I’ve been thinking about African American discourse and African American rhetoric (along with other indigenous rhetorics) since 1973, when members of CCCC were debating what would become the resolution known as "Students' Right to Their Own Language," eventually passed in 1974. That debate helped me think long and hard about the hegemonic status of "standard" English, about the home dialects and languages of my students, and about my own home dialect of the Appalachian mountain south, a language I grew up with, inhabited with ease, and loved, but which I seldom used as an adult in speaking, and never in writing.   At the time, I hoped that most other teachers of writing and reading would welcome this resolution, take its message to heart, and adjust their attitudes toward what counts as "proper" language use. Alas. Twenty-five years after the resolution, the debate still goes on, though "standard edited American English" has been challenged, seriously and serially, for decades now, from those who advocated during the Ebonics controversy to those who advocated for code switching and now to those who argue for code meshing and for "translingual" dispositions to language use.   As I travel around the country, visit schools, and go to conferences, I don’t see agreement across these lines of argument. Far from it. But I do see movement toward more progressive attitudes toward language variety and language use. And I also see very encouraging scholarly work addressing these issues, from Jerry Won Lee’s wonderfully insightful The Politics of Translingualism: After Englishes (Routledge, 2017) to Bonnie J. Williams-Farrier’s "'Talkin' Bout Good & Bad' Pedagogies: Code-Switching vs. Comparative Rhetorical Approaches" (a must-read essay in the December 2017 issue of College Composition and Communication), to the hot-off-the-presses On African-American Rhetoric by Keith Gilyard and Adam J. Banks (Routledge, 2018). I could name a number of others, but let’s stick with these three for a start: if you have not read them, you are in for a treat. I’ve learned so much from each of these texts, and as a result feel I can understand and embrace what Lee calls "translingual dispositions," and I am becoming more familiar with the moves and strategies of African-American rhetoric, thanks to Gilyard and Banks, as well as with the tropes, schemes, and syntactic moves of what Williams-Farrier calls African American Vernacular Tradition. I will write more, and more specifically, about what I’m learning soon, but in the meantime, if you’ve read any or all of these texts, I’d love to hear what you have learned!   Image Credit: Pixabay Image 2667529 by StarzySpringer, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

As a general rule, anyone who did not vote for Donald Trump for president wants to know why anyone else did. Along those lines, I was thinking about the way I introduce motivation when discussing argumentation, in terms of needs and values. In Elements of Argument, we explain an argument’s appeal to needs by citing Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy, explained in his 1943 “Theory of Motivation.” The most basic needs that motivate a human being are physiological: the need for food, water, sex, etc. Next comes the need for safety—security of one’s person, the family, health, property. It is difficult to focus on any other needs if one is hungry or lives in fear. Later Maslow revised his theory to explain that people’s needs on one level do not have to be completely met before they can concern themselves with the higher levels. Still, it is, as Maslow theorized, a hierarchy of needs. Only when physiological and safety needs have largely been met can people worry about the need for love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. A surprising number of authors have applied Maslow’s Hierarchy to the 2016 presidential election. Jamie Beckland does so in this way: “The biggest lesson for any political candidate is that they must speak to the lowest common denominator need on Maslow’s hierarchy that a majority of the electorate will relate to. A political campaign that helps people believe that they can become self-actualized, and achieve their highest and best dreams, can only win if the majority of the electorate believes they are safe; that they belong; and that they have self-worth. On the other hand, if the majority of the electorate does not feel confident in having food, clothing, and shelter, then a campaign focused on self-actualization is doomed.” Beckland writes about how Clinton “spoke to building a sense of community – of being Stronger Together. This appeals to our need for ‘Love and Belonging,’ and many people voted for Clinton because she represented this need. The need for Love and Belonging manifests itself in ideas like: The need for safe spaces, where minorities and historically oppressed groups can express their perspectives without fear of persecution. The need for women to have a voice in the political establishment, and to believe that any qualified person would be judged on their qualifications for the presidency, and not by their gender. The need to see yourself as part of the great American experiment, where people of different creeds and colors assemble under a shared vision of freedom and opportunity.” Beckland argues that Clinton lost because Trump appealed to more basic needs, to which voters responded more strongly. The fact that the Trump campaign understood the lesson Maslow had to teach is evidenced by its emphasis on job security, affordable healthcare, and security from threats posed by illegal aliens. Phil Fragasso explains, “At its most basic level, Trump’s harsh rhetoric appeals to the bottommost layers of Maslow’s hierarchy - physiological and safety needs. He’s going to deliver more jobs at higher pay, make ‘winning’ so common it becomes boring, and ensure that Americans are protected against terrorists domestic and foreign, can shout ‘Merry Christmas’ from the highest rooftops, and stop Mexicans from taking the jobs that Americans don’t want.” Fragasso differs from some other analysts in arguing that the next two levels on the hierarchy “best explain Trump’s core character and his continuing support: esteem and love/belonging.” Fragasso’s own bias is clear as he goes on, “Most tellingly, Trump provided his loyal supporters with something they rarely experience: the very same esteem and love/belonging [that Trump himself experiences]. Trump voters tend to reside on the fringes where they are often afraid to voice their politically incorrect (and often abhorrently [sic]) beliefs and opinions.” For Trump, as for any president, success and continued support from those who voted for him depend on whether or not he is able to fill the needs to which he appealed when he won their votes. Image Source: “Louvre Pyramid - Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs” by pshegubj on Flickr 6/30/12 via Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 license. ... View more

Last week, I reviewed several word cloud generators and suggested a few ways that you can use word clouds in the classroom. This week, I am sharing some ways that you can use word clouds in your classes to engage students directly in the learning process. The ten active learning strategies below ask students to move beyond the absorption of ideas typical of a lecture-based class to deep engagement with the ideas and development of relevant content area and critical thinking skills. 1. 25-Word Summaries With 25-word summaries, students summarize (or otherwise discuss) their reading in 25 words or less. Students must concentrate their ideas and make every word count. Once students submit their summaries, combine them in a single document, and generate a word cloud that reveals the 25 words that students mentioned most. For nonfiction readings, the resulting word cloud can show the main points of the reading, significant facts that are included, and key issues that stand out for students. For fictional readings, the word cloud can reveal significant features from the reading, such as themes and symbols. The word cloud below is the collected response to the discussion question “What are the main themes in A Raisin in the Sun?” For accessibility purposes, include the table of word frequency, which screen readers will be able to read.   