Count me among the multitudes mourning bell hooks, a teacher of teachers. My copy of her essay, “Keeping Close to Home: Class and Education,” in Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989), is so inked up I can hardly read the text through my blue ballpoint comments. I have both starred and underlined her reminder that students bring expertise to our classrooms. She urges us to maintain those connections by “knowing, naming, and being ever-mindful of those aspects of one’s past that have enabled and do enable one’s self-development in the present, that sustain and support, that enrich” (79). Her commitment to sharing power with students in a classroom is a lodestar for me. Compare hooks’ pedagogical humility with the recent viral post by a professor who tested whether students read his syllabus by hiding information deep in its pages about a campus locker with money in it, free to the first finder. No one claimed the money. Aha! Supposedly, this proves students are too lazy to read the fine print of a syllabus, yet another version of the much-memed complaint: “It’s in the syllabus!” But are all syllabi really worth reading? What could be gained by this “gotcha” approach, which positions students as disappointments, unable to appreciate an academic genre that is so often boiler-plate, by this professor’s own admission? What would bell hooks say about this power dynamic, and the conversations it shuts down? Our students, in my experience, are quite prepared to see the classroom as bell hooks does — as “… the most radical space of possibility in the academy” (Introduction to Teaching to Transgress, 1994).  Last month, on the last day of the fall semester, I invited first-year students to compose a list of advice to next year’s class. One student took notes at the front of the room, and I sat back to enjoy their spirited debate and (sometimes hilarious) editing by consensus. Among the items on their “Advice to Next Year’s Students”: Make personal connections in the class — with classmates and the professor. (Try putting down your phone when you come into class.) Be open and willing to put forth time and energy. Ask questions! Don't be afraid to ask for help. Take advantage of campus resources and support systems, including your professor’s office hours. Have fun! Be willing to make mistakes. Get the embarrassment out of the way by trying new things right away! They debated the wording of #6 for several minutes, trying to figure out how to explain that learning means taking risks, and being vulnerable. “But we don’t want to freak them out!” one student said, wondering if there was a friendlier word than “embarrassment.” Another countered, “Yeah, but let’s be real — weren’t we all embarrassed at first? And then it got better and less weird?” I basked in their self-reflection, their flush of confidence after 15 weeks of college, and their protective tenderness toward these future students. At the end of the hour, my voice caught as I thanked them for their wisdom and care and told them we all share a vision of the risks and promise of education. As our Spring semester begins, I sent these students their own suggestions hoping they will hear their wisdom. I imagine bell hooks cheering them on as they make the most of the “radical space of possibility” in our classrooms this semester. May we be worthy of them.   Image Credit: Photo of Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, taken by the blog’s author, April Lidinsky ... View more

“Is that the best you can do?” “It’s the best I can do under these circumstances…” “Just do your best. It will be fine.” “Yes, the roster changes weekly with Covid absences, and we could go online overnight.  It’s not ideal, but do your best.” “Dr. Moore, I’m really sorry. This isn’t my best work.” I’m hearing a lot about the best these days, usually qualified with a personal possessive marker (my, your, our) or a phrase (under the circumstances, right now, given the time limits). A word that would otherwise capture an intended target has become instead a reality check, an apology, and at times, an excuse.  “Is that the best you can do?” In my family, this question usually provokes a smile. As a somewhat precocious four or five-year-old, my son was also a finicky eater. One day, surveying pizza we had ordered for a family gathering, he looked at me quizzically. He didn’t care for tomato sauce, cheese, or pepperoni. (Basically, he wanted crust.) So, I carefully scraped all the toppings from his slice onto my own and presented him with his “pizza.” He scowled. “Aww Mom! Is that the best you can do?” Now at seventeen, my son struggles with the notion of best for a host of different reasons. His teachers are telling him to “do his best” for standardized essay exams. The problem, as he sees it, is that his best is not going to fare well when assessed by countable elements on standardized writing rubrics. He will do his best to articulate all the ways in which has wrestled with theology in Dostoyevsky, but he expects to receive feedback telling him what he should have done instead of his best (which, apparently, would not have been his best). I cannot fault his teachers here: they are required by a pantheon of educational institutions to measure learning in this particular way. But as his mom, I am grateful when his instructors find ways to acknowledge his intellectual efforts, as idiosyncratic and sometimes iconoclastic as they are.  My son calls it the game: doing his best means playing the game, subverting what he is actually learning to meet requirements that may or may not have anything to do with that learning.  I have been thinking about that game plays out in higher education, especially as the pandemic has upended our traditional classrooms. Since our initial shift online in 2020 to our current version of F2F courses, I have expressed my frustration over courses:  they weren’t my best. What I envisioned, what I planned and crafted—that did not happen, and given our current context, it will not happen this semester. In fact, that’s the theme of this lovely Twitter thread from Dr. Lindsay Masland, author of the opening chapter of Resilient Pedagogy. We can be resilient as we adapt our pedagogy, but we can also grieve: this wasn’t what I intended. It wasn’t my best. But if it wasn’t my best, was it thus invalid? Less valuable? Students learn about writing through assignments I design—and sometimes, in spite of them. In many languages, the verb for teach is actually a causative form of the verb for learn – teaching is causing learning. Yet truthfully, we know we cannot make learning happen. Humility requires that we anticipate and acknowledge learning that occurs regardless of our pedagogy. And we can look for evidence of learning in what was not our best, or perhaps not our students’ best. One student this past fall contacted me before submitting her final paper with an apology: it was just not her best work. But during the poster presentations of projects for that course, I began to talk to her about what she had originally envisioned for her poster: a multimodal exploration of the ways that syntax created and embodied light in a novel she had read. The digital presentation I saw was certainly not her best, but I could see how she was applying what we learned about syntax to the language in the novel, and the energy she poured into her analysis—along with the insights she discovered—made that short presentation come to life.  