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

2019’s word was “they,” when searches in dictionaries for that word skyrocketed. 2020 was predictable: “pandemic,” as the whole world tried to take in the full havoc and tragedy the coronavirus was having everywhere—nearly five and a half million dead from the virus as I write this post. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that Merriam Webster’s Word of the Year for 2021 is “vaccine,” a word people searched the dictionary 601% more often this year than in 2020. In announcing its word of the year, Merriam Webster noted that the word partially symbolizes hope for a return to our normal lives, hopes that are being severely tested by the arrival of the Omicron variant. But Merriam Webster also notes that the word “vaccine” was “also at the center of debates about personal choice, political affiliation, professional regulations, school safety, healthcare inequality, and so much more.” Its choice, then, perfectly captures the confusion and strife we are experiencing—as hope viewed with skepticism and rejection (often based on misinformation). A complex set of associations for a complex time. The Oxford English Dictionary, while giving a nod to “jab” and “Fauci ouchie,” chose a short form of vaccine—“vax”—for its word of the year. Referring to it as “jaunty,” a senior editor for the OED reported that the word “surged dramatically, occurring more than 72 times as frequently” as it did in 2020. Oxford Languages senior editor Fiona McPherson explained that other vaccine-related words increased as well, but “nothing like vax”; “It’s a short, punchy, attention-grabbing word.” The Cambridge Dictionary took a different approach, naming “perseverance” its word of the year: We can officially announce that the Cambridge Dictionary #WordoftheYear2021 is... 🥁 perseverance (noun): continued effort to do or achieve something, even when this is difficult or takes a long time Find out more here: http://ow.ly/e33L50GO1qg   #CambridgeWOTY According to the dictionary’s press release, people around the world have looked up “resilience” 243,000 times in 2021, in large part because of attempts to cope with the pandemic but also because of NASA’s Perseverance rover, which launched in February and is now sending back reports on microbial life from the red planet. I always look forward to seeing what the American Dialect Society chooses as its word of the year, but they are always later in announcing than the dictionaries so we will have to wait for that one. In the meantime, I wonder what our students would choose as word of the year, and I always think this makes a great classroom activity or writing assignment. For months, I was favoring “slog,” which is what I’ve felt I’ve been doing for the last two years. Or perhaps “one-foot-in-front-of-the-other.” “On hold” would work too, if not for word of year then perhaps feeling of the year. At least that’s better than “despair,” which I and millions of others have also been feeling as we wait, and long for, the waning of this pandemic. In the meantime, I think I’ll go with “resilience” and continue to hope. Image Credit: "Yellowed pages from a dictionary" by Horia Varlan, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

We’re limping our way to the semester’s end on our campus, and I can almost smell the anxiety, stale coffee, and giddy anticipation of winter break through my N95 mask.  ’Tis the season of self-reflection, as we invite (ok, require) students to write about how they have challenged themselves and what they have accomplished in a final essay, project, or perhaps over the whole semester, as I have written about here. We know that metacognition is a high-impact practice well worth developing, as Carol Dweck and others have argued (one of the many reasons I teach her work).  Just as many of us share with our students our own writing processes, pains, and joys, I hope we do the same with our own self-reflective work. My next annual report is due in January, and so I have spoken with my students about my process of reflection (ok, this is also required) on the new strategies I am trying in my courses, what worked and what I plan to revise next time around, and my analysis of student evaluations. Their eyes, above their masks, got big. “Will you quote us?” a student asked. “Sure,” I said, “though of course student evals are anonymous, so I can’t cite you. I trust you to offer me effective feedback, just as you have trusted me all semester.” (I write this, well aware of the research that shows the problems with student evaluations, but, recognizing my privilege, I have mostly found them effective tools when framed this way.) Any reflective writing prompt we offer our students at the end of a course could be a good model for our own self-reflection, so we don’t forget the lessons we’ve learned along the way, too. Here are a few I use for students that I plan to respond to in notes to myself. I suspect “Future start-of-semester April” will thank “Past end-of-semester April” for the insights, and (bonus!) this exercise will help me draft my annual report. What have you tried that’s new? What would you do differently next time, and why? What risks did you take, and what did you learn from them? What are you most proud of? What will you remember from this semester in five years? Why? What advice would you give next year’s students (or next year’s instructor, who might well be you)? What self-reflective prompts have you crafted for students that could also work for instructors, before we all “tak a cup o' kindness yet, / for auld lang syne”?   Image Credit: Photograph taken by the author, April Lidinsky ... View more