Word Frequency family     21 african     16 people     14 dream     10 dreams     10 abortion       8 act       8 knowledge       7 raisin       7 africa       6 2. Icebreakers with Survey Responses Choose your favorite icebreaker question: What’s your favorite food? What’s the last book you read? What kind of texts have you written in the workplace? Ask students to respond with online survey software, like Poll Everywhere or Mentimeter. Both of these tools allow you to present the survey responses in a word cloud, so you do not need any additional software. The cloud appears on the survey website as the responses are added. 3. Directed Paraphrase Check students’ comprehension by asking them to paraphrase the most recent lesson or activity that the class has completed. Encourage students to put the content of the lesson into their own words, rather than parroting back what they have seen or read in the class. Collect all of the responses in a single document, and generate a word cloud of the most commonly repeated words. Share the cloud with the class and ask them to consider why certain words showed up and why others were missing. Be sure to ask them to comment on how well the word cloud represents the lesson or activity they paraphrased. 4. Prediction Before students read the next section of an article or chapter of a book, ask them to suggest what they think will happen next. As with other activities, gather the responses in a single document and create a word cloud, which will identify the most popular predictions. Ask students to discuss why certain predications were popular, connecting to the available evidence from the reading they have completed. 5. Muddiest Point Ask students to write down whatever is most unclear about the lesson, in a word or two, before leaving the classroom for the day. Collect students’ responses and assemble them into a single document, from which you can build a word cloud of the points that most students noted. Open the next class session with the word cloud, and address the concepts that students have identified. 6. Focused List Build a focused list by asking students to respond to a question about a topic. This strategy can be used to stimulate prior knowledge by asking a question such as “What have you learned about the topic already?” Give students time to brainstorm a list of concepts that they recall, and create a word cloud of the ideas they have shared. Use the word cloud to extend discussion of prior knowledge by asking students to explain the concepts that appear in the word cloud. 7. Version Comparison As part of a research project, ask students to find two articles on their topic, ideally two that focus on different perspectives. Have students make a word cloud for each of the articles and then compare the two clouds. Specifically, ask which words that the two versions have in common as well as what their most significant differences are. Have students determine which of the most frequently used words communicate facts and which communicate opinion. If there are terms in the word clouds that students have not found elsewhere in their research, encourage them to examine these words further as they relate to the topic. 8. Role Play Again, set up a survey using online survey software, like Poll Everywhere or Mentimeter, but this time ask students to answer from another perspective. In literature courses, you can ask students to answer as they think one of the characters would respond. The activity can be used as a Prediction activity (#4 above) by asking students to predict what someone in a reading might do next or a decision the person would make. For any reading that students complete, they might respond as the author would. If you are studying argument, students can answer as someone on a particular side of the issue might. These role-playing surveys will result in interesting word clouds that reveal how well students understand whatever they are reading or studying. 9. Quiz-Style Games For this activity, you create the word cloud yourself. You could choose keywords from a text and manufacture a cloud, or paste in the text of a reading to create a cloud. Ensure that your cloud does not include the title of the piece or other words that would make the source immediately obvious. The word cloud above for A Raisin in the Sun would work for this activity. Use the resulting word clouds to quiz students: By looking only on the cloud, can they identify the piece that the cloud represents? Students could work individually or in teams to propose their answers, similar to a game show. This activity would work particularly well as a review exercise before an exam. 10. List-Cloud-Group-Label With this modification of the List-Group-Label strategy, you can stimulate prior knowledge as you introduce a reading, a unit of study, or a course theme. Write a word or phrase related to the subject area on the board. For instance, if the course will explore popular culture, you might focus on the word popularity or the phrase popular culture itself. Have students brainstorm related words and phrases using online survey software, like Poll Everywhere or Mentimeter (or in an open Google Doc). Make a word cloud of students’ responses. Next, arrange students into small groups, and ask each group to examine the word cloud closely. Groups can add or remove words or phrases as well as decide on whether particular items on the list should have been larger or smaller in the word cloud. Once they have considered the words, ask groups to arrange the words into several related subtopics and to provide a label for each subtopic. Have groups present their subtopics to the whole class and explain their arrangement. The whole class can compare the different subtopics that groups have created. Later in the course, after you have begun your exploration of the reading, unit, or theme, ask students to return to the labeled groups of words and consider how well they relate to the topic as it has evolved during the course. Final Thoughts As you can see from these ten ideas, word clouds can be a versatile tool in the classroom. They can be used for analysis, description, summary, and more. Perhaps my favorite thing about these uses of word clouds is that the results are always different. Although my classes may study the same topic or readings from one term to the next, the way that they create and analyze word clouds is always unique—and every so often, they reveal an idea that surprises me. What are your thoughts on word clouds now that you have seen some ways to use them? Do you have additional strategies to try? Would you complete one of these active learning strategies in a different way? Tell me your thoughts in a comment below. I can’t wait to hear from you. ... View more

Before the beginning of the spring semester, as I planned our assignments for the course, I tried to imagine where we might be by the end of the semester. I thought of skills to be practiced and outcomes to be measured, and I also considered multiple means of fostering persistence and resilience through the processes and products of writing. Through these means, I returned to a genre I had used in the past, the graduation speech. The end of the semester and the end of the school year can be a difficult time for many students in ways that they understandably may not be willing to share with us. They may struggle with intersecting issues of community and family, with food insecurity and racism, with the need to hold several jobs and to take a course overload to try to accelerate their education. In other words, the end of the year is a time when students need to keep most focused even as low energy levels may impede concentration. What to do? At the end of the semester, through the #redfored movement, public school teachers demonstrated against prolonged state defunding of K-12 education. The demonstrations began at the end of the last week of classes, impacting our community economically, politically, and emotionally. School defunding began during the recession of 2008, and accelerated over the ensuing nine years, or for half of the time that my traditional-aged first-year students had been alive. In the early part of the recession, in the first year of his presidency, Barack Obama had been invited to give a graduation speech at our institution. The speech became controversial, as described in the links connected to the assignment, when some people suggested that the President had not yet accomplished enough to earn an honorary degree. President Obama decided to speak at graduation anyway and wove the controversy into his remarks that demonstrated an exemplary understanding of kairos, or the rhetorical circumstances of the situation. Because this story held local interest for my students, I offered the speech as a reading to help understand the genre of the graduation speech. Also included was a website that