She had said, “It’s not what I hoped, not my best.” But all she needed was a simple follow-up: “Hmmm…. Tell me what you were hoping for, what you wanted to do. Talk to me about it.” That student didn’t ace the project, at least not by rubric standards. But she learned—and the growth in her ability to talk and write about syntax from August to December was standard-defying. I will take that: not her best, and maybe not mine. But some mighty powerful learning occurred. My spring semester starts tomorrow, and I’ve already received the first excused absence notice. My carefully constructed first-day plans must change, and I am already disappointed. Still, when I evaluate my pedagogy as not my best—and when students apologize for not doing their best—I want to open space to talk about that disappointment. Was it the best we could do? Maybe, just maybe, that’s not the question I need to be asking. Where have you found unexpected learning during the past three years? How has your approach to your best shifted? I’d love to hear from you.   ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Michelle Graber, Instructor of English and Communications at Mitchell Technical College.   Superheroes Students sit six feet apart – eyes beaming up at me expectantly, masks askew. I’ve never noticed so many of my students’ eyes: shades of blue, brown, green, and hazel. I wonder what the rest of their faces look like, this sea of superheroes tolerating the mandated masking of their identities for the sake of public approval. Wow. I’m teaching superheroes. I face the class during the pandemic peak and push them through their studies. One student raises his hand to ask a question, and I find myself contemplating Charlie Brown’s problems understanding his teacher. She must’ve been wearing a mask, too. “A little louder, please,” I say, trying to resist leaning forward to hear better as I meet the grass-green orbs of the student whose name I can’t associate with a face and whose words I cannot hear.    Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Two years ago, a good friend commemorated her 50th birthday by traveling to Selma, Alabama, to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and then visit as many places along the United States Civil Rights Trail as she could manage. The Trail, officially designated on January 1, 2018, and sponsored by the National Parks Service and the Trust for Public Land, includes hundreds of sites across fifteen states, like Monroe School in Topeka, Kansas, where Linda Brown Thompson had to ride a bus to school rather than attend the one in her own neighborhood (which led to Brown v. Board of Education); Martin Luther King’s childhood neighborhood in Atlanta; and dozens of other sites the Trust helped local communities preserve and honor. Students can use an interactive map to follow the trail—or to plan their own trip—here. My friend had limited time, so she focused on Alabama—Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, Montgomery, and Selma. It was in Selma that she discovered the Selma Interpretive Center, which is self-described as “a welcome center for the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail and located at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Visitors can explore exhibits and a bookstore dedicated to telling the story of the movement.” It was in this small center, near the very back, that my friend saw a round button/pin with the word “NEVER” on it—a white supremacy statement against integration worn by members of the Ku Klux Klan and others. This pin inspired her to come home and create her ALWAYS button, “a proud anti-racism statement to be worn by those who always support racial equality #AlwaysPin.” I’ve written about my Always pin before; two years on, I am still getting lots of questions about it. And as Martin Luther King Jr. Day approaches, I’ve come back to it again and to the Civil Rights Trail and what is to be learned by visiting it, even virtually in these pandemic times. Today, I traveled virtually across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and listened to President Obama’s speech on March 7, 2015, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery march, during which peaceful marchers were beaten bloody—and John Lewis nearly killed—as they stood up for civil rights and for freedom for all. I also explored the US Civil Rights Trail’s video gallery, which houses oral history videos such as Mississippi State Senator David Jordan’s haunting description of scraping together $1.00 for gasoline to drive to Sumner to witness the December 1955 trial of the two white men who murdered 14-year-old Emmett Till—a crime they clearly committed but for which they were promptly pronounced “not guilty.” In quiet, understated tones, Jordan tells of deciding to go to Sumner with his brother to see for himself what a US trial was all about and of hearing rumors that Emmett Till was alive and well, recently seen in Chicago, and that his murder was just a “gimmick” by the NAACP to increase membership (!). Of hearing Till’s broken body described in dramatic contradistinction to the misinformation and lies. Of watching the defendants drinking Coca-Cola and laughing. Of realizing that “no one was serious,” and that “this trial was just a mockery of justice.” I have just begun to scratch the surface of the oral histories and other materials available, all of which make me hope to travel at least part of the Civil Rights Trail in real life. More important, they make me hope that our students take an opportunity—soon—to visit some of these virtual sites, that they see which of the hundreds of civil rights sites are closest to them so that they might visit in person, and that they take time to travel back to 1955 to see what they can learn about that year in our history and to write about what they find. If they have relatives who remember 1955 (or another year during the height of the movement), perhaps they can even gather oral histories of their own. Regardless, I would ask students to focus on at least one key moment in the civil rights movement, one particular spot on the Civil Rights Trail, and reflect on its meaning then, and now—on its meaning to their lives and hopes and dreams. That’s my wish as we commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. in 2022. Image Credit: "Edmund Pettus Bridge" by miketnorton, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

