Three people, three signs: “I’m the autistic kid, and I’m scared.” “I’m the neuro-typical brother, and I’m scared.” “I’m the mother, and I’m scared.” No, the participants in the Women’s March on Washington in January were not just whiners who were upset that Hillary didn’t win. They weren’t just a group of angry women holding vulgar signs. Okay, there were a lot of angry women, and there were vulgar signs, but those holding them would argue that they were merely responding to candidate Trump’s own language: “This p*ssy grabs back.” “Keep your laws off my [silhouette of cat.]” “Just say NO to the Groper in Chief.” “Thou shalt not mess with women’s rights. Fallopians 20:17.” And in the vein of Dr. Seuss:  “I do not like u down my shirt. I do not like u up my skirt. I do not like you near my rump.  I do not like you, Mr. Trump.” Okay, angry AND creative. Future generations will need a good bit of context to understand some of the signs and some of the sentiments: “If only my uterus shot bullets, it wouldn’t need regulation.” “I thought we resolved this sh*t in the ‘70’s.” “Trump, urine over your head.”  We’ll let this generation’s kids grow up before we try to explain that last one. Many of the signs were a response to the ethos of Donald Trump, his ethics or lack thereof. What sort of person had, the day before, been inaugurated? What sort of people were the marchers? How did their rhetoric reveal that? How did their actions? In Arkansas, marchers were attacked online for their violence because a bus carrying four Arkansas high school students, among others in town for the inauguration, was attacked by protestors and had its windshield broken. Some who commented on the story said that marchers should be arrested. One said that they should be shot and left dead in the street. The story and the time stamp on the video capturing the incident made clear that the episode took place several hours after the march was over. No protestors were arrested. With this one exception, none were violent. The rhetoric of the march had a lot to do with anger, but it also had a lot to do with fear. Arguments are based on fact and hard data, but they also appeal to people’s needs and values. A friend commented on Facebook that people who had not lost any rights had no reason to protest. People who feel their rights are in jeopardy do. That was the major focus of many of the arguments summed up on signs at the march:  We are afraid of losing our healthcare.  We are afraid of the effects of climate change. We are afraid of losing ground. We are afraid of being discriminated against because we are women, black, transgender, gay, Mexican, Muslim, disabled. Thus the trio of signs with which I began.  The march had a mission statement: “In the spirit of democracy and honoring the champions of human rights, dignity, and justice who have come before us, we join in diversity to show our presence in numbers too great to ignore. The Women’s March on Washington will send a bold message to our new government on their first day in office, and to the world that women’s rights are human rights. We stand together, recognizing that defending the most marginalized among us is defending all of us.” President Trump’s response, characteristically, was a tweet: “Why didn’t these people vote?” In large part, they did. Some voted for him. If they didn’t vote in 2016, it’s a good bet they will in 2018. Photo Credit: Donna Winchell ... View more

Thirty-four years ago, Lisa Ede and I published a brief essay in Rhetoric Review called “Why Write . . . Together.” In response to that question, we offered a number of strong reasons for writing collaboratively, including the ability to mount larger research projects and answer more complex questions. And we embarked on a research study of collaborative writing across seven fields, which we reported on in a number of articles and a book, Singular Texts / Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing (1990, SIUP).   Our persistent calls for collaborative writing and our insistence that most work in the academy is done collaboratively, whether we recognize it or not, fell on many deaf ears—until the digital revolution made it abundantly clear that collaboration is the new normal, with Wikipedia being one prime example. In addition, the research I did for the longitudinal Stanford Study of Writing showed that our students are happily collaborating on everything imaginable outside of class—and that they are increasingly collaborating on course assignments as well. And of course, scholars in STEM disciplines have been collaborating on their work, almost by definition. Perhaps, we thought, the tide has turned.   But maybe not, as evidenced by a recent report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which asks “Is Collaboration Worth It?” in regard to a panel at the 131 st meeting of the American Historical Association. This report suggests that the tide has not yet turned in the Humanities, where the single-authored monograph is still the gold standard and the sine qua non for tenure and promotion.       A panel here Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association explored the pros and cons of co-authorship in what some argued should be a particularly collaborative field (uncovering and interpreting the past is not a one-person job), but isn’t. Asked to answer the session’s titular question – “Is Collaboration Worth It?” – panelists offered a lukewarm but hopeful consensus: it may not count, but it is, in some sense, worthwhile.    By “crass” accounting, collaboration is “absolutely not” worth it, said Ben Wright, an assistant professor of historical studies at the University of Texas at Dallas who helps lead a free, online, collaboratively built American history textbook effort called American Yawp. Though the project takes up much of Wright’s time, it will nevertheless be an ancillary piece of his tenure file, he said. “I’m not going to hinge my career on this project.”   