zumba class or on Sirius XM’s Chill radio during my morning commute.  I had planned to link to music videos on YouTube, but on one video, I was stopped by a “potentially offensive” YouTube warning. Mindful of my still-in-high-school dual enrollment students, I decided that I would link the audio version of that song and let students find the video themselves if they wished.  Another dilemma arose when I discovered that the song that had given me the idea for the lesson had no clean version available. I took the problem to my students and asked them if profanity in music offended them. They reacted just as I might have if an adult had asked my teenage self if I was offended by Mick Jagger’s onstage gyrations.  I included the song, prefaced with a warning that I had not been able to find a clean version. I then asked myself if this issue was the same as that of the video with the YouTube warning and decided that it was not. Some of the works of literature assigned in class also contain profanity, so these lyrics add no new element. I have listed and linked my song choices below, but the assignment is endlessly adaptable to your own musical tastes and preferences.  “Bad, Bad News” by Leon Bridges, a song about seizing the opportunity to make “a good, good thing out of bad, bad news.” “Give Me Everything” by Pitbull featuring Ne-Yo, Afrojack, and Nayer, a song that riffs on the theme of Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” This is the song with the YouTube community warning; judge for yourself.  “Havana” by Camila Cabello featuring Young Thug, a song about a heart divided, chosen because of its wildly entertaining video. “Dead Soon” by Autograf, featuring Lils and Bonsai Mammal, a song that justifies seizing the moment with the lyric “If we don’t see another light / Then at least we had tonight.” My students responded well to this assignment; all accurately identified the carpe diem lyrics (songs 2 and 4). When I asked myself if a 100 percent success rate meant the exercise was too easy, my answer was “not in this case.” Carpe diem is a fairly easy concept to grasp, recognize, and remember.  What really sold me on the assignment was not the success rate, but the ease with which students quoted song lyrics. My students find it challenging to make a point about literature and support that point with a concise quotation from the text itself. But doing the exact same thing with song lyrics seemed to be easy for them, perhaps because song lyrics are woven through their lives in a way that literature is not.  This accidental discovery suggests that one good way of helping students understand how to integrate quotations into their papers is to let them start with song lyrics. While I should probably seize the day and get to work on that, it’s a task for another day. ... View more

A recent discussion of the Writing Program Administrators listserv asks the questions, “How many of us have asked students their voter registration status?” Respondents submitted practices based on their varying perspectives and teaching locations. Some respondents offer their students extra credit opportunities to register to vote. Others bring registration forms to class or show voter registration websites. Additional respondents believed that offering extra credit was coercive, while others stated that extra credit for registering to vote would not be equitably available to all students because of immigration status or status in the criminal justice system, and still others suggested alternative extra credit options, noting that voter education plays a vital role in rhetorical education.   Here is my experience. Many years ago, in the months leading up to a presidential primary, I brought to class a stack of voter registration forms procured from a table in the lobby of our classroom building. I presented the cards in what felt like a neutral, non-partisan manner, discussing the history of voting rights, the importance of voting no matter one’s political affiliation, and so on.   My students listened patiently. A few students politely pocketed the cards. But by far, the majority of students in the class said: “Dr. Bernstein, I am not a US citizen.”   In that moment, I experienced a sense of humility that I have carried with me to this day. That moment is held with other sacred memories of voting-- and not voting: accompanying my mother into the voting booth as a preschooler and watching her flip the little levers of the old-fashioned voting machine; registering to vote for the first time at eighteen; voting for president for the first time absentee as a first-year college student far from home (and watching the debates for that election on television at night in the student union).   Yet the memory of my students, disenfranchised even as they paid taxes, troubles me still. As recently as 2016, some of us in the county where I was living-- myself and my colleagues included-- were denied the right to vote in the presidential primary because our voter registrations were misfiled as “independent,” rather than with a specific political party needed to vote in that state’s closed primary system. At the same time, in that same county, other citizens found themselves waiting to vote for many hours. The county government had drastically reduced the number of polling places. Poor communities of color were especially hard hit with the reduction of polling places.   All of these experiences have helped me to consider the necessity, and the difficulty, of addressing the intersections of political and rhetorical education in the classroom. Given the speed with which events cycle in and out of the news, my inclination is to return to my training in close reading gleaned from rhetorical history and comparative literature, and to share practices of textual explication with students. We first apply these practices to Civil Rights Movement readings, and texts that are densely packed, such as speeches by James Baldwin, or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Then I invite students to apply those same practices of persuasion and analysis to their own writing.   Currently in my classes, students are nearing the completion of their first writing projects, a culmination of a series of assignments that have unfolded over the last six weeks. The process looks something like this:   Reading: Read not only for main idea and supporting evidence, but also at the sentence level and for word choice and repetition.   