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.  Melvin Beavers Assistant Professor and First-Year Writing Director, University of Arkansas at Little Rock Melvin Beavers is an Assistant Professor and the First-Year Writing Director in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His research interests involve writing program administration, composition pedagogy, online writing instruction, rhetorical theory, and popular culture studies. He teaches first-year writing and a variety of upper-level writing courses. His work has been published in Academic Labor: Research and Artistry, the WPA Symposium on Black Lives Matter, and an edited collection entitled, Pedagogical Perspectives on Cognition and Writing. He serves as president of the Executive Board of the Southern Regional Composition Conference. Additionally, he has presented research at several national conferences, including conferences for the Council of Writing Program Administrators, Conference on College Composition and Communication, and the Association of Rhetoric and Writing Studies.     This presentation focuses on ways writing program administrators can begin to examine their programs and make moves to reflect a more antiracist orientation. In order to align a program's values with those of antiracist scholarship, WPAs should determine what forms of antiracism they can build into their program curriculum and programmatic assessment efforts.  Part of rethinking or reimaging the values and mission of a writing program involve questioning what Marcus Croom (2021) posits “what if our courses ‘programs’ were designed in a manner that did not perpetuate the neutrality and universality of whiteness, any aspiration to whiteness, or the false notion of it”. His remarks speak to the larger issue of systemic forms of oppression and racism that reverberate within writing programs. In this presentation, Dr. Beavers attempts to build a framework for WPAs to explore their writing programs and look for ways to make them more equitable, diverse, and inclusive. Watch the Webinar:  ... 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 second of four parts. David Starkey: Why is faculty professional development so important for corequisite composition instructors in particular? Elsbeth Mantler: In general, a lot of community college practitioners do not take classes in their own schooling that teach them anything about teaching. For example, a lot of English professors we have met with have backgrounds in literature or creative writing. Then, we add on the unique course structure of ALP. Many new faculty have never heard of the program, and have not received any formal training in education. I personally did not take a single education class in my past (not yet, at least!). DS: So, the lessons you’ve learned about teaching have mostly been on the job? EM: Yes, and through reading, researching, and learning from my colleagues. I really think it’s important to pay attention to what’s going on in the field. While I don’t have the formal education, Haleh and I make sure that we stay connected with research and best practices within the field. I have been attending the national Conference on Acceleration in Developmental Education (CADE) for over a decade. This conference provides an opportunity for colleagues doing this work together to present on important work in the field, and much of what’s presented includes tangible practical tools for the classroom. We also always keep up to date with other professional organizations such as the Conference on College Composition and Communications (CCCC), the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA), and the Community College Research Center (CCRC). We do ongoing research on Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning (CRTL), belonging, and Integrated Reading & Writing (IRW), pandemic teaching, among many other topics. Oftentimes, when Haleh and I are conducting new faculty trainings, this is the first-time faculty are even learning about ALP, teaching College Composition or teaching Integrated Reading and Writing. These foundational professional opportunities help faculty prepare to meet student needs. Long-term, ongoing, and consistent professional development is needed to help sustain the unique structure of this program. Our longitudinal data validates ongoing successes with pass and retention rates. Much of this success is because of relevant and consistent professional development opportunities for ALP faculty at all levels. Haleh Azimi: If we are asking faculty to support the students so deeply, we need to support the faculty with ample opportunities for professional development. DS: In your minds, what constitutes a successful faculty development activity? Could you give me an example of a single activity, then discuss how it might connect with areas of professional growth that you hope to foster? EM: We offer a series of workshops that occur once a month, but what makes this series sustainable is that we choose the topics based on organic needs and conversations that arise among our colleagues. For example, at the beginning of Covid, all of our face-to-face classes turned into remote synchronous classes overnight. This was a modality that had never been offered with ALP at CCBC. Some faculty struggled with how to translate what they would do in person into this new modality. We stepped in and identified a need for professional development in this new arena. HA: Yes, everything Elsbeth just talked about regarding our various modalities and professional development is so important. The general approach to teaching ALP online is the same as teaching in-person. The online course should use backward design so that the Academic Literacy course is supporting everything done in Composition I. Low-stakes, scaffolded assignments should be present in both courses, and prompt and thoughtful feedback from the faculty member is imperative. Any way that you can encourage community in the online classroom is essential. This could mean discussion boards where everyone posts a video of themselves or synchronous drop-in office hours, or, even guest speakers to connect students to college resources. Elsbeth and I are by no means experts in all of the areas where we provide professional development. We serve as facilitators and identify others within areas that are the experts. So, as Elsbeth points out, when we transitioned to a new modality because of Covid, we helped develop PD to support ALP faculty. ... View more

