My goals for the new school year include both increasing participation and asking students to track their own work. I’m hoping that putting those two goals together will help me succeed in checking them off on my list. I have always had trouble with grading student participation. I like the elementary school options for kidwatching with sticky notes or forms, where you have a place to take notes about each student’s participation and work. The strategy doesn’t seem practical at the college level however, so I need to find something that works for me. Part of the challenge is that students rarely understand what counts as participation, and, as a result, they don’t know when they need to step up their efforts. I found some tips in David Gooblar’s post, “ISO: A Better Way to Evaluate Student Participation.” My favorite strategy is Tony Docan-Morgan’s “participation logs.” I immediately knew I wanted to try them out in all the classes I am teaching. Based on Docan-Morgan’s model, I created my own spreadsheet templates, using Google Sheets,  with details on what students needed to log. In my fully online Technical Writing course, I created tabs in the spreadsheet for each of the following: Class Discussion Small Group Other Participation Self-assessment & Reflection On the Participation Log page on the course website, I provided an overview of the goal, details on how to make a copy of the template, and suggested how to log the work that students had done in the course so far. My Writing and Digital Media class meets face-to-face, so I explained and demonstrated the template for their course in class. It includes the same tabs as the technical writing template, with the questions rephrased to fit the classroom and the course. I’ll add an explanation page to their site before midterm so that they have everything they need for a midterm self-assessment. In addition to giving students the templates, I tell them what the work they are assigned would count for. For the Technical Writing course, I added a simple table, which had links (removed here) to the discussion activities to date in our CMS: If you posted in this Discussion List it on this sheet of your log Questions about the Syllabus and/or Course Logistics Class Discussion I am Traci — AMA (short for "Ask Me Anything") Class Discussion Introduce Yourself with a Short Professional Bio Small Group Ethical Poster Discussion Class Discussion For the assignments that I have given since we went over the logs in my Writing and Digital Media course, I have been including a note that tells them how their work counts with the assignment. The multimodal dig assignment, for example, ended with a note about the end of the grace period and this sentence: “This activity is graded Pass/Fail and counts as part of your participation grade as a class discussion.” So is it working? It’s still too early to tell. The Technical Writing students have only had their logs for a week, and the Writing and Digital Media students for a few days beyond a week. Their response in the face-to-face class to the logs seemed positive. The most positive sign for me, however, happened after a small group discussion of students’ design journals in the Writing and Digital Media class. As I was circulating among the groups, I overheard one of the students reminding the others in her group: “Don’t forget to add this to your log.” I’ll take that as enough of a success for now. How do you encourage participation in your classes? What strategies do you use to track how students participate? I would love to hear from you in a comment!     Source: Cropped from Soulforce at Gordon College - PDR by Zach Alexander, on Flickr, used under CC-BY 2.0 license ... View more

Work has always been a significant factor in my life, and I have counted my blessings every day for the work of teaching. Growing up, I watched members of my extended family engaged in hard physical labor—working in the fields, caring for animals, making clothes, cooking, cleaning. On it went from early morning until sundown. Now our society tends to think of “leisure activity” as involving some kind of physical activity: for my grandparents, aunts, and uncles, “leisure” meant getting away from physical activity for a while; it meant sitting on the porch in a rocking chair telling a story or two before bedtime.    This week I’ve been trying to observe all the work and workers around me, taking note of all those who make others’ lives easier through their labors. I watched closely as the post office clerk climbed a tall ladder to retrieve packages; I listened in as a young waiter took orders with a smile; I observed workers on a wayside cleaning crew scouring the area for litter and trash. I marveled at the teachers pouring back into their classrooms, ready for another year with their young charges.   Work, as we know, comes in all colors and flavors: Mike Rose has written eloquently on the dignity of work in The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker (which includes a chapter on Mike’s mother, who waited tables.) We also know that work can be grinding – beating people down to exhaustion and beyond.    Still, at least in this culture, we seem drawn to work, in part perhaps to help give our lives meaning. I think it’s worth taking time to talk with students about their conceptions (and preconceptions) of work—what they think it is and what they think it is for.  I often introduce such discussions with a favorite poem, like this one by Marge Piercy:   To be of use The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls.   I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again.   I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out.   The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.   On this Labor Day week,  I’m grateful for work that is real – and for all those who labor. ... View more

Seems like I’ve been thinking about abilities/disabilities a lot lately. I’ve written about Brenda Brueggemann’s brilliant work—and recommended her “Why I Mind,” which is on YouTube—and our Bread Loaf class has been doing quite a bit of soul searching in terms of our relationships, as teachers, to students with varying abilities/disabilities. And now comes Shoulder the Lion, a documentary film by Erinnisse Heuver and Patryk Rebisz.  Because a good friend is featured in the film, I drove to the Rafael Cinema House in San Rafael a few days ago to see a screening.  Knowing my friend, I expected it to be good: but in fact it was so far above good that I was just stunned.  This searing documentary tells the stories of three artists:  Alice Wingwall, an artist and photographer who lost her sight in 2000; Graham Sharpe, an Irish musician whose advancing Tinnitus makes it impossible for him to participate in his beloved band; and Katie Dallam, a veteran and psychologist who lost half her brain in a boxing match (“Million Dollar Baby” was inspired by this event).  The film moves back and forth among these stories, as the artists speak directly to viewers of their ongoing work and the emotions that accompany it.  