Writing: Write the body paragraphs first, and summarize the text, not only in terms of thesis and support, but again, for how the text is constructed, and the role of construction in effective persuasion of the reader.   Revising: Divide long paragraphs into shorter ones, and make sure that each new paragraph has an introductory and concluding sentence to help with transitions between them, adding additional citations from the text as needed for evidence.   Reframing: Add an introduction that dives directly into the main idea of your own essay. Offer a conclusion that presents the main idea as powerfully as possible, so that the reader is persuaded to accept, or at least to consider, the significance of the main idea.   These steps then become the grading criteria for the essay.   In fast-paced times, this work can feel slow, difficult, and painstaking. Yet the aim of this work is that students will learn not only to analyze dense material through reading and writing, but also that, through reading and writing, they will learn to explore the possibilities of imagining in challenging historical moments, with Baldwin or King and others a more hopeful and productive future. ... View more

David Leonhardt, opinion writer for the New York Times, recently wrote an editorial entitled “The Supreme Court Is Coming Apart.” That’s a claim, or the thesis for an argument. The more precise and less colloquial claim that Leonhardt goes on to support effectively is that “over the long term, the court risks a crisis of legitimacy.” Leonhardt offers two reasons for this potential crisis: the partisanship of the court and the radicalness of the Republicans on the court. Whether you agree with Leonhardt or not, it is possible to look at his argument as argument and to look at the wider range of arguments about the court that have become increasingly heated in recent years. There are factual claims about the court that are easy to support. If you look at the voting margins by which each court nominee has been confirmed, for example, it is easy to see that there was a time when a nominee of either political party was elected by a near-unanimous vote of the Senate. A well-qualified candidate appealed to both parties. Votes have increasingly come to be divided along party lines. That’s the sort of claim that can easily be verified. What about this part of Leonhardt’s argument: “There are no more Republican moderates. With Anthony Kennedy gone, every Republican justice is on the far end of the spectrum — among the most conservative since World War II”? That would certainly take more proof than a tallying of votes for confirmation, but an analysis of the voting record of Republican justices could be made in support of Leonhardt’s statement. The assumption is that the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh would tighten Republican control over every decision of the Supreme Court. Three days of questioning by the Senate did little to confirm or refute that assumption. Kavanaugh for the most part declined to take a stand on specific real cases but also declined to predict how he would vote on hypothetical ones. He essentially spent much of his testimony saying, “I can’t answer that.” The assumption, whether fair or not, is that he would vote as a conservative Republican. The problem, of course, is that our Founding Fathers did not plan for Supreme Court justices to vote along party lines. Making their appointments for life was seen as a way to avoid such partisanship. That clearly is not working. So what of claims of policy and the Supreme Court? Should the number of justices be increased, which would enable a Democratic-majority Congress, should one be elected, to even the playing field? That again advances partisanship, even though it lets Democrats “get even” for the Republicans’ blocking of President Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court. Is there any way to recapture the idealism behind the creation of the court? The Founding Fathers were prescient enough to build in a federal balance of powers. They built in compromises between slave and free states that still affect our government. They created a constitution that has had relatively few amendments considering how long ago it was written. What they couldn’t foresee was the America of 2018.   Image Source: “Supreme Court” by angela n. on Flickr 5/3/17 via Creative Commons 2.0 License ... View more

A week ago, I would have cringed, ducked (and maybe even shrieked) at the image on the left, captured recently by a skillful neighbor.   This fall, though, I’m a brand-new student in an evening Master Naturalist course, and so I find myself leaning into such sights, empowered by the fresh knowledge that this is a harmless, even dazzling, yellow garden spider. Not only that, I can see details I would have missed a few days ago. I can discern the telling zipper pattern on the body, and with a quick glance at my notes, I can even confirm the Latin name, Argiope aurantia, and show off my knowledge that the webbed zigzag of silk is called a stabilimentum. What I used to ignore or avoid has now come into focus with fascinating clarity. How have I been missing these details all these years? What more can I learn?   In her essay, “The Language of Discretion,” Amy Tan captures this exhilarating experience concisely: “Once I added ‘mauve” to my vocabulary I began to see it everywhere.”   This is a good time to reflect on both the fear and fascination of learning, since our writing students are also shuttling between fear (“Every assignment still feels like a risk!”) and a bit of growing confidence (“Hey! I can understand at least parts of this difficult reading … and I have something to say about it, too!”).   In my last post, I wrote about inviting students to self-reflect on their reading and writing process in journals. (Their insights are often hilarious, and they are slowly doodling some magnificent covers. I’ll share more in a future post.)   