Day after day, the words and images of a war being waged by an absolute autocrat against an unoffending nation simply because he can fill the airwaves, confronting us with a burgeoning catastrophe that, among so many other feelings, can overwhelm us with a sense of sheer helplessness. Why can't we declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine, as President Zelensky implores us? Why have we impeded Poland's efforts to provide the Ukrainian air force with fighter jets? Anyone paying close attention to the war knows the answers to these questions: because the author of this war controls the world's largest nuclear arsenal and has announced his intention to use it as he sees fit. And this (I believe) unprecedented declaration not only prompts many of us to wonder about the sanity of such a man but also reveals the somber limitations of power in a nuclear-armed world. Not even during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 was any such threat openly declared; the danger of nuclear annihilation was simply assumed. As the war drags on and the threat of ever-more-devastating assaults on Ukraine's civilian population looms (not to mention further military "adventures" along Russia's western borders), I find myself wondering about the potential popular cultural response to it all. Saturday Night Live has already weighed in, but I am thinking more along the lines here of the war movie rather than satirical comedy, and that response, if it is to come at all, will take some time. So for the moment two quite different existing popular cultural depictions of war come to mind as I contemplate the war in Ukraine, movies that include the cinematic double-header Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, and the climax of television's "Game of Thrones." I'll begin with the Avengers films. The parallels with the war in Ukraine are unsettling, for Avengers: Infinity War tells the story of an absolute ruler who annihilates half the population of the universe because he can, and no one can stop him. However, the parallels stop there because that's not the end of the story, for in the sequel a successful counterattack not only defeats the genocidal tyrant, it also resurrects his victims. Such a fictive outcome reveals the limits of popular culture, for while such movies can indeed explore, if only in metaphoric terms, the threats and challenges of dangerous times, they are constrained by the profit motive to provide cathartic, feel-good (or, at least, feel-better) conclusions. Absolute bummers just aren't as popular as happy endings, and the commercial pressures of the culture industry ensures that happy endings are going to be the norm. And then there is Daenerys and her dragon Drogon—George R. R. Martin's equivalent of the Bomb. Since Daenerys deploys this weapon of mass destruction to destroy the Lannisters' evil empire, audiences are inclined to applaud its one-sided use against a dragonless population, but the show's creators complicate the matter by having Daenerys run amok (absolute power corrupts absolutely), thus bringing a disturbing new angle into the story line. But not for long: to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, popular culture can only tolerate so much reality, and so in the end Daenerys is eliminated as Westeros chooses constitutional monarchy, as it were, over absolutism—a reassuring conclusion to a violently anarchical fantasy take on the wildly anarchical contours of actual history. It would be nice if such reassuring endings could be provided for the war in Ukraine. But the unentertaining reality is that there is no easy path to a happy ending here, only the dismal and unglamorous imposition of economic sanctions, cautiously ratcheted up step by step in the hope of stopping the invader without destroying the global economy in the process. Stay tuned.   Image Credit: "IMG_6030" by snamess is marked with CC BY 2.0. ... View more

I recently had the great pleasure of visiting Sarah Ruffing Robbins’s Authorship Seminar at TCU, where the students were not only reading about theories of authorship, and about collaborative authorship in particular, but also taking the opportunity to collaborate themselves and to view collaboration as an act rather than simply an object of study. The inimitable Carrie Leverenz joined in as well for one of the most lively and informative discussions I’ve had in a long time. Attending this seminar gave me a chance to relive my own long history with what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar call the “anxiety of authorship” that is particular to women, beginning with Lisa Ede’s and my decision to co-author an essay in honor of our mutual mentor, Edward P.J. Corbett, early in our careers—and the push-back and outright resistance we got to this idea from colleagues and department administrators as well as from Corbett himself. That response led us to theorize collaboration as a form of resistance and as a feminist undertaking, and led to a series of articles and two books on these issues. Today, questions of authorship and collaboration are more fraught, and more exciting, than ever as new technologies allow not only for larger and larger collaborations—for the kind of “authorless prose” characteristic of, say, Wikipedia—but also for questions about machine authorship. Such questions also resonate with works such as Clint Smith’s award-winning How the Word is Passed, which students in the seminar I attended are reading. The oral history project that Smith details in this absolutely compelling story represents another form of collaboration, one that brings forth voices and stories long ignored or forgotten.     Professor Robbins also shared their Cultural Stewardship Authoring Project, an assignment that invites students in the class to gather several current “covid era” artifacts (from March 2020 to March 2022) and develop labeling, description, and commentary on them for possible inclusion in the TCU archives. Professor Robbins calls it a multilayered aesthetic/historical collaboration.  This is a multi-part project that includes, in addition to the writing up of the artifacts and their historical context, reflections on the students’ own authorial processes, on what they have learned about the complex concept of “authorship,” and on what implications this learning has for highlighting cultural diversity in the archives. During class, they talked about the ways in which “covid culture” was so often intersectional, noting that for women the pandemic cut across so many aspects of their lives in ways that called for enormous reserves of energy. The class spent some time talking through these intersections in their own lives and about the artifacts they were thinking of choosing—everything from a vaccination card to a poem discovered during the pandemic to the page of a diary or a photo of a “quarantine room.”  Students will present artifacts in a future class, along with their interpretation of and reflections on them, a session I am very much hoping to attend so that I can thank these students and Professors Robbins and Leverenz for this deeply engaging experience. The project students are working on is, of course, deeply collaborative, and one that also raises issues of authorship, co- or multiple-authorship, and intellectual property or ownership issues. I can imagine a similar assignment in a first-year writing classroom, and I expect that if students curated such an archival project, their university library might be very interested in displaying it or in adding it to their own archives. All food for thought—and an encouragement to keep creating assignments that call for creative collaboration. Image Credit: Photo 824 by CreateHERStock, used under a Public Domain license ... View more