In the Dallam sections, we learn that losing half her brain left her with “nothing, nothing at all.” She had no memory, and she had to re-learn absolutely everything, from eating to speaking.  Eventually, Dallam discovered art and found that her “disability” had taken away all her inhibitions.  The results are fantastical, larger than life, monstrous, fabulous, riveting sculptures and paintings. Sharpe never tells us how his tinnitus developed or whether doctors have tried any treatments, but he dwells on his emotional state as he sank into and eventually accepted the fact that no matter what he would hear ringing in his ears:  the sound, he says, is like TV static, with no reception, and it’s LOUD.  He turned his talents to building a music festival in Ireland, which after ten years had won the reputation of “Best Small Festival” in the country. At the end of the film, we see him sitting in a field, strumming his guitar, and writing lyrics, something he continues to do even though he can’t really play them. Alice Wingwall, a dear friend for well over a decade now, speaks eloquently of losing her vision, of her deep anger at being blind, of her realization that “seeing” is about more than vision, of her sadness that so many sighted people today do very little true seeing—bombarded by images as we are—and of her determination to keep on capturing images.  And so she does, as brilliantly and dramatically as displayed in the film.  With her husband, architect and writer Donlyn Lyndon, she answered questions after the film in her typical straightforward, witty way.  And we met Rumba, her guide dog, who took the entire screening in stride, as though she knew she was a “star” of the show. This film, and the artists represented in it, give testimony to an argument Shirley Brice Heath has made throughout her career: that some form of art (music, dance, sculpture, painting, drama) is essential to human development.  Heath’s work with youth groups across the country has engaged young people in artistic endeavors, and for decades she has documented the progress they have made and the way in which art has enriched and changed their lives.  Of course, I think of writing as an art—and speaking as well.  That’s one reason I want writing teachers everywhere to focus on the ART of and in writing/speaking.  The style, the rhythm, the cadences, the syntax, all of which bring a written or spoken performance to life.  As teachers, we need to remember that all people have artistic potential (just ask comics artist Lynda Barry, and check out her books!), and especially so those with “disabilities.” ... View more

­­ Like many Americans, I stayed close to a TV on July 26, listening to the prime time speeches during day one of the Democratic Convention, just as I had done a week before during the Republican Convention.  I knew there would be protests, that Sanders supporters were set to make a stand, and that Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Michelle Obama, and Bernie Sanders would speak. I expected all the speakers to do well—to deliver their messages with pride and passion.  And they did.  But from the moment the first lady stepped onto the stage, I sensed a change in the convention hall.  She was radiant in deep blue, with that wide smile and direct way of looking at her audience.  As she began to speak, the raucous crowd quieted; all eyes on her, and then she delivered what to me was the most impressive speech of either convention so far.  In roughly 1500 words, she supported her husband’s legacy, showed why Trump would be an inadequate president at best (without ever mentioning his name), explained why she supports Hillary Clinton (and why it’s important that girls everywhere think of it as routine for a woman to be President), and underscored her (and Clinton’s) focus on children and families.  This brief speech packed a powerful yet subtle punch.  I took a closer look at the speech today, and came away impressed again with our first lady’s ability to connect to audiences and with the strategies she uses to do so.  Of the roughly 1500 words in this speech, 43 of them are “we” “our,” or “us”—and another 35 are words that refer to young people—“kids,” “daughters,” “sons,” “children,” “our children,” and so on.  The repetition of these key words hammers home her message: that the decision we make in November will affect how our children are able to lead their lives. And in this endeavor—this focus on the good of our nation’s children—Ms. Obama aligns herself with Secretary Clinton, as mothers who care above all for “our children.” So repetition is one key to the power of this speech, but alliteration and parallelism also work to make the words very memorable:  “the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation”; “character and conviction”; “guts and grace”; and many more.  And the use of simple word choice and syntax underscores and amplifies sentences like “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.”  So this is a speech to savor, and to save.  I plan to use it in classes, asking students to read it and then carry out their own mini rhetorical analyses, then to watch the speech as Michelle Obama delivered it, noting her pacing (flawless), her pauses, her facial expressions and body language.  My guess is that students will learn a lot about how they can improve as speakers and presenters. And that they will have more insightful and thoughtful responses to the message the speech sends from having done so. [Image: Official portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama in Green Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy.)] ... View more

I am writing this post on July 4, shortly after writing to the class called Writing and Acting for Change that I am team-teaching at Vermont’s Bread Loaf School of English.  Though it’s a national holiday, Bread Loaf classes meet on the 4 th , and though I am not on campus physically right now I am in touch with the class through e-mail, Twitter, and our private class blog. When I got up this morning, a student in the class had added a similar but much more eloquent post: A good reminder of the need for embodied action indeed.  In our class, we are reminding ourselves every day that we must go beyond talk to ACT if we intend to create any real change.  Thanks to Frederick Douglass for providing a brilliant example and for giving us food for thought on every 4 th of July. [Image: Frederick Douglass, by Political Graveyard on Flickr] ... View more