This article was originally published on January 6, 2022. I have never been more glad to see the back end of a year than I am of ushering out 2021: good riddance and please don’t come again, I say. But 2022 hasn’t started out too well, either. A couple of family crises, in fact, so I am taking a week off from the blog, accompanied by my new companion, an Apple 7 watch. The orthopedic surgeon who treated me after a fall a few months ago that left me with a fractured pelvis and wrist recommended it as an “alert system,” saying he urged all his patients who live alone to get one. Mine arrived around mid-December and has been my constant companion since. I have never worn a watch, so it’s taken some getting used to, but I’ve managed to load all my medical information into it and to set up a few other things, though I have a long way to go to get it fully operational. Of course, now if I fall, it will check on me and then call 911, emergency contacts, and in general alert the universe that I may need help. But it also talks to me. A few days ago, as I was waiting for my car to be serviced and decided to walk up a hill to pass the time, my watch suddenly said, “Hi Andrea, I see you are beginning a workout.” I was not, but pleased that it thought I was being industrious. And at 8:00 every evening, it says something like, “Hello, Andrea. It’s a good time for some mindfulness. Concentrate on your breathing. Breath in . . . and breathe out. Breathe in . . . and breathe out.” It carries on in this vein for about a minute and then says, “Well done!” So that’s my New Year’s advice to everyone: it’s 2022—time to take a deep breath in . . . and out. See you soon. Image Credit: "ATTIZ Apple Watch 40mm Metal Snap Silver Limited Band Strap" by TheBetterDay, used under a CC BY-ND 2.0 license ... View more

As the new year approaches (just two more days!), I am thinking of teachers of writing, of all our students, and of the world we inhabit. In my long life, I can remember some very fraught ends-of-years, but perhaps none as perilous as this one. The ongoing deadly pandemic. Social chaos. Factionalism and extremism on the rise. Threats to democracy from within. An inability, or refusal, to distinguish facts and truth from misinformation, crippling conspiracy theories, and lies. A planet teetering on the brink. And yet. We are still here. We are still teaching. We are still helping students learn to think and act for themselves—and for others. We are still creating small acts of kindness, small pockets of hope, small gestures of grace every single day. Resilience. Persistence. Perseverance. What my granny called Stick-to-it-ivity. We have all that, and more. So here’s to you and yours, with wishes for good fun, good food, and good friendship in the new year, along with safety and good health. And most of all, happy teaching. Andrea Image Credit: "Fireworks, New Years Eve, V&A Waterfront" by Derek Keats, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

I have two friends who have what seems to me a slightly odd annual tradition: at the end of each year, they work to list things they are grateful for—one for every calendar year! So this year, their list will include 2,021 entries. They say that the first few hundred are easy enough, but that beyond that, the going gets increasingly tough. Yet they persevere until they reach the year’s number, or occasionally go beyond it (!). Then they pore over the list, analyzing it and, literally, counting their blessings. I thought of these friends and their tradition last week when I corresponded with a writing teacher in Galveston. He described being worn out from a heavy day of work (he teaches six classes, after all) but deciding, in spite of everything, to stop by the Writing Center. There, to his surprise and delight, he found a number of his students from different classes, all working away on their writing. That they were doing so in spite of multiple out-of-school obligations and needs lifted his spirits: and the photo he sent me of this scene lifted mine as well. This teacher, passionate about his underserved and underprivileged—and deeply underestimated—students, is someone I am thankful for this year. It strikes me that he and his students are involved in mutual gift-giving of a very high order. These two anecdotes have me thinking, this holiday season, of the gifts I am giving, and receiving. Not just the material gifts—toys, books, and so on. But the gifts of love and friendship and learning and togetherness. So I am making a list of gifts, both given and received, that are most meaningful to me this year. And I think this would make a very fine assignment for students everywhere: no matter our circumstances, to take some time to write about what we are giving others and others are giving us that is most significant, most deeply meaningful, at this particular moment in our lives. Image Credit: "Christmas Presents" by Ravi_Shah, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