When many of us Baby Boomers and Gen Xers received our composition training, discussions of how to teach reading were an afterthought, if they were addressed at all. Fortunately, in recent years that has changed, and there’s currently a much-needed emphasis on integrating reading and writing in all composition courses, whether or not the word “reading” appears in the catalog description. While contemporary research about reading has begun to flourish (see the Works Cited and Suggested Reading List in the CCCC Statement below), in this post I’d like to focus on three especially valuable sources for supporting college level reading: the Reading Apprenticeship program, the essay collection Deep Reading, and the “CCCC Position Statement on the Role of Reading in College Writing Classrooms.” The Reading Apprenticeship program began in San Francisco in the 1990s and has become a robust and many-armed national entity. While enrolling in a Reading Apprenticeship class is not cheap—the 7-week introductory course costs $750—many institutions are willing to cover the cost for interested faculty. Moreover, much of the good sense and practical classroom activities covered in the courses are distilled in Reading for Understanding. The book and program employ an equity-minded, asset-based approach, building on students’ previous experiences as readers and creating a safe space for practicing common problem-solving strategies such as collaborative reading, chunking, inference, LINK (List, Inquire Note, Know), and the “Think Aloud” routine, in which a student reports to another student what they are thinking during the act of reading aloud. Throughout the book and courses, the emphasis is on metacognition, a conversation that is “both internal, as individual readers observe their own minds in action, and external, when readers discuss what they are noticing, what they are stumped by, and how they are solving reading problems” (89). Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom (NCTE, 2017) is a “celebration of literacy, intellectual generosity, and classrooms alive with deep reading and deep learning” (xxiv). In the book’s introduction, editors Patrick Sullivan, Howard Tinberg and Sheridan Blau refer to Elizabeth Wardle’s theories of two distinct learning propensities: “problem-exploring dispositions” and “answer-getting dispositions.” Clearly, the latter is preferable for inquiry-based college reading, and yet legislators continually attempt to proscribe the “messiness of deep thinking,” which Wardle argues “can be understood as an attempt to limit the kind of thinking that students and citizens have the tools to do” (xvi). The editors cite another reason for the disconnect between reading and writing in higher education: much of the most vigorous work on reading has been “written by and for secondary school teachers,” which “has helped perpetuate the idea in our discipline that reading instruction is the concern of K-12 educators only and does not require the attention of college instructors” (xvii). Happily, Deep Reading offers a wealth of approaches to reading instruction from a variety of instructors. Among the important areas the collection addresses are the reading attitudes and practices students bring with them from high school to college, strategies for cultivating reading skills students already possess, and the necessity of teaching “rhetorical reading,” which Tinberg argues in his chapter is particularly important in peer review, where “any reading of another’s draft needs to take into consideration the situation that produced the draft and the criteria and set of expectations that helped shape the writing” (253). In March of this year, CCCC released its “Position Statement on the Role of Reading in College Writing Classrooms.” The statement “affirms the need to develop accessible and effective reading pedagogies in college writing classrooms so that students can engage more deeply in all of their courses and develop the reading abilities that will be essential to their success in college, in their careers, and for their participation in a democratic society.” Those familiar with the Reading Apprenticeship program and Deep Reading will find a number of familiar concepts in the statement, including the four central principles for supporting the teaching and learning of reading: Teach reading comprehension. Teach reading approaches that move beyond basic comprehension. Foster mindful reading to encourage students to think metacognitively about their reading in preparation for a variety of reading in different contexts Teach students how to read texts closely and focus on significant details and patterns. Helpfully, each of these principles is accompanied by five specific strategies for employing the principle in the classroom. And the CCCC Statement offers a pointed reminder that instructors are never too old or young “to develop reading pedagogies that serve ever-changing student populations and are responsive to the contemporary moment.” ... View more

In my last column, I asked you to consider the claims being brought before America’s courts regarding religious exemptions to the COVID vaccine, and the arguments behind them. Using Toulmin terminology, the argument can be written like this: Claim: I should not be required to take the COVID-19 vaccine. Support: It is against my religion. Assumption: I should not be required to do something that is against my religion. As I pointed out earlier, a claim is only as valid as its support and the assumption (warrant) that connects claim and support. Because of the spiritual nature of religious beliefs, their existence is hard to prove. That is why the statement that “it is against my religion” is not as simple as it might seem. A starting point in the discussion should be whether there are religions that have a prohibition against receiving the vaccine. According to research done by Vanderbilt University Medical Center, “The only Christian denominations who cite a theological reason for opposing vaccines are the Dutch Reformed Church and Church of Christ, Scientist.” Members of those churches comprise a tiny percentage of those requesting religious exemptions from being inoculated. No other Protestant churches forbid vaccinations. What about the Catholic church? Fisher Phillips, one of the largest law firms in the U.S. representing management, summarizes the argument: “Some members of religious