During a recent visit to the writing program at San Jose State, I had a chance to see the outstanding work they are doing – reevaluating, streamlining, and updating the curriculum for their writing courses and getting an ambitious, directed self-placement program underway. So no more “remedial” courses at SJSU. Rather, students choose to enroll in one or two semesters of writing (this is a “stretch” course that students can place themselves into). Then they will take a second-year course (English 1B) on critical writing, a course that may be taught from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Richard McNabb, who heads up the composition program, Tom Moriarty, who is in charge of Writing across the Curriculum, and Cindy Baer, who coordinates the “stretch program,” are all excited about the possibilities for students taking on more agency, more responsibility for their own learning and about the changes they are making to their curricula.  And they, wisely, plan to follow the students carefully, monitoring the progress of those who elect one course and those who elect two. By this time next year, they hope to have a rich data set to share and to compare. SJSU is also, wisely, working with the two-year and other colleges in the area that send students to them. In fact, the day I visited there were teachers from five area schools, all sharing information and eager to learn about what SJSU is doing. So if their work with the revised curriculum and directed self-placement is successful, it will surely have a ripple effect on other schools. I’m wondering what other schools have similar programs, especially since directed self-placement has been around for quite a long time and research supports its efficacy, if implemented carefully and well. In the meantime, I’m impressed with colleagues and students at San Jose State. ... View more

Recently, I’ve been leading a month-long discussion on Stanford’s Book Salon, an online group started by the late great Diane Middlebrook. Diane was the noted biographer of Anne Sexton and Ted Hughes as well as of Billy Tipton (The Double Life of Billy Tipton chronicles the life of the jazz pianist who, for over 50 years, “passed” as a man—check it out!).   Diane was also a brilliant and supportive colleague and teacher; students literally lined up to get into her seminars. And she was a big fan of memoir. I’ve now hosted two of these salons, and each one has given me a chance to remember Diane and also to engage participants in reading and exploring graphic memoirs. The one we are currently working on is Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?   That’s Chast on the right, facing her parents, George and Elizabeth, to whom the book is dedicated, as they insist that they will talk only about “pleasant” things, among which are not death and plans for their very late years.   I find that graphic narratives work extremely well for memoir: the combination of words and images allow Chast to speak in her own voice and, through speech bubbles, allow her parents to speak for themselves; her drawings of them etch them firmly in readers’ minds. Especially haunting is the series of sketches of her mother that Chast drew during the last day of her mother’s life. No words needed there.   What has struck a chord with the people participating in the book salon is Chast’s unblinking honesty in describing her parents’ long decline and the part she played in their lives. An only child, Chast got more support/empathy from her father than her mother, who was the one IN CHARGE of the family in just about every way. Chast seems a lonely child, one left alone every day after school and often ignored, especially by her mother. When she married and moved away, Chast didn’t visit her “deep” Brooklyn home much, but that changed when her parents reached their late 80s and 90s and obviously needed help – though they would never admit it. As Chast describes it, they were “a unit,” timeless and everlasting, without a need for any other person at all.   Chast perseveres, however, though she hates doing it and hates not doing it: and that is the dilemma readers react very powerfully to. Many have found themselves in similar situations with aging parents: it’s not easy and it’s not pretty, yet children want and need to do what they can, while loathing many aspects of the work. Chast brilliantly captures the tensions, contradictions, and ambivalences in her own encounter with her parents’ last years.   She also manages to capture the absurdness of aging often in hilarious ways. Her father, moving slowly into dementia, moves in with Chast while his wife is in the hospital—and he becomes obsessed with a bunch of bankbooks back in his apartment (most of them acquired on a special “deal” that, for depositing $100, gets George and Elizabeth a “prize” of some kind—a toaster, blender, etc.). Convinced that evildoers are trying to break in and steal the bankbooks, he talks endlessly of them as if they are themselves survivors of some dreadful ordeal.   I have taught graphic memoirs since shortly after Art Spiegelman’s Maus won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and I realized that I should be paying a lot more attention to comix, as he termed it. I’ve never had a student who was not moved by Maus: in the early days, when they had never heard of the book, some were dismayed that the Holocaust was the subject of a comic book. As soon as they entered the world of the narrative, however, they were captivated: over the years, a number of students told me they had disliked history until they read that book. I also loved teaching Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!, a coming of age memoir, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are You My Mother? And of course there are so many others: Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese; Belle Yang’s Forget Sorrow; GB Tran’s Vietnamerica—I could truly go on and on.   But I do not teach these works in literature classes—but in writing classes. I have found that college-age students are drawn to memoir and that the image/word combination resonates especially strongly with them. So we analyze the panels and gutters, studying how they carry the story forward silently, and we look at the structure of the entire work and imagine “translating” it into a research-based essay or another genre, looking at the rhetorical strategies at work in each version. Inevitably, we do some drawing too (I am the worst in the room at this!), and several students have gone on to create graphic memoirs of their own and to publish them online.   What I absolutely love about all the possibilities open to writers today is the freedom it offers students as they literally write/draw themselves into being. College is a time of self-representation, of identity-creation, of learning about who you are. To me, graphic narratives in general and graphic memoirs in particular make a perfect vehicle for exploring these questions. ... View more

