Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Dr. Meridith Leo. Leo teaches courses in Composition and Rhetoric as well as Creative Non-Fiction at Suffolk County Community College’s Ammerman Campus. Dr. Leo earned her Ph.D. at St. John’s University where she focused on narratives of difference and belonging along with culturally responsive literacy narratives. Her research at St. John’s University led to work in Co-Requisite (ALP) coursework which is detailed in her dissertation “Integrating Emerging Writers into the Post-Remedial College: A Consideration of Accelerated Learning Programs.”   No Sleep, Only Teach Ding. It's 3 am. I should be sleeping but I'm not. That's the 3rd email from Katia. Ding. There goes another email. It's Jeremiah this time. Do I get up? The emails will just keep coming; they're awake. I guess it's time to start the day. Computer on. Login complete. Virtual meeting links sent. Black tiles slowly fade to Katia and Jeremiah. "Good morning. What's going on?" My voice is cracking as it wakes. Simultaneously I hear: "We need help with our essays!" Through a yawn, I manage to say, "Okay let's see what we can work through. Don't worry. We'll figure it out."     Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Carmen Misé, Assistant Professor of English and Communications at Miami Dade College - North Campus. Misé is an insatiable reader and greatly enjoys film. Her favorite genre is horror (mystery, suspense, thrillers, sci-fi). She writes non-fiction and poetry, enjoys being outdoors and spending time with family, friends, and her dog Hamlet. Misé just became a first-time mom. She believes in aliens, and yes, the Earth is round.   Hello! As I logged into Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, using the recommended browser, and triple checking my Internet connection, I instantly dreaded the sea of silence in our “classroom.” The silhouettes of “users.” No faces, no voices. I felt like that one time I shouted, “Hello!,” as I stood at the Grand Canyon's South Rim. My salutation echoed through time and space, but I did not know its end destination or if anyone heard me. That day would be different. We laughed and talked about our favorite local restaurants. I met everyone's cat. We didn't cover thesis statements, but I was OK with that.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines.  ... View more

Dr. Faye Spencer Maor is Professor of English at North Carolina A&T State University where she teaches composition, technical writing and courses in African American Literature and rhetoric. She received the PhD in Writing Studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research includes  work on feminism/womanism, African American writing pedagogy and literature.   Back in the 1970’s, I attended an HBCU by default for undergraduate school. It was the only college to admit me unconditionally and offer me financial assistance. The school gave me a scholarship and, to my surprise, placed me in honors English composition courses. Teachers were tough. We had no computers or internet (primitive, I know). My four years there were wondrous. I was safe, intellectually challenged and “unapologetically Black” (as they say today). It was there I was able to learn how to write, encouraged to write and given a platform to write. During my senior year, the advisor to the campus newspaper pulled me aside and told me I should go to graduate school. He told me my mind and abilities should not be limited to the job offer I had to work for a small-town newspaper. I ended up taking his advice and going to a large PWI (Predominately White Institution) out west for a Master’s degree.  Things went well there until I took a course from a professor who also happened to be the principal professor in the area in which I wanted to concentrate. In his class I made C’s and B- ‘s on my papers (that’s an F in graduate school). “Concerned” about me, this professor asked me to come to his office one day. In that meeting he told me he was “troubled” because I “couldn’t write” and needed to “check your papers line-by-line” and it was going to be hard for me to succeed. After all I was “deficient” in my education because I attended one of “those” schools and was admitted to their program because they were doing what they could for “Affirmative Action.” Devastation! I was humiliated and heart broken. I cried as I walked across campus because basically this man had just told me that getting a Master’s degree was impossible for me. I was pitiful and was only there because the university needed Black people! I went back to my efficiency grad student housing and cried and cried. What was I going to do?!  I was letting everybody down – myself, my family, my teachers…. Many of my friends were doing well working at big newspapers and television stations, but I was about to flunk out of a Master’s program because I couldn’t write! Why didn’t I know earlier? Was my writing really that bad? Were my teachers back at my alma mater wrong about me? A week of depression, crying and venting went by and then I decided to call my mentor who told me to go to graduate school in the first place. All I can remember of the phone call were two questions. The first was “How many people look like you in that class?” The second question was “What grades have you made in other classes on your papers?” My mentor made me stop, think critically, weigh the evidence, and make a conclusion – the very thing many of us teachers say we are trying to get our students to do. Examine is exactly what I did. I examined the fact that the only person who had trouble with my writing was this one professor. I managed to make A’s on papers written in other professors’ classes…. imagine that! I was a staff writer for a local magazine too. Now, don’t get me wrong, I was not the world’s best writer back them, but I also wasn’t any worse than many of my peers in the program.  This experience got me to thinking in a more poignant way about the pervasiveness of racism in almost every aspect of my life, and that even though I had gotten into a graduate program that was respected and one that I thought meant I had a little something going-on, I would have to deal with racism in the academy and no matter what, I better not forget who I was, how I looked or where I had gone to school. This experience taught me that despite what I thought about how well I was prepared, there would always be people in the academy who saw me and my undergraduate preparation as inferior. More importantly, I began to see how important and valuable and well prepared those teachers at my HBCU had made me. In both implicit and explicit ways, they knew what I had to face, whether I realized it at the time or not, and they got me ready for it. Ultimately, that teacher did me a favor. I decided that I wanted to teach writing at HBCUs. That institution gave me an education, I was learning, that was just as good, if not better, than what I saw at PWIs. I want all students of color to get what I got at my HBCU, and they should be able to get it no matter where they choose to go to school. So, my career has been varied, but always seated in my real-life experiences. I teach writing to students who are yet like me, given a last-minute chance by a school that may not have been their first choice. I teach them to prepare them for experiences like mine once they leave our HBCU. I want to be the voice in their heads reminding them to weigh the evidence, find the fallacies and reach a new conclusion about themselves and the world in which they find themselves, and after they’ve done that, do the same for someone else. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Dr. Nancy E. Wilson, Associate Professor and Directory of Lower Division Studies at Texas State University. Epiphanies Asked to share an epiphany, Misha mentions that while watching a YouTube video of a KKK grand wizard, she recognized that they had something in common: as an African American, she also wishes to preserve her racial heritage. When the class expresses alarm, Misha clarifies that she knows about the KKK’s hatred of African Americans; however, during quarantine she resolved to stop condemning and canceling others. Doing so made her feel superior but left her ignorant. She suggested that as a class we “run toward” uncomfortable topics and try to understand why people think what they think. Every class needs a Misha.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Kimberly Fain, Ph.D., J.D. teaches literature and writing as a Visiting Professor at Texas Southern University. She has authored over 50 publications including essays, articles, reviews, chapters and three books: Colson Whitehead: The Postracial Voice of Contemporary Literature, Black Hollywood: From Butlers to Superheroes, the Changing Role of African American Men in the Movies, and African American Literature Anthology: Slavery, Liberation and Resistance.     Digital multimodal texts—such as films, podcasts, and websites—offer varying textual features that appeal to an audience’s senses. When interpreting a multimodal text, features such as images, sound, and hyperlinks assist students with their critical thinking skills. Those various textual features engage students intellectually; therefore, they are powerful teaching tools. After 20 years of teaching—as I dive deeper into my research and writing in the field of technical communication and rhetoric—I emphasize more the persuasive elements of multimodal texts. Multimodal rhetoric has the power to persuade audiences to think or behave in a certain manner. Moreover, digital media offers educators the opportunity to teach multimodal rhetoric, while maintaining our students interests in pop culture subject matter. In this post, I’ll explore Beyoncé’s Homecoming (2019) as a multimodal text, explain how she uses storytelling as a method of truth telling, and offer student review questions for my supplementary article on this film. Beyoncé’s Homecoming is a 2 hour and 17-minute documentary featured on Netflix. This documentary is an exemplary digital text that utilizes multimodal rhetoric. Textual features such as the colorful concert footage, black and white behind-the-scenes commentary, and auditory quotes from intellectual icons—such as Audre Lord and Maya Angelou—teach diverse audiences about the power of Black womanhood, Black culture, and Black knowledge. As a cultural phenom, Beyoncé uses her pop culture platform and iconic influence to teach her audiences beyond the lyrics that she features in her videos. Beyoncé is a performer that makes her Black feminist rhetorical intentions known to her audience: “As a Black woman, I used to feel like the world wanted me to stay in my little box. And Black women often feel . . . underestimated” (Homecoming 1:07:35 -1:07:43). When Beyoncé’ speaks these words of invisibility, she is speaking to any marginalized individual that can relate to her feelings of self-doubt. Since Beyoncé draws her audience into her personal life with images of her children and rap mogul husband, Jay-Z, I also stress how storytelling is a form of truth telling. In an online Peitho journal article entitled “Black Feminist Rhetoric in Beyoncé’s Homecoming,” I express how storytelling is a persuasive tool when teaching student audiences. Gwendolyn Pough’s Check It While I Wreck It and “Personal Narratives and Rhetorics of Black Womanhood in Hip-Hop” inform my discussion of the use of storytelling or truth telling to evoke change in personal and social circumstances. By applying Pough’s theories of storytelling and truth telling in Beyoncé’s Homecoming performance, this explains how Beyoncé impacts her audience even though her storytelling and truth telling is rooted in the Black woman’s experience. (Fain) Regardless of students’ race, culture, or gender, many can relate to how storytelling is a valid form of truth telling. Storytelling as a method of truth telling persuades students to bring their own personal experiences into their analysis of the text. Unless a student can relate to the text, they have difficulty assessing its value. Since Homecoming was “No. 1 in over 40 countries, including the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Nigeria, Spain, and Turkey” (@Bey_Legion), scholars could argue that Beyoncé’s music has universal appeal regardless of her identity. Nevertheless, I chose Beyoncé because she is well-known and shares common identity traits with my students. For instance, Beyoncé is a Southern Black woman performer. I’ve found that students will engage with multiple intersection points of a performer’s identity. Students from the South can relate to Beyoncé’s Southern identity regardless of race. Students who are African American often relate to Beyoncé’s Black experiences. Meanwhile, non-black female students can relate to Beyoncé’s expressions of motherhood, sisterhood, and/or womanhood. Therefore, if you’re interested in informing your students, while they joyfully engage with pop culture that is relatable, musical documentaries like Homecoming function in that manner. When teaching this Homecoming unit, I prepare students by showing them the YouTube trailer. This fast-paced trailer creates excitement and anticipation amongst most of my students. Depending on the length of the class (45 minutes/115 minutes), I might spend one or two class sessions watching the documentary with my students. However, I provide at least 10 minutes at the end of class to discuss significant events in the documentary. If every student has access to Netflix, I will ask them to watch the remaining minutes for homework. After watching the Homecoming documentary, they read my article entitled “Black Feminist Rhetoric in Beyoncé’s Homecoming.” For classes that prefer to verbally communicate, students will take turns reading in-class. However, if they prefer to read quietly, I provide that option instead. By the next class period, students are expected to have finished reading my article. Prior to assigning the questions, I’ll ask them if they have any questions. After this verbal warm-up, students are ready to answer my assigned written questions. If they prefer to answer the questions individually, I offer that option. However, I receive more intuitive answers when students work with a partner. By working with peers to answer these multi-pronged review questions, students gain a sense of community, while they brainstorm their interpretations with each other. If I was working with a remote class, I would provide digital ways for students to engage with each other. For instance, I would ask a multi-pronged warm-up question