listed fifteen themes and other suggestions for composing graduation speeches (see the link below). But the main point of assigning the graduation speech as a final assignment was to give us an opportunity to imagine the future in a positive light. Students not only needed to write a speech, but also to envision themselves as graduating and being chosen to address their classmates. They had to consider the kairos that had produced such circumstances, and to focus on what it would mean to arrive at that historical marker in their own lives. In the conclusion for their speech, one student wrote: Take this speech as a lesson, pass it down to others, give them courage, and give them confidence. Tell them they can do it, those 4 little words mean a lot to people. Makes them push that much harder. Be the one to make the difference in someone’s college experience, and college career. That’s what I am here to do today, you guys don’t need this, you already made it. Give this to others and help them be better, you could be the difference maker. Under the intense pressures that students endure in the culmination of their first year experiences, offering courage and confidence to others can be a significant gift not only to students’ sense of community, but also to students’ developing sense of themselves as writers. As this student suggests, that gift can make all the difference. PROMPT FOR GRADUATION SPEECH Take what you have learned and experiment with a different genre: a speech that you have been invited to deliver to your college graduating class Revise the letter that you wrote to a younger audience as a speech for your class and audience members at your graduation Include your reading from earlier writing projects as references See this link for a list of 15 themes and suggestions for writing graduation speeches. Choose one of these themes for your graduation speech. Look at former President Obama’s 2009 graduation speech at ASU-Tempe for another example. See these links for the transcript, the video, and the historical background of this speech. Music educators performing in the #redfored band at the Arizona state capitol in Phoenix on April 30, 2018. The writing on the drum says: “The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige, and his life for the welfare of others.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.       Photo by Susan Naomi Bernstein ... View more

Today's guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn‌, a Professor in the English Department at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning, critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website Acts of Composition. Many of us find ourselves in larger class settings and look for new ways to encourage critical reading and writing. In one of my other Multimodal Mondays posts, Five for the Drive, I identified 5 easy ways that I have used Google Drive in my classes. I first came up with these assignments when I found myself teaching a literature class that had 35 students. The writing teacher in me wanted my students to write daily reflections on their reading selections and share those ideas with others. Although this worked for years, students often considered it a burden and it required quite a bit of reading and evaluation on my part. I decided it was time for a new model. First, I had to figure out what I considered important when it comes to critical reading: I want students to forge strong interpretations in which they connect their ideas to ideas in a text. I value it when students are text-specAific and can support their ideas through significant passages in a text. I encourage dialogic thinking as students discuss their ideas with others to help them move beyond their own thoughts and interact with the ideas of others. I want them to complete this interpretive work before we arrive in class so that our class discussions are purposeful, interesting, and substantiated. It is with these ideas in mind that I came up with this series of critical reading assignments. Background Reading The St. Martin’s Handbook:  Ch. 7, “Reading Critically”  The Everyday Writer (also available with Exercises😞 Ch.9, “Critical Reading” EasyWriter (also available with Exercises😞  Ch.7, “Analyzing and Reading Critically”   Assignment Series Collaborative Discussion Teams: Assign students to a collaborative discussion team that they will work with through the term. This is a place for them to try out ideas, engage in thoughtful conversation, and create interesting ways of looking at texts through active interpretation. This series of assignments trains them to be strong critical readers – skills they use in our classes and across the curriculum. Set up a Team Space: Each team will have online space and create an accompanying folder on the class Google Drive that includes the following sub-folders: Schedule of Facilitators and Weekly Questions and Passages   Example of Question and Passage Template      Students post weekly questions and passages to Google Docs: For each reading selection, all students in the group are required to post 3 significant, thought provoking questions and one interesting passage, reference or quote to the weekly Google doc. In some instances, I ask them to include more than one passage. The purpose of these questions is to open up discussion and to help students consider the deeper, multiple meanings in the texts we read. Students include their names next to their submissions. Students create a new document each week and curate their ideas of the course of the semester.   Example of Student Questions and Passages: Emerson Weekly facilitators: Students create a calendar of facilitators that will appear as an administrative document in their folder. All members will take several turns facilitating the team (through your LMS or through Google chat or other discussion software). The facilitator starts the thread by looking through the weekly posts to choose a question/passage or two or encouraging conversation and connected ideas. They should start a new thread for each selection, designated by the author’s last name or the title of the selection. In this online discussion, we look for quality conversations, which means that all members actively engage with the subject matter through bringing in their own experiences, ideas, and specific connections to our readings and class discussions. It is also the facilitator’s responsibility to frame and contextualize the questions to make sure that the conversation remains lively and connected.   Example of Facilitated Discussion   In-Class Discussion: By the time students arrive in class, they have already posed interesting questions, grounded their ideas in text-specific passages, and engaged in discussion with others. These exercises then become reference documents for engaged, full-class discussion. Students can access them on their devices and choose particular ideas and passages to share with the class. I have them do different things with their discoveries. I often have students copy them in class to another collaborative document on Google in which teams quickly transfer their questions and/or passages. All students and teams contribute their ideas towards an immediate visual aid for discussion.   Example of Collaborative Passages for Full Class Discussion   Reflection on the Activities I was originally motivated to create this series to manage larger classes and still encourage critical reading strategies. Now, I use them across my classes because they promote the kind of close reading that students often resist. Evaluation is easier because I am not reading full essays and can easily check for quality participation. Students also weigh in on the evaluation twice during the semester and report on their teammates’ participation and the significance of their responses. I also ask them to reflect, in writing, several times during the semester and read across their work from these collaborative discussions. I am not trying to say that these methods should replace exploratory, essay, or research writing. On the contrary, when students curate their ideas along with textual connections, they are more prepared to expand upon them in other writing projects. The most satisfying result is the quality of our class discussions. Every student participates and has a chance to have their ideas heard (which sometimes gets lost in full class discussion). Students always have available references to share with the class and are ready to contribute to the larger dialogic conversations.   Let me know what you think in the comments. ... View more