There’s been a very interesting thread on the WPA listserv about feedback recently. All the posts have been very thoughtful:  some argued that too much negative feedback is not helpful to students; others said that we live in an age when “the student is never wrong” and are afraid to give tough criticism.  Jerry Nelms reminded everyone that neither positive nor negative feedback can be helpful if students don’t understand it or have a chance to respond to it.  Maja Wilson quoted Peter Elbow to illustrate the kind of exploratory response she finds effective:  This discussion got me thinking about my own research on teacher feedback (or response).  In the 1980s, Bob Connors and I assembled a large random sample of first-year student writing and wrote a series of articles based on our analysis. One of them was on teacher response, and what we found was a clear preponderance of negative commentary, some of it well meaning, some of it downright mean spirited.  (See “Teachers’ Rhetorical Comments on Student Papers.” College Composition and Communication. 44.2 (May 1993): 200-223.)  Over 20 years later, Karen Lunsford and I attempted to replicate the study Bob and I did, and while we focused on an analysis of formal errors in the large sample of writing we gathered, we also took a close look at teacher feedback. Once again, we noted a great deal of negative commentary, though we were glad not to find the ad hominem slash and burn comments I had seen in the 80s.  (We wrote about this study in “'Mistakes are a fact of life': A national comparative study.”  College Composition and Communication. 44.2 (May 1993): 200-223.) Over the decades, I’ve experimented with all kinds of response:  for a while I was so worried about intruding on students’ texts that I wrote all my comments on post-it notes.  I’ve taped my oral feedback, used email for extensive commentary, and talked with students about what seems most helpful to them. Eventually, I found that what seemed to work best for me and my students was for me to give my most extensive response on drafts:  this I provide in a running commentary on the draft, noting what is working well, what I don’t understand, what questions I have, what I might suggest for the next go round.  Such responses are in writing—but they are a prelude first, to the student’s response to my comments, given to me in the form of a memo, and second, to a conference where the student and I focus together on the draft and simply talk through the ideas in it and brainstorm about what to try for in the next draft (which is often the final one).  This mixture of writing and talking leaves a lot of leeway for the student and allows for, I hope, frank interchange, ideally the kind of “dialogic interaction” that students in the Stanford Study of Writing identified as moments when they learned the most.  As always, I benefit from reading the postings on WPA and think back to how often that group has been of tremendous importance to me and my students—and to our field.  I wonder if any of you read this thread and, if so, what your responses were, and what mode of feedback seems most effective to you. [Photo via: Marcin Bajer, on Flickr] ... View more

As students were working on a Narrative Branding Remix assignment recently, I asked small groups to review example videos and compile a list of strengths and weaknesses. The group discussion strategy wasn’t groundbreaking. What was new for me was the technique I used to ask groups to report on their findings. Most often I ask students to simply choose someone to be the presenter, and that person summarizes the group’s observations. I usually ask each group to email me the notes with their names so that I can compile the ideas into a single document and share the notes with the entire class. That process meant extra work for me, however, and often delayed getting the notes to students who were absent or needed a notetaker. I began trying ways for students to gather their ideas into one document themselves, so that they would all have immediate access to the notes. We tried using Padlet, which I have used for class brainstorming (see Using Padlet for Class Brainstorming), but it was too distracting to have the different groups all on the same screen. Further, screen space became an issue, since the class was limited to one screen. I switched to asking groups to write their notes in a shared Google Doc. We then read and scrolled through the Doc as groups shared their observations. The shared Google Doc solved the problem with everyone writing on the same screen, but it introduced difficulties with scrolling and formatting. Even when I added a linked table of contents, groups had problems finding the right section of the document for their notes. If they wrote extensively, one group might end up creeping into another group’s page. Last, when groups turned to present their findings, I had to attempt to quickly reformat the entire document to make the text large enough to read on the screen. The process was better, but still not ideal. When it came time for the class discussion of example videos last month, I was reluctantly preparing to set up Google Docs for the groups to use when inspiration struck. Suddenly it occurred to me that I was using the wrong Google tool. Students were going to present their observations, so I should be using presentation software, not word processor software. I created a Google Slides file with a slide for each example video and placeholders for students to fill in, like this example: I was nervous when I introduced the idea to the class the next morning, but I worked to convince myself that the students in my classes all had the experience to make it work. They knew how to use slide presentations, and they had worked in collaborative Google Docs earlier in the term. I was just asking them to combine skills they already had. I told students that it might sound crazy, but we were going to give it a try. Happily, I can report that it was a grand success. Here are their slideshows: 10:10 class Branding Video Tips 11:15 class Branding Video Tips 01:25 class Branding Video Tips Once the groups finished gathering their ideas, I projected the slideshow and groups reported their observations while I clicked through the slides with the remote. It was easy to focus on each video as the groups analyzed them. I was free to move around the classroom, instead of being tied to the teacher workstation to scroll the Google Doc. The slide format helped students write more concise comments than they had with Google Docs. There was one significant change that I need to make. I had numbered the example videos (from 1 to 10), but I had included a title slide in the Google Slide files. That meant that Example Video #1 corresponded to slide #2, Example Video #2 corresponded to slide #3, and so forth. There was a bit of confusion, with some students ending up on the same slide. It was easy enough to sort out, but I could have avoided it by listing the slide numbers rather than simply numbering the list. I will know better next time—and I will definitely be using this technique again! Have you used collaborative composing in your writing classes? Do you have strategies that work or success stories to share? Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment below. [Top Photo Credit: Cropped from Duke Ellington DNG 349, by US Department of Education on Flickr, used under CC-SA-BY 2.0 license] ... View more