The encouraging note in this article is that the young scholars quoted all recognize the importance of collaboration for their own intellectual and personal and professional growth, even when it is not recognized by their departments. So I continue to hope that as these scholars mature they will begin to change the tenure and promotion policies in their department. But such change is amazingly slow: 35 years is a long time to have made so little progress!   In the meantime, I see a special opportunity, and an obligation, for writing teachers not only to provide assignments that call for meaningful collaboration and collaborative writing but also to introduce students to the very large body of research that supports the efficacy of such practices. It is a commonplace now for employers, from Main Street to Wall Street to Silicon Valley, to hire those who are good collaborators, good members of teams. And writing teachers know that good members of teams are not “yes” people, but rather those who look at problems from every angle, arguing out all possibilities and listening to varying viewpoints, and who know when and how to compromise without forgoing sound principles. These are abilities that teachers of writing know how to develop in students, just as we know how to create assignments that call for these abilities and that engage students in co-authorship.   So I’m encouraged that we teach students who will become history majors—and many other majors as well. We have an opportunity to send then into their majors with a strong understanding of the need for collaboration—and the knowledge of how to work and write collaboratively. Those are gifts that I hope will keep on giving and that will eventually lead to the kind of change that will make the question “Is collaboration worth it?” not even worth asking.   Image from PIXELS with CC0 License ... View more

I often find myself weighing the degree to which the workshops I lead should concern themselves with things other than the manuscript up for discussion. On the one hand, I believe in a workshop—especially at the undergraduate level—that focuses on writing, and not on what one does with the writing once it’s finished. Put another way, there’s no better element of professionalization than learning to write well. On the other hand, part of being a writer means giving readings and submitting work for publication, and I’m not doing my students any favors by pretending otherwise, or by withholding information or advice that could benefit them. Beyond that, I would argue that the very process of preparing a manuscript for a public reading or for submission to a journal makes one a better writer. When I know that I’ll be reading my work in front of actual, live human beings, I’m suddenly able to see the work with fresh eyes and less patience. I become a better self-editor. Imprecise words, flabby phrases, and lags in pacing—not to mention typos—announce themselves loudly. Similarly, when I prepare to submit a piece for publication, I find myself reading it through the eyes of someone who doesn’t already know me and who has no reason—or time—to give me the benefit of the doubt. The piece, in other words, must stand on its own, and it must stand out. So certainly there’s a pedagogical element to professionalization. Yet I value the workshop as a space that encourages ambition, experimentation, and even failure. That’s how we grow as writers, and much of the work we do in workshop is not meant for public consumption. The writer’s apprenticeship is a long one, and to rush the process—to make one’s work public before it’s ready—does the writer no favors. I’d love for others to weigh in: Does your workshop give a class reading? If so, is it made public? Does your workshop involve educating students in the submission process? Should students in workshop be encouraged—or even required—to submit their work? [This post originally appeared on LitBits on 11/3/11] ... View more

If the Golden Globe awards are anything to go by, La La Land is the greatest motion picture ever made.  Or something like that.   If we go by the most recent box office totals, it isn't half bad, either—but the Oscars haven't weighed in yet and that verdict could do a lot to boost the bottom line even further.   But if we look at La La Land semiotically, a different picture emerges, revealing not its quality or ultimate profitability, but rather what it says about America today.  Not surprisingly, that turns out to be a rather mixed message.   Let's start at the beginning, which, in a semiotic analysis, usually begins with a determination of the immediate system, or context, in which our topic appears.  In this case, that system is the history of Hollywood musicals, romantic drama division (the studio calls it a "comedy-drama," but the "comedy" part of the categorization has been questioned).  This simple act of situating La La Land within its most immediate context takes us right to our first signification, because the era of the Hollywood musical (evoking any number of cinema classics, with Singing in the Rain taking honors as the most cited of La La Land's predecessors) has long since passed, and so the appearance of a musical now marks a difference.  And that difference means something.   I see a number of significations here.  The first might be called the "when the going gets tough, America goes for uplifting distractions" precept.  Especially prominent during the Great Depression (which, not coincidentally, coincided with the true Golden Age of Hollywood), feel-good movies have always provided a distraction from the slings and arrows of outrageous reality, and nothing can beat a musical—especially a romantic musical—for making people feel good.  So it should come as no surprise, as we wallow in the wake of a Great Recession from which only a small portion of America has really emerged, that Hollywood gave the green light to a nostalgic film like La La Land, and that audiences, if not quite in blockbuster numbers, have been lining up to see it.    