Twenty years ago, I was up to my academic ears in The Stanford Study of Writing, a longitudinal study that followed a large cohort of students through their college years and one year beyond. I was reminded of this study and of how much it meant to me and my teaching when I sat in on a discussion with Karen Lunsford, Carl Whithaus, Jonathan Alexander, and other colleagues about their Wayfinding Project, now well under way. This team of researchers has written widely about their meticulous planning, their extensive piloting, and the initial phases of the project, as well as about preliminary findings. This longitudinal study seeks to track the ways writing is used by college alums, with a focus on everyday writing and social media, and on what writing means to the participants involved. In this discussion I attended, they described asking participants to describe a “most meaningful” piece of writing and they got a wide array of responses, such as one from “Benjamin,” who told them about a social media message he had posted to a small group, one that was then forwarded to a much larger Facebook group—and then turned up on the front page of Reddit, garnering some 10,000 views. To Benjamin, reaching this very large audience, albeit unintentionally, was deeply meaningful because of the sheer reach and scope. He seemed not so much interested in the content of the post—indeed, he didn’t want to talk about that—but in the number of readers he contacted. AWESOME, he thought. The researchers reported that talk of such social media writing often emerged at or near the end of interviews, after participants had told the team what they thought they wanted to hear about “official” writing—when, in this instance, it was the “unofficial,” social media writing the research team was vitally interested in! Again, this story took me back to the Stanford Study of Writing. In interviews, I often had a hard time getting students to talk about their in-class writing at all. With one student in particular, I remember asking about writing in her humanities course, which she said she “adored.” Adored, maybe, but she didn’t want to talk about it. Every time I asked a question, she would begin to answer but then quickly veer to out of class writing, especially for a campus activist group she was working with. Writing for her classes, she said (with emphasis!) was JUST writing. Writing for causes she cared deeply about, well—that was REAL writing. Such experiences helped us focus on extracurricular writing, and indeed the students’ attachment to and identification with such writing was one of the major findings of our study. So the Wayfinding team’s focus on “most meaningful” writing seems spot on and one reason I am following this fascinating project so closely. We need to know more about what students find meaningful in writing—and in what modes of delivery they choose to deliver such writing—and why. And we need to know much more about the relationship students have with their audiences (up close and personal to completely distant and disembodied, like Benjamin’s) and to their subject or content (again, up close and personal, like the obituary for a dog that one student described to the Wayfinding team, to the almost-beside-the-point content of Benjamin’s original message). What ratios could be drawn among these elements in the age of digital platforms and social media posts? What are the gradations of distance between writer and audiences, between writer and topic or content? And how do these ratios relate to writing satisfaction, to writing that is meaningful to students? Alexander, Whithaus, and Lunsford are helping to ask and answer these questions, and I am all ears to hear more about their findings. Image Credit: "Social Media" by magicatwork, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

I tried a new assignment this spring, inspired by the electrifying writer, Rebecca Solnit. I can’t stop thinking about it, and my students can’t stop talking about the way it has changed the way they see — and map — their environments. In particular, it has led them to appreciate the power of language, and sparked a desire to research and revise place names all around them. Solnit, as you may know, is a lover of maps. She captures the ways they make meaning in her wonderful collection, Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, co-produced with a geographer. In her "City of Women" map, for example, she provocatively reimagines the New York City subway system, with women’s names marking places we mostly know from historical men: Washington, Hudson, Frick, Rockefeller. Solnit says of her map that it "was made to sing the praises of the extraordinary women who have, since the beginning, been shapers and heroes of this city that has always been, secretly, a City of Women"— think Woodhull, Sanger, Chisolm. After reading Solnit’s essay, I invited students to apply her method to a location that means something to them, and to investigate place names and propose alternatives that would make hidden histories visible. I have rarely seen students so energized to revise existing texts, nor so inspired to propose alternatives. Some students discovered the place names in their hometowns only celebrated the white men responsible for the genocide of indigenous peoples. Some found street names in their neighborhood ignored the Black residents who profoundly shaped the community. Hardly any found women’s names on street signs, stadiums, or parks. Armed with scholarly research on the power of naming, and their own passions