In memory of poet-teacher Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)   Photo by Olga Tsai “The wreck in 33m deep in Bohol Island, Philippines.” November 12, 2019 Free to use under the Unsplash license   I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. -Adrienne Rich,  “Diving into the Wreck” From Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1973 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright 1973 by Adrienne Rich.     1. 2 Years Online This month, March 2022, marks the tenth anniversary of the death of poet-teacher Adrienne Rich, and the second anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown and the beginning of remote learning in New York City.  Two years later, I am still teaching online, and I still believe that online instruction is not a temporary solution to an intractable problem. Indeed, a problem as intractable as Covid-19 leaves its afterimage everywhere, even as the virus still hovers in the background, seemingly invisible, but not yet disappeared.    2. Diving into the Wreck: Affect and Asynchronous Teaching and Learning After two years, I more fully understand the challenges of creating and fostering online community, and especially affective involvement with asynchronous work– the work of feeling and experiencing writing beyond the minimal fulfillment of course requirements. Offline and away from immediate real-time classroom communication, I want to recreate a sense of purpose that was more easily conveyed in face-to-face classrooms before March 2020. Most of all, I want to reinvent movement and flow of lessons and interactions among students and among students and teachers. My hope is that we have taken time to work in community (synchronously on Zoom) and as satellites orbiting the community, but with a sense of connectedness (asynchronously).    In other words, asynchronous learning, for me, is more than following directions to complete the assignment, more than the number of pages, paragraphs, words, quotes, and citations that students often ask about. Of course the baseline requirements need to be clear, but asynchronous learning can involve more than merely satisfying the quantitative aspects of the assignment. The pandemic taught me that qualitative attributes of learning also matter. I had to think through how my students might be experiencing language in the wreck of lockdown and the suffering of too many communities.    This learning took place in the midst of lockdown, my father’s death from Covid concurrent with the beginning of the Capital riot (three weeks before his first vaccine was scheduled), then deep grief, and aggravated generalized anxiety, then Delta, and then Omicron. I learned again the multimodality of language, that the words cannot stay flat on the screen or in the inflection of my voice in a video recorded lesson. In asynchronous learning, in the long slow-motion and ongoing wreck of the pandemic,  I remembered “Diving into the Wreck”: “The words are purposes/The words are maps.”     3. National Emergency Adrienne Rich, the poet-teacher , whose memory is honored in this post, taught writing in the early years of the SEEK program (Seeking Education, Elevation and Knowledge)  and open admissions at the City College of New York.  In those years, Rich was present for the nationwide student strikes of Spring 1970.    The strikes, at hundreds of colleges and universities across the United States, took place in the midst of national catastrophe. At the end of April, in conjunction with the Vietnam War, President Nixon announced that US troops had begun a ground invasion of Cambodia, and that the US had been bombing Cambodia for eighteen months. Student protests rose up, in the midst of civil unrest, students died by state violence . On May 15th, two students were killed and twelve injured at Jackson State by local and state police in Mississippi and, on May 4th, four students were killed and nine students injured at Kent State by the Ohio National Guard.     In the aftermath of the killings and the subsequent strikes, colleges and universities closed and classes were canceled. Remote learning in the spring of 1970, as in the winter of 2020, provoked a sense of national emergency. Longstanding systemic violence no longer was invisible. My partner who was ending his first year at Kent State and was an eyewitness to the killings, had not yet completed spring quarter courses or  taken final exams.Then, as now, bearing witness to national emergency brought trauma and disruption.     4. Conclusion: Adrienne Rich and Analog Forms In 1970, as in 2020, educators struggled with what came next– what teaching and learning could mean in the face of confrontation with longstanding structural violence. The problems of violence and interrupted schooling were not new, as many people were already bearing witness to the violence and school closings precipitated by Southern resistance to Brown v. Board of Education.  In 1970, with no Zoom and no internet, remote schooling evolved to fit analog forms.    My partner settled his spring quarter grades in a tentative return to Kent State over the summer. Adrienne Rich grappled with teaching and learning catastrophic conditions in real time. With deep concern for her students (see Kynard pages 216-217), Rich offered culturally relevant writing assignments, and invited students to phone her and to mail their writing to her home address. Not long afterward, Rich published her poem “Diving into the Wreck.”     A decade after her passing, Adrienne Rich’s work in and out of classrooms remains deeply relevant . In “Diving into the Wreck,” Rich offers what feel like guidelines for the spring of 2022: “To see the damage done/ and the treasures that prevail.” These lines remind me not  to look away from either the damage or the treasures, to learn from what is found, what is reclaimed, and from what is irretrievably lost–  no matter the inconvenience  and the pain, to grow from that learning, however necessary and for however long. ... View more

This blog series is written by Julia Domenicucci, an editor at Macmillan Learning, in conjunction with Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. Class discussion can be a great way to engage students with each other and with course materials. Using podcasts as the basis for a discussion in your composition course can also serve as a nice change from talking about the usual essays, stories, or instructional content. This blog post outlines some discussion ideas for using podcasts in two ways—talking about podcasts and talking about the content of podcasts. Podcasts are well-established, but their popularity seems to increase every day—and for good reason! They are engaging and creative, and they cover every topic imaginable. They are also great for the classroom: you can use them to encourage student engagement and introduce multimodality.  LaunchPad and Achieve products include assignable, ad-free Grammar Girl podcasts, which you can use to support your lessons. You can assign one (or more!) of these suggested podcasts for students to listen to before class. Each podcast also comes with a complete transcript, which is perfect for students who prefer to read the content. To learn more about digital products and purchasing options, please visit Macmillan's English catalog or speak with your sales representative.   If you are using LaunchPad, refer to the unit “Grammar Girl Podcasts” for instructions on assigning podcasts. You can also find the same information on the support page "Assign Grammar Girl Podcasts."  