But if audience nostalgia accounts for a good deal of La La Land's success, there is also the enthusiasm emanating from the Hollywood community itself to consider.  The nostalgia of a movie like La La Land is very much an insider's emotion, an evocation of memories of the sort that those fortunate few who really did emerge from the madding crowd to reach the heights of the gaudiest version of the American dream can experience as their own.  For them (especially for La La Land star Emma Stone) the movie is scarcely fiction at all.  No wonder Hollywood loves it.     A less sunny side to Hollywood's self-celebration in La La Land, however, can be found in the film's use of jazz, a multicultural art form that (as a number of critics have noted) La La Land effectively whitewashes.  There is something of a Mad Men effect going on here, as if part of the film's nostalgia is for the days when the racial politics of filmmaking were more easily swept under the red carpet and white actors could be smoothly inserted into what many regard as black roles. After all, The Jazz Singer is also part of La La Land's genealogy.   Finally, to discover what may be the most profound signification of La La Land, we need to return to the fact that ordinary people are watching it and giving it high marks on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb in an era when much darker movies (e.g., anything with Batman in it, but don't forget Deadpool) are really breaking the box office.  Sure, a lot of this popularity is probably coming from viewers who are profoundly grateful for a movie that isn't some sort of superhero or sci-fi fantasy, but the fact remains that La La Land—for all of the much- ballyhooed "realism" entailed by its protagonists' less-than-professional dance chops—is a fantasy too for the vast majority of its viewers.  Which is to say that its starry-eyed "message" about "pursuing your dreams" is completely out of touch with the reality faced by Americans today.   Because (you knew I'd get to Donald Trump eventually, didn't you?) one of the indelible takeaways of the 2016 presidential election is that a substantial number of Americans have begun to lose faith in that American exceptionalist belief that America is the place where dreams do come true, where everything does turn out the way you want it to in the end if you only show enough grit and determination.  This essential optimism—what Barbara Ehrenreich calls American "bright-sidedness" (look for her in the 9th edition of Signs of Life in the USA on just this topic)—is badly fraying at the edges as the American dream falls further and further out of reach for most of us non-one-percenters.  And while this new reality is not something that the Hollywood dream machine wants to reveal in the nation's movie theaters, it certainly is showing up at the polls.   Which is to say that La La Land's success is a reflection of an America that is passing.  Its follow-your-dreams faith may have worked for Damien Chazelle, but the odds aren't favorable for the rest of us.  Guns N' Roses was certainly closer to the mark for those who do succeed in Hollywood with "Welcome to the Jungle," but the words of a Raymond Carver character (whose family has lost everything) from a short story called "The Bridle" are probably a lot more relevant for much of the rest of America: "Dreams," she says, "are what you wake up from." ... 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As I write this post, the situation around the live video of four young black people attacking and torturing a special needs white teen continues to develop.  When I first heard about the video, I thought of another Facebook live video that made headlines, the police shooting of Philando Castile, streamed to the world by his fiancée Diamond Reynolds.  Both are powerfully disturbing and quite frankly difficult to watch.  Both also suggest a potent intersection between technology and social media and race.  I’ve been thinking about how to teach these issues using Emerging, and here are some essays I would suggest.   Peter Singer’s “Visible Man: Ethics in a World without Secrets” is the logical starting point, since Singer explores not only our willingness to sacrifice privacy for panoptic security but also (and crucially for examining the Castile shooting) Singer discusses “sousveillance,” or the ways in which the watched watch the watchers, precisely what Diamond Reynolds was able to do.   Nick Paumgarten’s “We Are a Camera” is useful, too.  His discussion of the GoPro phenomenon isn’t just about the ubiquity of video technology, but also about the ways in which our experience of life changes by looking at it through a video lens.  It might be a way for students to think about the consequences of ubiquitous live video.   Bill Wasik’s “My Crowd Experiment: The Mob Project” is a great essay for thinking about the viral nature of digital media and Torie Rose DeGhett’s “The War Photo No One Would Publish” considers the power of images by examining a case of censorship.  Both of these offer additional ideas that students can use to think about the power and circulation of digital images.   Of course, race is even more central to both videos and so you might also consider Maureen O’Connor’s “Race, Ethnicity, Surgery” or Steve Olson’s “The End of Race: Hawaii and the Mixing of Peoples” or Jennifer Pozner’s “Ghetto Bitches, China Dolls, and Cha Cha Divas,” all of which consider the enduring persistence of race in America.   Since these videos also implicitly call us to action, inviting us to advocate for social justice, you could find Charles Duhigg’s “From Civil Rights to Megachurches” a valuable addition for thinking about the necessary elements that enabled the civil rights movement or Kenji Yoshino’s “Preface” and “The New Civil Rights” for exploring the future of civil rights and the kinds of actions that might be needed to bring new models of rights into being.   We’ve always wanted Emerging to be contemporary enough to engage with the world students live in.  I believe it offers ideas and concepts that can help them thinking critically about their world.  Facebook live certainly isn’t going away and our country’s racial tensions aren’t, either.  Hopefully students will gather the critical thinking skills they need to make that world a better, safer place by working with and through some of the readings in this text.    TAGS: social media, race, facebook, video, assignment idea, Peter Singer, Nick Paumgarten, Bill Wasik, Torie Rose DeGhett, Maureen O’Connor, Steve Olson, Jennifer Pozner, Charles Duhigg, Kenji Yoshino, Emerging, Barrios ... View more