communities, including those in the Catholic Church, have concerns about pharmaceutical companies using fetal cell lines derived from past abortions to develop the vaccines. Their objection is the belief that receiving the vaccine constitutes co-operation with abortion. However, in December 2020, the Vatican announced that, in the absence of ethically irreproachable vaccines, the available COVID-19 vaccines were ‘morally acceptable’ given the danger of the pandemic. The announcement said that the use of such vaccines would ‘not constitute formal co-operation’ with the abortions that took place in the past.” No COVID-19 vaccine contains fetal stem cells. The stem cell lines used in developing COVID-19 vaccine are decades old and have been used in developing vaccines that most people have taken without objection in order to attend public school. Non-Catholics have also widely used the stem cell argument to try to avoid being vaccinated. Some businesses have taken an interesting approach to that claim. The right to request a religious exemption is based on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission requires reasonable accommodations for workers who have sincerely held religious beliefs — unless doing so poses an undue hardship. How do you determine what constitutes a “sincerely held religious belief”? Conway Regional Health System in Arkansas provides an example of an employer that has bluntly declared, “Prove it.” Fisher Phillips explains, “In response to the large number of such exemptions requests, Conway decided to present employees with an attestation form. In signing the ‘Religious Exemption Attestation for Covid-19 Vaccine’ form, employees must affirm that ‘their sincerely held religious belief is consistent and true’ and they do not, and will not, use any prescription, over-the-counter, or other medication or vaccines that have used fetal cell lines in their development and/or testing. The form lists 30 medications that Conway states have used fetal cell lines in their development, including everyday medicines like Tylenol, Aspirin, Motrin, Ibuprofen, Pepto Bismol, Tums, and Benadryl.” Before COVID-19, anti-vaxxers were already resisting having their children vaccinated against childhood diseases that vaccines had virtually eliminated. Diseases like measles, mumps, whooping cough, and chicken pox have started making a comeback as a result of the anti-vax movement. Now vaccinations have become so politicized that parents on both sides of the issue have started screaming at each other outside schools and at school board meetings and threatening violence. It will not be a popular move, but states may need to heed the lesson learned from COVID and start enforcing stricter rules allowing fewer exceptions for religious and philosophical reasons. A dislike for a vaccine does not constitute a legitimate reason for a religious exemption.   Image Credit: "Flu Vaccination Grippe" by Daniel Paquet is licensed under CC BY 2.0   ... View more

Today's blog is something in the nature of a retweet, focusing on the Medium blog post of a novelist whose story of online harassment could make a very good topic for classroom discussion and potential writing assignments. This is Fonda Lee's "Twitter Is The Worst Reader," which can be summed up best by a choice selection of quotations from the post itself.  I’ve been in my share of Twitter blow-ups. On six different occasions in recent years, I’ve had to step away from my computer after being buried by internet vitriol. Being on Twitter at all as a semi-public figure is like playing with plastic C4 explosive on a daily basis .  .  . To be fair, I did walk straight into controversy the first time I got dogpiled online. Back in 2018, a tweet I made about Nike’s endorsement of Colin Kaepernick got picked up and amplified by mainstream media outlets and caused Trumpists to send a wave of racist abuse my way for days. Although I stand by that tweet unequivocally, the experience sucked a lot and I emerged thinking, Okay, let’s never do that again. From now on, I’ll avoid tweeting about current events or politics and stick mostly to books and movies and writing. Unfortunately, that approach didn’t pan out, as my tweet dissecting JK Rowling’s retconning of Dumbledore and Nagini received a massive outcry from Potterheads who told me I was a sh*t writer who had no right speaking on the greatest fantasy writer of all time .  .  . In most cases when I’ve taken heat on Twitter, what I actually said mattered far less than what I didn’t say but that others inferred. I wanted Tolkien removed from bookstores, I didn’t want youth to read books, I approved of whitewashing — all conclusions that, given who I am and what I believe, make me unsure whether to laugh or cry or vomit. I was accused, over and over again, of the sin of not being clear. Many detractors told me, “If people are making the wrong assumptions about what you said, then obviously it’s because you’re a sh*t writer” .  .  .  In short: Twitter removes the trust between writer and reader by flattening meaning to the single most offensive understanding and proliferating that version alone. Lee's excruciatingly funny account of an all-too-common experience—which is driven home by a reading of the comments section that follows her blog—is something of a parable of our times, with a cultural significance that our students would benefit from by discovering for themselves. So rather than diving in with an interpretive explanation of my own, I invite you to assign Lee's essay to your students (be sure to include the comments section) and ask them to consider the following questions: What does Lee's Twitter experience tell us about the current mood in the world? Why is it so hard to make your meaning clear in online communication? What connections can be found between Lee's observation that "Twitter removes the trust between writer and reader by flattening meaning to the single most offensive understanding and proliferating that version alone," and the way that online news and information are packaged today?  How do social media like Twitter contribute to the ever-widening ideological gap in America today? Such questions may well appear to you to be rather obvious in their implications, but your students, whose immersion in the world of social media tends to make them take everything that goes on there for granted, may find them to be revelatory. By all means, add any questions of your own to the list and invite your students to come up with questions of their own.   Image Credit: "Twitter Buttons at OSCON" by Garrett Heath is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