This blog series is written by Julia Domenicucci, an editor at Macmillan Learning, in conjunction with Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. With the end of the semester comes the submissions of final projects. But no piece of writing is ever truly final! Use this assignment to encourage students to reflect on how they might revise and improve their finished works from this semester. Podcasts are well-established, but their popularity seems to increase every day—and for good reason! They are engaging and creative, and they cover every topic imaginable. They are also great for the classroom: you can use them to encourage student engagement and introduce multimodality.   LaunchPad and Achieve products include assignable, ad-free Grammar Girl podcasts, which you can use to support your lessons. You can assign one (or all!) of these suggested podcasts for students to listen to before class. Each podcast also comes with a complete transcript, which is perfect for students who aren’t audio learners or otherwise prefer to read the content. To learn more about digital products and purchasing options, please visit Macmillan's English catalog or speak with your sales representative.   If you are using LaunchPad, refer to the unit “Grammar Girl Podcasts” for instructions on assigning podcasts. You can also find the same information on the support page "Assign Grammar Girl Podcasts."  If you are using Achieve, you can find information on assigning Grammar Girl in Achieve on the support page “Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course.” If your English Achieve product is copyright year 2021 or later, you are able to use a folder of suggested Grammar Girl podcasts in your course; please see “Using Suggested Grammar Girl Podcasts in Achieve for English Products” for more information.   Using Grammar Girl Podcasts to Think about Revision Pre-Class Work for Assignment: Choose 3 areas in which you felt your students struggled in their writing during the semester. Assign podcasts that you feel represent those areas for your students, and have your students listen to them before class.  Then, ask your students to choose 1 or more pieces of writing from the semester. The work should either: Exhibit one or more of the areas of challenge you’ve identified Exhibit success in one or more of the areas of challenge you’ve identified Alternatively, if you are using the folder “Grammar Girl: 25 Suggested Podcasts,” you might ask your students to review the list of suggested podcasts and identify one or more that they feel exhibits a challenge or challenges they had in their paper. Tip: See “Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course” and “Create an Assessment” for help with making Grammar Girl podcasts available to students in your Achieve course. In Achieve, Grammar Girl podcasts are organized into one of the following categories: Academic Reading, Writing, and Speaking; Adjectives and Adverbs; Apostrophes; Capitalization; Commas; Grammar for Multilingual Writers; Grammar, Clarity, and Style; Other Punctuation; Parts of Speech and Parts of Sentences; Pronouns; Quotation Marks; Spelling; Subject-Verb Agreement and Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement; Verbs; Word Choice; Word Usage.  Assignment: Ask students to write 1-2 paragraphs reflecting on how the errors do (or do not) manifest in their writing. Students should address the following questions: Which of these areas, if any, do I see myself struggling with in my writing? Which of these areas did I not struggle with? What other challenges did I have in my writing? What successes? What tips from the podcasts can I implement in my writing going forward? Advanced Assignment: Ask each student to revise their essay or piece of writing. The revisions should address any errors and areas that would benefit from clarification, but students should also feel free to revise any portion of their work.  Tip: If you are using an Achieve English course, consider creating a custom Writing Assignment that students can use to submit their revisions. Students can upload their original essay for revision. If the writing being revised was already submitted in Achieve, students can download that work from the other assignment and upload it to the new one for the revision. Refer to the article “Guide to Writing assignments for instructors” for help with Writing Assignments. Looking for other end-of-semester ideas? Check out “Using Grammar Girl Podcasts to Reflect on Writing & Accomplishments.” As you begin to think about the next semester, be sure to check out our other Grammar Girl assignment ideas. You can access previous posts from the Bedford Bits home page or by visiting “30+ Grammar Girl Assignments for Your Next Class” on the Quick and Dirty Tips website (these assignments are based on the blog posts, and six of them include downloadable PDFs!).   Did you use Grammar Girl—or any other podcasts—in your classes this semester? Let us know in the comments!   Credit: "Revision" by raindog is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Stuart Barbier, a Professor of English at Delta College.   Pension “Your Internet connection is unstable,” warned my computer during yet another Zoom. That’s not the only thing that’s unstable, I thought, unable to separate non-work life (gardening and PBS period dramas) from work life (freshman composition and workplace drama). Face-to-face, I taught all students at the same time, answering questions within the class well enough that students rarely contacted me otherwise. Online? Endless emails, texts, phone calls, and videos, assignments trickling in like water torture, twenty-four/seven, as I turn my computer on when I get up and off when I go to bed. Retire, a friend suggested. Alas, too young.     Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Over a dozen years ago now, the inimitable Cynthia Selfe published “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing” (see the June 2009 issue of College Composition and Communication), in which she reviews the history of aurality/orality, demonstrates how and why it was subsumed by writing and the written word, and calls for significant change, particularly in light of the rise of multimodal composing: [I]n light of scholarship on the importance of aurality to different communities and cultures, I argue that our contemporary adherence to alphabetic-only composition constrains the semiotic efforts of individuals and groups who value multiple modalities of expression. I encourage teachers and scholars of composition, and other disciplines, to adopt an increasingly thoughtful understanding of aurality and the role it—and other modalities—can play in contemporary communication tasks. (616) Here Cynthia, in her typical understated way, points out what should have long been utterly obvious: that many communities of color, and particularly Black communities, value the “multiple modalities” that include sound and rhythm—and that, moreover, they have a great deal to teach all of us about those modalities. I come back to this article often, and it certainly bears re-reading now in light of current attempts to make good on promises of critical awareness of many language traditions and of anti-racist pedagogies. I’ve written before about Nicole Furlonge’s Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature (2018) and of the lessons it teaches us about how to access—and to value—the aurality in work by Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Aretha Franklin, Zora Neale Hurston, and others. How to “listen in print.” I got my first lessons in how to listen in print from Dr. G, beloved professor Geneva Smitherman, whose Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (1977) changed my life. Over the decades, I’ve worn out three copies of this book: it has taken me many re-readings to grasp even a portion of its wisdom. But among its many lessons is its deep understanding of the role sound and rhythm play in Black language and Black rhetoric. One of my favorite passages in this book deals in detail with what she refers to as “tonal semantics”—the way speakers use intonation and rhythm and inflection to create emphasis and command attention, using the voice like a musical instrument. Smitherman connects tonal semantics to the importance of African drums and drumming (I think always of the brilliant “Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk,” which opens with a riveting series of drum beats) and the evolution of that culturally important sound into combinations of words and sounds to “achieve spiritual equilibrium and psychological balance” (137). She goes on to describe types of tonal semantics, including talk-singing, intonational contouring, repetition, rhyme, alliterative word play, and narrative sequencing, all Black rhetorical strategies that we can learn to recognize and value by “listening in print” and in person. Listen to any Martin Luther King, Jr. speech and you will hear tonal semantics at work. Or think of the features of spoken word poetry and of how the sound of speakers’ voices themselves do so much to carry the meaning. I am thinking right now of Amanda Gorman’s spoken word performances: as Smitherman says, she uses her “voice, body, and movement as tools to bring the story to life” (149). If Cynthia Selfe’s article deserves re-reading, the work of Geneva Smitherman deserves multiple re-reading. In fact, it should be by every writing teacher’s side. I’ve been grateful to Dr. G for over forty years, for helping me learn to listen in profoundly new and important ways. Image Credit: "Transistor Radio with Casette Tape Recorder" by richardclyborne, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

The roof of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi.  As a neurodivergent learner, I did not receive an accurate diagnosis until fifteen years after graduate school, yet my disabilities were never invisible to me. In high school, for example, my “D”s in geometry took just as much, if not more, work than “A”s in my literature classes. My teachers often told me that I was not working up to my potential and needed to try harder or, conversely, that I took life too seriously. But they did not understand, and I did not know how to explain, that the processes of working in geometry or literature felt often felt very different, and those differences were deeply related to attention. Decades later, my struggles with attention seem relevant to fully remote teaching and learning. In an online space with infinite distractions, how do we draw in and hold onto the attention of our students, and how can we allow them to focus their attention to grow their writing and learning?   Since moving online beginning in the emergencies of March 2020 through the uncertainties of December 2021, every semester has brought its own insights and frustrations, and there is obviously not a single answer that fits every class in every semester. This semester, however, students seemed to ask for more directions than in past online semesters, but the directions seemed to inadvertently stymie students’ writing, to bring students to a stopping point. Students did a good job of following the directions, but they generally did not seek to move beyond the minimum threshold, no matter how much encouragement I offered. At times, students appeared to follow the directions as if the directions were formulas to solve proofs in geometry step by step. The hyper-focus was on attempting to follow the directions exactly as they were written, and the directions themselves became a distraction from the writing process. They could follow the directions specifically as written, but following the directions alone would not produce a sufficient amount of writing. Following the directions would not yield enough writing to meet the length requirements for the grades students were hoping to earn. After much reflection this semester, I realize that the directions contain two unstated assumptions. The first assumption was that, encouraged by group and individual activities, students would write to process their thoughts about the text. Processing thoughts would involve building on class activities, reading the text closely, and trying to make sense of their own interpretations of the text. The second assumption was that students would use the directions not as a formula, but as a recipe. A formula must be followed in the same fashion by everyone to achieve the same result. A recipe offers basic directions but invites the cook to switch up the ingredients as desired. In other words, writing, for me, does not mean filling out a template, or finding one singular answer to a straight-forward question-based prompt. Yet without a template some students struggled with organization. Without the prompts, some students struggled to find their own motivations for writing. Even as students and I had grappled with these writing process issues before 2020, the constraints and the confusions of the pandemic brought increased distractions and even more difficulty finding flow. One of the distractions of geometry was that my teachers assumed students would come to the course with general knowledge that could be applied to learning how to use formulas to solve proofs. The teachers did not expect to teach that general mathematical knowledge, but they expected all of us to adapt that knowledge to geometric proofs. Because of my undiagnosed disabilities, I had fallen far behind in general mathematical knowledge and could no longer overcompensate for what I had not yet learned. That left me hyper-focused on the directions, with not enough room in my working memory to figure out why proofs matter. Without this understanding, I was constantly distracted by the directions, and because of the distractions I could not concentrate enough to find the deep flow of my thoughts. I could not take ownership of geometry. In a global pandemic, fully remote teaching and learning collapses time and condenses space. Zoom is not a normal classroom, and cannot be retrofitted to fit traditional expectations. There is no formula because we cannot predict the results. Moreover, even if we had a formula, not everyone would be able to follow it. But we can create a recipe, and we pay attention to adaptations and changes. In this way, I am beginning to see templates and prompts not as barriers, but as conduits to learning and as a means of learning to concentrate more fully on the purposes and processes of writing. In other words, in muting distractions perhaps we can begin to imagine the aspiration of reaching flow.   