in the Discussion Board and require students to respond to one or two of their classmates. Digital teaching platforms—such as Blackboard Collaborate Ultra—provide small group options that allow students to engage more privately. To familiarize my remote students, I would provide a recorded lecture accompanied by lecture notes. This will provide more context for watching the documentary and completing the review questions at a distance. If you choose to have students work in digital groups, they can complete this task in Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, Zoom, Skype, FaceTime and more. To combat disinformation and promote the importance of textual evidence, I emphasize how determining the ethos of an author is necessary for an individual’s interpretation of a text. Please see below where I present the first four review questions. Even when my students verbally discuss their written answers in class, I provide private feedback in Blackboard. As a result of professor-student and peer communication, my students report to me that that they have a deeper understanding of various themes—such as Black womanhood, Black culture, and Black knowledge—after completing the assignment. Review Questions:  How does the author’s bio establish her ethos (e.g., credibility, expertise) to speak about African Americans, Black feminism, and communication? Why is it important for an author to have expertise when speaking, teaching, and/or writing on any subject? Explain in 4-5 sentences.  Based on the Abstract, what are 5 arguments presented in this article? Please use bullet points to list your answers.  Please see the hyperlinked key words below the Abstract. What is the purpose of these keywords? Click on 3 different keywords. List the key words you chose and why. Then, explain in 3-4 sentences what you learned.  After reading the first paragraph of the article, describe the Homecoming documentary in your own words using text evidence from the reading. Explain in 4-5 sentences.   Bibliography @Bey_Legion. “Beyoncé’s #Homecoming—The Live Album is #1 in 40 countries.” Twitter, 17 April 19, 10:36 a.m., https://twitter.com/Bey_Legion/status/1118538707747913729. Fain, Kimberly. “Black Feminist Rhetoric in Beyoncé’s Homecoming.” On Race, Feminism, and Rhetoric, special issue of Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric in Composition, vol. 23, issue 4, Summer 2021. https://cfshrc.org/article/black-feminist-rhetoric-in-beyonces-homecoming/#pou3. Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé. Directed by Beyoncé and Ed Burke, performance by Beyoncé, 2019. Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/title/81013626. Accessed 28 December 2020.    ... View more

    As another school term ends, I think back on what we hope our students have learned about argumentation. Some of that knowledge has to do with analyzing the arguments made by others. I would hope that students leave an argumentation class a little less gullible than when they entered and, yes, a little less gullible than many of the people they will cross paths with in their daily lives. They need to be able to see the flaws in others’ arguments, even when they are tempted to accept those arguments. They need a vocabulary for explaining what is so wrong with so much of what passes for truth these days. As they see new controversies arise in the social and political worlds that they inhabit, they need to be able to read the most recent headlines and the most recent social media posts with a critical eye. They must understand the need for seeking common ground as a starting place for reconciling seemingly irreconcilable differences. Hopefully, they leave us knowing a little more about what sources of information to trust, including blocking out those voices that tell them that no media outlet is to be trusted. Some of that knowledge has to do with backing up their own arguments. As a new teacher, I did what was then popular and assigned one big research paper, and then after seeing the mistakes students made, wished they had another chance to get it right, but the term was over, and it was too late.  As I evolved as a teacher, I learned to teach the use of sources as a skill to be gained through practice. Students can start learning to use sources skillfully from the first time they write about something they have read. They can learn that to use sources is just that—to make use of sources to advance their own ideas. The idea is to avoid a patchwork quilt of quotations from sources that have very little of the student’s own ideas to hold them together. They can learn that a source worth using is worth identifying with more than a name in parenthesis. I would hope that by the end of the term each student can smoothly incorporate sources into his or her writing while providing the claim to authority that makes that source worth drawing on. I would hope that students leave knowing how to find good sources and how to identify which sources are good and reliable. This means learning to sift through all the chaff available online to find the seeds of value. Research is so much more than finding any old source to list on a works cited page. Recognizing and constructing successful arguments are skills that can be learned. Never has there been a greater need for citizens to have those skills. Some of the most basic rights we hold as citizens are under threat. Every time our students decide whom and what to vote for they are using the skills of argumentation. When they stand up in support of that very right to vote they are doing so as well.   Photo: "Dimension"  by KT King is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

In his recent opinion essay in the New York Times, “My College Students are Not Okay,” Jonathan Malesic suggests that college administrators start “resisting the temptation to expand to remote learning, even if students demand it, and ensuring that faculty workloads leave time for individual attention to students.” Nevertheless, it seems possible to look at the same evidence of students’ challenges in Spring 2022, and to arrive at much different conclusions.   Malesic believes college students’ current malaise was precipitated by remote learning during the lockdowns and quarantines of 2020-21. Instead, I suggest it might be more helpful to think of the historical context for the shift to remote learning. Remote learning did not exist in isolation from events that took place alongside COVID inthe last two years that students have eluded to in class discussions, journals, and writing projects: George Floyd’s murder, the 2020 presidential election, the January 6th, 2021 Capital Riot, the white supremacist murders across the US, the climate disasters of wildfires and Hurricane Ida, and so on.      Moreover, the pandemic has not yet ended and the consequences, visible and invisible, continue to impact our students: nearly 1 million dead from COVID-19, the inception of vaccines, and the divisiveness of vaccine mandates and mask mandates. Other challenging circumstances are systemic racism and  the dismantling of the social safety net. The absence of a functioning safety net became more visible in the multiple crises in disparity that accompany COVID–healthcare, mental health care, childcare, housing, food security, education–the list goes on.    