In talking to my students about the common logical fallacies, I stress that it is not as important that they are able to label a fallacy as it is to recognize when there is a problem with the logic in a given statement. The list of fallacies in our text and in every other argument text on the market, with variations, is useful for alerting them to what can go wrong with logic, but knowing the difference between a straw man and a red herring is less important than recognizing that the logic is skewed. That applies to seeing fallacies in what they read and hear, and also in what they write. You don’t have to look far in today’s newspaper or online news or listen too long to the news to hear logical fallacies. Our hope is that news reports will present facts and that commentary, where cases are built for or against interpretations of those facts, will be clearly labeled as commentary. Unfortunately, the line between hard news and commentary has become increasingly blurred. All it takes is comparing the coverage of an event by CNN and by Fox News to see that. Any controversial topic brings out flawed logic. The more controversial the issue, the more flawed the logic is likely to be because when emotions get involved, they can outweigh reason. Bias can change the way a story is covered simply because of what is included and what is left out. To be fair, reporting the facts alone of a case often includes a person’s stated reasons for his or her actions, and these reasons often include their own faulty logic. A fight breaks out aboard an airliner because one person is afraid to sit next to another because of the color of the other person’s skin or the clothes he is wearing. That’s a hasty generalization. To assume that to limit the sale of automatic weapons will lead to taking away everyone’s guns is a slippery slope. To justify one politician’s indiscretions because another politician is equally guilty of indiscretions illustrates the two-wrongs-make-a right fallacy. (They don’t.) For years, advertisers got away with false use of authority. An early ad claimed, “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” Actors who played doctors on television advertised all sorts of medications and cures. In an interesting recent play on that tradition, a group of television doctors admit in a series of Cigna ads that they only play doctors on television, but that they still want you to get an annual checkup. Is Marie Osmond or Jennifer Hudson any more qualified than any other user of a weight-loss program to argue for its efficacy? The claim to authority is only valid in such a case if the celebrity actually used or uses the product. In the political sphere, President Trump has actually been accused of ordering attacks on Syria as a red herring to draw attention away from the Stormy Daniels story. His administration has been compared to the early days of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, which most would classify as a false analogy, but some would not. Is blaming Hillary Clinton’s loss of the presidential election on a letter written by James Comey a post hoc fallacy or not? These examples are enough to suggest that students won’t have to look far if they are asked to bring in examples of logical fallacies from the news or from advertising. The class can discuss what is wrong with the logic and why. They can start to think about where logic goes wrong and maybe start to notice flawed logic when they see or hear it. Peer critiques of their argumentative essays can point out flawed logic that is so hard for a writer to see in his or her own writing. The terms matter much less than an eye or ear attuned to errors in reasoning. Image Source: “I Can Be Persuaded” by Martha Soukup on Flickr 10/30/10 via Creative Commons 2.0 license ... View more

In April 2014, I had the great pleasure of attending the First Symposium on Teaching Composition and Rhetoric at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. With the theme of “Let Our Voices be Heard,” the symposium was held at NC A&T and sponsored by publisher Bedford/St. Martin’s. Shortly after the symposium, I wrote about it, focusing on a powerful and provocative keynote address by Vershawn Young. (I also gave a keynote but didn’t need to talk about that!) As always happens when I get to visit an HBCU, I learned a ton–especially from the talented and vocal students who attended.   Everyone at that first symposium left hoping for another one, and this year our wishes came true: again sponsored by Bedford/St. Martin’s, chaired by David Green, and held at Howard University and at the United Negro College Fund offices in DC, this Symposium on Teaching Composition and Rhetoric at HBCUs: Remembering Our Pasts, Re-envisioning Our Future certainly lived up to my high expectations. Keith Gilyard closed out the first day with his keynote, “Paying the Price to Make the Mic Sound Nice,” in which he urged all of us to begin with who our students are, not where they are, and to put autobiography and an exploration of the “I” at the center of our teaching and writing. In Gilyard’s view, progressive education is characterized by “rigorous and democratic development of ‘I’” and by exploration of the social/political world our students inhabit.   The other conference keynote was delivered by my fabulous colleague Adam Banks. In “Hold My Mule: Black Twitter, Digital Culture, and a Renewed Version of Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL),” he offered a holistic view of what it means to “do language work,” demonstrating the influence of GIFs and memes especially in articulating and disseminating black culture. Arguing that if technology and technological issues are a key area of inquiry and if “Black expressive culture is on the rise, the goals in composition classes must change.” A renewed vision of SRTOL, then, would put an emphasis on Black language and rhetorical practices that go “far beyond the linguistic”; would go well beyond print; and see remix as an indisputable part of Black culture. These new foci would help us to completely rethink intellectual property (which, as Larry Lessig has long argued, we absolutely must do) and to create pedagogical and social spaces where young people can “come with the remix” as accepted and valued practice.   These very brief summaries don’t do justice to the rich talks given by Gilyard and Banks: for more from them, you can pre-order their forthcoming book, On African American Rhetoric.   While no open conflict erupted, it was clear that not everyone at the symposium embraced these “newfangled” ideas, and there were those who advocated adherence to standard edited English, citing a 2010 study that found that 58% of those using AAVE have writing problems and 73% have reading problems (see Abha Gupta, “African-American English: Teacher Beliefs, Teacher Needs, and Teacher Preparation Programs”). In spite of a lack of unanimity, I came away reminded, once again, that English has always been a plastic language, shifting and changing shape as it absorbed new features from many other languages and from many dialects. And there’s nothing I’d love more than a “renewed vision of SRTOL!”   Every panel I attended during the conference left me instructed and inspired. From Corrie Claiborne and Jamila Lyn’s description of a program they developed to work with young men at Morehouse around issues of gender and of sexual harassment, to ALEXANDRIA LOCKETT’s exploration of “Gender Politics of Excellence at HBCUs,” to Kendra Bryant’s forceful evocation of “Black Student Writers in the Social Media Age,” to Khirsten Echols’s “Turning the Page, Shifting the View: Considering HBCU Literacies,” and to a very powerful closing roundtable on the “Challenges and Triumphs of HBCUs” (featuring a searing testimonial by Faye Spencer Maor on why her work at HBCUs has been central to who she is and why she is where she is today) as well as Jason DePolo’s haunting reminder that “faculty working conditions [which are sorely lacking at most HBCUs] are student learning conditions.”   I could go on and on about this remarkable gathering, and I am grateful for the opportunity I had to learn from all these remarkable scholars. Best of all, I learned that there will be a THIRD symposium on HBCUs, this one to be held at Morehouse College in the Fall of 2019. You know I’ll be there! To view the full program from this year's symposium, visit the https://community.macmillan.com/community/the-english-community/hbcu-forum?sr=search&searchId=8a6ebc3f-57df-495a-93f4-68af7459b4af&searchIndex=0‌. ... View more