    The Beijing Olympics has, of course, been in the headlines for much of February. With an event so large, there are inevitably many controversies to consider as examples of argumentation. Many claims about the Olympics will take the form of claims of value about individual athletes or teams because as we watch them, we are making value judgments just as surely as the judges are although theirs are judgments based on years of experience and training. When politics enters in, we move largely into the realm of claims of policy. After the 2014 Sochi Olympics, Russia was technically banned from competing in the next three Olympics because of doping. Russian athletes are still allowed to compete, however, under the “Russian Olympic Committee” instead of competing for their country. That in itself, of course, is controversial. It seems to be a distinction without a difference. Then the world of Olympic figure skating was rocked by the revelation that one of the skaters who led the ROC to team gold had tested positive for a banned substance: trimetazidine, a drug used primarily for heart patients but one that increases blood flow and stamina and thus can enhance athletic performance. The name of the athlete should not have been released because she is a minor, but the fact that there was only one minor on the gold-medal team made it obvious that the guilty party was Kamila Valieva, favored to win the women’s individual gold as well. One reason for her high scores is her ability to complete the quadruple jump--the first woman to ever land one in Olympic competition--and she landed two! The logical conclusion that many drew was that Valieva should be suspended and that her team should not receive the team gold. In fact, the medal ceremony for the team competition was suddenly scrapped when the drug test results were revealed. To complicate matters, though, the drug test was administered on December 25th, and the results were not reported until February 8th. Negative drug tests indicated that Valieva did not have trimetazidine in her system at the Olympics, but she did when she qualified. Technically she is classified as a “protected person” because of her age, and many, including former winners of Olympic figure skating medals, like Katarina Witt, blame Valieva’s coaches, not Valieva herself. Witt claims, “What they knowingly did to her, if true, cannot be surpassed in inhumanity.”  What seemed like a fairly clear case that Valieva should be suspended from competition is thus complicated by the time lag since the positive test and her age—complicated enough, in fact, that the Court of Arbitration for Sport made the decision not to suspend her, stating that to do so would cause Valieva “irreparable harm.” Juliet Macur and Andrew Keh of the New York Times report, “The panel ruled on a narrow question: Did Russia act improperly when it lifted a suspension of Valieva last week only one day after imposing it? That decision effectively cleared the path for Valieva to compete in the singles event, but three organizations—the International Olympic Committee, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and skating’s global governing body—immediately challenged it in appeals to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the highest legal authority in global sports.” The court of public opinion may not be as forgiving. And the gold-medal podium may be a very lonely place for a fifteen-year-old. Photo: “Olympic Rings”  by Paul R. is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Pamela Childers, a lifelong secondary, undergraduate and graduate school educator, writer, editor, and consultant. She enjoys collaborating with colleagues and students.   Student Teaching “Go wash your mouth out with soap!” And he did. The 8th grader returned to our grammar lesson in progress, raised his hand, and bubbled out the next answer. In Biology class, I distributed apples and asked, “Who can identify the internal parts you just dissected?” And they all did, delighted to eat their half apples. Rushing to my senior English class to discuss the Romantic poets, I passed a student at his open locker pulling out a knife. “May I have that, please?” And he handed it to me. Things were much different in 1965, I have learned.    Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines.   ... View more

It makes me cringe to admit this, but I didn't realize until recently that "cringe" had mutated from a verb to a noun, or more precisely, to a classification. It is even a culture now, whose history is succinctly documented in Kaitlyn Tiffany's "How Did We Get So ‘Cringe’?"—wherein we can discover that not only has an entire book been devoted to the subject (Melissa Dahl's Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness) but that cringe aficionados will engage in cringe-worthy online disputes "on what cringe even means." And no, I don't want to go there myself. From all appearances, cringe, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. What I do want to explore here, then, is not what is or is not cringe but what the whole cringe culture signifies, what it tells us about ourselves and the society we live in. To begin, then, with the history of cringe culture, Tiffany observes that it emerged in the early part of the new millennium, when "the majority of the cringe came from the fact that the people posting [on YouTube] didn’t seem to totally understand that anybody in the world could see them." What worked for Justin Bieber, in other words, did not work at all for the countless others who put up videos with their own high hopes only to get the red buzzer, so to speak, from cringing viewers who were simply embarrassed by what they were watching. For Tiffany, this sort of early cringe "was caused by empathy. You would be horrified if a video of you like that were made public. You could watch in privacy and feel grateful that yours was not a public life at all." But since then the ethos of cringe culture has decidedly hardened. Malice has replaced empathy as cringe spotting has become akin to savoring train wrecks, while the connotation of the term has shifted from "embarrassing" or "humiliating" to "lousy" or "awful," and, more profoundly, "worthy of a thorough Internet dog pileup."  Constance Grady's Vox article "Why so much Obama-era pop culture feels so cringe now" introduces another, one might say traditional, source of cringe that emerges from the way that the passage of time has a tendency to transform yesterday's flavor of the month into today's castor oil. Grady sums the process up nicely in her opening paragraph, which is worth quoting in its entirety: One of the oddities of getting old is bearing witness as the pop culture you used to think would always be beyond reproach slowly slides out of favor. As millennials age into the solid middle of the culture here at the end of 2021, they’re getting to experience that disorienting slip with some of the most beloved pop culture of their youths, and most particularly the pop culture that was celebrated during the presidency of Barack Obama. Um, yes. And I am sure glad that I never had anything to do with Disco, nor did I ever wear a Nehru jacket. But there is something deeper going on here than the time and tide of pop cultural fashion, for in Grady's subsequent description of the way that "Hamilton is [now] understood to use its color-conscious casting to 'whitewash' the slave-owning founding fathers .  .  . [while] Harry Potter, fans note to each other significantly, 'was a trust fund jock who became a cop and married his high school sweetheart,' and moreover his author is transphobic .  .  . [and] Parks and Recreation is a symbol of the failure of liberalism in the face of Donald Trump," we find cringe shifting to outright cancel—that net-fueled wave of digitized vigilantism that I explored in my last blog. Thus we can see that the evolution of cringe culture is part of a larger cultural turn towards intolerance, incivility, and a fundamental social divisiveness that transcends traditional political partisanship to include the kind of online behavior that, as Tiffany notes, forced the cringe-aggregating Reddit forum r/cringe to "ban people who were .  .  . going into the YouTube comments of a cringey video and telling the subject to kill themselves."   And that makes me cringe.   Image Credit: "Embarrassed Lion" by MrGuilt is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

I remember when I first read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a few years after it was published in 1949—I was 15 maybe, and so young that 1984 seemed a million years away. Unreachable. And to my teenage mind, the nightmare scenario the novel painted seemed far-fetched and outlandish. Unthinkable. When the year 1984 came around, I re-read the book, and of course experienced it completely anew. This time around it seemed prescient and predictive. It's time to re-read Orwell’s book again. I pulled it out this week when I read that the insurrection of January 6 was “legitimate political discourse.” Remember doublethink, the mind control that makes people accept contradictory things simultaneously? In Orwell’s—or his character Winston’s—words, doublethink is To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. (32) The mind control of doublethink works together with newspeak, the controlled language that rigorously restricts what people are allowed to say. The control of language leads to and is deeply implicated in the control of thought that characterizes the totalitarian superpower of Oceania. In 1974, the National Council of Teachers of English was inspired to combine the two terms to create the “Doublespeak Award,” to be given to “a glaring example of deceptive language by a public spokesperson.” The first award went to Colonel David H. E. Opfer, who, after a U.S. bombing raid in Cambodia complained to the press that "You always write it's bombing, bombing, bombing. It's not bombing! It's air support!” Over the decades, the NCTE has accepted nominations for the “award” and presented it to individuals, groups, corporations, and governments. But perhaps we are now so overwhelmed by efforts at mind and language control that the award seems . . . well, not so much outdated as just outdone. In any case, NCTE has announced a hiatus for the Doublespeak Award: At this time, NCTE is not accepting nominees for the 2022 Doublespeak Award. We are currently working to re-imagine the award in order to align it with our current mission, vision, values, and policies about the importance of public language and its positive impact on literacy education. They are, however, “accepting nominations for the Orwell Award, which honors an author, editor, or producer of a print or non-print work that contributes to honesty and clarity in public language.” Perhaps it is time to focus on positive contributions to public discourse, to call it out and honor it. After all, research has shown over and over again that negativity and misinformation is read and forwarded and retweeted at a much higher rate than language that would garner the Orwell Award. As Jonathan Swift pointed out, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” I have found students ready to rise to the occasion of this award, bringing in their nominations for a piece of writing that “contributes to honesty and clarity in public language.” I think this makes a great activity for students, whether done individually or in groups. On one occasion, our entire class submitted a nomination; I wonder now if an entire writing program might do so. How I would love to see the 2022 Orwell Award presented to first-year writing students! Nominations can be sent to publiclangaward@ncte.org, and the very minimal guidelines for nominations can be found here. Part of me, however, thinks the Doublespeak Award for deceptive language is still needed, to say the very least. So I am looking forward to when NCTE’s Public Language Awareness Committee will complete its reimagining. In the meantime, what would your students’ nominate for a Doublespeak Award? I’d say “legitimate public discourse” as a description of an event that left five dead and hundreds wounded and beaten is a pretty strong contender. Image Credit: "1984 Book Covers" by colindunn, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Photo by Rick Mason @egnaro Published on January 26, 2018 Panasonic, DMC-TS2 Free to use under the Unsplash License   In his essay “Remediation at the Crossroads,” republished in 2012 in Teaching Developmental Writing 4e, Mike Rose considered the “national attention–public and philanthropic” paid to what was once widely called “remedial” education. “To make significant changes,” Rose writes, “we’ll need to understand all the interlocking pieces of the remediation puzzle, something we’re not oriented to do” (29).    In the decade since, the pejorative term “remedial,” with its connotations of damage needing to be fixed, has fallen out of favor. Instead, the focus is on building on students strengths. BIPOC educators emphasize and enact pedagogies such as Counterstory, which “provides opportunities for marginalized voices to contribute to conversations about dominant ideology” (Aja Martinez), Anti-Racist Black Language Pedagogy, which “centers the linguistic, cultural, racial, intellectual, and self-confidence needs of Black students” (April Baker-Bell), “abolitionist strategies” that “love and affirm Black and Brown children” and “seek new possibilities for educational justice” (Bettina Love), and “culturally sustaining pedagogies” that “sustain the languages, literacies, and cultural practices of students and communities of color” (Django Paris and H. Samy Alim ). These pedagogies hold in common affirmation, reparation, and the elimination of harm.   