Now, I want to reflect on how challenging these academic “habits of mind” are, as we guide our students to practice them, however tentatively, in our writing classrooms. My co-author, Stuart Greene, and I, open From Inquiry to Academic Writing with the “habits of mind” of academic writers, starting with:   Inquiry — through observation, asking questions, and examining alternatives Seeking and valuing complexity — through reflection, examining issues from multiple points of view, and asking issue-based questions.   Let’s remind ourselves how rare these activities are in our culture. They may have been rare, too, in some of the classrooms in which our students either thrived or failed. After all, in an age of information-overload, people often prize (and are praised for) simplistic summaries that enable them to make a confident-sounding pronouncement, and move on to the next topic. In contrast, the “habits of mind” we ask our students to develop involve seeking more questions than answers, and opening up complex possibilities that include and value their experiences. These habits call for what José Antonio Bowen calls “slow thinking.” Our task is to model for our students the pleasures of what sounds like frustrating work. (Why lean in to peer at that spider? Because a web of meaning becomes visible when we do.)   Here’s an accessible Practice Sequence of activities you could use, or adapt, to demonstrate the value of these habits of mind:   Inquiry — through observation, asking questions, and examining alternatives: Find out through  searching what the most popular majors are on your campus. Is there anything that surprises or puzzles you? Write down any questions you have, including: Why are things the way they are? What alternative explanations can you provide to account for differences in the popularity of the subjects students major in?   Seeking and valuing complexity — through reflection, examining issues from multiple points of view, and asking issue-based questions: Imagine other perspectives on the data you found on the most popular majors on your campus. How might other students, or parents, explain your findings? What explanation might faculty members offer, both those who teach in those majors and those who do not? (You could seed this conversation with any number of recent sources on the workplace value of the humanities.)   Exercises like these can help students “see” aspects of their own campus and community for the first time, and set them to wondering: Why? The answers are multi-faceted, will raise additional questions, and will reveal the way their own experiences and decisions are woven into this new knowledge. And … they’re off and running, if not toward delight, at least toward interest in what had been invisible.   What adult learning experiences have shaped your own teaching? What webs of meaning fascinate your students right now? Photo credit: Anne Brown ... View more

Ann Charters‌ is the author of The Story and Its Writer. I’ve been a Kerouac fan since 1958, when I read his just-published novel The Dharma Bums.  In the 1950s, the overwhelming majority of Beat Generation authors were men who rarely wrote about women as independent, equally talented individuals or even as equal partners.  Ironically, in the next generation, the discovery of the freedom of Kerouac’s spontaneous prose style helped some of the women who read his books gain the confidence to become experimental writers themselves. The tenth edition of The Story and Its Writer includes Kerouac’s experimental prose narrative “October in the Railroad Earth,” his story about his daily life in California in the autumn of 1952. It is considered the best short example of what Kerouac called “Spontaneous Prose.” He wrote the story in San Francisco while he lived in a skid row hotel and worked as a brakeman-in-training for the Southern Pacific Railroad.  In his commentary “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (also included in the tenth edition of The Story and Its Writer), he described his highly personal method of writing.  In his approach, Kerouac tried to write his mind into a text as directly, honestly, and completely as possible, hoping to capture the free, spontaneous flow of his thoughts and feelings at the moment of putting words down on paper.   Kerouac composed “October in the Railroad Earth” eighteen months after he created his most famous novel On the Road during an inspired three weeks in April 1951, though he’d tried unsuccessfully for years to write it.  His novel, now considered an American classic, took nearly seven years to be published in 1957, but only after it had been first rejected and then completely revised into conventional prose by his editors.  The 1951 original so-called “scroll manuscript” of On the Road, unpublished for a half-century until 2007, reads much more like spontaneous prose. As Kerouac once told an interviewer, “I agree with Joyce, as Joyce said to Ezra Pound in the 1920s, ‘Don’t bother me with politics, the only thing that interests me is style.’” Kerouac knew what he was doing. At the time he wrote to his friend Allen Ginsberg that he was “originating. . . a new way of writing about life, no fiction, no craft, no revising afterthoughts.” Later the English critic Michael Horowitz understood that at midcentury Kerouac’s style –“That ingenuous art of spilling the beans – all that’s remembered laced with all that chimes in from the senses at the instant of writing, emptying consciousness as per action painter and jazzman’s delivery” – was to change the direction of American prose. The woman author I have in mind who was influenced by Kerouac’s writing is the novelist and biographer Chris Kraus.  In 1997 she published her second novel I Love Dick, which elicited heated controversy at the time though recently it has become the basis of a successful American television series released on Amazon Video.  Like Kerouac, Kraus used what was happening in her own life as the basis for her fiction.  As a critic noted on the back jacket of I Love Dick, by “tearing away the veil that separates fiction from reality and privacy from self-expression . . . Kraus forged a manifesto for a new kind of feminism that isn’t afraid to burn through itself to embrace the whole world.” I Love Dick is full of references to Beat-era writers, not only Kerouac but also less famous figures such as Lew Welch, John Wieners, Ron Padgett and Paul Blackburn —all males.  As Kraus writes in I Love Dick about the married painters Elaine and Willem de Kooning, the 1950s was a period “that believed in the utter worthlessness of Women.” [sic]  It was a time when the commercial success of women authors, even extremely talented writers like Flannery O’Connor who wrote in a conventional prose style, was the exception, not the rule.  The example of Kerouac’s courage creating his autobiographical, spontaneous prose method and following it despite the repeated rejection of his writing by established publishers, inspired Kraus to find her own voice as a writer.  Kerouac’s story encouraged her to create highly original autobiographical fiction in which she too expressed herself as openly, honestly, and freely as she could. ... View more