Photo "The roof of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi" by Thomas Drouault on Unsplash. ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn, a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy, and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition    Overview “Protest music has always been an essential form of political expression in the US. And at times of political and social unrest, it becomes a crucial refuge — both for musicians, as a release valve for their frustrations and convictions, and for listeners in need of a rallying cry.” – Bridgett Henwood, “The History of American Protest Music, from ‘Yankee Doodle’ to Kendrick Lamar”   One of the courses I teach is an American Literature survey course that provides opportunities to explore a broad range of texts and genres. As we study these texts, I do my best to teach strong interpretive reading strategies and to incorporate multimodal texts and representative visual composition. I work to expand students’ definition of literature and encourage them to practice critical reading strategies to interpret cultural and historical texts and contexts along with traditional texts. This assignment does all of these things, and so I think it can work for a composition course as well as a literature course. Music and lyrics are a popular form of literature that students easily connect to through their lives. I have talked about the ways I have used music in my classes in previous posts (see Music and Class Playlists), but in this assignment, I ask students to look specifically at protest music as a genre. Although protest songs are in their repertoire, students are often unaware of their historical and cultural significance and the ways they have initiated social change. As referenced in the article “The History of American Protest Music, from ‘Yankee Doodle’ to Kendrick Lamar,” “Protest music has been around for centuries: As long as people have been getting fed up with the status quo, they’ve been singing about it. And because music styles, human emotions and social issues are so wide ranging, protest songs are too.” This assignment immerses students in the history and variety of protest music and asks them to interpret particular protest songs. They also work collaboratively with others to read across the examples and present them in a multimodal slide show.   Resources The St. Martin’s Handbook – Ch. 9, Reading Critically The Everyday Writer (also available with Exercises) – Ch. 7, Critical Reading EasyWriter (also available with Exercises) – Ch. 8, Reading and Listening Analytically, Critically, and Respectfully   Steps to the Assignment Historical Context and Genre Examples - Introduce students to the genre of the protest song. I take students through an exploration of protest music and have them read a couple of sources that show the span of the genre. I like the article “The History of American Protest Music, from ‘Yankee Doodle’ to Kendrick Lamar” by Bridgett Henwood, along with some aggregate resources such as Rolling Stone’s Top Protest Songs, Best Protest Songs in History, and a protest song playlist on Spotify. I also show them the brief video “The Evolution of American Protest Music” and guide them to the Spotify playlist (both linked in the Henwood article), which provide an overview with examples. Individual Protest Song Interpretation – Each student will focus on a protest song and search to find lyrics and a video link of an example of music as protest literature or social awareness. I ask them to think about issues and ideas that are important to them and focus on the ways the song creates awareness. They should choose something that has meaning for them—one that has specific cultural, social, or historical implications in which they might be interested. Students then write a short summary that provides artist information (name, year, title, etc.) and an analysis of how and what the song is protesting, including several significant passages from the song that speak to their claims. Have them include the link to the video, and look for them to forge a strong, substantiated interpretation. Like any literature with controversial content, I urge students to be sensitive in their choices and the ways they frame their discussions. Teachers can decide to let students include explicit lyrics or edited versions of the songs based on their own classroom contexts. Individual Slide – Each student then creates an accompanying Google Slide in which they include the song title and artist, a representative image, a meaningful passage from the song, a statement of protest, and a link to the song. Collaborative Slideshow – Students work in teams for this next part and add their individual slides to a Google team slideshow. They review and listen to their teammates’ songs. As a team, they shape the collaborative slideshow to include: An original, engaging title Team number and member names Team members’ individual slides A collaborative slide for takeaways—They should read across all the songs to look for patterns, connections, larger meanings, and meaningful ideas. References Presentation – Each team presents their slideshow to the class (both individual and collaborative takeaways and connections). This allows students to discuss the range of possibilities and artists and the ways these songs affect social change and awareness. It also introduces students to songs they might not have heard before to consider for future analysis (and listening pleasure). I encourage them to take notes along the way to select songs to which they might want to return. Students then post their team slideshows to a common space (Google Drive or a course LMS). Review and Listen – Students review and listen to at least 5 unfamiliar songs from other teams' protest music collections. They post a bulleted list of their choices along with a sentence or two comment about something they considered for each song. Playlist – As a fun addition to the assignment, teachers can compile a class playlist to share with students for their own music libraries. Check out the Protest Song Playlist from my Fall 2021 class.   