Remedial and deficit models always cause harm for students, and Rose recognized this. Throughout his long career, Rose contemplated the impact of social class in postsecondary education, and he feared that the coming changes would concentrate on “profiles of remedial students” as “profiles of failure” (29)  He hoped that the reforms would take into account students’ demonstrated potential for success at the postsecondary level (29), and he worried that “for all the hope and opportunity”  promised by the reforms, “our initiatives lack the kind of creativity and heartbeat that transform institutions” (30). In other words, Rose believed that the reforms would perpetuate harm to students rather than eliminate it, something that would eventually harm postsecondary institutions themselves. A decade later, throughout the duration of the coronavirus pandemic, postsecondary enrollment has decreased by over 10 percent in public and for-profit postsecondary institutions, and “public two-year colleges have been hit the hardest: enrollment in the sector has fallen by 13.2 percent since fall 2019” (Whitford). While correlation is not causation, and the economic consequences of the pandemic preclude a universal return to normalcy, it is hard not to wonder if one aspect of these declines (exacerbated and increased by the pandemic) relates to a lack of institutional transformation.   In practical terms, I want to return to Mike Rose’s opening metaphor, “the interlocking pieces of the remediation puzzle, something we’re not oriented to do” (29).  For me, a puzzle suggests a final product, as if the interlocking pieces offer a perfect fit that solves the enigma. I agree with Rose that postsecondary education is “not oriented” to either understanding how the pieces interlock, or how “to make significant changes” that serve the greater good of the community.    For this reason, the photo at the beginning of this post is not a completed puzzle, but a chaotic arrangement of lego pieces seemingly impossible to imagine as a completed project. This photo also appears as the first image in a slide show that I created for my online classes to explain the processes of working toward completion of their first writing project for the semester. While metaphors might not immediately solve seemingly insurmountable problems, perhaps, visual metaphors can help with thinking outside the box—even as teaching continues inside the boxes of Zoom rooms and powerpoint slides.    Four additional slides from the Writing Project 1 powerpoint conclude this post. The first slide offers two photos of my orange tabby cat Destiny as he descends a staircase. The staircase metaphor invites students to imagine writing step by step, as opposed to solving the impossible puzzle represented by the lego pieces. The next three slides, taken in Arizona and New York City, depict trees in different stages of thriving and precarity. These slides ask students to reflect on the care and attention needed for writing to flourish and to grow.    My hope is to reconceptualize writing, and perhaps even everyday life, as opportunities “to make significant changes” – in other words, as necessary, to practice revision.   Instead - think of writing as a process - step by step             Consider the trees - a metaphors for the processes of writing Without careful attention, trees are in danger of falling Well-tended trees have space to flourish and grow   Rose, Mike. “Remediation at the Crossroads.” Teaching Developmental Writing, edited by Susan Naomi Bernstein, 4th ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013, pp. 27-30.   ... View more

Twitter is a mystery to me. I cannot manage the flow of information; I feel inundated and overwhelmed by the threads that appear (despite the fact that I have carefully limited the number of people I follow). Nonetheless, I am delighted at times by snippets of wisdom or encouragement, as well as by trends that prod my own thinking about pedagogy. One recent trend involves a photo or concept accompanied by a question—and then the phrase “wrong answers only.” This thread, for example, interrogated the notion of Gricean maxims, a standard in the pragmatics section of any introductory linguistics textbook. While most answers were just fun (the Gricean Maxims are an indie band or perhaps a type of hair coloring), others challenged the maxims with a healthy dose of sarcasm for their so-called “neutrality” as a framework for analyzing discourse. The “wrong answers only” thread starter invites participants to have some fun, yes, but also to define via the negative or to confront assumptions and points of confusion. Such an activity, to me, seems ideally suited to a college classroom: I am wondering if others have used that as a discussion starter or writing assignment in their classes.  I plan to try a couple of “wrong answers only” activities in the next couple of weeks. As a mid-term exercise in a course I’m teaching on second language/multilingual (L2/Lx) writing, I am going to have students revisit some of the key questions we asked at the beginning of the term: who is an L2/Lx writer? What does L2/Lx writing look like? Where does L2/Lx writing occur? What sorts of pedagogies promote L2/Lx writing development? I am going to ask the students to consider these—and some of the assumptions we’ve already uncovered—by having them give me “wrong-answers” only. We’ll start that discussion in a synchronous Zoom session, and we’ll shift it to the asynchronous discussion board after that.  I will also try this as a class-closing exercise in my first-year/corequisite writing course: we’ll take a concept—thesis, introduction, paragraph, sentence, organization, source, etc.—and I’ll ask students to post a definition or example, anonymously, “wrong answers only.” Their responses can serve as a basis for reflection or discussion in subsequent classes—and a way to see how their perception of key concepts can evolve over the course of the semester. Have you used “wrong answers only” (or a variation thereof) in your composition courses? What happened? I’d love to hear from you.   ... View more

In a recent conversation with Kendra Bryant, a professor at North Carolina A&T State University and an amazing scholar and teacher, she reminded me of an essay Lisa Ede and I wrote long ago, one of many pieces that advocated for collaboration in general and collaborative writing in particular. When Lisa and I first began writing together, our colleagues in the humanities considered this practice bizarre at best and absolutely wrongheaded and certainly detrimental to our careers (or “impossible” as one person said) at worst. These negative reactions only made us more determined to write together and, in addition, to do the research to demonstrate that most of the writing that goes on in the world is done collaboratively—even “creative” writing, since our definition of collaboration is broad and expansive. So in one of our essays, we described this practice as “subversive.” Subversive, that is, of the paradigm of the single, solitary, totally autonomous, and almost always white, male author, of course, but also of the whole intellectual regime that went along with that paradigm. We understood the irony of subverting this paradigm just at a moment when women, and especially women of color, were seizing power associated with this stance. But we wanted to subvert it any