Today's guest blogger is Amanda Gaddam, an adjunct instructor in the First-Year Writing Program and the School for New Learning at DePaul University. She holds a B.A. in English with a concentration in Literary Studies and a M.A. in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse with a concentration in Teaching Writing and Language from DePaul, and her research interests include first-year composition, adult and non-traditional students, and writing center pedagogies. I think I’ve been doing multimodality wrong—or at least, I’ve been doing it the same way that I’ve always done it since I began teaching years ago. When creating opportunities for multimodality in the classroom, I have focused primarily on the outcome and how students can fulfill an assignment objective by incorporating multiple or alternate media in their final product.  It only recently occurred to me, during a conversation with a student about her writing process and the challenges of stagnation, that multimodality might also be effectively integrated as part of the writing process, even if the final product looks like a traditional academic essay.   If creating multimodal texts helps communicate ideas in rhetorical ways tailored for particular audiences, then multimodal prewriting and revision activities may also help tailor the writing process for a writer’s individual needs, challenges, and strengths. The goal of the follow suggested multimodal writing activities is to encourage students to embrace the constructive value of multimodality during the drafting and revision processes, instead of just in its expressive value in an end product.   Background Reading The St. Martin’s Handbook Chapter 3: Exploring, Planning, and Drafting Chapter 4: Reviewing, Revising, Editing, and Reflecting The Everyday Writer (also available with Exercises) Chapter 8: Reflecting Chapter 22: Making Design Decisions EasyWriter (also available with Exercises) Chapter 6: Learning from Low-Stakes Writing Chapter 11: Creating Presentations   The Activities The following activities are merely suggestions to get you and your students thinking about how to incorporate multimodal writing into the writing process. There are countless options out there to which students may respond, and those options may also depend on your classroom, your schedule, and your assignments. I recommend that you follow up on these activities with a post-writing reflection component to encourage students to evaluate the effects of multimodal drafting and revision on their work.   Free vlogging For a multimodal twist on free writing, challenge students to set a ten minute timer and record themselves talking through their early ideas, questions, and/or issues related to their writing topic. As in written free writing, they should try to continue talking for the entire ten minutes—even if they run out of things to say or veer off topic. Not every minute of the video will be useful once they review the footage; however, by first verbalizing their ideas and subsequently evaluating them, students will gain a better perspective on where they’re at in the writing process, where the roadblocks and questions remain, and what they need to do to forge ahead. In the reflection component, you might ask students to compare their experiences with traditional free writing and free vlogging: In what ways are each effective for you? Ineffective or challenging? How might you incorporate this activity in future writing projects?   Interactive outlining Many students are tied, for better or for worse, to traditional outlining because it was required in high school or middle school composition courses. Fans of the traditional outline might consider using Prezi to create an interactive outline that highlights the relationships between ideas through movement and visual connections. For reflection, consider asking students to comment on the idea of “flow,” a buzzword often used in relation to writing and revision, but rarely defined. Interactive outlining may help students more clearly conceptualize what they mean by “flow” and how they might revise and reorganize their work to more effectively incorporate it into their final essay.   Reflexting One of my greatest challenges as an instructor is not knowing what students do with or think about my written comments on their work. Part of the issue, I think, is that sometimes students don’t know what the comments mean or don’t take the time to adequately engage with the feedback before revising their work and submitting it.   Ask students to use a free, online text message conversation generator like https://ifaketextmessage.com/ to create a conversation between your written comments and their reactions, questions, and plans for revision, all texted from their phones. Encourage them to embrace the genre by using emojis, gifs, and discourse-specific language rules to create their responses. Doing so will force students to engage with each and every comment, better equipping them to create a plan for revision. In the post-writing reflection, ask students to think about the degree to which they incorporated your comments compared to previous feedback experiences.      Reflection The activities suggested here and the countless other opportunities out there for incorporating multimodality into the drafting and revision processes are easy to fit into your existing course structure because they can complement nearly any scheduled writing assignment. Instead of just giving students time to draft, encouraging (okay—requiring) them to try something new and different might help them adopt practices that actually work, rather than those which are merely familiar. Perhaps most importantly, utilizing multimodal composing in this way allows both you and your students to expand preexisting definitions of pre”writing” and create essays with more depth and creativity. ... View more

As readers of this blog know, I have long been a faculty member at Middlebury College’s famed Bread Loaf School of English, a MA program in English (language, literature, writing, rhetoric) aimed primarily at high school teachers. Over the decades, it’s been a huge privilege to work with teachers from all over the country (and some from beyond our shores), and especially to be associated with the Bread Loaf Teachers’ Network (BLTN), launched 25 years ago by the inimitable Dixie Goswami. I believe this is the first electronic teacher network, and it works to support teachers and their students, to provide resources, to encourage research and publication, and to hold meetings at the state and local level.   In turn, BLTN helped to launch the Next Generation Leadership Network, made up of middle and high school students at various sites around the country (I wrote about this exciting initiative in The Next Generation Leadership Network). One of these sites is on the Navajo Nation, and in late March, with funding from the Ford Foundation, Rex Lee Jim, Ceci Lewis, and their colleagues hosted the Hazhó’ó Hólne’ writing conference in Window Rock, AZ. (As Rex explained to me, the Navajo title translates to something like careful, purposeful, intentional, and beautifully crafted talk.) The conference’s subtitle, “Food for the Body, Mind, and Spirit: Creative Juices for Creative Expressions,” described the conference well: for two and a half days, we wrote, talked, sang, chanted, and performed. I came away exhilarated, instructed, and humbled (as I so often am) by the wisdom and grace of these young people.   In addition to the Navajo Nation group, students (and teachers) came from Atlanta, Georgia; Middlebury, Vermont; Louisville, Kentucky; Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Aiken, South Carolina. All were fiercely and passionately engaged; all were articulate; all were highly aware of the needs of their own communities—and all had plans for how to meet those needs. During our time together, we did workshops on graphic design, on writing effective op-ed pieces, on poetry, on blogging, on food metaphors and their meanings, on the crucial importance of water, on nature writing, on performance, and on the “lost art” of letter writing (students brainstormed about very important letters, including MLK’s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Phyllis Wheatley’s letter to George Washington, Paul’s Epistles, the Declaration of Independence, and the human letter of Henry “Box” Brown, who literally mailed himself to freedom in a wooden crate). We also listened to and explored traditional Navajo stories, songs, and prayers, presented by Rex Lee Jim.   Outside of our sessions, we talked together about environmental and social issues, such as the need to substitute water for sugary sodas, the need to plant and maintain gardens of fresh vegetables and fruit, and the need to act locally to elect officials responsive to such needs. As we concluded, everyone wrote a brief paragraph about what each had gained/learned during the weekend. Reading these when I got home not only brought the conference back to the center of my attention; it also electrified me, filled me with hope for a future led by these brilliant, engaged, and wise young people.   And that’s really the greatest gift of teaching in general and teaching writing in particular: working with and learning from brilliant, engaged, and wise young people.   Credit: Pixabay Image 1986107 by rawpixel, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