If you are using Achieve, you can find information on assigning Grammar Girl in Achieve on the support page “Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course.” If your English Achieve product is copyright year 2021 or later, you are able to use a folder of suggested Grammar Girl podcasts in your course; please see “Using Suggested Grammar Girl Podcasts in Achieve for English Products” for more information.   Using Grammar Girl Podcasts to Talk about Podcasts as a Medium Pre-Class Work: Assign two Grammar Girl podcasts of varying lengths for your students to listen to before your next class. Suggest they make notes about the podcasts like they would for other readings or content assigned in class. For a longer podcast, you might assign “The Proto-Indo-European Language” (15:45) or “Bare Infinitivals” (15:12) or “Affect versus Effect” (09:15) and for a shorter podcast you might assign “Hyphens in Ages” (02:28) or “Pronoun Order” (02:55) or “Momentarily or In a Moment?” (01:43). Tip: If you’re using Achieve, see “Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course” and “Create an Assessment” for help with making Grammar Girl podcasts available to students. Discussion: In class, assign your students to small groups of 3-4 students, either in person or virtually. Ask them to discuss the following points: How do we, as a group, define “podcast”? How do podcasts differ from lectures, videos, or audiobooks? How are they similar? What are examples of podcasts we have listened to? How are the two Grammar Girl podcasts we listened to similar? Different? What is the structure of each of the podcasts we listened to? Is there an introduction, middle, and/or conclusion?  What are the other defining elements of these podcasts? How did the content inform the length of each podcast? Did either podcast feel too long or too short? If too long, what information could have been removed? If too short, what could have been added? What questions do I still have after listening to this podcast, either about the content or about how it was created? Reflection: After discussing in their groups, ask each student to write a summary of the group’s thoughts. Come back to discuss the questions, and each group’s answers, as a class. Tip: If you are using an Achieve English course, consider creating a custom Writing Assignment that students can use to submit their reflections. Refer to the article “Guide to Writing assignments for instructors” for help with Writing Assignments.   Using Grammar Girl Podcasts to Generate Discussion around a Topic Pre-Class Work: Assign two Grammar Girl podcasts on a topic (or similar topics) you want your students to work with. As they listen, ask students to record the following for each podcast: 1 thing they learned 1 question they still have 1 personal connection (to an experience, piece of writing, class, etc.) Tip: If you’re using Achieve, consider assigning podcasts from the folder of suggested Grammar Girl podcasts in your course; please see “Using Suggested Grammar Girl Podcasts in Achieve for English Products” for more information. Or, you can assign podcasts from the categories that these podcasts are organized into, like “Academic Reading, Writing, and Speaking,” “Adjectives and Adverbs,” or “Word Usage.” See “Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course” for help with assigning podcasts other than those in the suggested podcasts folder. Discussion: In class, assign your students to small groups of 3-4 students. Ask them to discuss the following points: Summarize the topic(s) covered in the podcast. What were the differences between how the podcasts addressed the topic(s)? The lessons learned from each podcast. Were any of our takeaways the same? Similar? The questions we still have. How might we find the answers to these questions? Presentation: Students should then take their findings and create a short 3-4 minute presentation based on their discussions. The presentation should include a summary, their takeaways, and any remaining questions. Encourage students to use visuals (images, graphs) as well as text, and cite their sources (the podcasts, the image creators, etc.). Each group can then present to their classmates, or the presentations can be shared online.   This semester, be sure to check out our other Grammar Girl assignment ideas. You can access previous posts from the Bedford Bits home page or by visiting “30+ Grammar Girl Assignments for Your Next Class” on the Quick and Dirty Tips website (these assignments are based on some of the blog posts, and six of them include downloadable PDFs!).   Have you used Grammar Girl—or any other podcasts—in your classes? Let us know in the comments. We’d love to hear from you and learn about how you are using podcasts this semester—or in past semesters!   Credit: "Old phone" by nicolasnova is marked with CC BY 2.0. ... View more

I'm currently reading Plurilingual Pedagogies for Multilingual Writing Classrooms, edited by Kay M. Losey and Gail Shuck, and it includes Shawna Shapiro's "'Language and Social Justice': A (Surprisingly) Plurilingual First-Year Seminar." While this essay has not helped me make clear distinctions between plurilingualism and translingualism, it has reminded me of the critically important work Shapiro has been doing for years now, slowly and steadily and carefully building a case for putting critical language awareness at the heart of our writing classrooms and our writing curricula. I've been privileged in the last year or so to follow Shapiro's work closely and to be part of a group with whom she shared chapters of her new book, Cultivating Critical Language Awareness in the Writing Classroom. This book is thoroughly grounded in theory and research, but also in the daily practicalities of teaching writing. In fact, I'd say that is one significant hallmark of all Shapiro's work: the weaving of theory and practice, along with the insistence on collaboration and on attending with great care to the voices of students. This new book has been called a critical "toolkit for supporting and embracing linguistic diversity" in writing classes, and it certainly is that, though the "toolkit" is embedded in a rich historical and theoretical context. The same can be said for her recent essay on language and social justice: it walks the walk and talks the talk of "plurilingual pedagogy," always in the service of student writers/speakers, and always deeply collaborative. In this case, the students are key collaborators in creating the principles the course rests on as well as in shaping its curriculum. We hear their voices loud and clear throughout the essay, culminating in student writing for a "Writing beyond the Classroom" assignment that invited students to use their entire writing and linguistic repertoires. The two poems and the presentation of them described at the end of the essay demonstrate the power of mixing languages, of the human voice, and of the possibilities embodied in a plurilingual pedagogy. There are other terrific essays in Plurilingual Pedagogies for Multilingual Writing Classrooms, and I expect I will be writing about them in due time. But today, I want to recommend Shapiro's article in particular—and her book. When I think back on my early days of teaching, with only an MA in literature, I know I would have given just about anything to have had these resources at my disposal. But in addition to her book and many articles, Shapiro is building an amazing online resource for all of us. Called the CLA Collective, this is