In other words, the suggestion that remote learning alone caused students’ current difficulties is disingenuous at best, and catastrophic at worst. Our students’ current disengagement with schooling is part of a constellation of issues that predated the pandemic, and that will continue to exist in the aftermath. Because of this, I would suggest that students did not feel cared for before the pandemic, and even more so, during the pandemic. COVID might have been an opportunity to pull together for the greater good. Instead, chaos ensued.    Remote learning certainly disrupted students’ lives. It did not help that there was no apparatus in place to address the needs of students who did not have access to the internet, and who had a difficult time engaging with Zoom, among other issues. The insistence on Zoom serving as a replacement for face-to-face classrooms exacerbated an already difficult situation, and a number of factors continue to contribute to students’ lack of engagement online: caregiving responsibilities, full-time work to support families and themselves, illness, including COVID and mental illness. This list of causes intersects with the absence of the social safety net, and the lack of infrastructure to support asynchronous learning, much less online classrooms.   Instructors also face these circumstances, especially, but not exclusively, adjuncts and other contingent workers in education This largely includes workers of color, who are often on the frontlines of student support. Contingent workers are usually assigned to this work without adequate compensation, without an adequate safety net, and in isolation from colleagues.    Justice: quilt patch from the quilt “2016/2022: In Hope and Sorrow” by Susan Bernstein Photo by Susan Bernstein   To return to Malesic’s original point–that administrators should not capitulate to student’s demands for increased remote learning–is to leave aside the fact of the increase in students with mental health disabilities, and also to ignore the high costs of college education and the need for many students to work to pay for their education, while supporting their families. To suggest that faculty workloads be adjusted to give students individual attention is to overlook the fact that contingent workers have high student loads at more than one institution. It is also to neglect the reality that contingent workers are not fairly compensated for the additional emotional labor of counseling or advising.   What do I suggest instead? Somehow, whether we teach remotely or face-to-face, we have to reconfigure the system–the whole system, not only academia, but the social conditions in which academia is embedded. That is not a quick fix. These last two years, the only thing I can think to do is to teach Baldwin, to share with my students Baldwin’s concern that “All safety is an illusion.”  I can try, as my long-time mentor used to remind me again and again, to keep the class grounded in writing, and to make sure that the students are working to grow their own writing. I can stay up to date with theory and practice, as well, and I can try to be a good colleague.   Additionally, I can try to change the system, both individually and collectively. Surely that seems too daunting a task. Yet, as this second full year of online teaching draws to a close, I continue to ask myself–and to ask you, my audience–what choice do I have to do anything else but to support positive changes?     The consequences of doing nothing haunt my dreams. Through that haunting, I allow my dreams to regenerate imagination, and to consider possibilities not yet imaginable. Listening to dreams might seem contradictory, or naive. Yet listening to dreams also reminds me to listen to students, however they communicate, whether through faces, blank screens, voices, Zoom chats, and especially silences.    Sharing the unexpected possibilities of imagination is a responsibility to be taken seriously. The challenge, in a time of pandemic is to confront that responsibility, even in weariness and even in fear. For the last two years in the isolation of remote learning I have taught James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr. I have read and reread their work, written new assignments, and worked with students to make meaning from their twentieth-century texts. I have done this teaching because, I realize, I am also searching to make meaning. The search is also a responsibility, and the search is ongoing. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Jenna Morton-Aiken, Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy.   Voices Day 1: Welcome to Technical Writing. I cultivate tone and words to establish authority with young, mostly male, maritime cadets. Call me Dr. Their body language shouts, Stop trying, your class doesn’t matter to me. Weeks 1-3: Deploy resistance with strong voice and applied expertise as Covid-19’s shadow grows. Maybe this doesn’t suck, white gaps between double-spaced submissions whisper. Week 4: Campus abandoned, we’re all silenced. Week 5+: I’m here, I write with memes and raw emotions, my voice virtually transformed. Theirs, too—Help me, they say. I’m drowning, they say. Your words matter to me, they say. We write.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

For the last month or so, it’s been awards season at colleges and universities across the country—and of course I am especially interested in awards for student writing. A week ago, I had the pleasure of joining one such event at Stanford for the annual Oral Presentation of Research Awards, given every year to students in the second-year required writing course. While individual classes in this course are themed so that students can elect a class on a topic that appeals to them, all students prepare an extensive research-based argument—and then “remediate” it into a fifteen-minute oral presentation. Over the years since we first introduced this course and assignment in the early 2000s, this assignment has consistently engaged students’ imaginations—and effort. Over and over again, they tell us that having an opportunity to “boil down” a lengthy written text into a memorable oral presentation is one of their most rewarding challenges. It’s no surprise that this assignment, or some version of it, is now common in writing programs, as students learn the importance of being able to communicate the results of often difficult-to-follow research to public audiences with clarity and verve. Imagine my delight, then, as I listened to these four students describe their research and receive commendations for their work (including a generous cash award as well as several books chosen especially for them by their instructors): Ijeoma Alozie, “What Heartbeats are Worth Listening To,” about medical neglect and “misogynoir” in medical institutions, Liv Jenks, “Charting a Car-Free Point Forward: Addressing Resident Opposition to Green Urbanism,” which featured extensive field-based research on local attitudes, Amantina Rossi, “Pelo Melo: An Exploration of the Dominican Mother-Daughter Dynamics Regarding Hair, Beauty, and Professionalism,” about inter-generational tensions surrounding expectations and desires, and Haley Stafford, “Environmental Equity at Bay: Climate-Driven Evictions in Jakarta, Indonesia,” about causes and effects in a city that is literally sinking. As I listened to these four second-year students, I was struck by the range of their research interests, by their understanding of the methodologies available to them, and especially by their eloquence: while their comments were clearly crafted, they were delivered with such poise, openness, clarity, and audience awareness that they seemed to be in conversation directly with me. That these students have all had their personal and educational lives disrupted during the last two-plus years of a pandemic made their savoir faire all the more remarkable—a celebration truly to be cherished. I hope your school year is winding down as well as possible and that you may have some much-needed R and R during the summer months. I am going to be taking a break from Bedford Bits for a while myself, looking for ways to enjoy life’s good and simple pleasures. As I do so, I will be thinking of writing teachers and students everywhere with admiration. Image Credit: Photo 839 by NappyStock, used under a Public Domain license ... View more