Today's guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn‌, a Professor in the English Department at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning, critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website Acts of Composition. Multimodal composition relies heavily on the relationship between text and image. As teachers in this context we can emphasize to students that composing images takes the same kind of thought and energy as composing written texts. We consider our audience, purpose, subject matter, and context and make rhetorical choices that communicate meaning. Of course, students can just snap pictures and capture strong images by happenstance, but I try to get them to understand that composing images involves rhetorical strategies and an understanding of visual rhetoric. Kenneth Louis Smith in the Handbook of Visual Communications (Routledge, 2005), helps make that distinction.  Not every visual object is visual rhetoric. What turns a visual object into a communicative artifact--a symbol that communicates and can be studied as rhetoric--is the presence of three characteristics. . . . The image must be symbolic, involve human intervention, and be presented to an audience for the purpose of communicating with that audience. This definition is a good place to start our conversation. How do we symbolize? What is the difference between literal and representative images? How can we use visuals to move beyond pretty pictures and create persuasive communication? I use this and other sources to introduce students to the idea of image rhetorics and discuss particular rhetorical strategies to consider while composing visuals. I find it useful for students to think about metaphors and their relationship to designing visual content. Thoughtco.com and other online sources offer glossaries and definitions for rhetorical devices and visual metaphors. I also use Sean Morey’s discussion of Image Rhetorics (The Digital Writer) to investigate terms and to help initiate students into learning the language of visual composition. He discusses the following rhetorical lenses and image categories: Analogy, Metaphor, Metonomy, Synecdoche, Enthymeme and provides detailed visual examples of each. Morey also talks about the importance of text and image relationships and suggests terms like Anchorage and Relay, Juxtaposition and the distinction between Denotation and Connotation. Students learn the language of visual composition and start to see ways to change and enhance their visual composing practices through this assignment.  Background Resources: The St. Martin’s Handbook: Ch. 16, Design for Print and Digital Writing; Ch. 17, Presentations The Everyday Writer (also available with exercises😞 Ch.22, Making Design Decisions; Ch. 23, Presentations  EasyWriter (also available with exercises😞 Ch.3, Making Design Decisions; Ch. 11, Creating Presentations Steps of the assignment: Have students study and learn image rhetoric terms and strategies. Look online for examples that demonstrate the principles of visual rhetoric. Gather students into teams and have each team compose a collaborative Image Rhetoric Slide show through Google Slides. Each student is responsible for a single slide that features a different rhetorical term in which they 1) Define the term, 2) Compose an original visual example, and 3) Provide an explanation of the meaning they are trying to communicate (and what makes it effective). Students present the slide shows in class and discuss examples. Reflection: It is one thing to understand a definition and repeat its characteristics on a test. It is another to apply that knowledge through this kind of exercise. Students found interesting connections and creative ways of presenting persuasive visual communication. Students come to see larger connections between cultural concepts and learn how images can bring complicated ideas together in impactful ways. For example, Aiden’s slide provides an analysis of metaphors, creatively combines two concepts, and draws a “comparison between unhealthy fried foods known to be carcinogenic like fries and tobacco products.” This assignment helps students understand that many of the messages around them are composed through these lenses and that they can actively compose persuasive visual images of their own.  I have included two of the team presentations below: Team 1 – Image Rhetorics Presentation Team 2 – Image Rhetorics Presentation Let me know what you think in the comments. ... View more

Many teachers of writing may have read an interview with Lori Salem, who directed Temple University’s Writing Center and is now Assistant Vice Provost and Director of the Student Success Center there. Conducted by Rose Jacobs and titled “What’s Wrong with Writing Centers,” the interview focused on data drawn from a quantitative study of responses from 4,204 Temple students (the entering class of 2009) to a variety of questions, including ones about whether or not to use the writing center.   As Jacobs reports in her interview, Salem found that practices that are near-orthodoxy in writing centers—such as nondirective instruction, in which tutors prompt students to come up with the right answers themselves; and a resistance to focusing on grammatical errors—are most effective for privileged students in good academic standing. . . . These methods, meanwhile, poorly serve the most frequent visitors: female students, minority students, those with low academic standing, and those who are speaking a language other than English at home. In this interview and in other work, such as her prize-winning 2016 essay, “Decisions. . . Decisions: Who Chooses to Use the Writing Center,” Salem argues that we should completely rethink what we do in writing centers and see writing centers as pedagogical workshops—“”a place where writers encounter writing tutors who know their stuff—and a space where pedagogical practices are constantly being developed, explored, and tested.” The rethinking Salem envisions calls for differentiated pedagogies rather than what she calls “policy pedagogies;” that is, pedagogies that reject monolithic policies in favor of basing tutoring strategies on individual students’ perceived needs.   It’s hard to disagree with these conclusions; indeed, the writing centers I have been associated with never followed monolithic policies and certainly tried to tailor tutoring strategies to the students we worked with. Salem says that writing centers almost universally reject working with grammatical issues, but that also has not been my experience: in my own tutoring, I seldom begin with such issues, preferring to first understand what the student is trying to do in a piece of writing and making a plan, with that student, for achieving the goal. That often leads to intense engagement with student writing along with a lot of careful listening. And it can often lead to a discussion of some grammatical element—but that’s not where I begin.   I have two other responses to Salem’s work, for which I am grateful; we need more such studies and we need them badly. First, I question the efficacy of seeing students who use writing centers as somehow “remedial” or in need of remediation. Salem is right that the “remedial” label clings perniciously to writing centers (it’s what Judy Segal, referring to students’ saying that they “love” lectures when we know that such lectures are largely ineffective, calls the “undertow effect”). But that doesn’t suggest, to me, that the students coming to us are remedial or that it is helpful to think of them as such. Taking students as they come, listening carefully to them, modulating our strategies to accommodate their needs and wishes doesn’t necessitate using any labels at all.   