first a companion website to Shapiro's book, but as I know from many conversations with her, Shawna sees it as potentially so much more. Rather, she envisions it as a gathering space or hub for all teachers of writing, one where we can share and learn from one another. (You can join the Collective by going to the "Connect" page and simply signing up.) But even in its early stages, the site is full of information and resources, including syllabi, handouts, readings, "Shawna's 'Top 5' lists of other websites"—and more. If you are looking for ways to promote social justice in and through your pedagogy and to encourage and enable linguistic pluralism—while attending to everything else your university expects of you AND teaching multiple courses every single term—then this new book and website can be of enormous help. Maybe I'll see you at the CLA Collective! Image Credit: "Stack of thin flexicover books on reflective table" by Horia Varlan, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Commenting on student papers, for me, involves a lot of sipping tea and staring into space. So, my eyes often rest on this young tree growing across the street from my work table at home. Springtime floats on the breeze some days in March in Indiana, but buds are still tight, so I can see clearly the serpentine structure of this tree. I admire the way it has veered off course — due to wind, or kids hanging on low branches (there’s a school nearby) — and then found its way back to the vertical climb. How? Through continued growth. Yes, I’m dealing in metaphor here; it’s an occupational hazard of English majors. But now that we’re midway through the semester, it’s a good time to check in with students — and with ourselves as instructors — to see what’s going well, and what we might do differently as we all continue to grow. Andrea Lunsford’s recent post, “On Engaging Respectfully,” reminds us of the power of using our writing classrooms to help students practice (including failing and trying again) the skills we need now for deep, thorny, and necessary conversations in this divided world. Self-reflection and self-assessment are also skills our students take with them into other courses and far beyond. For many years, I’ve given over to students the power to assess their own participation. If you’d like to dip your toe into the practice of “Ungrading,” handing students the responsibility for this aspect of their evaluation is a low-stakes and high-impact place to begin, since “participation” grades are inherently subjective from the instructor’s perspective. As I wrote about here, students tend to handle this responsibility with seriousness and aplomb if they are offered some guidance and encouragement to reward themselves for growth. In my classes, we reflect in the first days of the semester on the power of taking risks and stretching ourselves as learners. Students set specific participation goals for themselves. Now that we’re midway through the semester, it’s helpful to carve out class time for self-reflection to see if they think they are veering off course, and how they would like to continue to grow. The assignment doesn’t take long: In a paragraph, please reflect on your own participation and attendance in this course up to this point in the semester. How are you challenging yourself? What are you pleased with? How would you like to progress or grow between now and the end of the semester? Remember that at the end of the semester, I will ask you to weigh in with a written self-assessment and numbers (out of a possible 200 points) about your attendance and participation over the whole semester. This is a time to pause and reflect and set some goals for the rest of our time together. I’m always illuminated by their self-assessments, which are often humble and frequently funny. They help me evaluate whether I’m doing enough to structure democratic discussions and activities that engage each individual. Like students, at this point in the semester, I, too, can fall back on tried and tired activities that don’t push any of us into new territory.  I see self-assessment as more than a “course correction,” though that might be part of what happens with this assignment. But that phrase doesn’t capture the value I see in that serpentine tree, more interesting for its serpentine journey. Nor does it capture the environment I try to cultivate in my classroom, where students can transform themselves by taking risks, often by failing for a bit while trying something new, rather than following the straight line of what they’ve always done to succeed in school.  Wisdom, strength, and even grace come from allowing ourselves to veer into new territory, reflecting on what we learn along the way.   Image Credit: Photograph taken by the post’s author, April Lidinsky ... View more

The following interview with Haleh Azimi and Elsbeth Mantler, Co-directors of the Community College of Baltimore County’s Accelerated Learning Program, focuses on professional development for faculty teaching corequisite composition and was conducted via email in December of 2021. This is the third of four parts. David Starkey: Have you had strong institutional support for the professional development you are doing at CCBC? How has that manifested itself? Haleh Azimi: Yes, CCBC has offered institutional support for ALP professional development. The office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (PRE) at CCBC studies ALP pass and retention rates, and this data collection helps inform our decision-making about professional development needs. Our PD options vary depending on faculty needs. For example, we have an onboarding 2-day workshop for those brand new to teaching ALP. Our dean provides stipends for adjunct faculty who require this training. We also have embedded mentors for those new to teaching ALP, and this is something that we are very proud of. DS: You also have a Certified ALP Instructor Workshop Series. What happens there? HA: We provide ongoing professional development opportunities each academic year. There are specific requirements pertaining to this internal certificate program. Once an adjunct faculty member meets this requirement, they are given a stipend. Full-time faculty who meet the requirements of the Certified ALP Instructor Workshop Series can use this as equivalency credits for our internal promotion process. Finally, CCBC has always supported efforts to host our national conference, The Conference on Acceleration in Developmental Education (CADE). The institution provides the college’s resources to ensure a successful national conference. Elsbeth Mantler: Another thing that demonstrates CCBC’s commitment to ALP is the fact that our roles even exist as co-directors. If we did not have the embedded co-directorship then the program would not be as robust as it is. DS: You certainly have a commendable arrangement going on at CCBC. What recommendations would you give to faculty whose administrations aren’t currently willing, or able, to pay for faculty development? EM: I would really urge faculty to apply for grants. There are often institutional grants that are internal. When doing so, faculty should tie in the institution’s strategic plan and how funding for co-requisite professional development directly enhances the goals of the strategic plan. Likewise, I think that people developing PD opportunities should also apply for external funding. Often, when we are hired for external consultations, institutions inform us that they have secured funding through external organizations in order to fund our visits. DS: Good ideas! Any other suggestions? EM: You can make internal incentives that are free that help encourage people to participate in professional development opportunities – in other words, be creative in how you approach professional development. Are there ways to incentivize faculty involvement in PD that are not tied to stipends? For example, could you offer prioritized staffing preferences? If there are steps or levels for promotion, could this contribute to their promotion? Or, can facilitators provide tangible attendance documentation, such as a certificate for faculty to document on their CVs? Institutional support is absolutely critical in ensuring ALP’s success, but there are alternatives when there are creative faculty problem-solving ways to address professional development. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Sonia Feder-Lewis, a Professor at Saint Mary's University of Minnesota's Graduate School of Education.   Awakening It was a dream course assignment: a small upper-level honors class in Women’s Literature. A reward near the end of graduate school. Eleven students: 10 women and one brave young man, newly separated from the Army for carefully undisclosed reasons. The women treated him gently as we read Woolf, Morrison, Erdrich, Chopin. “The Awakening is the greatest book I have ever read,” he said passionately. Two decades later, he recognizes me in a coffee shop. Without pause, he tells me the course had been his favorite. And his hardest. I do not ask why.     Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

One of the most memorable sessions I attended at this year’s CCCC happened on Sunday, when the “Rhetoric’s Histories: Traditions, Theories, Pedagogies, Practices” SIG (“special interest group”) met. This session featured five speakers who spoke for about five minutes each, reminding me once again of how much can be said in that short span of time. (My favorite Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition meeting ever was one where speakers each had 8 minutes. I can still remember how electrifying the atmosphere was as one after another scholar spoke right to the point!) In this session, Tamika Carey from University of Virginia explained to us why rhetoricians must study impatience—and argued that rhetorical impatience is always a “necessary source.” Lisa King from University of Tennessee spoke compellingly about dominant narratives about Indigenous peoples: that they are gone, simply disappeared, or that they are “niche,” a kind of “add-on” to the history of the U.S. (One telling example: while the oldest structure on her home campus is the Indian Mound, it is never mentioned in the official narrative the university tells about itself.) Aja Martinez from University of North Texas described the “rhetorical gymnastics” being used to brand Critical Race Theory as toxic and showed how she is mounting counter narratives, one step at a time. And Kathleen Welch from University of Oklahoma continued her critical analysis of Aristotle and Neo-Aristotelian rhetoric and alerted us to forthcoming work on World Rhetorical Traditions, edited by Hui Wu and Tarez Graban. That’s a book I will be trying to pre-order! Perhaps Haivan Hoang from University of Massachusetts Amherst most captivated my imagination, though, with a searing report on “racial melancholia” in writing classes. Building on Freud’s definition of the term as “unresolved loss,” Haivan told us about her research with Asian American students and their many, many unresolved losses—losses that often come up in assigned readings for their courses. She quoted students who spoke movingly about being in classes where the readings seemed intended to educate or teach white students, ignoring those in the class whose families had lived the traumas being described. I couldn’t write fast enough to capture the quotations, but the point they made really struck home and I have thought long and hard about how I choose readings and how I prepare students for reading and discussing them. One student in particular commented on how there never seemed to be time to absorb and really discuss; the class instead just rushed on to the next reading. That made me think of the “slow reading” movement and of the utter inadequacy of the “coverage model” in our classes. Less is usually more, as this student noted. So much to learn. And attending this virtual conference reminded me of that fact—and made me long even more for an in-person meeting next year. While I could see all of these amazing speakers on my computer screen, their impact would have been even greater in person. So I will hope for that next year. In the meantime, I am grateful to all these scholars for their wisdom and advice. Image Credit: "13' MacBook Air (2010)" by brendanlim, used under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license ... View more

The following webinar was presented as part of Bedford’s 5th Annual WPA/Writing Director Workshop.  This year’s theme was Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in First-Year Composition.  The workshops focused on best practices for incorporating diverse, equitable, and inclusive practices into your course.  Learn more about the overall event.  Jay Dolmage Professor of English, University of Waterloo I am committed to disability rights in my scholarship, service, and teaching. My work brings together rhetoric, writing, disability studies, and critical pedagogy. My first book, entitled Disability Rhetoric, was published with Syracuse University Press in 2014. Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education was published with Michigan University Press in 2017 and is available in an open-access version online. Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability was published in 2018 with Ohio State University Press. I am the Founding Editor of the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies. I am also the co-author of the Bedford/St. Martin's books How to Write Anything and Disability and the Teaching of Writing.   Last October, as part of Bedford’s Fall 2021 WPA Workshop, I developed a presentation designed to address the ableist attitudes, policies, and practices that are built into higher education, focusing on our composition classrooms specifically. This workshop was recorded, and we are sharing it now to make it more accessible for the broader community. The talk was divided into three timeframes.  First, I explored some of the ways disability has been historically constructed at our Universities asking: how has ableism come to inflect what we do as teachers, in particular in the writing classroom?  Then, we interrogated the minimal and temporary means we have been given to address inequities, and the cost such an approach has for disabled students and faculty. This was the “during the pandemic” part of the talk, and we examined some of the ways we have – actually quite quickly – “pivoted” or adapted to an emergency teaching scenario. In some ways we have advanced access in this pivot, and in other ways we have not. Finally,  we explored how we can move forward, planning, from the beginning, to make our teaching as accessible as possible, so that we don’t have to make temporary or unsatisfactory modifications later. The hope is that we can think about what we want to change permanently about higher education, now that we have been offered a chance to reevaluate our priorities and revisit policies, procedures, patterns and pedagogies. Please have a look at the video and share widely!  I think we all agree that before this pandemic, our schools had too many unnecessary barriers in place for students. During the last twenty months, we have all viewed and experienced new barriers, or saw the old ones from new perspectives. Now we have a chance to build something different. Watch the Webinar: ... View more