In a previous edition (the 7th) of Signs of Life in the USA, I presented a semiotic interpretation of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight as a hands-on illustration of how to conduct semiotic analyses of popular movies. Focusing on the critical difference between Jack Nicholson's portrayal of the Joker in Tim Burton's Batman and Heath Ledger's Academy Award winning interpretation of the role, I noted that while Nicholson’s Joker "was far more violent and sadistic than any Joker in the past, he "was motivated by desires that his audience could understand: He wanted money, he wanted power, and he wanted revenge . . . . We may not be on his side, but we can understand him." In contrast, Ledger's Joker "doesn’t want power, as is evident from the fact that while he makes war on the mob, he does not attempt to build his own organization . . . . And he doesn’t want money, which is dramatically symbolized by his setting fire to a huge pile of cash atop which sits the mob’s accountant. He doesn't really seem to want revenge (even his indications that he was cruelly raised—suggesting thereby a possible revenge motive emerging from his childhood—are undercut by later speeches that make it clear that he will say just about anything, no matter how untrue). And he doesn’t want sex (Nicholson’s Joker had a girlfriend, though she was horribly abused; Ledger’s Joker is completely unattached). Basically, all he wants to do is create mayhem and make people suffer as much as possible." Tying this difference to a promotional poster of Nolan's Batman featuring an image of the Caped Crusader standing in front of a New York City skyscraper whose upper stories appear to be on fire (clearly evoking some of the most searing images of the 9/11 attacks), along with the significant subtitle, "Welcome To A World Without Rules," I concluded that "Ledger’s Joker is very much a reflection of the terroristic violence of our times. Simply stated, Ledger’s Joker is a terrorist, and as such he raises an important question that is very explicitly presented in the movie: namely, how can a society fight terrorism without becoming terroristic itself? Batman: The Dark Knight both reflects and addresses this larger cultural dilemma by dramatizing the choices that civilized societies must make when battling enemies who do not seem to respect any limits. Thus, while Batman is willing to break some rules to fight the Joker, he is not willing to kill him when he has him at his mercy (the Joker even anticipates this as he dares Batman to kill him and so become like the Joker himself). Reflecting the dilemma that Americans face when confronted by such shadowy organizations as Al Qaida, Batman: The Dark Knight was ultimately a profoundly political film which raised questions about the conduct of the entire war on terror." I recall this analysis now as America is being confronted with an ever-growing threat of domestic terrorism, with the massacre in Buffalo being the latest in a seemingly unending string of such attacks. And, as so often seems to be the case now in the digital age, there appears to be a trail of prior actions and Internet posts that, if effectively handled, could have led to measures that might have prevented the tragedy. But as law enforcement authorities would tell us, if an arrest was made every time someone posts disturbing content on the Internet, or acts weird at school or at work, a good proportion of the country would be in jail. And so we are once again faced with The Dark Knight conundrum: namely, how can a society fight terrorism without becoming terroristic itself? What liberties are we willing to give up for the sake of public safety? What liberties, the Constitution being what it is, are we able to give up? These are not rhetorical questions on my part. And no, I'm afraid that I do not have the answers. ... View more

  As I completed my first fully ungraded writing course this semester, I faced up to the inevitable: I still had to post a university-required final grade after a liberating semester without them. While I have done ungraded portions of my classes for many years, this small upper level writing seminar was the perfect opportunity to try a fully ungraded course … an opportunity that left me surprised by how my students and I ultimately felt about putting in a final grade. That was one of many end-of-semester surprises I’m still thinking through. I sure loved the freedom of crafting innovative assignments  that offered more space for creativity, knowing I wouldn’t have to encapsulate my feedback on student efforts in a single letter grade. I relished instead letting my comments drive the progress between scaffolded drafts. I converted our courseware site to “Incomplete” or “Complete” and reveled in the conversations after each assignment when students decided whether they had completed the expectations of the assignment and their own abilities, or whether they wanted to work further on the essay. Sometimes those conversations were downright giddy: “I surprised myself in this final draft.” “The risks I took were pretty fun, actually!” What I hadn’t anticipated was how emotional the discussions about the final grade would be for some students. After all, I had been transparent from the start of the semester that we would decide their final grade together in a self-reflective conversation they would lead. I let them know they should be ready to talk about their process, growth, learning, and plans for the future. It was a strong group of writers, and I reminded them often throughout the course that they were meeting my highest expectations, and that in grade-speak they were all doing “A” work. I thought that after all the feedback and many meetings over the semester, our final conversations would be a simple and celebratory. A few were. In several cases, though, very strong students had real difficulty saying the words “I deserve an A for all I accomplished this semester.” Sometimes students would say they didn’t want to seem “braggy,” and I’d gently help them unpack the difference between being conceited and honestly assessing one’s strengths, and why this was an important lesson to carry forward in all parts of their lives. I tried to keep quiet as students ventured into the strange territory of putting a conclusive grade on work which we had all semester thought of as work in progress. Some students would claim they only “deserved a B or a C,” and seemed to want me to offer the higher grade for them. Instead, I kept prompting them to reflect on their growth until they landed with some confidence on the grade — inevitably higher — that more accurately represented their learning.  Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that these conversations prompted some tears. After all, the equation of grades with self-worth — or shame — is deeply engrained.  As I held out the Kleenex box and offered space for their reflections, I resolved to make this type of reflection a more substantial part of future class discussions. Certainly, the emotional depth of those exchanges has made me all the more committed to addressing the institutional “need” for grades. As always, our colleagues are a wonderful resource. The #Ungrading conversation on Twitter about navigating the end of the semester is nuanced, with experienced ungraders and novices mulling over these academic conventions and institutional restrictions. I have found those discussions to be helpful and reassuring. They are also fundamentally democratic in a time when such thoughts are necessary for us as instructors and citizens, I’d argue. Susan Bernstein speaks my mind eloquently in her recent post on concerns for our students in this alarming time of democratic erosion. There’s a lot to think about this summer as we find time to rest and to prepare ourselves and our students for the work ahead.   Photo Credit: “Weighted Companion Cube Tissue Box Cover” by Mandy Jouan is used under a CC By-NC-ND 2.0 license. ... View more

Michael A. Reyes teaches first-year writing and literature of the Americas at Cal Lutheran University and Cal State LA. He specializes in rhetorical genre theory and contemporary Latinx docupoetry. He’s also the Assistant Editor of Poetry at The Offing and a former member of the Bedford New Scholars Advisory Board.   Two years ago, a Cal State LA student petition circulated around social media. It was a petition to grant all students at the university A’s. The reason? The coronavirus pandemic had made any equitable learning, and therefore fair distribution of grades, impossible. The petition was thesis-driven and so well-organized with diverse appeals and sources. It was truly a great demonstration of the critical thinking and writing I hope to inspire in my students! It was this spring 2020 petition that sparked my interest in seeking alternatives to traditional grade and point systems. I agreed with the students’ argument that the difference between a passing and failing grade is less about being apathetic and instead much more to do with resources and accessibility. So, I spent the summer developing my own version of Asao B. Inoue’s course grading contract, which I was assigned to read during my graduate studies. My goal was to introduce to students a new way of being motivated that didn’t include the pressure and standardization of letter grades on their assignments. The outcome would be the same: receive a final course grade. But, how I guided them to that outcome would be extremely different. Instead of receiving a letter grade or point value, all assignments would receive a “Complete” or an “Incomplete.” In doing so, I imagined that I would further open my classrooms to a pluriversality of writing and reading levels, especially when a student’s “best” may look a lot different during the pandemic. I presented the grading contract to my classes on day one of the fall 2020 semester. It included my rationale for the contract: to decentralize my role and instead place students as authorities in their own reading and writing growth; to acknowledge labor over expertise and understand that one semester is not enough to dictate “meeting” or “advanced” reading and writing skills; and to have students be motivated by feedback and collaboration. The grading contract also included the table I’d use to determine their final course grades: Final Course Grade # of Missing or Incomplete Assignments A 0-2 A- 3 B+ 4 B 5 B- 6 C+ 7 C 8 C- 9 No Credit 10 or more   To my surprise, no students protested (and haven’t during my 2 years of using it). They each accepted the terms, and saw it as a chance to, as one first-year student noted in a post-grading contract reflection assignment: “. . . take your time and try to write as well as you can without fear that everything has to be perfect. For this class you will find your writing style and your voice. It sounds cheesy I know but I’m being serious.” My obvious concern was that students would take it for granted and submit haphazard work, but that was never an issue. I credit my use of a TILT framework that clearly communicated what would constitute a “Complete” for each assignment. Additionally, this called on me to revise a few of my weekly reading responses and rhetorical précis assignments to be less frequent but a bit more challenging. For instance, I only assigned one homework assignment per week, which would ideally allow for student comprehension and transformation to sink in. Students would therefore not be punished for taking natural pauses to work through difficulties. The quality of my assignments seemed to also improve since I had to design them for productive difficulties. I anticipated that the less frequent and more manageable the assignments were, while still promoting productive struggle, the more students had a real chance to think about their thinking and then submit. It’s been two years since first implementing a course grading contract in all my classes, from developmental to advanced composition, and even in inter-American literature courses. Summer breaks seem to be my reflection periods. So, as a new one approaches, I’m committing to working through a few realizations I’ve made—some good, some not so good: In an access-oriented institution with no corequisites, this allowed for students to be comfortable with where they were at—truly living up to the age-old motto of meeting students where they’re at. My grading anxiety reduced so much. I no longer worried about the high stakes implications of giving a student one point more or one point less on an assignment. Students were more encouraged to read the feedback to see how I and their peers were interpreting their choices. I also saw a lot more risks! Although I tried, not all assignments required the same amount of “labor,” so some missed assignments were higher stakes than others. To be honest, I’m still unsure about how to address this. Can and should a final draft of an essay carry the same weight as a 200-word reading response? I concluded that students, particularly in my composition classes, should check in more frequently with the grading contract (not just at the beginning and end) via journal reflections to build a more thorough understanding about the value of this system. In other words, I want to build more feedback loops for me to see how students are processing their growth and not associating this with the discourse of grades. I wondered how a course grading contract’s value changes depending on the course. I found it valuable for creativity and risk-taking in my upper-division courses where students