Reflections on the Activity The assignment draws on many multimodal components: music, representative visuals, digital representation, and collaborative digital composing. Students enjoy this assignment because it helps them appreciate the ways their critical reading skills can be applied to cultural artifacts and to their lives. And . . . almost everyone loves music! Students focused on songs that protested issues such as: Unity, peace, and strength War involvement and political change Government corruption and abuse of power Civil and human rights Violence Media influence and distortion Gender identity and empowerment Many students said that they heard these songs before but did not stop to consider their meaning or the impact they might have on social awareness and change. I always find it interesting to hear new songs and themes they select and add to my own playlist as they share their work. ... View more

Brendan HawkinsBrendan Hawkins(recommended by Elias Dominguez Barajas) is pursuing his PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition at Florida State University. His research, teaching, and faculty development interests and experiences span rhetorical genre studies, histories of rhetoric, online writing instruction, and general education composition classes. He serves as a College Composition Program assistant director where his primary responsibility is mentorship for first-year teachers. How do you engage students in your course, whether f2f, online, or hybrid? When I started teaching online, I made weekly activity sheets that described the goals for the week as well as the readings and activities students would do. I have adopted a similar practice for my face to face, onsite teaching as well. I keep a running Google Doc with my lesson plans typed up for students to see. I project it on the whiteboard and use it as a reference point for class. It is a simple practice, but it helps students who are unable to attend that day (because I’ve essentially taken notes for them already) and it helps me both visually and verbally indicate where we are in the day’s plans. This move is a simple act of transparency that I try to implement throughout my teaching. What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students? I aim to help students understand the complexities of genre and how the concept functions in their everyday decision-making processes. They typically think of “genre” as a classification system but don’t realize the role it plays in not only how they understand but also how they respond to situations, particularly those in the writing classroom. We examine the contexts in which genres typically happen and how those genres shape how folks act and interact with each other. My favorite example is the small, unassuming genre of menus. If students can see how texts—produced and received as genres—function and interact with other texts and people(s), I think students are set to be effective communicators in a variety of situations, both curricular and extracurricular.  What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? I’ve enjoyed the chance to meet other instructors from across the U.S. Conferences are hard to attend (especially when they’re cancelled for pandemic-related safety concerns), so being part of Bedford New Scholars was a great way to meet other folks in the field and share ideas about teaching and about the ways we use instructional materials. How will the Bedford New Scholars program affect your professional development or your classroom practice? It’s a vague and/or cheesy answer, but I have lots of notes from the summer summit that I plan to revisit ahead of my next semester of teaching. I appreciate the time to sit and listen to how other teachers approach their teaching. It’s also great to hear about other courses and about other institutions, since I—as many other folks might—get tunnel vision when thinking about my own institution’s curricula and policies.   Brendan’s Assignment that Works During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Brendan's assignment. For the full activity, see Rhetorical Analysis Activity. We have a common syllabus for our 1,000 and 2,000-level courses, which means our major assignments are the same across all sections. Therefore, I chose to share an activity I do with students that helps them build genre and rhetorical knowledge they’ll need both in these courses—particularly the 2,000-level course—and in their other classes. I provide the framing for the day’s activity (Figure 1) in a Google Doc I share with my students, which we use all semester for our lesson plans, notes, and activities.   Figure 1. Screenshot of the day's Lesson Overview.   The lesson I’m sharing is a two-part lesson that asks students to (re)define key rhetorical terms we had been covering ahead of a rhetorical analysis project. Rhetorical definitions often remain too abstract for students to sese how these aren’t just terms but actual practices. As Figure 2 demonstrates, I ask students in the first activity to define the rhetorical term assigned to their group and then describe how it functions within the speech we were analyzing.   Figure 2. Grid students use for small group activities.   As they completed the activity, students were able to both define and apply the definitions. I was able to move from group to group (via Zoom breakout rooms in this case) and challenge the ones who provided a vague or brief answer and help those who were struggling. We then turned to practice rhetorical skills in another way. Students struggled in their previous activities to determine the difference between summary and analysis. The second half of the day’s lesson, depicted in Figure 3, asks students to summarize a section of the speech we were analyzing and then provide a separate analysis or evaluative statement about that part of the text. By the end of the activity, we were able to use students’ answers to the activity to build a rough outline of a rhetorical analysis we could write on the speech.   Figure 3. Excerpt of grid used for the day's second activity.   ... View more