and perspectives, students re-wrote area maps and designed keys with biographies that explained their newly proposed place names. We all learned a lot as they celebrated local suffragists, ballplayers in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, Black reformers, women schoolteachers, Indigenous peoples, and grandmothers who they believe deserve to be celebrated as community-builders. I have never seen a group of students so jazzed about sharing their work, nor an assignment that students were still talking about months after they turned them in. My students’ projects have reminded me of the unexpectedly emotional response I had to visiting the Women's Rights Pioneers Monument last summer. Meredith Bergman’s sculpture was installed in Central Park on August 26, 2020, to commemorate the passing of the 19th Amendment and is one of the few monuments of historical women in the city. As I lingered over the details in the strong, bronze faces of Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, other passers-by stopped to marvel at the significance of seeing women honored this way, to name them, and recognize their work. A mother with tears in her eyes patted her young daughter’s back, and a pair of white-haired women clutched one another’s hands, saying, “This matters. This matters so much.”   Image Credit: Photo of the author at the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in Central Park, New York City, provided by the author. ... View more

Spring in North Georgia is lovely—the azaleas and ornamental pear trees are blooming, and the green of new leaves creates contrast against the deeper hues of magnolia leaves and our ubiquitous pines. Those pines are also a primary source of the layer of yellow pollen now coating porches, cars, benches, and sidewalks (no need for sidewalk chalk these days—we can just inscribe a quick note in the pollen).   This spring has also marked my return to in-person conferences. On March 18 and 19, I was in Atlanta for the NOSS conference—the National Organization for Student Success; I left from there for Pittsburgh and the American Association of Applied Linguistics annual event. I had hopes of attending the CCCC virtual event and TESOL—but I found myself on information overload. I returned from Pittsburgh to the final third of our spring semester, and I realized I could not divert any further time away from my classes. I did make space for a plenary and a couple of sessions this past weekend from the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL) virtual event, but even then, I found my head spinning as I processed a wealth of information.    I am acutely aware of limited resources at my university; no one faculty member can expect to receive funding for more than one or (at most) two conference presentations. Making the most of those limited funds means we need to target proposals to attend just the conferences most relevant to our research and pedagogy interests.    And therein lies the challenge: My primary area of interest is metalinguistic development and writing pedagogy with multilingual and corequisite writers. That area—and the questions it raises—crosses several disciplinary boundaries, including basic writing, composition/rhetoric, applied linguistics, educational linguistics, translingual studies, and L2/Lx writing. Conferences in these disciplines abound—along with journals and edited collections and webinars—at the international, national, regional, and state levels. This year, I chose NOSS (close to home) and AAAL (a good fit for a current project analyzing student work in online discussions); within those two events, I could only visit a fraction of the sessions offered: research on embodied and multimodal representations of grammatical concepts, discourse analysis of online misinformation, a thematic corpus analysis related to mental health, research into speaking aloud to process feedback on writing, tough questions about corequisite success data, a program to jump-start corequisite success with a boot camp, multimodality and standard concepts of academic writing for ESL students, virtual reality to teach pragmatics, a personal ethnography of code-switching choices. I collected as many resources as I could, and I began to build a reading list for the summer.    Another challenge: Each conference session represents both theoretical and empirical research traditions that I may not be familiar with. Some terms (stance, metalinguistic, agency, translingual) are used across disciplines, but not always with the same definitions or foundational texts. At times differences between the disciplines can be contentious (see Hall and Atkins et al.) As much as I can, I want to appreciate and understand the disciplinary histories informing the work I do, even if I cannot be as fully immersed in those histories as others are.   Over the past month, the return to conferences—and the resulting flood of new reading—has felt both energizing and  overwhelming.  How do I process all the concepts, the data, the possibilities presented at these conferences? Where do I begin? And that takes me back to pollen. For right now, those of who live in Georgia know we are just going to have to sit in the pollen for a while; it cannot be tamed. But in a few weeks, the pollen will dissipate, and we’ll be left with the blossoms, the greens of summer, fresh vegetables, and vaulting shade.    And maybe that’s what I will do with my return to conferences—just sit in the information this while—and see what grows this summer.   Have you been back to conferences this year? How do you process what you are learning?  ... View more