Since the fall, I’ve visited several colleges and universities to review writing programs and their curricula, and I’ve had a chance to see many outstanding course descriptions, syllabi, and related materials. The teachers and administrators I’ve spoken with were all thoughtful, engaged, and committed to students and to student writing. They had worked hard to craft assignments and choose texts that students could enjoy, as well as learn from. But in looking at syllabi, one thing in particular leapt out at me: while all these programs listed a handbook as one of the class texts, that’s about as far as it went. Nowhere did I see a handbook even mentioned in daily class work, much less fully integrated into the course. Now maybe I’m touchy since I’ve written some handbooks myself. And maybe teachers are using their handbook in class but not showing it on the syllabus (I didn’t ask teachers about this issue, though perhaps I should). At any rate, I expect that more often than not, the handbook is assigned—but not taught. If this is the case, it’s no wonder students complain about textbook costs: they don’t want to spend money on a book they never use. I wonder if others have encountered this situation or have thoughts about it. In my experience (50 years of it now!), I need not only to introduce my students to a handbook, working through front matter and previewing in detail the parts of the book and how to use them, but also to work with the handbook in class, modeling for students how it can serve as a support for all their writing. I’ve written earlier about a series of interviews I did with first-year writers across the country about a year ago, interviews in which a number of students said, for example, that they didn’t know where the index was or what to use it for. So I remind myself frequently that my students don’t know what I take for granted—like where to find an index. In fact, I try not to take much of anything for granted, remembering what I felt like as a bewildered first-year college student trying to learn the ropes of academic discourse. And that means that I look for ways to get students into a handbook and to use it in class. Here are just a couple activities that have worked for me: 1. I introduce my students to our handbook on the first or second day of class and walk them through it so they will begin to be familiar and “easy” with it. I try hard to engage students by asking them to work in pairs or small groups with their handbook to answer questions like these (and I like to give a little prize of some kind for the group who finds the information most quickly and successfully): Where do I find information on using italics for emphasis? How do I cite a TV program using MLA style? How do I use quotation marks with poetry? Where can I find advice on working collaboratively? Should I say “compare to” or “compare with”? How can I find help in moving from a topic to a thesis? 2. I hold “tools of the trade” days, and include them in my syllabus: 15 minutes once a week (or more if it feels necessary) when students bring in every question they have about grammar, usage, punctuation, or any other aspect of writing. No question is too small or too “dumb.” They also bring questions they have about a particular choice they need to make in a draft they’re working on. Then we break into groups to answer the questions, documenting just how we have come up with tentative answers. Finally, we share information and discuss what we’ve learned. 3. I teach writing and research processes with the handbook, and we all have our handbooks ready at hand during every revising and peer reviewing workshop. Of course, any textbook is only as useful to our students as we make it, but that seems to me to go double for handbooks. We have to use it—or they will lose it! [Photo credit: Lendingmemo on Flickr] ... View more

Today's guest blogger is ​ (see end of post for bio). When I teach the second semester course of the first-year composition sequence, an unofficial course goal of mine is to help students gain an understanding of their discourse community and what academic writing and research in their areas is like. I give each student the opportunity to focus the entire class on their individual academic discipline. Each student has great flexibility in terms of what direction the course takes. Throughout the course, students gain experience learning about genres of writing that are used within their discipline, how writing is used within the discipline, and what topics academics/professionals in their discipline have recently been writing about. In addition to the larger, more involved multimodal composition projects I include within my composition courses, I also find smaller, lower-stakes multimodal assignments to be valuable for students. Smaller assignments, such as this example, provide opportunities for students to experiment with multimodal composing. This way, students can take risks that they otherwise might not take with a larger project, but these attempts at different compositional techniques can offer students an increased range of approaches and tools to use when composing future multimodal projects. The following  in-class activity helps students to learn about writing in their discipline and discourse community through learning about academic articles and genre conventions. Objective For students to develop an understanding of how academics in their fields work as writers, helping to familiarize students with expectations for writing in their academic areas. Background Reading The Everyday Writer provides a useful collection of readings in the “Academic, Professional, and Public Writing” section, spanning chapters 17-25. Specifically, in my class, I encourage students to read the one chapter that connects best with their academic field in addition to chapter 17, Academic Work in Any Discipline. Each student then reads two chapters. Most academic majors fit nicely into one of the following chapters: Chapter 18, Writing for the Humanities Chapter 19, Writing for the Social Sciences Chapter 20, Writing for the Natural and Applied Sciences Chapter 21, Writing for Business Class Activity This activity can take a variety of shapes and last multiple class periods, depending on how an instructor chooses to integrate it into the curriculum. The outcome of the project is for students to create a multimodal ‘How To’ guide for future students in their majors regarding writing in their academic major. In my class, I limit the scope of this to focus on the genre of the academic article, and accordingly, students’ work on this project focuses on that one type of writing as well. I prefer to have students work in groups for this project, as it provides greater opportunity to converse about writing in a specific field, and also allows students to pool resources to complete the task. Once groups have formed according to related academic areas, students are tasked with determining the conventions associated with academic articles in their field and deciding how to collect that information and how to present it as a multimedia guide. I encourage students to conduct and capture interviews with professors from their discipline and to study multiple examples of the academic article genre and to connect their findings from both to specific concepts explained within The Everyday Writer chapter related to their field. Through their chapter reading and study of their academic articles, ensuing class discussions, and outside interviews, students identify key conventions and