way, making room for other models of composing that could have just as much power and influence, not to mention integrity. I’ve thought a lot about the twenty or more years that Lisa and I worked on this project together since her untimely death on September 29 of last year, of our failures as well as some successes and especially of the great fun we had pursuing this goal. For decades, we collected examples of collaboration in every field imaginable, filling such a big box of materials that we had to invent “intertexts” in our book on collaboration just to include some of them. And so Lisa and collaboration were much on my mind last week when I heard a terrific interview with Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva—the Kitchen Sisters. I have long been a fan of their deeply collaborative work, especially Hidden Kitchens, The Hidden World of Girls, and most recently, their The Kitchen Sisters Present, a Radiotopia podcast. I agree with Ira Glass, who says Nelson and Silva have “some of the best radio stories ever broadcast.” But what interests me most about their work is its collaborative nature. Once when they were visiting the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking at Stanford, they spoke about this aspect of their work, emphasizing not only their own collaboration with each other but also their collaboration with the astonishing array of people they have interviewed. In this regard, they pointed out that they keep their own voices out of their programs as much as possible, leaving the floor and the microphone to those they are featuring. They said sometimes they have had to work for months or even years to come up with programs which focus never on them but always on the person or people being interviewed, the true stars of the show. Nelson and Silva are amazing storytellers—of other people’s stories, in the other people’s own words. But they are also very serious and talented archivists, who for four decades have kept meticulous records of all their work, including the ephemera that surrounds and enriches it. To my delight, this archive is going to be housed in the Library of Congress—all 7,000 hours of audio, photos, handwritten journals, podcasts, and story books. Talk about a resource for student writers and speakers! This archive will provide a treasure trove of stories: Have you ever wondered about how George Foreman came up with the idea for his grill? Ever heard of the Pack Horse Librarians, who carried knapsacks full of books on horseback (or muleback) into the most inaccessible areas of rural Kentucky—thanks to the inspiration of Eleanor Roosevelt? Did you know about the “Homobiles,” a 24/7 all-volunteer queer car service Lynnee Breedlove thought up to provide safe rides for the LGBTQ+ community in San Francisco? Well, students can learn all about these and so many other profoundly intriguing and hopeful stories. But they can also learn about, and study, the deeply layered collaborations that are going on in and around these stories that come to us from the rich soundscape of radio. Davia Nelson captures the sense of collaboration in her description of the Kitchen Sisters’ work: Archival artifacts merging with stories from people whose voices don’t often make the airwaves merging with music. Ricky Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, The Maysles all have a place in the inspirational pantheon. . . . Sounds stacked and stretched, individual stories building into a bigger story, human stories so minute, so detailed and particular, that when layered they become the universal story. Studying the work of the Kitchen Sisters reveals the subversive nature of their collaboration, still going strong after almost half a century. And now their archives are protected, and will be available to inspire others to collaborate in equally significant ways. I’ll be listening in, and I hope you and your students will too. Image Credit: "Kitchen Sisters" by spicemix.pro, used under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license ... View more

What a one-two punch to lose both bell hooks and Thich Nhat Hanh in successive months. I wrote about bell hooks’ influence on my teaching in my last post, and recently returned to her beautiful essay, “Engaged Pedagogy,” in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. In that essay, hooks introduced me to Thich Nhat Hanh’s insights about pedagogy, which focus on ways instructors can engage with students on the project of “self-actualization.” Ah, no pressure there! But of course, writing instructors understand that serious engagement with personal growth is exactly what we do when we offer students tools, intellectual context, questions, and lots of practice in articulating what they believe and why they believe it.  Not all of Thich Nhat Hanh’s message speaks easily to me, such as his vision of teachers as healers. (Who am I to claim such powers?) But I appreciate that, as hooks puts it, he “offered a way of thinking about pedagogy which emphasized wholeness, a union of mind, body, and spirit” (Teaching to Transgress 14). This evergreen reminder that we have the privilege of accompanying whole people who share with us the ongoing embodied experience of living through a long pandemic reminds me that I am among friends who see teaching and learning as one way to heal ourselves. Lest that sound impossibly aspirational, hooks translates this into terms that ring true to me: “[Thich Nhat Hanh’s] focus on a holistic approach to learning and spiritual practice enabled me to overcome years of socialization that had taught me to believe a classroom was diminished if students and professors regarded one another as ‘whole’ human beings, striving not just for knowledge in books, but knowledge about how to live in the world” (15). Yes, indeed: Isn’t that  — learning how to live in the world — the charge for those of us who teach the liberal arts? Along those lines, the title of history professor Catherine Denial’s essay, “The Pedagogy of Kindness,” caught my eye in a colleague’s social media post. I devoured Denial’s description of shifting away from her training in pedagogical “rigor” posited as “toughness,” to an approach of “kindness.” Like Susan Bernstein’s recent post on hooks, which draws on the Teaching to Transgress chapter “Embracing Change,” Denial focuses on hooks’ point that “there can be, and usually is, some degree of pain involved in giving up old ways of thinking and knowing and learning new approaches” (43). Consider the heavy thinking we ask of our students, and the implications for changing the ways they — and we — understand the world. Consider further that we are all doing this labor in a marathon of a global health crisis. The circumstances are so urgent, and kindness may be the only attitude that can bear us up and through. For all that calm guidance, bell hooks was unafraid to admit the messiness of her human experience, too. Her description of revealing to Thich Nhat Hanh that she was often filled with rage at the racism and injustice in the world is so, well, kind. hooks said, “he met that rage with loving kindness. And I would just always remember the sweetness with which he told me ‘Oh, hold on to your anger and use it as compost for your garden’”  — as if, even in corrosive circumstances, kindness can make learning, and learning how to live in the world, imaginable. As I write this post in South Bend, Indiana, on Groundhog Day, a blizzard has closed our campus. Springtime and growth feel impossibly far away, but I’m hanging onto this idea of compost, remembering that the kindness we try to summon for students is good for us, too.   Image Credit: Photograph taken by the author of this post, April Lidinsky ... View more