In the early years of my teaching, I expected students to do most of their writing outside of class. Class time meant practice in close reading, discussion, peer review, and grammar work, along with explanations of assignments and conferencing.  While I was teaching at a community college in Virginia, I had one colleague who did not allow students to do any writing outside of class—everything was “in-class writing.”  Part of his reasoning related to keeping tabs on plagiarism, and at the time, that logic seemed cynical to me. And it spiked my own anxiety: as a student, I felt constrained and coerced when forced to write in class; I wanted to spread my materials (notes, articles, legal pad, laptop, coffee) across a wide space. I cringed when surrounded by cinder block walls and stark, industrial clocks whose ticking hands drummed towards my time limit. I associated classroom writing with testing—with worry and panic, with images of others typing or scribbling when my own words would not come.  So I resisted in-class writing as much as I could, despite a frequent reality in my developmental (and later corequisite) classrooms: the students were not writing outside of class, and whatever I had planned to do in class would not work.  These days, my in-person composition and corequisite classes may spend 75% or more of time in class working on writing—or a curious blend of writing, paired collaboration, small group conferences, and individual sessions between students and the two senior writing fellows who are working with me. All of this happens at once: we are writing, doing peer review, revising, and conferencing together, all in a sort of fluid dance supported by a quiet hum as students talk, re-watch short videos, slip out for an iced caramel latte from the shop upstairs, slide chairs, move closer to plugs for their devices, or find ways to share a screen.   Strangely enough, it was the pandemic that gave me the freedom to make some of these adjustments: with a very liberal absence policy, I began using a screen capture for all of our in-class sessions, dividing them into short videos of 4 to 8 minutes on key topics.  Students who missed class could watch at home—but I found that even students who were in class might benefit from watching these videos at home—or at the moment they needed the information, not necessarily on a particular class day. I began shifting a lot of content to those short videos, housed on our LMS, and letting the students write (and talk about their writing) in class.  And I am watching my students get a lot more writing done. Our campus is a commuter campus, and many of my students come to class between jobs—where they can’t write, not even on breaks. Going home may entail caring for a child, a sibling, or an older family member. They may have to share a computer at home, or they may not be able to rely on their internet connections—and it can be difficult to type on a phone. Students may be in search of housing, of food, of safety. We have 150 minutes of composition class and 60 minutes of corequisite support each week—and no amount of training in “time management” will produce for them a better chunk of time for focused attention on writing.  Does doing most of our writing in class solve all the issues? Not at all. I have students who—for a number of reasons—do not watch videos or read outside of class. They still aren’t prepared. But it’s quite easy to show them where to find the information they need and let them watch or read in class. Do all of them stay on task? No. They watch TikTok videos, shop, text, and do homework for other courses. But most will do some writing work—and talk to me about it. Do they finish everything in the time we are given? No. But they have drafts to show me. I have spent far too many class sessions with first-year writers, frustrated because what I planned to do wouldn’t work:  they weren’t prepared, or group members were absent.  But when the plan is to write, talk about writing, and then write some more, the plan generally works.  And effective teaching often occurs, whether I planned specifically for a given “lesson” or not, because the lesson is what the students need, at that moment, for their writing. ... View more

4Cs, the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication (4c22), takes place online March 9-March 12, 2022. In a 2013 Bits blog post, I offered an unconventional guide to the convention. Examining the guide years later, I find that the most relevant section remains a series of questions that invite the audience to reflect on students (lightly revised): In moments when I feel most overwhelmed by my surroundings, I try to remember students and what I can bring home to share with them. I continually ask myself: How can I make time to learn new skill sets or to attend to new theories and ideas that will allow me to grow as a teacher/scholar— and for students to have access to the wider world of scholarship in rhetoric and composition and writing studies?    In this context, I want to offer a bit of history. By 2013, I understood the challenges posed by the convention, especially trying to absorb and process so many sessions, exhibits, and workshops all in a span of four days. However, 2013 felt different to prior years. That year, the convention was held at the Riviera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, which offered inexpensive hotel rooms– and a casino. With all that in mind, Las Vegas felt like a refuge. When needed, I could escape the feeling of overwhelm in convention crowds, despite o not playing casino games. I found solace in the casino at the Riviera, The casino, as I recall, had a room with only slot machines, and those slot machines made the room pop with colorful lights and the sounds of canned music. In that cacophony of light and sound, I somehow found an immense sense of comfort, a welcome relief for my overloaded working memory, and a chance to refocus.    Photo by Susan Bernstein, Las Vegas, Nevada. March 14, 2013.   Additionally, and significantly in 2022, 4Cs offers expanded attention to access. This expansion grows out of concerns about accessibility at the 2019 convention in Pittsburgh, the last time before the pandemic that 4Cs met in person. The next year,  in September 2020, Adam Hubrig and Ruth Osorio hosted a symposium, Enacting a Culture of Access in Our Conference Spaces, in College Composition and Communication, one of the major journals in writing studies. Anchored by many voices and experiences, the symposium presents an activist space for reimagining accessibility at 4Cs.  This year, 4Cs will once again meet online and there will be enhanced opportunities for refocusing. The changes in technology mean that  the convention need not be absorbed in four short days. Anyone who registers for 4Cs will have access to the online archive until Friday June 10th. With this extension , my working memory will have more time to process the convention slowly and in manageable chunks.   One manifestation of that activist space is a comprehensive accessibility guide and a visual miniguide written by Sean Kamperman (committee chair), Morgan Blair, Andrea Olinger, and Jeanne Popowits. Contrast that to 2013, when the  Hospitality Guide contained a single page with a link to an Accessibility Guide offered by the CDICC (Committee on Disability Issues). The guide, composed by local accessibility coordinator, Michael Intinarelli, local arrangements chair Robyn Rohde, and the 2013 CDICC chair Jay Dolmage, could be downloaded as a Word document, and offered a detailed description of the floorplan, as well as the sights and sounds of the Riviera.  