qualities of academic articles in their discipline. From there, the real work of creating the guide begins, with students considering how to demonstrate the conventions and how to convey the importance of those discussions. While the focus for every group’s guide will be about the same type of writing, the decisions of what matters most and explanations of why will differ, as will students’ plans for how to present that information as a guide for future students to refer to as they begin their work in this major. They’ll collaborate on a specific organization of the content, on what media to employ, of how to capture their determinations about the genre conventions, and ultimately on how to develop their respective guides. For instance, a group of nursing majors may develop a project that incorporates a presentation software, such as Prezi, Google Slides, or PowerPoint. Their focus would be on academic articles in healthcare, and they might choose to interview nurses, doctors, professors, or other healthcare professionals to get a general sense of how they use academic articles within their profession and what they value about this genre. Their presentation could be arranged by covering the general purposes for this genre and who uses the genre (both writers and readers). Some key points could be identified and then supported through clips captured (audio or visual) during their interviews. Other valued conventions could be identified through images taken of sample academic articles. For instance, the way an author uses outside research could be demonstrated through an image, or collection of images, of portions of an article to document the moves this writer made in blending research into her article. Students might also decide to illustrate a point through visual metaphor - perhaps a nursing student might include a diagram of a circulatory system to infer to readers the importance of connectivity throughout a text.  Altogether, these students might identify five key concepts and demonstrate them through various media and modes collected and presented through a presentation. While we can easily discuss this genre of writing and agree upon important conventions, discussion alone limits the potential for students to firmly grasp the importance of these conventions. By having students create these multimedia ‘how to’ guides, not only do they get experience analyzing the sorts of work they’ll do later in this class, but they also get an opportunity to practice rhetorical thinking for how best to convey their message to future students in their majors. Jason Dockter teaches first-year composition at Lincoln Land Community College. He completed his Ph.D. in English Studies at Illinois State University. His research focus is primarily on rhetoric/composition, with specific interests in online writing instruction and multimodal composition. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

Today's guest blogger is Amanda Gaddam (see end of post for bio). Social media represents a large percentage of the reading and writing that first-year students do outside of the classroom, so it makes sense to acknowledge and even take advantage of it inside of the classroom. In my DePaul WRD 102 Basic Writing course, we use Instagram throughout the quarter to document various stages of their writing processes in unique and interesting ways, to provide a centerpiece of an in-depth rhetorical analysis project in the middle of the term, to facilitate conversations about audience, context, and purpose, and to create a multimodal final reflective essay with their course ePortfolios.  For basic writers in particular, using Instagram to create a gallery of their writing successes and challenges throughout the quarter has proved especially beneficial in boosting the amount of evidence and analysis final reflections. Background reading The following handbook sections provide useful questions for not only writing a final reflection for an online platform such as Digication, but also for selecting content and captions for photos taken throughout the quarter: Writer's Help 2.0 for Lunsford Handbooks: Ch.3a: Plan online assignments The Everyday Writer: Ch.24: Communicating in Other Media The St. Martin’s Handbook: Ch. 18: Communicating in Other Media Writing in Action: Ch. 4: A Writer’s Choices EasyWriter: Ch. 1c-1g in A Writer's Choices The Assignment: We Did It for the ‘Gram 1. I ask students to create an Instagram account (if they don’t already have one) and post at least five pictures with a hashtag unique to our class.  Most students have an Instagram account prior to my class, and those who don’t are able to sign up in less than two minutes.  Some students choose to create second Instagram accounts rather than post school-centered images to their personal or private accounts. I try not to give too many instructions about the content of their pictures; rather, I encourage students to think about their own writing processes—their challenges, habits, strategies, and resources—in order to take photos that reveal new or tacit knowledge about how they approach writing tasks. And, in the interest of fairness, I post photos to Instagram using the hashtag, too. 2. I engage the class in informal reflections and discussions in class about their rhetorical choices for composition, content, and editing.  By midterm week, students are required to have at least two photos posted to their Instagram accounts so that we have something to reflect on and talk about in class (weekly reminders to take pictures help students remember and meet this deadline). I ask students to bring in their photos, either in print or digitally, for a free write about rhetorical choices—why they chose to capture that particular moment, as well as the intended rhetorical effects of chosen filters, compositions, editing, and captions.  The results of the free writing jumpstart a discussion about cultivating personas, audience, and exigence.  3. I introduce the final reflection assignment about two weeks before the end of the quarter. As far as final reflection assignments go, my reflective essay prompt is fairly standard—I ask students to think about new strategies that they tried throughout the quarter, the challenges they faced as writers, and progress toward personal goals or course learning outcomes. I encourage them to use the Instagram photos they have taken over the quarter as evidence of the activities or processes they discuss in their essays because as we’ve no doubt discussed by this point in the term, evidence is crucial to support their claims.  4. I use a reflection worksheet to help students connect the actions or strategies depicted in the pictures to the course learning outcomes and their ongoing development as writers and students. Effective reflective writing is challenging; asking students to talk about the past often elicits simple reports of tasks they’ve accomplished rather than in-depth discussions on how they accomplished those tasks and what they’ll take away from the experiences.  