  Over  numerous editions of Elements of Argument, we have debated where to place the Definition chapter. Sometimes defining a term is a matter of finetuning to be sure every detail of the content is clear, which might come in at the revising or editing stage. At other times, definition is at the heart of the argument and must be stipulated from the beginning. Sometimes, the way a key term is defined can be used for deceptive purposes. Even if deception is not intended, it can hamper communication because the term is defined differently by the writer/ speaker and audience.. Changing the definition of a term can also cause confusion.  For example, there is debate now over how the term “fully vaccinated” is defined. There was a time not all that long ago that to be fully vaccinated meant to have two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine or one dose of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. Although each company had different standards for what “fully vaccinated” meant, the definition was widely explained and widely accepted. Now booster shots have complicated the picture. Does fully vaccinated mean that a person has had a booster shot in addition to the initial one or two shots? Some countries are already rethinking what “fully vaccinated” means in making the decision whether or not to allow someone into the country. As of January 16, 2022, the CDC made a useful distinction between up-to-date and fully vaccinated: “Up to date means a person has received all recommended COVID-19 vaccines, including any booster dose(s) when eligible. Fully vaccinated means a person has received their primary series of COVID-19 vaccines.” According to a recent Cnet.com article entitled “Why doesn't 'fully vaccinated' for COVID-19 mean booster shots?”, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, was asked by CNN at a White House press briefing, “‘Can you explain why the CDC is not changing the definition of “fully vaccinated,” given that could potentially encourage more people to get a third shot?”’  The US has currently boosted 85.5 million people, or about 40% of people considered fully vaccinated. Walensky responded: “In public health, for all vaccines, we've talked about being up to date for your vaccines. Every year, you need a flu shot; you're not up to date with your flu shot until you've gotten your flu shot for that year. ... What we really are working to do is pivot the language to make sure that everybody is as up to date with their COVID-19 vaccines as they personally could be.’ Despite the CDC's reticence to change the definition, many organizations and governments who use the term ‘fully vaccinated’ are adding booster requirements to their COVID-19 rules.” The CDC is wise not to change the definition because of the confusion the change would cause but also because of the criticism it would draw. Those who are vaccine hesitant and do not agree with vaccine mandates would question scientists for changing the rules. Each new variant requires new thinking, and the best advice scientists can offer is based on what they learn with each new day of studying the virus. They must be clear in stipulating to the public what they mean by the terms that they use and cautious about changing the meaning of key terms. Photo: “Definition of Blog” by Doug B is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and William Golding's Lord of the Flies are among those relatively rare literary classics that enjoy both popular and high cultural acclaim (F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is another). I find myself thinking of them now as I contemplate the current success of Showtime's "Yellowjackets" and the growing prominence of "cancel culture" in our popular and political discourse. Let me explain. Beginning with "Yellowjackets," I hardly need to note how the newly continued series is an amalgamation of Golding's novel (with a gender change) and "Lost," complete with proliferating mysteries that identify it as belonging to the "mystery-box" genre of television programming. Whether or not Yellowjackets eventually evolves into full-bore supernaturalism (as "Twin Peaks"—the founding father, as it were, of mystery-box television programming—did), will be a question for future episodes to reveal. But what is now clear is the way in which the series, like Lord of the Flies (and, one might add, Heart of Darkness) serves as a parable of the fragility of what we call "civilization" when under stress, dramatizing not only the savagery that lurks just under the surface but the turn to despotic leaders (like Golding's choirboy Jack Merridew and "Yellowjackets"' Antler Queen) that desperate societies all too often make. It is in such contexts that we can begin to understand the notorious antics of the QAnon Shaman and his ilk. As for "The Lottery," I am struck by a recent Vox article by Rebecca Jennings entitled "Stop canceling normal people who go viral," and sub-headed, "It’s making the world a sh***ier place. West Elm Caleb is only the most recent example". In her essay, Jennings deplores the way that Internet cancel mobs have moved from politicians and celebrities to ordinary people who happen to (often inadvertently) displease the folks on social media sites like TikTok. Jennings focuses on what she calls "the Case of Couch Guy," a college student whose girlfriend orchestrated an elaborately choreographed surprise visit that she duly recorded and posted to TikTok. But instead of the mushy "aw gee" response she expected, TikTok exploded with, in the exact words of "Couch Guy" (the boyfriend in the case), "frame-by-frame body language analyses, armchair diagnoses of psychopathy, comparisons to convicted murderers, and general discussions about my ‘bad vibes.’” In short, he was cancelled. And so, as "The Lottery" erupts into reality in the digital age with social media mobs casting stones at their hapless victims, and "Yellowjackets" updates Lord of the Flies to hold a disquieting mirror up to America's growing social and political desperation, we find once again how popular culture mediates and illuminates the realities of everyday life, and why it behooves us not only to be entertained by what it reveals but to take it very seriously as well.   Image Credit: "finger mobile 8" by jetheriot is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