already had a stronger grasp of university rhetorical genres and had less confusion about “hidden curriculum.” However, I found it valuable for inspiring affective approaches to my first-year composition classes. These students could freely unlearn and learn academic assumptions and writing conventions. In other words, learn academic conventions through play. The grading contract did not interfere with course outlines nor department common reading and writing assignments, which was always my leading pitch to my department chairs and program directors. My approach, after presenting it at an end-of-semester English department showcase, was adopted in the Graduate Teaching Associate’s Program at Cal State LA and moved tenured faculty to have informal and formal conversations about assessments. The talks, however, have slowed down. I imagine next steps would be the chair forming a committee. This entire move was DEIJ-motivated—a desire to move away from the arbitrariness of grades and points. However, how can I better rationalize my final course grade table? At the moment, to be honest, it does read a bit arbitrarily – the line between three missing assignments and four, between an A and a B, can be a thin one. Achieving equity can’t happen in one semester. Equity is urgent, but I’m finding it okay to be slow-paced to allow for deeper reflections along the way. And, to allow for more energy into making one strong and detailed contribution, as opposed to many mediocre ones during a semester. ... View more

May seems like a very good month to celebrate teachers, as the school year draws to an end and award and commencement ceremonies blossom. For ten years now, the month has been marked so by the Academy for Teachers in New York City, an organization whose mission is “to honor and support teachers through world-class learning experiences that inspire them to continue changing lives, in the classroom and beyond.” Started by author Sam Swope, the Academy offers “master classes” to teachers from New York schools, the first of which occurred on May 31, 2012, when Professor James Shapiro of Columbia led a college-like seminar on Hamlet. As Swope described it Shapiro, a world-class scholar who’s been living and breathing Shakespeare for decades, started with the play’s first lines: “Who’s there!” “Nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself!” “Long live the king!” Time stopped for the teachers. An hour later, they were still only a few lines in. Everyone needs their minds blown from time to time. Teachers more than most. Swope and master class teachers like Rinne Groff, Billy Collins, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Gail Collins, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jill Lepore, and lots and lots of others have been blowing minds and celebrating teachers ever since. This year, for the first time, I was able to attend the annual “Show Teachers the Love!” celebration, held on May 9 at the New York Historical Society. In this year of ongoing division and seemingly eternal COVID, this was the perfect antidote: an evening that saluted teachers everywhere, and especially those associated with the Academy and with their new Early Career Fellows program. Over its ten years, the Academy has hosted 300+ master classes for 3,000 teachers from 600 public, charter, and private schools, who collectively teach 30,000 kids every year. I’d say that’s pretty impressive. The evening’s gala kicked off with music by The Scooches and was emceed by comedian Bonnie McFarlane, who introduced us to a performance by Rosie’s Theater Kids, dance by Yin Yue, tap by Ayodele Casel (I could hardly stay in my seat for that one!), music from Harp & Plow, and a reading by John Turturro of the Academy’s 2022 “Stories Out of School” Flash Fiction Contest winner, “Sunshower,” by Australian teacher Josephine Sarvaas. (You can read this fabulous “story out of school,” which was published in A Public Space, here.) For me, however, the highlight of the evening was playwright Jeremy O. Harris’s presentation of the Woodridge Award for Great Teachers to his high school English and drama teacher, Candace Owen-Williams. Harris, whose highly acclaimed Slave Play garnered numerous Tony nominations, spoke at length about growing up as a tall, skinny, queer Black kid in a small, deeply conservative town in Virginia, about the bullying and harassment, about feeling unseen and unheard, not to mention unappreciated. Except that his English teacher, Mrs. Owen-Williams, stayed after school to listen to and encourage him, to nurture his obvious talents, to help him mount a production of The Laramie Project at their school (she had also been Matthew Shepard’s teacher. . .), to pursue college, and especially to pursue his dreams. The audience, hushed and rapt, listened hard and then burst into lengthy applause when the award was presented, and kept cheering, and cheering, as teacher and former student shared the moment. It is one I will not soon forget. Is there a teacher who inspired and supported you? And what of those students you have inspired and supported? Who would you like to give an Award for Great Teachers to? As this month of May progresses, I am thinking of so many great teachers I have learned from. I want to thank and to honor them all. Image Credit: Photo by Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for EDUimages, used under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license ... View more

An article I wrote in 2021 explores the value of using concordancing software as a tool for pedagogical reflection. The practice is simple: faculty collect a set of assignments, reflections, or open-ended evaluations from students into a single document, and the resulting file is analyzed via word cloud software (such as this free version) or a concordancing program (such as AntConc) to discover patterns of lexical use that point to dominant themes in the data.    In May, as I am wrapping up my first semester as coordinator of a Writing Fellows program (tied closely this past year to our first-year composition and corequisite courses), I have decided to look at the second-semester reflections of the student fellows through the lens of lexical analysis. As might be expected, the most common noun mentioned was students; after all, the fellows program is student-centered, and tutoring reflections understandably center on the fellows’ interactions with students. But among the many other words that were highlighted in my analysis, one in particular stood out:  wait. When I looked more closely, it was clear that students used this word only when conjoined to another: time. Wait-time was a concept that one of the fellows had encountered as part of training she had received as a supplemental instructor for our university; she later chose an article about wait-time in second-language instruction as a basis for a seminar discussion she led. The fellows group as a whole latched onto this idea as a critical factor—not just for tutoring, but for writing, learning, and thinking in general.    