Four years ago in the Bronx, I taught Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” in a first-year writing course. New York City was still emerging from the impact of Hurricane Sandy, and the trauma of unanticipated change was very much on all of our minds that spring. “Allegory” was a required text in this student cohort’s Introduction to Liberal Arts class, as well as in our writing course. In our course, the program required that we read a novel from a preselected list. That was how I came to teach The House on Mango Street with “The Allegory of the Cave.” Our focus, growing organically out of students’ writing and class discussions, became the significance of education, and the development of resilience in difficult times. Four years later, “Allegory” seems equally relevant, and brings back memories of studying this text as a first-year student many years ago. My first-year liberal arts education did not include a first-year writing course. Instead, I wrote weekly papers for Introduction to Philosophy, gaining an understanding in basic concepts of theory and rhetoric that has kept me grounded both in and out of the academy.  As a result, I remain convinced of the value of a liberal arts education for all students, across majors and disciplines. From that experience of education emerged a key question that still holds value for a first-year students: “What is truth?” Because students enrolled in our institution’s Stretch program have the benefit of having the same teacher and cohort across two semesters, I already had an awareness of students’ concerns with growing as writers. Indeed, as I read students’ reflective writing after the election this past November, I began to brainstorm readings for the spring semester. My goal was to begin in January with a reading that would take up the themes of change and transitions with the question of “What is truth?” In the fall, we had briefly discussed Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, and over break I listened again and again to Patti Smith’s rendition of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” which she performed in Oslo as part of the Nobel ceremonies. “Hard Rain” is the story of a prodigal son who has returned to his community to tell the truth of his experiences. “Allegory” is the story of leaving the Cave for the light outside. When a person returns to the Cave, the Cave’s inhabitants do not believe the truth of the world in the light outside. Different experiences, different truths: How does the audience for “Allegory” make sense of these differences? In other words, “What is Truth?” remains both a contemporary issue and an ancient rhetorical question. In teaching and learning Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” or any difficult text, an important strategy is not to abandon the text at the first signs of students’ struggles. Indeed, those struggles can become significant points for discussion and close re-reading. At the same time, it can be helpful to pair the text with more contemporary and accessible sources so that the students can synthesize rhetorical and thematic relationships across time and place. Those sources may be required by our writing programs, open for us to choose, or selected by students in collaboration and on their own. In any case, the search for truth continues and I look forward to why and how we will address this subject in class this semester. Activity With these thoughts in mind, we completed the follow activity on the first day of the course, in preparation for taking on the first writing project of the semester: Consider the meaning of this following passage from Plato's "The Allegory of the Cave."   And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent. You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners. Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave? True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads? (Plato) Then consider the connections to these two interpretations of the song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" by Bob Dylan. The first interpretation is sung by Bob Dylan in 1963. The second interpretation is sung by Patti Smith in 2016. What connections do you find between “Allegory” and the two interpretations of “Hard Rain”? Make a list of those connections, offering specific examples to support your ideas. Use this list as your study guide for your first reading of “Allegory.” When you reach a difficult place in the text, consult the list. We will discuss and write about “Allegory” in our next class.   Image source: By Veldkamp, Gabriele and Maurer, Markus [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