As I’ve been working on revising some of the textbooks I’ve written, I’ve been thinking hard about how to present research to students in ways that will speak to them where they live and where they are in life, and that will take them beyond Western paradigms of what research is, who can do it, and what counts as objects of and sources for research. Looking back at my own training in research, I see that I got very little in the way of formal instruction. My PhD program in English asked me to take advanced courses in bibliography, of course, to learn my way around an array of bibliographical sources. We also studied various theories (textual criticism, deconstruction, new historicism, etc.) and their methods, which were, however, assumed rather than taught. And all of these courses were firmly grounded in Western ways of conceiving and carrying out research. As I entered the field of rhetoric and composition, I studied quantitative and qualitative methods of research—and used both to inform the largest research projects of my career—all again informed by Western concepts. Only when I began seriously studying the art and culture of Indigenous Peoples (and particularly of the Haida of the Queen Charlotte Islands in Canada and of the Navajo Nation) did I begin to question how I had defined and conducted—and taught—research. And when I began studying and writing about “narrative justice”—people’s rights to their own stories—I learned even more about varying research definitions, traditions, and methods. (Click here and here for previous posts I’ve written on narrative justice.) What I’ve learned has made “research” more and more exciting and engaging to me—and I hope to students as well. I’m thinking particularly right now of a first year student who came to my office to talk about “research” by which—I slowly realized—she meant MLA documentation style.  Research, I suggested, was so much more than a citation style: research begins with questions that deeply puzzle you, and the search to explore those questions may lead you to . . . well, wherever it takes you. As Candace Epps-Robertson puts it in her contribution to “Octalog IV: The Politics of Rhetorical Studies in 2021,” her research involves sources that may not be in historical societies or university libraries. Some [sources] will be revealed perhaps as a fragment online, or others buried in a backyard shed. Perhaps others still are told in a language not my own. . . . Others won’t be shared at all because they’re too painful or too delicate to be revealed. Epps-Robertson sees research as messy, sometimes haphazard, and potentially richly rhizomatic. Drawing on the insights of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—who conceived of research as nonlinear, calling for multiple and anti-hierarchical ins and outs, a kind of deeply networked activity of collecting, exploring, and interpreting—Epps-Robertson describes research she did on racism in relation to school closures as invoking “conversations in diners, back porches, and family reunions,” a kind of community-based inquiry that led her, often haphazardly, to voices that “may not always make it into an archive or text.” Epps-Robertson goes on to describe an example of a community archiving its history and presence through a process that does not utilize a traditional Western approach but rather a rhizomatic one: the Korean band BTS and their global fandom ARMY. “This community,” she argues, “is creating and maintaining a type of decentralized rhizomatic archival network, resisting the notion that one database, one physical location, or one person can document a holistic history that crosses borders, languages, and cultures.” Such a broader, more inclusive and extensive notion of research can help us understand the complex relationships between communities and archives—as well as new ideas about who counts as an “expert” and what counts as a “source.” Most important, it can take us and our students out into communities of practice where we can hear and learn from their work and the stories they tell about it. Such a broader concept of research will, I believe, engage students more fully in research—and potentially in their own communities. If you have examples of rhizomatic research assignments and/or projects, I would love to hear about them! Image Credit: "BTS-01539" by mduangdara, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

What’s your vision for an individual or small group writing conference with first-year and corequisite writers—especially when they have submitted drafts in advance? Do you see the conference as a predictable genre, one that will unfold according to a standard script? Or is it something else? This semester, I am working with a group of junior and senior writing fellows, all of whom are partnering with first-year and corequisite writing classes. In preparation for the fellows’ first week of interaction in their assigned courses, I wanted them to think about what a writing conference looks like. Ideally, we noted, first-year writers will approach fellows with a clear sense of the help they want and a set of questions to address. But in reality, that rarely happens: initial conferences between novice writers and novice fellows may lapse into stretches of awkward silence, and fellows may feel compelled to fill that silence with “you shoulds” and “you coulds.” Queries and suggestions may be met with shrugs, nods, or respectful “oks.”  I asked fellows to consider some sample drafts and think about how they would initiate discussion during the writing conference: what would their opening gambit be? They shared these initial moves—both questions and comments—with the rest of the group, posting anonymous digital sticky notes.   Next, I invited fellows to analyze those opening moves much like they would the introductory paragraphs of a text. How might these comments and questions frame the following discussion? What expectations would those moves establish for student writers? Did the comments and questions give prominence to the student writer, the writer’s process, the form or style of the text, the assignment, language, developing content, the fellow as reader, or something else? Was an invitation to dialogue articulated or implied? Was a stance taken? As we began to evaluate the questions and comments we had generated, I noticed a growing sense of concern among the fellows: “I think I did this wrong.”  In short, they experienced in our preparation session exactly what first-year writers often experience during conferences: what they hear in questioning is that they “did it wrong.”   