“Every research activity is an exercise in research ethics; every research question is a moral dilemma, and every research decision is an instantiation of values.”                                     –Joshua W. Clegg and Brent D. Slife I’ve been asking myself this titular question for the last year or so and especially in the last months as I’ve been working to revise the research section in the next edition of The Everyday Writer. I’ve been encouraging students to see storytelling as part of the research process and to look for sources in what might seem like unexpected places: back porch gatherings, attic archives, cookbooks and diaries, and many forms of oral knowledge. And from all kinds of people, not just experts sanctioned by print publication. People like my grandmother, for instance, who graduated from the 9th grade—the highest grade available in her county—but was a walking archive of local knowledge, including ways to make medicines from plants that she had learned from the indigenous people there. I treasure the tape recordings I made with her when she was 95—but only recently have I thought of her as a bonafide “source” for research. I’ve been reading, too, as you probably have as well, trying to stretch my thinking beyond Eurocentric research models and methods. Most recently, I’ve been studying the second edition of Bagele Chilisa’s Indigenous Research Methodologies: Social science research needs to involve spirituality in research, respecting communal forms of living that are not Western and creating space for inquiries based on relational realities and forms of knowing that are predominant among the non-Western Other/s still being colonized. . . . I belong to the Bantu people of Africa, who live a communal life based on a connectedness that stretches from birth to death, continues beyond death, and extends to the living and nonliving. (2) Chilisa goes on to argue persuasively that research communities must expand what counts as knowledge and knowledge production and practice, as well as who counts as a valid and valuable source. She asks that Indigenous peoples of all worlds be given equal rights “to know, to name, to talk, and be heard” (4).   Recognizing the need to decolonize research methods and procedures is a first step, and it is one that Chilisa and other Indigenous researchers are helping us take. But it is only a small first step. Going beyond recognition to action, to actual change in practices, requires much more knowledge and understanding and involves, as does all research, important ethical questions. When Chilisa calls for more and better cross-cultural partnerships and collaborations, for instance, she warns that social justice research that uses these practices must change them, to make certain that they are completely inclusive. That would include using Indigenous forms of gathering information as well as Indigenous analytical frameworks—no easy task for researchers schooled only in Western traditions. I am left, after reading this book, with more questions than answers, especially about how first-year student researchers may learn and practice research based on Indigenous as well as Western principles and procedures. My approach thus far is to move very slowly on this project while I continue to read and to learn from colleagues like Bagele Chilisia, to whom I am mightily indebted. I’ll write more as I learn more, and I would love to learn from YOU. Image Credit: "Weathered Porch" by Thomas James Caldwell, used under a CC BY-ND 2.0 license ... View more

Black Panther: The Ancestral Plane NOTE: The photo is from Unsplash and is free to use under the Unsplash license. On the last day of face-to-face teaching and learning in March 2020, my first-year writing classes watched the first hour of the film Black Panther. This time, we had taken great care to investigate such historical contexts as the Black Panther Party and the 1992 civil unrest in Los Angeles, examining an early scene in the film for visual references. Students added their expertise in the work of Marvel Studios, as we laid the groundwork for self-selected topics for the second writing project.  It was Tuesday. “See you Thursday for Black Panther Part 2,” I said at the end of class. The train at rush hour was unusually empty. More commuters were wearing masks. I wrote in my journal throughout the long ride. On Twitter several hours later I saw the announcement that our university was closing down.  In the ten weeks of lockdown and confusion that followed, there was no Black Panther Part 2. Some students had already seen the film or had access to streaming services and chose to write about Black Panther anyway. But not everyone had access to the film, much less access to wifi. In April, as my city became the epicenter of the pandemic, I watched the film by myself. Although I love Black Panther, I could not bear watching the film again after that, and especially not after Chadwick Boseman died. There were too many reminders of a world that now felt lost and beyond repair. But a few weeks before the 2021 Thanksgiving holiday, we began work on writing project 3, the research paper. Students had worked on Civil Rights Movement writing for most of the semester. For the third writing project, they would need to interrogate their own learning and investigate a research question of their own choosing related to Civil Rights writing. I showed an excerpt from Stanley Nelson’s Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution.  