Second, I am not as totally condemning of “nondirective practices” as Salem seems to be; she says, in essence, that such tutoring is “not an effective method for teaching language learners in any way.” I know that Salem has research-based evidence for this claim, and I take the point that such practices may be aimed at students of privilege. But, as always, it depends on what you mean by “nondirective.” In my experience, the term means trying first and foremost to get to know the student sitting beside me so that I can get a sense of that student’s fears and also dreams. A case in point: I was teaching in China and doing some tutoring, working with a woman who was returning to college and for whom English was the fourth language she was trying to master. As I got to know her over the course of many sessions, I learned that one of her primary reasons for reading, writing, and speaking in English was to help her four-year-old son. Knowing that helped me know where to begin, focusing on conversational moves and on learning strategies for helping her son begin reading English. Had I launched into a highly directive approach, I don’t think I would have gained these insights into my student’s very particular needs.   Though I do have some questions and challenges for Salem, I continue to be impressed with the work she is doing. The unexamined writing center is not worth working in, and we need more critics like Lori Salem to help us ask hard questions about whose interests we serve—and whose we do not serve—in our Center.   Credit: Pixabay Image 3211179 by rawpixel, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

The classroom can and should be a place where students learn to engage critically, and develop the skills necessary to enter nationwide debates as active, democratic citizens. In order to do so, they must understand the rhetoric used by the media, by the government, and by proponents on either side of an argument. The warrants, assumptions, and terminology used in public debate – especially regarding hotly contested issues – often go under-examined.   Case in point, the choice of terminology used in discussing the role of guns in American society reflects the most essential differences between those on different sides of the debate about Americans’ right to own guns. In the aftermath of the most recent school shooting, proponents of restrictions on gun ownership have increasingly used the term “gun safety” rather than the term “gun control” to draw attention to their primary concern. Weighing in on that side of the debate is the emotional appeal provided by Parkland students—and thousands of their counterparts elsewhere—giving a public face to the victims and potential victims of gun violence and voicing their plea for new legislation to prevent similar massacres in the future. Even though it is difficult to argue against gun safety, so far legislators have not been swayed by the terminology or the tactics. Is it simply party loyalty that drives a legislator to vote against restrictions on assault rifles? Is it campaign contributions from the NRA that prevent legislators from voting to increase the age at which an individual can buy guns? Why have some businesses proved more willing to restrict gun sales than our government? If the most basic fear of gun control advocates is that more children and young people will die without more restrictions on guns, the most basic fear of gun control opponents is giving any modicum of control up to the government. Their simplest defense is that the Second Amendment gives Americans the right to bear arms. There is no room in their philosophy for the historical context of that amendment or the consideration of changes in guns that have come about since it became law. Does the right to bear arms mean the same thing in an age of automatic guns and armor-piercing bullets? Does the Second Amendment mean that there can be no restrictions on the type of arms any citizen can bear? What can be more important than keeping schoolchildren safe? The answer has to be keeping American citizens safe from the government. Not just from government restrictions, but from total control by an armed government of an unarmed citizenry. It is the ultimate result of the slippery slope that begins with giving an inch. It is the ultimate extension of the argument by gun owners that they have the right to protect their families. After all, what was “a well regulated Militia” designed to protect our young nation from? What were the Founding Fathers afraid of when they devised this means of protecting “the security of a free State”? The citizenry must be able to protect themselves against enemies from without or enemies from within. Since we have our armed forces to do the first, the only justification for a well-regulated militia is to protect from the latter. This sort of analysis of the warrants or assumptions underlying arguments for and against restrictions on gun ownership can help to clarify, if not resolve, the stalemate regarding any changes in existing laws. Encouraging students to participate in such an analysis not only hones their understanding of argument, but also invites active citizenship. Image Source: "AK-47 Assault Rifle // Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947" by Brian.ch on Flickr 01/19/10 via Creative Commons 2.0 license ... View more

Recently, I had a chance to spend a day with teachers of writing at the University of Texas at Arlington (thank you Justin Lerberg!). I came away impressed with how carefully they have designed their writing assignment sequences for their first and second writing courses and how seriously they were about continuing to analyze and interrogate their assignments and other parts of their curriculum. If the unexamined life is not worth living, it’s my strong opinion that the unexamined curriculum/assignment sequence is not worth teaching.   The first assignment in the first course sequence calls for a discourse community analysis, and they have developed a detailed (four and a half pages!) assignment sheet that guides students through thinking about invention, arrangement, style, and some logistical considerations. They begin by defining discourse community as “a group of people who share common interest, goals, values, assumptions, knowledge of a topic, and . . . discursive patterns, i.e. specialized vocabulary, speech genres, and ways of communicating.” They follow with examples of discourse communities, from fans of a particular sports team to military vets, avid gamers, followers of a TV show or film series, etc.   The major purpose of this assignment, they say is “to demystify the process of entering an academic discourse community . . . and to reflect on and analyze the discursive skills you mastered as an insider in a discourse community.” As they pursue this assignment, of course, first-year college students are also entering, whether they are aware of it or not, the academic discourse community of their particular university. A lot has been written about this process (think of David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” or, even earlier, Tom Huckin, Carol Berkenkotter, and John Ackerman’s “Conventions, Conversation, and the Writer” – and later articles that asked whether entering the discourse communities these articles describe was a form of manipulation rather than liberation), which I won’t rehearse here and which the UTA students don’t necessarily need to know about. But putting this assignment in the context of this strand of scholarly investigation would be helpful for those teaching it. Indeed, ongoing examination of and work on assignments demands this kind of rhetorical contextualizing—it keeps us honest!   I also wonder if an assignment like this one can go at least a good way toward helping students not only identify their major discourse communities and describe how they became “insiders” in the communities, but also to examine the assumptions and values (most often unstated) of the communities. Where are they coming from, literally and figuratively? What kinds of people do they include—and exclude—and why? What other groups’ values are furthered by this community and how clearly are they articulated? Adding this layer of analysis would, I think, further enable the critical thinking this assignment asks for.   Finally, I wonder if in preparation for this assignment, it might be profitable to lead the class in trying to analyze a discourse community they don’t belong to—so that they may be more open and able to examine it with a tough critical eye. If so, that experience might help them bring the same critical skills to how they became members of their own discourse communities.   Thanks again to colleagues at UTA for such an invigorating visit and thought-provoking discussion of assignments!   Credit: Pixabay Image 593344 by StartupStockPhotos, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