Of course, the fellows weren’t “doing it wrong.” They had targeted significant concerns about these early drafts. But conference spaces, like developing texts from the first-year writers, are sites of “logogenesis”—the making of meaning—where participants are establishing identities, navigating relationships, testing understanding, and making sense of genre conventions. As experienced college writers, the fellows recognize the complexity of writing choices and the impact of those choices on the resulting text. I want them to see they can apply a similar thinking process to their choices within the conference. In student conferences, we of course want to work on the paper at hand. But with corequisite writers in particular, fellows may also want to affirm student writers as writers, develop empathy, encourage agency, practice metalanguage, and offer opportunities for play. Thus, their opening gambits might include these: What is the big statement you wish to make with this assignment? What’s your biggest struggle with this paper? What part of your paper do you like the best? Why? What part of the paper needs the most attention right now? Wow! What a story—that’s really powerful. I struggled when I first read this assignment. How about you? As the fellows imagined opening moves, they realized they wanted more information:  when they get student drafts for review, where will students be in the process? Will they have received any instructor feedback yet? Are these drafts going to be assessed by a rubric? How many additional revisions will students have? What is the instructor’s goal for the conferences between fellows and students? These questions framed the fellows’ next session, when they discussed logistics and expectations with their assigned instructors.  When the fellows meet with first-year writers for the first time, the conferences may be just as rough as the student drafts they discuss. But if the fellows can reflect on the conferences as texts, critically, they can revise or edit their conference strategies, even as they assist first-year writing students to do the same with their papers.  I am excited about what will occur in the conferences—both for the first-year writers and the fellows. I suspect their reflections will prompt me to revisit my own conferencing strategies. How about you? How do you promote conversation in your individual conferences?  ... View more

  As a new year and a new school term begin, it’s time to look back at the key terms around which Elements of Argument is organized and which can be used to analyze whatever controversial issues appear in today’s headlines: claims, warrants, and support. The claim part is easy. When we react to something we read or hear in the news, unless we phrase our reaction as a question, we are most likely making a statement in the form of a claim, no matter how ill- or well-conceived it is. “He’s an idiot!” and “It’s about time!” are claims, though the type of claims that, in those exact forms, seldom make it into formal written arguments. They happen to be claims of value. Not everyone will agree with all of these statements, but in form, they are claims of value: Joe Manchin is a disgrace to his party. Stewart Rhodes is an American hero. The verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial was unfair. Joe Biden is a man of compassion. The advice offered about COVID by the CDC is confusing. If you move in one direction from claims of value, you have claims of fact. These are different from statements of fact because at least some readers or hearers would have to be convinced of their validity – while a statement of fact is always true, a claim of fact may not be: Unemployment is the lowest it has been in fifty years. The Omicron variant in general causes fewer severe symptoms than earlier variants of COVID-19. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill will have massive impacts on small towns across America. In the last year, a number of states have passed new legislation restricting voting rights. The 2020 Presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. Move in the other direction, and you have claims of policy, the “should” or “should not” statements of argument: The Democrats should end the filibuster to pass the Voting Rights Bill. Mail-in ballots should be allowed in presidential elections. Everyone should be fully vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19. No one should have to be vaccinated against his or her wishes. Current gun laws should be enforced more stringently. The validity of any claim in argumentation depends on the ability to offer support for it. Students studying argumentation will learn a range of different types of support to use, depending on the subject. They will also learn to analyze the evidence offered in defense of any claim they are being asked to accept. A couple of general observations: Reputable media sources will not present information that they do not have sources for. There are both legal and ethical reasons for not doing so. One of the major reasons for the political split in our country is the willingness of Americans to accept what they hear from any news source or any social media source without demanding support. Too often they are willing to accept statements that they already agree with without demanding evidence of their validity. The element of argument that is most problematic for students—and others—is what Toulmin called the warrant, which we now call the assumption. Recognizing warrants or assumptions in the arguments that surround us takes practice. As students start thinking of the arguments they see or hear in terms of the elements of argument, it helps if they think of the assumption as the bridge linking claim and support. We are willing to accept a claim based on the support offered because of a broader belief that we hold. Why should the filibuster be done away with in order for the Voting Rights Bill to pass? Because of the broader belief that some pieces of legislation are too important to be held to the sixty-vote requirement rather than a simple majority. Why should mail-in ballots be allowed? Because of the broader belief that voting should be as easy as possible. Why should no one be required to be vaccinated against his or her wishes? Because of a broader belief that individuals have the right to make decisions about what is done to their bodies. What about the other side of the issue, the belief that everyone should be vaccinated? Because of the broader belief that the safety of the many outweighs the wishes of the individual.  Headlines are a course in argumentation in and of themselves. In teaching argumentation, we have to stay on top of the demanding task of analyzing them in terms of the elements of argument. We are forced to analyze why we hold the opinions that we do and to present the reasoning behind even opinions that we do not agree with.   Photo: “Newspapers B&W (4)” by Jon S is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more