While canvassing my neighborhoods as a candidate for the local school board, I ended up discussing with a parent the difference between reading on a screen and reading a book. It’s reasonable to think about the differences at a time when young people and adults typically shift from one media environment to another about 27 times an hour. We skim for information, and are easily distracted by alerts and responses to a new email or Twitter post.   The urgency to integrate technology in classrooms has been motivated by what educators believe will most engage students, since they are already immersed in screen culture. I have heard others argue that access to technology will enable students to function as citizens. It is this idea of citizenship that matters to me because I think schools should help students use the knowledge they acquire as participants in their communities. I’d even say that I’d like school to foster in students a sense of how learning can be used in the service of the common good.   But I wonder if the allure of technology ignores some important questions about how media affects what and how students read? If researchers are correct, then youth are at best taking in bits of information without processing this information very deeply.   How students process information matters a great deal if we expect them to become citizens in a world where the very idea of “truth” has been challenged and where we need to work together with compassion, empathy, and understanding in order to create a safer world for everyone. It is important, as Maryanne Wolf acknowledges in Reader Come Home, that technologies not cause us to lose sight of the real-time relationships that demand our attention. It is important to humanize individuals who are different than we are in our efforts to make a difference in the world.   I worry that the adoption of technology often precedes deep consideration of what we want students to do and the kind of people we want them to be: citizens who are deeply invested in things that matter, who understand the value of taking on the perspectives and feelings of others, and develop a questioning habit of mind based on sustained inquiry.   I’d like to think technology can serve as a tool that fosters students’ ability to be empowered. But it is only a tool. Students also need to practice citizenship in supportive environments where students see that learning is an integral part of what it means to be human. As Martha Nussbaum reminds us, then, “It is . . . urgent right now to support curricular efforts aimed at producing citizens who can take charge of their reasoning . . . to explore and understand their own capacity for citizenship” (Cultivating Humanity, p. 301).   What kinds of curricular efforts are others making to create spaces for the kinds of reflection that authors as diverse as Maryanne Wolf, Martha Nussbaum, and Sherry Turkle call for? What are some ways to encourage our students to read deeply in order to develop a sufficient knowledge base to respond critically to what they are reading? How do others encourage students to read patiently, to resist binary thinking, and pass over into others’ experiences as empathetic readers who value complexity? How do we quiet students’ minds amid the avalanche of information that competes for their attention in what feel like increasingly brief moments of contemplation and stillness? These are pressing questions for me because democracy and citizenship require us all to have such moments of contemplation and stillness if we are to make responsible decisions.     Image Credit: Pixabay Image 1910184 by Wokandapix, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

This post is the second in a series on Memorable Reading. For the first post, see Memorable Reading, Part 1: Fiction, Poetry, and Drama.   It is August, and the minds of many of us are turning back to school and the need for creating new syllabi, retooling old ones, or learning how to teach the ones that we are required to use. As I began the process of course preparation, I thought back to the many texts in my education that stuck with me. Especially significant were texts I discovered in times of transition, between high school and college, post-college employment and my MA, the MA and the PhD. I remember the readings that kept me motivated through difficult moments, and the texts that opened my mind to new possibilities. I wanted to know what still inspired other educators in and out of school, so I posted my question to my Facebook timeline and to several Facebook groups engaged with writing studies. The responses are listed in two separate blog posts. The first post covers fiction, poetry, and drama and the second post concentrates on philosophy, pedagogy, and non-fiction. Some responders listed more than one text across genre lines. In this case, I have grouped their responses with the first genre mentioned. The purpose of these lists is to reflect on texts that has inspired the responders over time, rather than to fashion a new canonical mandate. For me, these inspirations, read in aggregate, are powerful reminders of how much good writing matters, and how, for many of us, good writing, carefully read, can help to shape the course of life and vocational choices. My hope is that the lists offer memories of our own inspirations and, in doing so, allow us to make wise choices as we prepare our courses for the coming term. Hive mind: What is one reading from your education that you still remember? That transformed you, perhaps? That sticks with you, even though it's been years? NOT something that you taught, but something that impacted you deeply as a student -- in or out of school? WHY do you still remember it? What impression did it make on you? Why was it relevant to the rest of your life? I'm considering compiling these readings in a blog post, so let me know if I can use your name, or if you would rather be anonymous. Thanks in advance for all responses ! Aaron Kerley The Ethics of Ambiguity. It freed me from thinking being an individual as an intrinsically selfish pursuit. Christina Fisanick Judith Butler's "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution" because it helped me understand how reality is social constructed AND that not only could I read thick cultural theory, but I could understand and teach it! George Yatchisin Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” Still so pertinent. Jeff Cook Ken Wilber’s A Brief History of Everything. He convinced me that seeing a work through multiple perspectives is better than trying to solve its riddle and find it’s ‘meaning.’  