Your students should use Merriam-Webster.com, for sure. It’s the best dictionary for everyday purposes, and I’ll explain why after I give you a bit of background and do some complaining. Once upon a time, I might have recommended the New Oxford New American Dictionary. But the print edition hasn’t been updated since 2010, and its free online sibling is a bit of a project to find. Click here, and where you see “Dictionary” in white-on-black letters, scroll down to “Dictionary (US).” I definitely would have recommended the American Heritage Dictionary. It’s still good. But once upon a time, it had ample resources and wasn’t shy about offering informed, expert advice. I was thrilled when, years ago, the AHD invited me to become a member of its “usage panel.” But last month, after half a century’s existence, the usage panel was disbanded. And as of this spring, the AHD’s editorial staff will consist of one part-time lexicographer. The AHD ain’t what it used to be. The American Heritage Dictionary was launched in 1969, with the goal of restoring lexicographical standards that many felt had been recklessly abandoned when Merriam-Webster published Webster’s Third Unabridged, in 1961. Web3 did away with usage labels like “colloquial,” “incorrect,” and “humorous.” It lopped 250,000 entries out of its predecessor to make room for 100,000 new words (“unabridged,” eh?). And it was “descriptive,” promising only to inform people about how words are used. If folks said “irregardless,” then “irregardless” was a word worthy of inclusion. (Okay, Web3 does label it “nonstand.”) Its predecessor, Webster’s Second, published in 1934, is widely acknowledged to have been magisterial in its day. It was proudly “prescriptive,” advising people how to use words. According to W2, “irregardless” is “Erron. or Humorous, U. S.” The outrage that, in some quarters, arose when Web2 abdicated in favor of Web3 led to the creation of the AHD. It assembled an impressive hundred-member usage panel (Isaac Asimov! Alistair Cooke! Langston Hughes! Barbara Tuchman!). Their collated opinions about the likes of between you and I were presented as notes beneath the relevant headwords (99 percent of the panel disapproved of between you and I—and I sure wish I knew who the rebel was). As for “irregardless,” it doesn’t look as if the first edition’s lexicographers even bothered to ask for the panel’s opinions. The note beneath the word reads, “Usage: Irregardless, a double negative, is never acceptable except when the intent is clearly humorous.” But the AHD, along with the other major dictionaries, has by now slid some distance down the slippery slope whose bottom Web3 was so eager to reach. Heck, even the incomparable but special-purpose OED now tells you that “literally” can mean “figuratively.” To be sure, descriptivism has qualities that many find appealing. It presents itself as egalitarian, answering “Why should we privilege the locutions of dead white men?” with “We shouldn’t, and we don’t. We tell you how a range of past and present English speakers use words and encourage you to make choices for yourself.” I mistrust that claim, because no doubt all sorts of biases lurk in the underlying data. What’s more, if dictionaries really wanted to help writers and speakers of various English dialects use them more effectively, shouldn’t there be specific dictionaries for many more subsets of English than there are? All the dictionaries I’m discussing purport to cover all dialects. Second, descriptivism is a definable goal that for-profit companies, which publish most dictionaries, can comfortably aim for. Data about word usage is in limitless supply, and it’s cheap and superficially unambiguous, while discernment about usage can be hard to find, costly to engage, and easy to doubt and argue with. Finally, descriptivism feels scientific, like linguistics. And up to a point, it is scientific. Today’s lexicographers have at their command astonishing “corpora”—huge electronic compiled bodies of language, drawn from a wide range of spoken and printed sources—to tease out new information about how the language is used. Big data! Would you, however, consider it a good idea to fold your school’s English composition program into its linguistics department? The two have different purposes and use different methods. The purpose of dictionaries was, until the 1960s, neatly aligned with the purposes of English composition courses: to teach people how to use our common language correctly, clearly, and effectively. Web3 and its successors, including M-W.com, have washed their hands of that responsibility. I’ve even heard lexicographers make fun of the idea that that’s their job. Meanwhile, the rest of us turn to dictionaries in hopes they’ll teach us to use language better. Sorry, that’s not what they do anymore. So why is M-W.com the best dictionary for everyday purposes? Because it’s free, readily available, and easy to use. It has usage notes that give sound guidance. It’s online (as the others are too), so you always see the latest versions of entries. Merriam-Webster itself admits that its .com dictionary is more up to date than the latest edition of its Collegiate. And the Collegiate—and therefore, I have to assume, M-W.com—is in wide use. Stylebooks including The Chicago Manual, and periodicals ranging from The New Yorker to MIT Technology Review, have it as their house dictionary. In descriptivism—as in other things I like better, such as evolution—success breeds success. If the nation’s most widely used dictionary says that the verb “face-palm” is written with a hyphen and “humblebrag” is not, that in itself is bound to skew the words’ spelling toward those choices—until the people who mostly use them decide dictionaries are irrelevant. I’ll write some other time about how to go around dictionaries direct to the sources and be your own lexicographer. Credit: Pixabay Image 1798 by PublicDomainPictures, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

When students are asked to work in groups, they may not know what good teamwork looks like. Like anything in the writing classroom, models can help them understand how to collaborate effectively. The challenge is modeling the process for them. I can demo any number of writing strategies as well as provide step-by-step instructions on technology questions. Modeling group work, however, is not a one-person job. Pop culture to the rescue! The infographic to the right analyzes the teamwork strategies of six pop culture teams. It describes the team, identifies the team members, outlines their strategies, and suggests some debriefing notes. It is long and detailed, so you need to click the image to read the full-sized image or view the original on the Inloox site. As students begin working together in their writing groups, I share the infographic above and ask them to compare their own teams to those in the infographic. I invite them to respond to these discussion questions: How accurate are the characterizations of the teams in the infographic? Would you change them? Does your team match any of those in the infographic? How well does the infographic team compare to your team? Tell us how. How do the characteristics of teams in the infographic relate to those in the readings for this week? After discussing the infographic, I ask students to brainstorm a class list of other pop culture groups that they are familiar with. If they have trouble getting started, I offer some examples of television shows that feature a team of characters that works together to meet a goal, like NCIS, S.W.A.T, or SEAL Team. If students need additional inspiration, I throw out some categories like teams in anime, teams in movies, and teams in literature. With a list compiled, the class can talk about how the various teams compare to those in the infographic and hypothesize why some groups are more successful than others. The ultimate goal is to find teamwork strategies that students can use as they work together, so I close the discussion by asking students to create a list of techniques to use in their own groups. As an extension activity, students can apply their list of strategies by working in groups to choose a team from the class list and collaboratively design an image that presents the team, modeled on the infographic. Do you have an activity to improve student group work? Please share your ideas in a comment below. I’d love to try your strategies in the classroom.   Infographic from InLoox ... View more