Rereading that description in 2022, I find a poignant sense of history in a place that no longer exists. In 2015, the casino and hotel were closed down, and in 2016, three years after 4c13, the Riviera was imploded.   However, I would prefer not to end this post with an implosion. Instead, as I revisit the blog post from 2013, I notice another guideline: “Remember the global context.” The example I used was a memory from ten years earlier. In 2003, 4Cs convened in Manhattan and coincided with the beginning of George W. Bush’s declaration of war against Iraq, and subsequent street protests in Times Square and Washington Square. I remember walking into the convention hotel after attending one of the protests, my hair dripping with rain. In 2022, I feel no nostalgia. As I revise this post in early March, Ukraine is at war, and the situation changes with each passing hour. For me, that global context remains inseparable from remembering my students. How can I keep students’ concerns at the center in a constantly evolving world? Attending 4Cs will not answer this question. Nevertheless, with extended access, I hope to find–and to pass along–opportunities to learn and grow. ... View more

When Harper & Row, way back in 1990 when it was still called Harper & Row, picked up my book The Signs of Our Time: Semiotics: The Hidden Messages of Environments, Objects, and Cultural Images (1988) for republication in their Perennial Library series, they made a subtle change in the subtitle of the book, changing it to The Secret Meanings of Everyday Life. I had no say in the matter, but I knew why they made the change: clearly the idea was to make the title more intriguing for potential readers who, in this conspiracy-obsessed society of ours, believe that a lot is being hidden from them and they want to find out what it is because they think that it is doing them harm. (It bears noting that I didn't have anything to do with the original subtitle either, which also attempts to pique reader interest with a promise of revelation, of a lifting of the veil on something that has been concealed, something dangerous.) In reality, however, the practice of cultural semiotics has nothing at all to do with concealment or secrecy. If there is any element of occultation at all in the matter it is simply that of what is hidden in plain sight, of what appears to us right there in the open inviting us to ask questions about it, questions that can be answered by looking at other perfectly visible cultural phenomena that both contextualize and explain what we are seeing through what I call "systems of association and difference" in every edition of Signs of Life the USA, the book that grew out of The Signs of Our Time way back in 1994. Take, for example, the recent headline from the Los Angeles news source KTLA: "Super Bowl commercials: Heavy on celebrities and nostalgia".  Now, over the years I have performed a lot of semiotic analyses of Super Bowl commercials, both of individual advertisements and of the way that the ads have become almost as important as the game itself. I have analyzed puppies and vampires, office workers and blue jeans, attack dogs and pink bunnies .  .  .  the list goes on and on. But this time I want to look not at any particular Super Bowl LVI ads per se, but what has been said about them generally in the mass media. Here are some more headlines to give you some idea of their drift: "Touchdown or fumble? Check out the celebrities who star in the 2022 Super Bowl ads"; "Here are the top celebrity 2022 Super Bowl commercials"; "The Super Bowl ads showed celebrities rule the world. We’re just buying stuff in it"; and so on and so forth. So it isn't just KTLA that noticed how celebrity performers dominated this year's Super Bowl advert extravaganza. As I say, it's all in plain sight. But what does it tell us? We can begin our analysis with a simple question: to wit, why were there so many celebrity adverts at this year's Super Bowl?; to which KTLA offers a succinct answer: Off the field, Super Bowl advertisers were in a tough competition of their own. Advertisers shelled out up to $7 million for 30 seconds of airtime during the Super Bowl, so they pulled out all the stops to win over the estimated 100 million people that tune into the game. Big stars, humor and a heavy dose of nostalgia were prevalent throughout the night. So far so good, but now we are faced with another question: how does such star power translate into effective advertising? The answer to this question is practically self-evident: Americans are not only entertained by celebrities—and thus associate their pleasure in watching celebrity ads with the products being advertised, enhancing the possibility that they will purchase them—they also tend to identify with, and, accordingly, to trust them. Advertisers have known this for a very long time, so the system to which the Super Bowl LVI ads belong is a large and historically well-grounded one. In one sense, then, the ads this year were nothing new. But the fact that so many mass media reports highlighted the sheer volume of celebrity ads this time around marks a difference, a difference not in kind but in degree. There just seem to have been a lot more celebrities featured in this year's Super Bowl ads than there have been in past years, and this difference raises further cultural-semiotic questions. One such question could be, what is it with celebrities anyway these days?, and George Packer's essay "Celebrating Inequality" (which you can find on pages 86-88 in the 10th edition of Signs of Life in the USA) provides a trenchant answer. As my head note to Packer's analysis puts it: "Our age is lousy with celebrities," George Packer quips .  .  .  and it’s only getting worse. Indeed, in tough times like today’s, when the gap between the rich and the poor yawns ever wider, celebrities loom larger on the social horizon than they have in more equitable times, overshadowing the rest of us. And we’re not just talking about entertainers. Indeed, as Packer notes, they include entrepreneurs, bankers, computer engineers, real estate developers, media executives, journalists, politicians, scientists, and even chefs. And as the new celebrity deities gobble up whatever opportunities are left in America, Packer believes, America itself is turning backward to the days of the Jazz Age and Jay Gatsby. So, meet the new celebrity gods; same as the old celebrity gods — or "something far more perverse." Packer's essay was written in 2013, and since then the situation has only intensified, with Super Bowl LVI being just one signifier of this intensification. In the intervening years the power of the Internet "influencer" has also grown, along with that of the traditional celebrity, within a social environment in which fewer and fewer people are taking up more and more space. The Super Bowl ads are a case in point. Advert roles that once went to non-celebrity performers are increasingly going to the already successful. This is not trivial if you are a budding actor yourself, because television advertising has long been a gateway to an economically sustainable career for non-celebrity performers. When we expand the system further, we can see, for example, how the career path of journalism has been similarly affected, with only a handful of celebrity journalists raking in most of the money while the rest flounder as freelancers or simply give their writing away for nothing. And I hardly need to explain how the adjunctification of higher education is affecting many of the members of the Macmillan Learning community, as a shrinking number of TED-talk-level celebrity professors enjoy a growing proportion of the financial rewards. The list of examples could go on and on. As I say, all of this is in plain sight. There is no conspiracy. One only needs to look at what is going on all around us, and our own participation in it. Thus, in what constitutes nothing less than a betrayal of the American dream, the victims of a society that is producing fewer and fewer "winners" and more and more "losers" are looking in the wrong places for the sources of their distress, laughing at funny Super Bowl commercials starring A-list performers when the joke, in the end, is on them.   Image Credit: "365 x36 Guinea Pig Conspiracy" by David Masters is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