After the Supreme Court heard arguments last week about the Mississippi abortion law challenging Roe v. Wade, liberals in America seemed to give up, assuming that, after fifty years, Roe v. Wade will soon no longer be the law of the land. A decision will not be made for six months, but the language of the conservative justices convinced most news commentators and their various guests—and most liberal Americans—that the matter is all but decided. Justice Sonia Sotomayor summed up the despair of many liberals in a statement that will go down in history as a defining observation about the future of the Court: “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? I don’t see how it is possible.” Sotomayor’s emotion is clear when she associates the anticipated action by the Court with a bad odor. What about her logic? Is she justified in making the claim that the Court is no longer performing judicial acts, but rather acting out of political motivation? This is a perfect example of how I try to illustrate to my students how to read data and what logical conclusions can be drawn from numbers. It is a fact that over the last 35 years, there have been a number of justices confirmed by a unanimous vote or near unanimous vote, which means that both political parties were in agreement while supporting their nomination: Sandra Day O’Connor, confirmed 99-0; Antonin Scalia, confirmed 98-0; Anthony M. Kennedy, confirmed 97-0; David H. Souter, confirmed 90-9; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, confirmed 96-3; Stephen G. Breyer, confirmed 87-9. It is also a fact that with the three justices confirmed to the court during Donald Trump’s term in office, the vote broke down along party lines with rare exceptions. In the case of Amy Coney Barrett, all Republicans voted for Barrett with the exception of Susan Collins, and all Democrats voted against her confirmation, with Independents siding with the Democrats. The same was the case with Brett Kavanaugh, with the single exception in his case being Democrat Manchin from West Virginia voting with the Republicans. The same with Neil Gorsuch, with two other Democrats joining Manchin in voting with Republicans. Prior to Trump’s term in office, there had certainly been times that the vote for or against confirmation broke down along party lines, including in the case of Sotomayor’s own confirmation. Never, however, had it been so blatant that one issue determined who was placed in nomination and how the vote went. Trump made clear that he would place only anti-abortion justices on the Court. Unlike the earlier unanimous and near-unanimous decisions based on the belief that a justice would uphold the law of the land, we are left with a court that many see as having been handpicked to uphold the will of a minority of Americans on one issue. And how does this problem get resolved since Supreme Court justices serve for life? Is our justice system irrevocably broken? The Founding Fathers did not foresee justices being confirmed to the court for political reasons and deciding cases based on their own moral codes rather than on the Constitution. There is discussion about restructuring the court, increasing the number of justices to overcome the entrenched bias toward the conservative. That in itself might be seen as a partisan political move, but short of change in conscience on the part of today’s politicians, it may be the only way to return the Court to the state of integrity that Sotomayor sees it as so tragically lacking.   Image Credit: 2013.01.28 RITGER_Sotomayor_427 by Commonwealth Club is licensed under CC by 2.0.  ... View more

In my first blog of the Fall 2021 Bits blogging season I observed that "the pandemic hasn't stimulated (at least yet) any significant reflection in American popular culture over the past few months," so it is only appropriate that in this, my last blog of the season, I should note that a theatrically-released documentary—"The First Wave"—on the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic now has appeared, along with a grim review in the Entertainment section of the Los Angeles Times. The film, as Roxana Hadadi writes, "transports us back and places us alongside front-line workers doing all they can to save everyone they can" in the early days of the pandemic, when few but the frontline healthcare workers themselves could have imagined that today, over a year and a half later, we would be facing (what number is it now?) yet another wave named Omicron—not to mention violent resistance to vaccinations and any other measure to control the virus. I will leave it to Hadadi's review to re-illuminate those early days for you, even as we approach another winter of viral discontent. Otherwise, if you are reading this blog at all, you are probably gearing up for that onslaught of end-of-term grading that leaves one strung out and exhausted enough without the extra burden of having to worry now about whether next term is going to be all-remote again. But if you have the heart to think about it at all right now, I would suggest that you prepare a list of relevant questions for your 2022 classes, questions like: How has the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing divisions among the American people? What cultural mythologies come into play when we try to explain and interpret those divisions? How has the myth of "American Exceptionalism" shaped the response of many Americans to the pandemic? Has that mythology been shaken by the pandemic, along with America's long-standing tendency to look at what Barbara Ehrenreich has called the "bright side" of things? Can Americans stand another wave of infection and death, or will they go into full-scale denial and return to "normal," in despite of the virus? And finally, have our lives been changed forever by the pandemic? If so, in what ways? In asking such questions, and any that you and your students may come up with, keep in mind the importance of trying to answer them not according to the way you hope things will come out, but by gathering, in a cultural-semiotic manner, as much relevant information as you can, situated in an historically framed system of associations and differences, while abductively seeking the most likely answers and explanations. As a hint in this regard, my own system goes back to the 1940-50s as I try to explain (at least to myself) the otherwise incomprehensible (to me) ongoing resistance to vaccinations in the face of clear evidence that no one has been transformed into a lizard by any of the available shots, and it is the unvaccinated who are overwhelmingly ending up in the hospital with COVID-19 or are dead. By the time I return to this blog we should have a better picture of where Omicron is going to take us, and since this is a simple fact rather than an interpretation, let us hope that things are not going to get worse.   Image Credit: "Seahouses Lighthouse and Wave" by TomBurley is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more