To help students think about past, present, and future in their reflections, I ask them to complete the following worksheet in class: What you did How you did it Learning outcome Future applications I have students fill out the two columns on their own and talk to a partner to discover learning outcomes that the experiences can map onto and future applications for the knowledge or skills they have acquired.  5. Students write and present final reflections and their Instagram galleries to showcase the writing strategies they employed throughout the quarter. Digication ePortfolios are required of all students in every first-year writing course at DePaul, so students have the means and opportunity to create a multimodal reflective essay that informs the rest of their showcased work.  Most students choose to use the photo gallery function available on Digication, which allows viewers to scroll through the photos and read accompanying captions. Students' Images Below are some examples of photos taken by my students (and me). View more images on Instagram with #depaulwrd102. Reflection This assignment is an easy way to start talking about multimodality in the classroom because the platform is free and most students are experts walking into the classroom, which means they have a lot to say from the very beginning! Analyses of Instagram photos come naturally to most students, and they have very little trouble understanding how images can be read as texts. Finally, as a result of this assignment and the associated class activities, I have received some truly introspective and evidence-based reflections that were mostly free of report-like language and superficial appeals to my vanity as a teacher. Asking students to use their own images to reflect on their writing gets them thinking about how writing and media can complement, inform, and even complicate each other. Guest blogger Amanda Gaddam is an adjunct instructor in the First-Year Writing Program and the School for New Learning at DePaul University. She holds a B.A. in English with a concentration in Literary Studies and a M.A. in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse with a concentration in Teaching Writing and Language from DePaul, and her research interests include first-year composition, adult and non-traditional students, and writing center pedagogies. ... View more

Recently I had an opportunity to speak to a group of two-year college writing teachers in Texas. The topic very much on their minds: guns in their classrooms.  As I learned, the Texas legislature has passed a new law, which takes effect this coming August.  Here’s what it says: (You can read more at http://www.armedcampuses.org/texas/.  This site also has a petition to keep guns off campuses.) The teachers I talked with are enormously concerned about this new law and what it will mean for their teaching and for their students’ learning.  More than a few of them described “training” they are taking to help them prepare for and deal with the new law:  they are warned to “be very careful” not to introduce topics that might upset students.  And if a shooter appears in their classes, they are to face the shooter and shield their students.  Of course we talked about other things—primarily about how to help all of our students develop into confident and competent writers. But these conversations about guns in classrooms are what have stuck in my mind.  Every. Single. Day.  Many teachers I spoke with seemed fearful but resigned:  “This is Texas,” they said.  Maybe so, but I came away thinking about the havoc this new law can have:  we all know that college students are at a vulnerable time in their lives, that many of them are suffering from anxiety and depression. Research also shows that college-age students’ brains have not fully developed, especially in the area controlling split-second decisions.  These facts make having guns in classrooms seem counterproductive, at the very best. In addition, this law is almost certainly going to have a chilling effect on freedom of speech and on one of the foundations of higher education:  the opportunity to encounter ideas across the spectrum, including those that may be difficult to understand or accept.  I am fortunate to have taught at a university without guns, and I hope that will continue to be the case.  What I would like to do, though, is join a national movement of teachers, especially those who teach on campuses where guns are allowed in class, to declare that we will not teach in an atmosphere of grave danger. Arriving at the Bush International Airport in Houston on my journey home, I was met by a large red sign on the outside door:  Would I meet a person carrying a concealed licensed firearm?  In fact, I did not—at least not that I know of—but I was more cautious than usual.  It was a long day, and I hated concentrating on people with guns rather than thinking about students and their learning. ... View more

I just returned from a visit with grandnieces Audrey (11) and Lila (8) and, as always, I loved observing what they were up to regarding literacy/ies. They had a two-day holiday from school, so in all, we had three days for fun. We started by seeing the new Star Wars film, which they judged to be “way too long” but engaging; they were outraged by the death of a favorite character, and they loved Finn. They also deftly pointed out several product placements, showing that their critical antennae are up at least part of the time. The next day we had rain and even some snow, so that meant—reading! We have our own book clubs when I’m not there: each girl chooses a book, and we read two chapters and then have a text or FaceTime talk about it. I am constantly impressed with their reflections and with how they anticipate what may happen next (and why). This day, though, we could read together. Lila chose one of Frances O’Roark Dowell’s Phineas L. MacGuire books, and over the course of the day she read the entire volume to me out loud. She has a wicked sense of humor and a very soft heart, so we had to pause and laugh or commiserate often as the adventures piled up. Once she misread, saying “He rode his book” rather than “He rode his bike” and got so tickled that she lost her breath laughing—and then rode around the room on her book. She also took to correcting Phineas (known as Mac), who is prone to refer to “Me and Marcus.” Lila silently changed this to “Marcus and I,” nodding disapprovingly as she did so. This book’s lessons are pretty obvious—compassion and kindness win out over obnoxiousness and selfishness every time—so we talked about that and about experiences she had had with both in her second grade class. Eight-year-olds have a lot on their minds, as this reading experience reminded me. And so do eleven-year-olds.  