In 1987 the United States celebrated the 200th birthday of the Constitution. In a famous speech included in Elements of Argument, Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court, explained why his celebration of the anniversary was reserved. He wrote, “I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever ‘fixed’ at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite ‘The Constitution,’ they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct two centuries ago.” He concludes, “Thus, in this bicentennial year, we may not all participate in the festivities with flag-waving fervor. Some may more quietly commemorate the suffering, struggle, and sacrifice that has triumphed over much of what was wrong with the original document, and observe the anniversary with hopes not realized and promises not fulfilled. I plan to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution as a living document, including the Bill of Rights and the other amendments protecting individual freedoms and human rights.” Thirty-five years later, we sometimes hear the term “constitutional crisis.” The term refers to a problem that arises within the government that the Constitution is not able to resolve. The inability of the Constitution to handle every situation that arises is exactly why Marshall celebrated it as a “living” document, one that has been revised as necessary to keep up with the changes that over 200 years of national history have brought. Some of these changes were the inevitable result of positive societal change. The Civil War was fought to prove that we were no longer a nation that defined some of its citizens as only three-fifths of a person. Marshall writes: Along the way, new constitutional principles have emerged to meet the challenges of a changing society. The progress has been dramatic, and it will continue. The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 could not have envisioned these changes. They could not have imagined, nor would they have accepted, that the document they were drafting would one day be construed by a Supreme Court to which had been appointed a woman and the descendent of an African slave. ‘We the People’ no longer enslave, but the credit does not belong to the Framers. It belongs to those who refused to acquiesce in outdated notions of ‘liberty,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘equality,’ and who strived to better them. Nothing has revealed more clearly “outdated notions of ‘liberty,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘equality,’” and the political split that exists in our country, than the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.  There was a time not all that long ago that a well-qualified candidate could be approved by a large majority in Congress across party lines. The Framers did not intend for an individual to be elevated to our highest court and to serve there for life on the basis of his or her position on a single issue nor did they intend for a nominee to be approved or not by a vote along party lines. Short of a constitutional change, legislation that would change the makeup of the Court would allow the party in power to “pack” it—in this case, to increase the number of justices from nine to thirteen to allow Democrats to balance the conservative justices appointed under former president Donald Trump. However, in April of 2021, President Biden put in place a commission made up of law professors to study how to make constitutional changes in the Supreme Court. Perhaps the Framers did not foresee the power of partisanship as it has evolved over the intervening years. The policy change that our nation seems headed toward is a major constitutional change in our country’s highest court, the type of change that Marshall celebrated as evidence that our Constitution is a living document. Photo: “Constitution"”  by EpicTop10.com. is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

The Stanford Study of Writing—a five-year longitudinal study of writing development throughout college—is almost twenty years old now, and it’s interesting and gratifying to note that I am still in touch with some of the participants. They are now well into adulthood, with families and into their (sometimes second!) careers. When I occasionally speak with one of them, what I can say is that being a part of this five-year study is something they remember well, something they still say had an impact on their lives. This makes me wish that all student writers could be part of carefully designed longitudinal studies: simply being in the study, I think, has a strong effect. Because of that experience, I’ve been following research based on longitudinal studies ever since, most recently in Dana Lynn Driscoll and Wenqi Cui’s “Visible and Invisible Transfer: A Longitudinal Investigation of Learning to Write and Transfer across Five Years,” published in the December 2021 issue of College Composition and Communication. In this study, the authors “tracked students’ writing knowledge, skills, and strategies as they engaged in undergraduate writing experiences over five years.” They considered their findings to be surprising: While students do transfer a considerable amount of knowledge, 78% of transfer that occurs is often “invisible” to them, or they may re-attribute where knowledge comes from over time. Further, higher rates of transfer are correlated with learning that is expanded or reinforced at multiple points in students’ education, including in FYW and disciplinary writing. Our range of findings suggest wide-ranging implications for writing instruction and assessment, including articulating the importance of reinforcing and expanding prior knowledge both in FYW and disciplinary writing, the complexity that genre forms and genre knowledge play in learning transfer, the unseen nature of transfer of different writing skills, and the issue of invisibility . . . . (230-31) This study is well worth reading in its entirety, especially for the rich case study of one particular student. And the findings are certainly important and deserving of additional research, though to me they were not at all surprising. In fact, they corroborate some of what I saw in the Stanford study and, moreover, my own experience in almost fifty years of working with undergraduate college writers. Much of what any of us learns remains “invisible,” below the level of consciousness, but operative, nevertheless, in important ways for further learning and for everyday life. That is not to say we shouldn’t follow the advice of Driscoll and Cui and work hard to make the invisible visible—to focus on opportunities for ongoing student reflection and to focus on reinforcing and expanding writing knowledge, skills, and strategies well beyond FYW and indeed throughout the undergrad curricula. We should do all we can to advance these goals. But we should also recognize, as these authors do, that learning will always be messy and difficult to track and that invisible, sometimes increasingly tacit, knowledge will always mark processes of learning. So thanks to researchers like Driscoll and Cui, we have new questions to ask and new goals to pursue. Here’s to more and more good, solid longitudinal research on writing. Image Credit: "Lake Street Transfer (early 1940s)" by Chicago Transit Authority, 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.  Steve Schessler English Department Chair and Instructor, Cabrillo College Dr. Steve Schessler received his Ph.D in English from Emory University and then an M.A. in Education: Instructional Technology from San Francisco State University. He is an experienced English Composition instructor and current department chair with more than fourteen years teaching English, nine of those at Cabrillo College. He uses Achieve to teach a college composition class contextualized for STEM majors. Dr. Schessler divides his time between duties as chair, instructor, and faculty co-lead for Guided Pathways, a statewide initiative focused on equity and access.     As part of Bedford’s equity-focused Fall 2021 WPA / Writing Director Workshop, I discussed challenges for equity and access in intro composition classes from my perspective as an instructor at a federally-designated Hispanic Serving Institute and a researcher of improving equity in the online classroom - with lessons applicable to the face-to-face classroom, too. In this workshop, we looked at some of the current challenges for advancing equitable outcomes in my classroom as well as those of participants. You can review your own program policies and classroom practices through an equity lens and join in our conversation about ways to improve the student experience - and results. Watch the Webinar: ... View more

Bedford/St. Martin's is pleased to announce the participants in the 2022 Bedford New Scholars Advisory Board! Advisory Board members are:   Olalekan Adepoju   Olalekan Adepoju (recommended by Andrea Olinger) is a doctoral candidate in the University of Louisville’s Rhetoric and Composition program. He teaches a variety of courses in writing, including first-year composition and intermediate college writing. He also serves as the assistant writing center director, where he works with international/multilingual students as well as graduate students and faculty writers. Currently, Olalekan is an executive committee member of the Non-native English-Speaking Writing Instructors (NNESWIs) in the United States. His research interests lie in writing studies, intercultural rhetoric, ESL teaching, and discourse analysis. He has continued to write about these interests and published in both peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed journals.   Dilara Avci   Dilara Avci (recommended by Dev Bose) is pursuing her MA in Teaching English as a Second Language at the University of Arizona. She has taught writing and literacy across diverse backgrounds and age levels, from elementary school to college. She is currently teaching First-Year Composition. Her research interests are the role of individual learner differences such as language aptitude and anxiety in writing and material design with a focus on digital literacies and critical pedagogy. She believes in the importance of sharing experiences and creating an inclusive learning environment and has been involved in a variety of Teaching-as-Research Projects, Faculty Learning Communities and conferences on writing and teaching practices. Noah Bukowski   Noah Bukowski (recommended by Scott DeWitt) is pursuing a PhD in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy, specializing in Disability Studies at The Ohio State University. Noah attempts to foreground accessible pedagogies and collaboration in all of his work on teaching writing. He has taught First Year Writing, Introduction to Disability Studies, and co-taught Introduction to Teaching First Year Composition as a Graduate Writing Program Administrator. Ever since his undergraduate degree and into graduate school, Noah has worked in the writing center as both a tutor and administrator. In 2019, Noah co-authored a chapter in Theories and Methods of Writing Center Studies with Brenda Brueggemann titled "Writing Center Research and Disability Theory." Noah is currently most interested in the work of finessing accessible pedagogies during the pandemic.   