Then, something long-sleeping stirred in my thoughts. I asked: Would you like to watch Black Panther the week of Thanksgiving? The Marvel film? The film would be an optional source for the research paper. Later that week I sent out a follow-up survey. Based on the response, there would be two watch parties, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. We would watch my copy of Black Panther together on Zoom. I envisioned the watch party as self care for students and for me as a community of writers, and as a mental health day that would allow us to keep the routine of the Zoom class. In the past, I used to set aside the week of Thanksgiving as a mental health day for all of us, students and teacher alike. My own mental health days pre-pandemic generally consisted of sleeping late, staying off the internet, and reading a book with the cat curled in my lap. This year, I would instead spend the day on Zoom watching a film that evoked painful memories of the involuntary transition from face-to-face to remote teaching and learning. What was I thinking?   I was thinking about self care as framed by Black lesbian warrior poet Audre Lorde in her book A Burst of Light. In a quote often repeated, and very often misunderstood, Lorde writes: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Lorde’s conception of self care is NOT the individualized self-care of bubble baths and essential oils, but self care as enacted by BiPOC women, a care of self that involves activism, community, and joy. Drawing on Lorde’s work, queer feminist critical race theorist Sara Ahmed  suggests, “We reassemble ourselves through the ordinary, everyday and often painstaking work of looking after ourselves; looking after each other.” I reflected once more on what self care might mean in an extended time of uncertainty and grief. Black Panther ‘s plot turns on contested ideas of self care as care for the community. Wakanda’s relationship to the rest of the world is embroiled in constant conflict, and the conflict intersects with questions from a first-year writing course focused on Civil Rights writing. In times of sorrow, exhaustion and loss, what does it mean to bear witness? To break silence? To reckon with history? Black Panther offers multiple challenges to these questions, and ends in Black joy, the joy that rests in self care and the affirmations of community.        ... View more

Emily GresbrinkEmily Gresbrink(recommended by John Logie) is pursuing her PhD in Rhetoric, Scientific and Technical Communication at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. She expects to complete her degree in 2024. Emily currently teaches University Writing, housed in the First-Year Writing program. Her research interests encompass technical communication, the rhetoric of health and medicine, pandemics, rhetorical analysis, archives, bioethics, and mentoring. She also serves on the University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts Assembly as a Graduate Student Representative, co-chairs the graduate student mentoring subcommittee for the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication (CPTSC), and works with the mentoring committee for the Online Writing Centers Association (OWCA). How does the next generation of students inspire you? I am always inspired by the creative approach students take to assignment prompts. Giving them something open-ended like a discussion post and getting a range of answers is reflective of different career paths and scholarly goals, but also of the way students think and process their work. I love seeing how students think, and how those thought processes come out on paper and multimodal assignments. Sometimes I get caught up in my own process of writing that I have been comfortable with for so long, and it’s refreshing to see how a younger scholar might approach a similar task.  I am also inspired and invigorated by the commitment to real-world change, intervention, and action my students bring to and from the classroom. Academia exists within a bubble, and it can be hard to take what we learn out of the classroom and interject it into the world. But I see and hear the ways that students want to make a difference — say, “I can use my voice to be more confident when I write about issues I care about” — that keeps me coming back to the classroom, easily. This next generation of students is going to be a paradigmatic shift in the way things are done in the world. It’s so exciting. What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students? So, hear me out: Ratatouille (2007) was really onto something when Chef Gusteau said, “Your only limit is your soul. What I say is true — anyone can cook.” I tell every one of my students that on the first day of class, and sometimes people are like … “Why is this instructor talking about a Pixar movie?”  But genuinely, I feel that way about writing — anyone can write. The skill I aim to provide my students, then, is individual practices: that is, how to tease out writing in a way that works for their position, their minds, and their bodies. Not everyone will like the pen-to-paper approach and some will like podcasting or audio forms of writing. That’s okay; let’s run with more audio-based feedback and writing remixes. Someone else might be a very technical, document-based author. Great; let’s lean into editing techniques, document design, and get them where they want to be. Letting students make safe mistakes, find what works for them, and get into the cuisine and chef skills they like (to keep the cooking metaphor alive) will help them create a writing piece (culinary masterpiece?) that fits their style.  What would your blue-sky courseware look like for a composition course?  That is a good question. I am a major fan of all-in-one tools, especially ones that include textbooks, assignments, peer review tools, calendar apps … the less clicks and stops my class has to make in their busy lives, the better it is.  