After Wilber, (which sounds like a Mister Ed biopic) I started asking those questions about all of my life. ‘What’s another way to see it?’ It got applied to dirty dishes, car crashes, and people who wear socks with sandals. Joanna Howard I remember my grad school professor giving me a copy of an essay “I and Thou” in which Martin Buber discusses the difference between having a job and having a vocation—and while I can’t remember if it related to teaching, our discussion did, and I have thought of that conversation from time to time over the years.  The significance was that I was a grad student who wanted to be a community college instructor, a teacher, and this conversation and Buber’s piece validated my choice. Let me add that theology classes in high school and my coursework in grad school often helped me reflect on what I was doing in my life, what did I want it to become, what did I want to do, which is why Marge Piercy’s poem, “To Be Of Use” was (and is) a poem that I keep coming back to in moments when I feel I’ve lost direction. Buber and Piercy’s works are like rudders prodding me back to a considered direction. Buber reminds me to view my students as ”Thou” and not “It,” I have been my happiest and most successful with this perspective, and have gained the most as a fellow human being from it. (No pun intended.) Lynn Reid As an undergrad When Abortion Was a Crime was transformative in my thinking about Roe v Wade. And a book called The Tattooed Soldier might be the one I most remember reading (and later teaching). Women of Sand and Myrrh, too. In grad school, Time to Know Them by Marilyn Sternglass. Pf Lengel I and Thou, by Martin Buber. Buber, in collaboration with the beloved late Ken Morrison, opened a pathway between my mind and my heart, a path where life and relationships live in infinite Presence. I can't always find my way to that place, but it is my enduring vision and my most cherished aspiration. Sophia Snyder A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. I read it my freshman year of college and it was my first introduction to the power of academic feminism. I was familiar with popular feminist political writing about the present day (this was 2003, in the midst of the heyday of the feminist blogosphere!) but I had never encountered the idea that we never finish re-writing history, and that *who* writes the history books and sees value in what historical documents is vitally important. Steve Cormany Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Simplify, simplify, simplify. Try not to complicate things. Live life in an elemental way. Be conscious of your place in the universe. It allows you to live your life carefully. Susan Naomi For me it was “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus. As a student struggling to transition from high school to college, life often felt like rolling that rock up that mountain, only to see it tumbling away me at the peak and having to start all over again. Now, as I reread The Myth, I focus more on the moment of joy, on Camus's notion that: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Valorie Worthy Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being— self actualization and peak experiences!   ... View more

It is August, and the minds of many of us are turning back to school and the need for creating new syllabi, retooling old syllabi, or learning how to teach syllabi that we are required to use. As I begin the process of course preparation, I think back to the many texts in my education that stuck with me. Especially significant were texts I discovered in times of transition. I remember the readings that kept me motivated through difficult moments, and the texts that opened my mind to new possibilities. I wanted to know what readings inspired other educators in and out of school, so I posted the question to my Facebook timeline and to several Facebook groups engaged with writing studies. The responses are listed in two separate blog posts. The first post covers fiction, poetry, and drama, and the second post (next week) concentrates on history, non-fiction, pedagogy, philosophy, psychology, and writing studies. Some responders listed more than one text across genre lines. In these cases, I listed their responses under the first genre mentioned. The purpose of these lists is to reflect on texts that has inspired the responders over time, rather than to fashion a new canonical mandate. For me, these inspirations, read in aggregate, are powerful reminders of how much good writing matters, and how, for many of us, good writing, carefully read, can help to shape the course of life and vocational choices. My hope is that the lists offer memories of our own inspirations and, in doing so, allow us to make wise choices as we prepare our courses for the coming term. Hive mind: What is one reading from your education that you still remember? That transformed you, perhaps? That sticks with you, even though it's been years? NOT something that you taught, but something that impacted you deeply as a student -- in or out of school? WHY do you still remember it? What impression did it make on you? Why was it relevant to the rest of your life? I'm considering compiling these readings in a blog post, so let me know if I can use your name, or if you would rather be anonymous. Thanks in advance for all responses !  