I wonder how many teachers of writing are beginning to think it’s time to take a linguistic time out and think through a number of terms that are coming at us from all sides. Here are just a few of them: bilingual (and in particular “dominant bilingual,” “balanced bilingual,” ”incipient bilingual,” etc.), multilingual, metrolingual, polylingual, plurilingual, translingual, languaging. . . I could go on and on. And I’ve been reading as fast as I can, trying to keep track of all the permutations of these terms, the controversies swirling around them, and the ideological freight that each term carries. Not to mention the choices hard-working teachers have to make, often on the fly. In Marshall and Moore’s 2018 study “Plurilingualism Amid the Panoply of Lingualisms: Addressing Critiques and Misconceptions in Education,” published in the International Journal of Multilingualism, they distinguish plurilingualism (which comes from European theorists) by saying that it moves away “from the view of languages as separate, parallel, autonomous systems based on discourses of complete competencies to a view that recognizes hybridity and varying degrees of competence between and within languages” (3)—except that such a distinction also seems to apply to translingualism, and perhaps other terms as well. One very recent book that is helping me think about these terms is Kay M. Losey and Gail Shuck’s edited volume Plurilingual Pedagogies for Multilingual Writing Classrooms, though its title demonstrates terministic slippage at work. From what I’ve read of this book so far, the authors seem to be making a very strong case for moving swiftly away from the heretofore dominant English-only approach in writing classes (a good start) to what they present as a plurilingual approach that would recognize and value “the many proficiencies students bring with them to the classroom” and thus create “a classroom climate of mutual respect and admiration, fostering self-efficacy and self-confidence in learners” in which “students’ full identities and backgrounds. . . would become an essential, honored part of the classroom community” (2). I applaud this approach—but it seems to me characteristic of translingual and even multilingual approaches as well. I feel like I am swimming in alphabet soup. I clearly need to stop complaining, dig deeper, and do much more reading. And then perhaps I can write something that will clarify these terms—if only for myself. Words—and definitions—matter. So if you can clarify distinctions among these terms, I am all ears and would appreciate the help! Image Credit: "Hostelling International 19" by orijinal, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

The weather in Northern Indiana has been shifting daily between swirling snow, then sunshine, then sleet and slush, then sunshine again. Everything feels unsettled, but it’s clear we’re tipping toward springtime. In my classrooms, too, I can feel a shift in the quality of the conversation. Now, more often than not, students speak to one another rather than pinging back to me, collaborating textual discussion – one they can own, with pride. It brings to mind Andrea Lunsford’s recent post on the subversive joys of collaboration. Any instructor knows the thrill of witnessing a class “take off, or “jell,” or … pick your metaphor. Don’t we live for those moments? The tipping point for one class was discussing a text that I’m teaching for the first time, Robin DiAngelo’s “Nothing to Add: A Challenge to White Silence in Racial Discussions.” While 10 years old, the essay is still timely. DiAngelo unpacks in startlingly useful ways the “rationales for white silence” that we commonly hear during discussions about race. Among the list of rationales: “It’s just my personality – I rarely talk in groups”; “Everyone has already said what I was thinking”; “I don’t know much about race, so I will just listen”; “I don’t feel safe / don’t want to be attacked, so I am staying quiet”; “I am trying to be careful not to dominate the discussion”; “I don’t want to be misunderstood / say the wrong thing / offend anybody”; and “I don’t have anything to add.” (2-3) DiAngelo challenges readers to see how these claims, which may seem reasonable at first, often are ways of maintaining white privilege. These excuses for silence allow whites to remain comfortable and removed from conversations that could – and should – destabilize the norms that hold white supremacy in place. In our discussion, students honed in on “Everyone has already said what I was thinking” and “I don’t have anything to add,” as reasons they could identify with, especially. The conversation took off from there, with many students admitting that they often remained silent in discussions, letting others carry the weight, even if – or especially if – they agreed with what others had said. But as DiAngelo says, “If we are moved or gained insight from what someone shared, we should say so, even if others have said it” (8).  She adds: Positioning ourselves as having less of value to contribute than others in the group may be rooted in dominant culture’s expectation that knowledge should be a form of “correct” information. Yet sharing what we are thinking, whether “right” or “wrong,” articulate or clumsy, is important in terms of building trust, conveying empathy, or validating a story or perspective. (8) Wow, what a tipping point these insights provoked. Now, students frequently respond to one another to endorse ideas (“Yes - I was thinking the same thing!”) or feel freer to praise one another, even briefly (“That is such a good way to put that!”). Our classroom is filled every day, now, with more voices, more ideas amplified, and more perspectives visible and audible to all. Students feel more supported by one another, and are getting to know and trust one another much faster. Just as sap is rising outside, the energy in our discussions is surging in a way that feels perfectly in sync with the season. Explicitly talking together about fruitful and often low-risk alternatives to silence has given members of the class new confidence and freedom to speak up. Even if you don’t teach DiAngelo’s piece, I’d encourage you to raise these common reasons students stay quiet in class, and listen to your students’ responses. What might happen if you help them reframe silence in this way, and invite them to raise their voices in support of one another? Let’s share additional ideas, too, for methods you’ve found for shifting the ground of classroom discussion. I’m ready to listen and respond; as my students will tell you, it sure feels good.   Image Credit: Photograph taken by the blog post’s author, April Lidinsky ... View more