I liked being able to play around with Achieve’s peer review tools this summer during the Bedford New Scholars summit. That had a slick interface. There was not a confusing exchange of emails, cross-platform integrations (email suites to LMS), and it was all in one place. And you could edit and share feedback right in Achieve, which was nice. I also really like having a good textbook to ground the coursework and discussions throughout the semester. I have previously utilized 50 Essays in a section of first-year writing and my students liked the variety of essays they got to read over the course; having everything in one place for them made it easy instead of carrying around a lot of books or having to sift through a bunch of files. Oh, and having e-book availability is great too!  What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? Oh, it is super fun. We met for a week in June and clicked right away. Every one of the other scholars in the group brings so much to the table that is unique and fulfilling to composition and pedagogy. I remember leaving our virtual event in June feeling so refreshed and ready to teach again. I am still thinking back to that week even now and calling into the ideas and topics we talked about during that time.  It is valuable as well to see and engage with how publications, textbook development, and production works as well. Sometimes as emerging scholars in graduate studies, we do not get to see that; we just work with the texts. But being able to collaborate with the folks who make the books we use is interesting — we can ask questions about publication, pedagogy, development, and the backside of what makes a book. It’s genuinely really fascinating to understand, and it has given me a greater appreciation for textbook development.    Emily’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 Emily's assignment. For the full activity, see Literacy Narrative. My assignment that works is a literacy narrative. I utilize this assignment when teaching first year writing. This is the first assignment my students and I work together on, and it is often the favorite of the whole semester. Briefly stated: A literacy narrative in this context is both a reflection and narrative — it’s a free-flowing piece of writing that allows students to dive into their identity as writers, but also lets them settle into a practice of writing and revision that they will use throughout their semester and beyond. They get to choose their own story under the direction of one prompt: writing about a time where writing impacted them.  This assignment works because it is a space for students to make productive mistakes and find their footing. Students have liked to ease into the writing process with a space to talk about themselves — they are experts in their own lives and experiences! — rather than a hard research topic. And there is some sort of catharsis about writing about writing. I cannot tell you how many students write about the trauma of ACT or SAT exams and how this class could serve as a reset for that unpleasant experience.  ... View more

This post was originally published on November 25, 2021. I will be thinking of writing teachers and writing students everywhere this Thanksgiving, and giving thanks for all the magnificent colleagues and even more magnificent students I have had the honor and privilege of knowing over my very long career.  When I count my blessings, which I try to do every single day, teachers and students—along with my beloved grandnieces Audrey and Lila—are at the top of my list. I hope this day, even in the midst of a seemingly never-ending pandemic, will bring time shared with your loved ones, time to give thanks for and with them, and time for some relaxation and reflection. With thanks, and every good wish, Andrea Image Credit: "Happy Thanksgiving everyone!" by InaFrenzy, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

I contributed to a recent publication called Resilient Pedagogy. I was drawn to the call for proposals last year by the tone of the word resilient. Resilient comes from a Latin word meaning to leap or bounce back: like coils compressed and then released, we spring back into place after a time of tension or pressure. BOINGGG! The multiple shifts in teaching context during 2020 were certainly pressure points, and my co-authors in Resilient Pedagogy highlight the creativity and determination with which faculty responded to that pressure.  But as we near the end of 2021, I wonder: Have we sprung back fully? Or have the coils perhaps tangled a bit, thrusting us more sideways than back up? Has our resilience also exposed our breaking points? It’s not the most encouraging of times for faculty right now. Just look at some recent headlines from The Chronicle of Higher Education:  “Why I Quit,” “Morale is in the Ditch,” “Tenure Under Threat in Georgia,” “Florida Is a Five-Alarm Fire for Academic Freedom.” I’m in Georgia, where issues of safety, masking, self-governance, and tenure protections have only added to the stresses of pandemic teaching. I have colleagues who—two years into a tenure-track position—talk about burn-out. This Tweet, reshared throughout social media feeds, captures the frustration: our assigned work and those ill-defined “extra duties as required” far exceed 100% of our available time. We are tired. I am so tired I cannot “can’t,” much less “even.” A quick Twitter search for “tired of being resilient” led me to many who share this sentiment. We aren’t necessarily bouncing back. We’re coping, getting by, and—in some cases—withdrawing.  