Angela Rhoe Sonia Sanchez’s We A BaddDDD People, my introduction to the Black Arts Movement. This collection of poems about the power, beauty, and strength of black people blew my mind and helped me to unequivocally love myself and embrace my blackness. Life changing!! Ann Etta Green  Not an essay, but the first book where I recognized myself in an educational setting was The Beans of Egypt, Maine by Carolyn Chute. It set me on a path so when I found Calling Home, Janet Zandy’s collection of working class women’s writing, Dorothy Allison, Sandra Cisneros, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker all clicked.  In terms of short stories, “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker. I attempted my first piece of feminist criticism on that story and failed. But a good failure. For me as an undergraduate, I was deliberately seeking out female teachers and women writers because there was such a lack of them in my experience. I didn’t have a theory of why—I was just looking. And I was also looking for examples of people like me who didn’t know people in college, other first generation college students or working class writers, but I didn’t have that word yet. Simultaneously, I was trying to “catch up” by taking canonical courses because somewhere along the way, I had the idea that I should prioritize canon, to know the canon but reject it. Bill DeGenaro Early in undergrad: Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Was awestruck by the world-building and convention-exploding. I grew up loving horror novels so at the time the chapter narrated by a dead body blew my mind. Years later, the whole book’s audacity sticks with me, the idea that breaking rules as a writer and provoking readers smartly can unleash so so much. Cecilia Ready When I started college women were absolutely marginalized. But though I identified with male characters, I never lost my identity as a woman. Thus Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist had a huge impact on me. Naturally I fell in love with Stephen Daedalus, but his statement, “Non servium” resonated with my already rebellious nature. Of course, my rebellion consisted of refusing to follow traditional female career paths. James Wermers I took a class as an undergrad in modern Catholic novelists, and much of what we read in that class has stuck with me. Mauriac’s Therese Desqueyroux, Greene’s End of the Affair, and Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop in particular challenged me, consoled me, pushed me, and forever changed me. As much as anything I have ever read, they taught me the complexity of faith, failure, love, and humanity. Keith A. Waddle This quote from George Eliot's Middlemarch: "for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” My appreciation for that quote and the overall wisdom of that novel grows the older I get. Lisa Blankenship Undergrad: Egalia’s Daughters by Gerd Brantenberg; Toni Morrison; Shakespeare. Grad: Rhetorical Listening, Kris Ratcliffe; Anticipating China, Hall and Ames. ED is a satire switching gender roles in a (would it be?) dystopian society; opened my eyes about sexism and one of my first intros to feminism. Morrison same about black terror and trauma in the US historical and ongoing. Shakespeare: used to read it and weep alone in my dorm room, feeling maybe less alone than ever. Rhetorical Listening helped me as a white woman be quiet and listen to women of color hopefully a bit more. Anticipating China: most powerful book on comparative rhetoric and philosophy I’ve ever read. Natasha Murdock “The Yellow Wallpaper” had a pretty profound influence on me. It taught me to recognize the way I was being stifled and abused by my marriage, to be honest. It was monumental in helping me regain a sense of myself as a writer as I was going through my divorce. Paulette Stevenson The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (in HS). I was appalled at the treatment of animals and workers. I remember thinking how much these people were getting screwed over by others for just trying to live a better life in the US. I was 14, living in a small town in the Midwest, and the novel allowed me to experience oppression like I hadn’t seen before. Oh and I also became a vegetarian after reading it. Note: I haven’t read it since, so I’m not sure if it holds up to my take. Ted Fristrom "The Distance of the Moon." I always wanted to be a musician, but I had this weird notion at the end of high school that being a writer might be acceptable as well. After reading Cosmicomics, I thought being Italo Calvino would be more than acceptable. Perhaps that's circular answer to the relevance question. Why would I want to emulate Calvino? I don't know. Who wouldn't want to be Calvino? I had a short attention span and liked things that were a little surreal; it seemed to break up the monotony of my childhood. ... View more

[This post originally published on November 13, 2012.] One of my all-time favorite assignments is to ask students to create a time capsule focusing on their writing and themselves as writers. I’m not sure if it’s because of my obsession with archives, my love for scrapbooking, or my fascination with the things that go into writing a text that draws me to the activity. Whatever it is, the assignment helps me learn more about how each student writes while at the same time encouraging students to reflect on their writing and how it changes. To begin, I explain the basic assignment. The goal is for students to create time capsules for themselves as writers. The audience for the activity varies. I’ve asked students to create time capsules that they will open later in the term or at some point in the future. It can be interesting to do the assignment early in the term and then open the time capsules at the end of the term as part of their final project. I’ve also asked students to create time capsules at the end of a term as a way to reflect on the work that they have done during the course. With students’ permission, I’ve opened some of these time capsules at the beginning of the next course I teach as an overview. I set up the assignment as early in the term as reasonable. If I wait too late, students may well have discarded artifacts that they would like to include. Most students will understand what a time capsule is, but to be sure, I always kick off the activity with some background. Now that Apple has a back-up solution called