Brittny Byrom   Brittny M. Byrom (recommended by Michael Harker) is a PhD student in Rhetoric and Composition and serves as the Associate Director of Technology and Finance of the Georgia State University Writing Studio. Her primary research focuses on the intersection of theories of rhetorical empathy and beauty and justice. Her work in writing center research concentrates on developing balanced practices between tutor emotional labor and collaborative learning environments. Brittny began teaching in 2017 and began working in writing centers in 2015.   Antonio Hamilton   Antonio Hamilton (recommended by Kristi McDuffie) is pursuing his PhD in Writing Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He teaches first-year composition courses and is a member of the Rhetoric Advisory Committee. His research interest focuses on how writing is remediated and potentially restricted in online writing environments, such as Automated Writing Evaluation software and Language Models. He is specifically interested in writer agency when writing with these programs, and what forms or styles of writing are prioritized. His research draws on intercultural rhetoric, algorithmic knowledge, and rhetorical genre studies perspectives to assess how writing is digitally transformed.   Laura Hardin Marshall   Laura Hardin Marshall (referred by Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers) is a PhD candidate at Saint Louis University, specializing in Rhetoric and Composition. Her research focuses on the response practices of writing instructors and consultants, examining what feedback we offer to students, how we offer it, and what students then do with that feedback as they work through their revisions and future assignments. She has taught courses on basic writing and college preparation, introductory and advanced composition, and writing consulting and has published articles on writing program and writing center administration.   Rachel Marks   Rachel Marks (recommended by Angela Rounsaville) is pursuing her PhD in Texts and Technology with an emphasis in Digital Humanities at the University of Central Florida, where she expects to defend her dissertation “On your Left!”: Exploring Queerness, Masculinity, and Race in the Marvel “Captain America” Fandom in May 2024. She currently teaches the first-year writing course Composition II: Situated Inquiry of Writing and Rhetoric and has taught Composition I: Introduction to Writing Studies in the past. She has also served as a consultant at the University Writing Center and as a student editor on Stylus: a Journal of First-Year Writing. Her research focuses on LGBT representation in popular media, fan interaction and critique on social media platforms, and how fans respond to representations of queer characters in the media.   Madhu Nadarajah   Madhu Nadarajah (recommended by Nick Recktenwald and tia north) is pursuing her PhD in English with a concentration in Cultural Rhetorics at the University of Oregon where she is researching the discursive practices within the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. She is currently serving as the Assistant Director of the Composition Program where she worked on redesigning the Composition Policy Handbook, helped with graduate teaching instruction, and facilitated the annual Composition Conference. She is also a Culturally Responsive Teaching Fellow in which she draws on her work in Cultural Rhetorics to provide anti-oppressive teaching principles for the wider Composition community in the classroom. Lupe Remigio Ortega   Lupe Remigio Ortega (recommended by Mary Fiorenza) is a dissertator pursuing her PhD in English, Composition & Rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. She currently serves as the Senior Assistant Director of English 100, the first-year writing/freshman writing requirement at UW-Madison. In this position she works mentoring first-time English 100 instructors, which includes leading fall and spring orientation, teaching a first-year writing proseminar, and organizing and leading professional development workshops. Previously she has taught English 100 at UW-Madison as well as first-year writing at California State University Fresno and the first-year writing equivalent at Reedley College in Reedley, California. Her research focuses on transnational literacies, indigenous literacies (oral and spiritual), and the impact of migration on Mixtec literacy practices in the US and Mexico.   ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Lisa Lebduska, Professor of English and Director of College Writing at Wheaton College.   Observations As a grad student adjuncting at 3 schools, I always ran late. One rainy day, I flew into my office, changed into dry shoes, then rushed to class. When class ended, a student was waiting for me. "We just wanted you to know," she said, "that we noticed you are wearing two different shoes." I looked with horror from the beige wedge on my left, to the black pump on my right. "Why didn't anyone say anything?" "We thought it was another one of those exercises where you were trying to see if we were paying attention to details… We were."   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

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