For me, resilience (even before the pandemic) is what occurs in an ongoing process of adjustment: strategy X is not working for students in class Y, so we tweak that strategy (or abandon and replace it). And on occasion, we redesign the syllabus from top to bottom. But what happens when that complete redesign, the total overhaul, is needed in EVERY course AT THE SAME TIME? In the past two weeks, I’ve had multiple no-shows for scheduled individual writing conferences, and over half of those who have made it to the office (or Zoom meeting) did not have the expected draft to discuss. In my introductory syntax and pedagogical grammar courses, students have scored well below our target benchmark of 80% on tests of key concepts. Something is amiss. There isn’t much time to think about adjustments, much less complete redesigns. Yet something has to give. As I hear some colleagues talk about quitting, I know I need to ask some tough questions. Question #1: Right now, do you enjoy teaching? At the moment, no—I don’t. Well, not as much as I used to. But I don’t want to quit. Question #2: Then what (realistically) can you do about the situation? I don’t want a recipe: “three (or five or ten) steps to recovering joy in the classroom.” We can’t fix what is broken with three simple steps. And yes, the material support and confidence of our university systems would go a long way to inviting resilience and restoring joy, but I cannot make such support appear.  So, I ask myself again, what can I do about it, realistically? Here’s what I’ve come up with, for my context: In those introductory grammar classes, I can flip the classroom. Each week, I’m recording six short videos (5-8 minutes), each addressing one key concept for students to review before class. During class, we are discussing, creating tree diagrams, and working through problems. No lectures. Students have been more alert the past two weeks, and have told me they love the short videos—quarantined students are keeping up, and the short content allows for easier test review.  In those same classes, I am offering opportunities for re-tests on critical material in the class, focusing on mastery more than the grade. I’ve seen students move from 50% or 70% mastery to 75% or 90%.  Their success—and growing confidence—brings me joy.  At the same time, I am sticking to deadlines (for my own sanity): in my first-year writing classes, draft submission times are absolute, at least if students want written comments and an initial grade. I will still discuss late drafts in conference, before the final portfolio submission. But I give written (or voice-recorded) comments only for drafts submitted on time. In short, I am guarding my time more carefully. For me personally, this has included recovering the practice of a weekly Sabbath—time set aside for worship in my faith-community, time with my family, and time for good reading (Dostoevsky and Dante). And I’m looking towards an extended time for vacation and personal research (recognizing the privilege inherent in this choice): I will not teach next summer. This isn’t a rulebook or 4-step program. It’s an easing of tension: I am not necessarily “springing back” at this moment. But the coils aren’t breaking, either. I would love to hear how my colleagues are managing resilience in these difficult days.  ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Heidi Rosenberg, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Wisconsin Business School.   Teaching in the Time of COVID Shana says she’s all right. How can I help? Each student is a square within a square I hold. She nearly pulled her finger off—it got caught so typing is one-fingered. She moved to her own place. She was pregnant, then not. The father of the never-born-baby smacks. I email, it’s her birthday—“happy birthday.” I am the only one who said that.  Her family—This is why I moved out. I say, You didn’t move far enough. She has a scholarship, job, apartment. We come to terms. One thing she asks: how do I stay when there’s nothing?     Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... 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.   Summarizing is integral to writing when using other sources. Students are probably most familiar with summarizing text sources--let’s use podcasts to practice the skill of summarizing other mediums! 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 Practice Summarizing Pre-Class Work for Assignment: Assign podcasts for your students to listen to. You can assign one podcast to the entire class, assign a few for students to choose from, or assign students to specific podcasts. While any podcast will work for this assignment, you might consider one or more of the following options, which discuss topics of some debate: Should Writers Keep a Journal? Can You Start a Sentence with "Which"? Can You Say "These Ones"? "Irregardless" versus "Regardless" The Emphatic "This" Introduce or recap the concepts of summarizing for your students, such as: Identifying the thesis or main idea Recounting the main points without including every detail Using your own words Using objective language Surrounding any language from the source in quotation marks Remind students about the transcripts available for the podcasts. Tip: In an Achieve English course, you can assign instructional content about summarizing. Look or search for Reading content about summaries or summarizing. Refer to the help documentation about adding Resources if you need help adding the content to your course. Assignment: Ask students to listen to the assigned podcast and write a summary of the podcast. Pair students up or place students in small groups. Ask each student to comment on where their peers’ summaries succeed and where they might need more improvement. Tip: If you are using an Achieve English course, consider creating a custom Writing Assignment that students can use to submit their summaries and conduct peer review. Refer to the article “Guide to Writing assignments for instructors” for help with Writing Assignments. Reflection for Assignment: Ask each student to review their peers’ feedback and write a paragraph or two about the feedback they received. Then, hold a class discussion about summaries. Were there any aspects of summarizing some or many students struggled with? What was the easiest part of summarizing? What sort of language is objective? What language might be analytical or a personal response? Did any students accidentally plagiarize, and, if yes, how can that be corrected?  Follow-Up Assignment: Each student revises their summary based on the feedback they received and the class discussion, and then submit it for a grade.    Credit: "Belief System alternate: Sound waves" by Chuckumentary is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 ... View more