Time Capsule, it is crucial to make sure everyone understands what we’re talking about. Wikipedia has a Time Capsule entry, which I use as a basic explanation. I play this YouTube video of the Westinghouse Time Capsule, buried in 1939 and to be opened in the year 6939, to provide a concrete example: Video Link : 2263 I also share some news articles on time capsules, like these: 1910 time capsule opened at Cleveland Elementary Norway’s 100-Year-Old Mystery Package Opened Copper box steals the show: 1898 time capsule opened 1888 Time Capsule Unearthed in N.J. Time capsule opened after 50 years 1912 capsule opens Old Abington tricentennial Empire State Building Time Capsule Ruined The assignment I ask students to complete is not as complex as the time capsules in the news and video nor do students wait as long to open them, but these examples are a good way to review the characteristics important to time capsules. If I have time capsules from a previous course to share, I open them at this point too. After exploring the examples, we create a class list of characteristics. I like to make sure students understand these details about time capsules: The goal is to show someone in the future what life was like when the time capsule was assembled. It’s not meant to showcase buried treasure or priceless artifacts. Money and artifacts can be included, but they normally are not remarkable treasures at the time when the time capsule is assembled. The items in a time capsule should be long-lasting. They need to survive a long time without decaying in some way. The items also need to be things that will not damage one another and/or they need to be specially packaged so they won’t damage one another. The time capsule can include items that predict what life will be like when the capsule is opened, like letters to a future self or messages to future generations. I ask students to brainstorm a list of the items in time capsules as well, so that they have a working list of the kinds of artifacts they will gather for their own time capsules. I also review the documentation included with the Westinghouse Time Capsule, and ask students to include similar explanations and reflections with their time capsules. Beyond these instructions, I like to leave the specifics up to the individual students. They can choose the kind of container and what goes into it. They can include digital artifacts as well as analog materials. I prefer not to dictate requirements like the number of items or the kinds of things to be included. This assignment is very personal, and I want students to reflect on themselves as writers. If I provide a checklist of what to include, the assignment won’t do what I want it to. The only specific item I require is some explanatory, reflective pieces that help identify the items and their importance. Opening these time capsules is always informative. I learn so much about students every time I use the assignment. It’s tempting too to think about what my own time capsule might look like, as a writer and teacher. If I were in the position to do so, I’d love to ask new graduate teaching assistants to gather time capsules after orientation that they will open at the end of the academic year as part of a final reflection on their teaching. Do you have assignments that ask students to reflect on the writing they have done in the past? What artifacts do you save from your own writing and teaching? I’d love to hear from you. Just leave me a comment below! ... View more

If you were around in 1960, you probably remember rockabilly singer Eddie Cochran singing about the “Summertime Blues” (check it out on YouTube!). The lyrics are clever—all about how the singer has to work all summer and so has “summertime blues.” Teachers of writing often have such blues as we work all summer to get ready for another year, often while also teaching or holding down other jobs. So it’s worth patting yourself on the back as this summer rolls in and, I hope, avoiding too many summertime blues.   I will certainly be working most of the summer: writing articles and chapters and working on books. But I’m also determined to take a couple of weeks off to relax and do some good summertime reading.   I wrote a few weeks ago recommending Keith Gilyard and Adam Banks’s On African American Rhetoric, from which I’ve learned a great deal (especially from the chapter on Black Twitter). But I’m going to take time this summer for reading outside our field, and I hope you can do so too. In case you don’t have a summer reading list set yet, here are a few books that I have on mine: Steve Almond’s Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country, published by Red Hen Press, offers seventeen “bad stories,” narratives Almond says we must fight against and try to replace with “stories that offer a vision of the American spirit as one of kindness and decency, the sort that powered the Emancipation Proclamation and the New Deal and the War on Poverty.” Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, Books 1-3. Go Shuri! Need I say more? For sheer escapism, nothing’s better to me than a Louise Penny Chief Inspector Armand Gamache novel set in the lyrically beautiful Canadian village of Three Pines. There are 13, I think, and I’ve been saving the most recent one, Glass Houses, for a special treat. Number 14, Kingdom of the Blind, is due out in November and I’ll probably pre-order it! Georgina Kleege’s More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art, from Oxford UP, captivated me with its title alone, but since I’ve read other works by Kleege (Sight Unseen and Blind Rage), I know she is a gorgeous prose stylist who brings her keen wit, intelligence, and unflinching honesty to every page. This one’s on the top of my stack. Finally, another book about art, though this time it’s art in clay. Julia Rowntree and Duncan Hooson’s Clay in Common (published in Britain by Triarchy Press and available on Amazon) introduces readers to the Clayground Collective, a “project book for schools, museums, galleries, libraries, and artists and clay activists everywhere.” I love the idea of “clay activists,” and I’ve dipped into the book just enough to believe that I will emerge from this read as part of the activist group, who believe that we are losing far too much when we lose touch with knowledge that comes to us through making and through using our hands.   So I plan to try to balance summertime work blues with summertime reading joys. While I do, I’ll be taking a bit of a break from this blog space. But like Elizabeth Warren, I will persist—and be back soon. Wishing you a peaceful and joyful summer.   Image Credit: Pixabay Image 1702617 by Bequest, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