Audrey and I took turns reading the third book in Lois Lowry’s Giver series. Since we’d already read the first two books in our typical book club way, we spent some time talking about what had happened in The Giver and Gathering Blue, including a meditation on “utopian” and “dystopian” and the role these words played in the series. Then we plunged in to The Messenger, which Audrey soon said “cut to the chase” better and more quickly than the first two. She picked up right away on the word “trade,” saying “there’s something going on with this word!” And she was right, as the plot turns on an ominous Trade Mart that comes to threaten the village. We stopped often to reflect on events and talk about our expectations and hopes for the characters, our assessment of the story (“really gripping!”), and words (“Wow, ‘subtle’ has a ‘b’ in it. How cool!”). We didn’t finish the book in one day, but did so in the car on the way to the airport. Now we are embarking on the fourth and last book in the series, Son, and I look forward to many text messages and emails and phone calls about it. After a day of reading and with the weather still bad they turned to building. They each had a Roominate kit (started by girls and meant for girls—and boys—who want to build things). The kits come with four pieces of plastic (about 10” by 8” ) meant to serve as three walls and a floor—and then a bunch of other smaller plastic parts that can be fit together in different ways, colored paper and felt, and a few other things. There are some pictures but only bare-bones instruction:  “just build whatever you imagine!” they say. Lila quickly announced she was going to build a restaurant called Avery’s. She papered the walls, built four tables for two, fit them out with napkins, menus, and candles, and set up a serving station. She made a big menu board (ice cream sundaes for $4; chicken tenders for $3; grilled cheese sandwiches “on the house”) as well as a “daily specials” board, a welcome sign, and a tipping policy (“give a lot”).  Audrey took more time to think but then decided to build her ideal cabin for Camp Kanata, where she and Lila will spend two weeks this summer. If you can enlarge the photo below, you’ll see how intricate the work is: the stack of tiny felt t-shirts on the top shelf of a cupboard, next to a dress hanging on a paper hanger; the two bunk beds with quilts and pillows and signs for the girls assigned to them (Eva, Audrey, etc.); the windows, broom (made with a cut-off pencil) and paper dustpan; the bedside table with its candle (“really, really hard to make”) and The Giver on it; a bookshelf (Smile is there, along with Moby Dick); and what she called “signage”—Cabin Clean Up Score Card, Camp Rules, Chore Chart, even a fan (top right) that she rigged up with batteries (it works!). Audrey and Lila worked all day on these construction projects, chatting away, often to themselves, about challenges and problems they had to solve and the effects they were trying to create. Since they were working with very small items like candles, a lot of hand-eye-brain coordination was called for, along with concentration and focus. I had a hard time getting them to take a break for lunch! They graciously let me join the team and I was sometimes allowed to help out (“Aunt A, would you cut another circle just like this one?”). So the maker movement—and reading—are alive and well in Chapel Hill. And on these two days, while both girls used the Internet to look up things they needed (definitions of terms, how to do this or that), they were not as tied to the iPads as they are sometimes wont to be. For now, I’m starting our next “book club” books and watching for additions and improvements to the Roominates! ... View more

Recently, Jerry Nelms posted a very interesting comment on procrastination to the WPA listserv. In it, he reviewed some research on procrastination and recommended Eric Jaffe's "Why Wait? The Science Behind Procrastination," published in Observer 26.4 (April 2013). I expect as many teachers procrastinate as do students. I am certainly not a procrastinator (described in the literature as people who chronically put things off even though they know doing so is harmful). But I have had my moments: I vividly remember having an assignment to review Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations shortly after it came out. I was still in graduate school and awed at the opportunity to review a work I greatly admired. In fact, I felt intimidated, and these feelings led me to put off and put off and put off. Eventually, I recall giving myself a stern talking-to and deciding that I would not allow myself to do a single thing until I had written five pages of the review. It took me more than eight hours and I was sweating it all the way through, but I sat at the typewriter until I had those pages. In his WPA listserv post, Jerry points out that he sees students procrastinate out of such intimidation, or out of fear that they won’t do a good enough job. These students may not be “official” procrastinators—the twenty-some percent of us who are chronic procrastinators—but even occasional procrastination in high-stakes circumstances can be a serious challenge. In J. R. Ferrari’s Still Procrastinating? The No Regrets Guide to Getting It Done (2010), he recommends several ways to combat procrastination, including offering rewards for those who get things done early rather than punishments for those who are late. He uses the tax deadline as an example, saying that even procrastinators might get their taxes in early if they had a financial incentive. This strikes me as a sensible idea that could easily be adapted to the classroom: for major assignments, students could get a bonus of some kind for early submission. Better yet, individuals could offer themselves an incentive: a special treat if they get the assignment done ahead of time. Source: Post Memes on Flikr​ In his post, Jerry Nelms recommends putting the topic of procrastination front and center in the classroom, talking through some of the research on it, pointing out that chronic procrastinators often don’t do nearly as well on assignments as their non-procrastinating peers, and asking students to join in conversation about their own putting-it-off habits, and how to overcome them. When my students are working on a major project, we almost always break it into smaller parts or tasks, so that the deadlines are less intimidating and hence easier to meet. In addition, I ask students to make a term calendar, working backwards from the due dates of all their assignments (we try for all classes) and then figuring out when the assignment needs to be started in order to get it in on time (or earlier). Many students keep electronic calendars, though I still see a good number who like to hold onto a paper copy—or who keep both an electronic and a paper calendar. I first started keeping such a calendar in my first year of college: my week-at-a-glance book was always with me, and it served me very well. The transition from high school to college, where students must take charge of their own time, is a difficult one for many, as it was for me. An assignment calendar can help! Research shows that for chronic procrastinators counseling can be valuable, and such help is usually available on college campuses. But most conclude that in the long run, dealing with procrastination is a matter of failing to self-regulate. That’s something most people can do a little work on, and it’s worth discussing with our students. ... View more