My recent thinking about this year’s new emojis, how they are used/abused, and especially the role they play in so much online communication led me eventually to several intriguing discussions of tone indicators, a letter or letters placed after a forward slash at the end of a phrase or sentence to indicate the tone (or feelings) intended. Also known as “tone tags,” such indicators are helpful in written communication, where body language or facial expressions can’t help convey tone and feeling. They have been especially useful for neurodivergent people who may not always understand tone or nuances of meaning. As you might expect (or know), they are widely used on social media like Twitter and TikTok. I was interested to look through a few “master lists” of tone indicators, only a couple of which I knew (my absolute favorite is /c for copypasta—look it up!). Here are some examples: /j = joking /hj = half joking /s or /sarc = sarcastic / sarcasm /srs = serious /nsrs = not serious /lh = light hearted As I thought about these “indicators,” I realized that they are not completely new. I knew, for instance, that Jonathan Swift had used special marks in the margins of his text, and that at one point an upside-down question mark had indicated a rhetorical question. (The illustrious British printer Henry Denham seems to have been the inventor of that one.). And I learned that a 17th century British philosopher, John Wilkins, used upside-down exclamation marks to signal irony. But the number and ubiquity of tone indicators in use today surprised me. While tone indicators are typically used at the end of a sentence, etiquette seems to call for including them at the beginning as well as at the end of a sentence when possible, and for never using them as a joke. Writing in Screen Shot, Malavika Pradeen says that [T]one indicators can be used anywhere over text be it personal chats, social media or even emails—absolutely anywhere the tone is ambiguous and hard to pick up on. But one disclaimer is to avoid using them as a joke. It defeats their entire purpose and strips a safe space from neurodivergent people.  So just what are these tone indicators? They're paralinguistic, certainly, but are they like punctuation marks? Or not just “like” punctuation marks but actual punctuation marks? How do our students understand their use—and how and when do they choose to use them? These sound to me like some very good research questions students might like to take on /srs. Image Credit: "Lighted Keyboard 1" by sfxeric, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

It’s never a stretch to hear writing teachers bring up social justice issues; it comes with the territory. Teaching writing means working closely with first-year students, which means facing the hard truths about why some college students manage to persist and others do not. When we read students’ writing and listen carefully to their ideas and experiences, the structural inequalities that pervade our communities and campus culture are evident everywhere. That said, I’ve never heard a conversation turn so swiftly from pedagogy to a full-on critique of capitalism as I have in a recent faculty discussion group on “ungrading.” I have written about this movement several times in this space: see here and here for recent posts. But the most recent discussion of “ungrading” practices on our campus, with colleagues from a variety of disciplines, reminded me that we might find pedagogical allies almost anywhere on our campuses, including in STEM fields. After all, most of us — and not just in Composition — pursue teaching not because we hope to sort and rank students based on an imagined meritocracy, but because we believe in the liberating potential of education. As Alfie Kohn reminds us, “a ‘grading orientation’ and a ‘learning orientation’ have been shown to be inversely related.” Further, grades train students to accept the very structural inequalities that our campus equity principles oppose, as Richard D. Wolff points out: It starts as schools train individuals to accept the grades assigned to them as measures of individual academic merit. That prepares them to accept their jobs and incomes as, likewise, measures of their individual productive merit. Under this framework, unequal grades, jobs and income can all be seen as appropriate and fair: Rewards are supposedly proportional to one’s individual merit. For this reason, I’d urge writing instructors — and all your pedagogical allies — to bring your insights to your university’s discussions about Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ). While I suspect most of us are sympathetic to DEIJ efforts, more of us could examine how the default to grade-driven pedagogy feeds precisely the opposite philosophy. Now, when so many of our campuses are rightly thinking through what it would mean to put our DEIJ principles into practice, is just the right time to insist that pedagogy is part of those discussions. Those of you reading this are the ones to raise your voices. Even if Twitter is not your customary platform, I’d encourage curious instructors to take 15 minutes to search #Ungrading on Twitter to listen to the wide range of thoughtful colleagues offering examples, testimonials, some stumbles and plenty of successes as they shift their classrooms away from grades and toward learning. I have found that every “But what about X?” objection to teaching without grades is being discussed already with innovation and creativity by our colleagues. Let’s learn from them — and from all of you — in time to try something new in our upcoming semesters. If you’re adventuring into ungrading, let us know how it’s going in the comments.    Image Credit: "3D-04-22-09-0002a interior design classroom" by jimf0390 is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more