In my last post, I shared Lumen5, a site that allows you to make short videos by pairing free-to-use images with the text from a webpage or handout. Today, I’m sharing another simple, free tool that you can use to make short videos for the classroom. Edify Animaker offers a suite of tools to create “Animated Videos, Done Right!” The tool boasts an impressive collection of Fortune 500 clients, including Google, Adidas, GE, FedEx, Ebay, and Walmart. How Animaker Works Its website describes using Animaker as a straightforward process: “Click and Choose. Drag and Drop. Edit and Play. That's Animaker.” That overview is a bit of an oversimplification, but the process is relatively easy to master. There are two broad ways to go about creating your video: (1) begin with a template for a specific genre of video, or (2) create a video of your own from a blank project file. If you choose the template option, Animaker asks you to “Click and Choose” one of ten different video templates: Explainer Video Facebook Video Cartoon Video Advertisement Video YouTube Video Birthday Video Christmas Video Greeting Video Presentation Lyric Video Instagram Video The alternative option begins with the video equivalent to a blank page. After you “Click and Choose” one of these options, you move on to the “Drag and Drop” portion of the project. Regardless of the option you choose, you next can “Drag and Drop” assets into your video, picking from a variety of included characters, properties, and backgrounds. In addition to the included assets, you can upload your own images and sounds (within certain file size constraints) to use in your production. Finally, you move on to the “Edit and Play” part of the process, adding transitions, setting how much time the assets spend onscreen, and choreographing the various parts of the video. You can preview the video as often as you'd like. When you are satisfied, you export the video. The free option of Animaker allows you to export to Facebook and YouTube. Once the export is complete, you’re ready to share the video with students. An Example Video To test Edify Animaker, I created the video below, which addresses the question, What Is the Grace Period in Your Technical Writing Class? Video Link : 2257 Most of the copy for the video came from course documents, such as the general explanation of the grace period on the course syllabus. The Animaker video did take a bit longer to create than the Lumen5 video, as Animaker's tools are more sophisticated. While Lumen5 videos were a simple combination of background images and overlaid text, Animaker videos include options for backgrounds, characters, properties and text. Each of the assets in an Animaker video can be manipulated for time on screen and beginning and ending transitions. Constraints of Animaker Most of the constraints of Animaker are clearly outlined on the Pricing Plans page, which compares four plans (Free, Personal, Startup, and Business). The free plan creates only two minute videos in SD quality. Additionally, the free plan limits users to only five exports per month. As a result, if you use the free version, you must be careful to edit and preview completely before you export to ensure that you do not run out of resources. Educators can take advantage of the Premium pricing on the Edify-branded version of Animaker. The Premium plan costs $ 0.20 / month for students and $10/month for teachers (billed yearly). The Premium pricing model increases the maximum video length to 30 minutes, allowing for Full HD, HD, and SD quality videos. Further, the Premium plan increases the number of exports to 200 (from five on the free version). As is typically the case with free plans, Animaker’s most basic plan offers only a limited collection of image and sound assets. This constraint can easily be overcome by uploading your own images and sounds to supplement the basic library. The Premium plan for educators includes the highest number of assets (identical to the Business Plan). While the free version does not allow you to download the video, savvy users can export the video to Facebook or YouTube and then download from either site in order to create a personal backup or edit with another program (e.g., Camtasia). These downloaded versions will not be as flexible as the project files on the Animaker site. As was the case with Lumen5, students with visual impairments will need a transcript of the text of the Animaker videos. The text in the video is not readable by a screen reader. That said, downloading the video from the intermediary site may be necessary to customize closed captions and transcripts. YouTube can automatically create captions from the audio soundtrack; however, it will not be able to convert text that appears on the screen alone for the visually impaired. Final Thoughts on Animaker The free version of Animaker allows users to create more sophisticated videos than Lumen5 does, including the ability to upload a voiceover recording. Naturally, I prefer to use the free version as long as I can. If I found myself needing additional resources from Animaker, the Premium Plan for educators seems like a reasonable upgrade, for only $10 a month. Much like Lumen5, Animaker is also simple enough for students to use. I would not use Animaker as students’ very first video production tool; however, once students have created some basic videos using their smartphones or animated slideshow presentations, they would have the skills to step up to the additional features that Animaker offers. I encourage you to take an hour or two to try out Edify Animaker this summer. You should find yourself able to make a relatively polished video that you can use in the classroom, even with the free version of the tool. Once you try Animaker, come back and tell me what you think. I would love to hear what you think about the features that it offers and how you might use the tool to create resources for your classes. ... View more