Wait-time—for processing, exploring, testing ideas, playing with language—underlies much of the learning process. (And as I pointed out in a post a couple of weeks ago, our time-bound schedules for classes and semesters often militate against wait-time, both on a macro and micro scale.) When wait-time is offered, learners move forward at a pace that suits them, and they can (perhaps) carry ideas forward as well, ideas that might otherwise have been abandoned in the effort to keep up with the instructor or the tutor or the clock.   After two intense semesters of collaborative learning with these student writing fellows, we are facing a long summer break. Fortunately, all but one of the fellows will be returning to the program in the fall; in fact, I considered this past week giving the fellows some sort of summer assignment—reading a book, journaling, revising their “philosophy of tutoring” statements, mapping out personal goals for the fall, or doing some thematic coding of data we collected during the past year. But I think, instead, I am going to consider this summer an extended form of wait-time—just to see what happens, both for the fellows and for myself. Many of them will be doing what I would assign anyway, as part of their normal routines. But I don’t want to determine what that practice looks like for any of them; I’d like to see where this wait-time takes them—as writers, tutors, readers, and whatever else they are becoming.   Our work in first-year composition programs—and with other undergraduate programs—is always going to be constrained by institutional schedules and timeframes. But having seen the results of wait-time across semesters (as well as across months or years in creative and collaborative projects), I am wondering how we might invite extended wait-time in spite of those institutional constraints.  Any thoughts? I’ll be considering that question this summer—and waiting to see what possibilities emerge. ... View more

  Lately I have been spending a lot of time in Malibu Creek State Park, a spectacular setting popular with deer, coyotes, skunks, mallards, geese, herons, hikers, runners, rock climbers, mountain bikers, and movie/TV buffs—the latter due to the many productions whose outdoor scenes have been filmed here over the years on what used to be land owned by 20th Century Fox. Visitors may recognize scenic backdrops from cinematic classics such as How Green Was My Valley, Planet of the Apes, and (most famously) M*A*S*H—both the movie and television spinoff. While I am tempted to write here about the tricky passage from the park's Century Lake to the M*A*S*H filming site (tricky, at least, for a sixty-something man on a mountain bike), that topic isn't really pertinent to a cultural-semiotic analysis. The M*A*S*H franchise, on the other hand, most certainly is. So here goes. As with most semiotic analyses, the key to the analysis begins in a difference, in this case, the difference between the popular movie of 1970 and the even more popular television series of 1972-1983 (for the sake of brevity, I am not including the 1968 novel upon which both the movie and the series were based). To begin with, then, in the days before subscription networks like HBO broke through the limitations placed upon commercial television, M*A*S*H the movie could be much raunchier, and gorier, than the TV series ever could be. The differences between the two in that respect signify just how much things have changed since the 1970s, with TV fare like The Sopranos and Game of Thrones pushing boundaries that not even the movies dared to explore fifty years ago. Much more significantly, the blatant sexism of M*A*S*H the movie was considerably toned down in the television version, reflecting (especially as the series developed) the growing influence of the women's movement on American popular culture through the course of the decade. Any extended analysis of the M*A*S*H franchise would accordingly need to take both of these differences into account. But my focus here will be upon another difference, the difference, that is to say, between the way that the movie and the series mediated America's experience of the Vietnam War, for while both were clearly understood as metaphors for that war, their takes on it were quite distinct from one another. The movie presented a sharp satirical attack on the conduct of an increasingly unpopular war as U.S. Army officials led their unwilling conscripts into harm’s way. The series, on the other hand, softened that attack considerably (the development of the character of Colonel Sherman T. Potter—who does not appear in the film—is particularly striking in this respect) to focus instead on a more generic anti-war sentiment. This gentling down of the film's biting satire is probably what most accounts for the immense success of the TV series, a success reflected in the fact that 105.9 million viewers (almost half of the U.S. population at the time) tuned in for its final episode, even though, unlike television series such as The X-Files and Lost, it had no tangled webs to unweave, nor, unlike shows such as Game of Thrones, did it have a complex, series-long plot line to bring to a conclusion. In the series finale, the Korean War simply ends and the characters head home. But the broad sweep of its final audience shows how M*A*S*H managed to bring together tens of millions of Americans who, not so very long before, had been bitterly divided by a failed war—and the larger cultural conflicts that accompanied that failure. This achievement was not accomplished by accident, for the M*A*S*H series went out of its way to give something to almost everyone. For those who had opposed the Vietnam War, it maintained the anti-war vibe of the movie, along with a gentler version of its sixties-style attacks on military authority. But for those who resented the anti-Vietnam War movement, there was that far less caustic, much more simply comedic, take on the armed services, with a fatherly Colonel Potter and a buffoonish Major Frank Burns (face it, Larry Linville was no Robert Duvall) to soothe them. And, probably most important of all, there was Alan Alda (no Donald Sutherland was he) as Hawkeye Pierce, irreverent and full of mischief but ultimately a sentimental and even reassuring emotional anchor through eleven seasons. The role that would establish Alda as the face of a new kind of masculinity: the so-called “sensitive man of the 1970s.”  Thus M*A*S*H the TV show mediated and reflected the social movement of a decade when America pulled back from the tumults of the sixties, softening many of the sharp edges of that more revolutionary time (those now-ridiculed male hairstyles were long-hair lite, while seventies-style "soft rock" speaks for itself) as the counter-culture came of age and joined the Establishment—a process that would find its own reflection in 1983's The Big Chill. But there were other historical processes at work, because even as Americans gathered around the small screen for the final episode of M*A*S*H, a counter-revolution was already underway. The Reagan era had begun, and with it a continuation of the culture wars that had pulled America apart in the sixties, and which continue to divide the country into ever-more-hostile camps. And it is highly unlikely—if not flat out impossible—that any television series today (or, for that matter, any artifact of popular culture), could ever achieve what M*A*S*H managed to achieve: a brief moment of cultural concord.     Image Credit: "M*A*S*H Jeep" by contraption is marked with CC BY 2.0. ... View more