One of the key components of modern writing instruction is the rhetorical attention paid to the question of audience.  And I hardly need to tell whatever audience I may have here what that's all about and why it's important—especially in the era of socially-mediated inscription.  But there is another angle to the matter that, if a great many recent news stories are of any significance, appears to require some attention too, not only by students, but by instructors as well.    I am referring here to the seemingly endless stream of news reports—both from such sources as Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle of Higher Education, on the one hand, and numerous mass media news sources on the other, if the story is shocking enough—concerning college instructors who appear to forget that when writing on Internet-mediated platforms the whole world is your potential audience, because no matter how you may set your privacy settings on Facebook, or no matter how obscure you may assume your Twitter account to be, there is always someone out there ready to take a screenshot, no matter which side of the political divide you may find yourself.   The most recent cause celebre in this regard involves the Drexel University professor whose "All I want for Christmas is white genocide" tweet particularly lit up the holiday season this year.  The point of my analysis here has nothing to do with academic freedom and the related question of what Drexel administrators should or should not have said about it: I'll leave that to the innumerable online commentators who have been doing battle over those matters.  Rather, what I am interested in is the question of audience, and how a failure to consider that question can lead to all sorts of unintended consequences.   The crux of the matter here lies in the assumption that everyone who read the tweet would be aware that the phrase "white genocide" has become a special term of reference for alt-right sorts who use it to deplore the rise of multiculturalism and the impending loss of a white racial majority in the United States.  Those who have rushed to the defense of  the offensive tweet—along with its author—have assumed that everyone would have seen that the tweet was a sarcasm-inflected endorsement of a multicultural, multiracial society, not a call for a massacre.   But here is where the question of potential audience comes in, because while the author of this tweet and his intended audience of Twitter followers may be well aware of the alt-right meaning of the phrase "white genocide" these days, the majority of potential readers of the tweet are not, and to such readers the tweet is going to look appalling without some sort of semantic clarification.  But that is something that you can't do in the text-restricted medium of Twitter, and no amount of after-the-fact backfilling can repair the damage that may be done after a careless tweet. This brings up another, related point.   This is the fact that social media in general—but especially those of the Twitter and Instagram variety—either require or encourage writing in a kind of shorthand.  Unlike the blog form, which allows a writer to stretch out and elucidate when the inevitable semantic and rhetorical ambiguities of discourse threaten to fill the air with confusion, the preferred modes of digital communication today almost presuppose a homogeneity of audience, a readership that understands what you are saying because it already agrees with you and shares your perspectives.  Hence a writing in shorthand, even when the platform allows for discursiveness.   And that raises a risk.  For there is something about social media that seems to encourage provocation rather than argumentation, especially in the form shorthand-ed jabs.  Certainly this is the case when writers assume that they are writing in safe echo chambers wherein those who "belong" will nod their heads in agreement and those who don't will be offended.  But while offending those who aren't on one's side in a dispute may be "fun," it sure doesn't make for an effective argument.  In fact, it is likely to backfire—which is one reason why social media do not provide a sound platform upon which to learn university-level writing.   This matters, because at a time when America is tearing apart at the seams, it behooves us as educators to be doing everything that we can to encourage careful argumentation rather than reckless provocation.  I am not so naïve as to believe that simply resorting to rational argument will always win the day (Aristotle himself made no claim to guarantee this in his Rhetoric), but a carefully developed, audience-aware argument will, at least, have a far smaller chance of backfiring than a provocative tweet will.  Thus, it doesn't really matter whether the Drexel tweet was intended to be provocative or not (I suspect, however, that with its openly-avowed sarcastic intent, provocation certainly was part of its composition); what matters is that its disregard for audience has produced a situation that puts higher education on the defensive, not those whom the tweet meant to ridicule. In short, the thing has backfired, and, in the context of a number of similar recent backfires, this is not something that higher education can well afford. ... View more

It is not always easy to distinguish between drama as literature and drama as theatre.  My view has always been that good drama is based on good literature, but having said that, we all know that there are moments in the theatre when the action moves far beyond the printed page and its stage directions.  Those are the moments when we realize that drama is theatre. This meditation is a result of my having just seen a wild adaptation of Molière’s A Doctor in Spite of Himself directed and adapted by Christopher Bayes, whose roots are in the Theatre de la Jeune Lune.  Bayes tossed out the standard text and built a commedia dell’arte version on the comic bones that Molière had provided beneath the dialogue. The result was dynamic, wildly comic, and enthralling to the audience.  And while the slapstick, the ham acting, the sometimes lewd jokes, the inappropriate, but funny, music, and all the  screaming, shouting, dancing and romping was over, we realized that the story line that Molière concocted as a way of ridiculing the current medical profession was in a bizarre way, still intact. What I realized–and what delighted me–is that no printed version of this adaptation could ever have done justice to it.  And that goes for any version on YouTube or even the iPad or laptop–because much of the fun of seeing the play was in sharing the pleasure with a living audience. In teaching I think it is important to try to talk about the aspects of the play that go beyond the printed page, but at the same time to make sure that the literary values are clear and that they remain the bones on which the production must be animated. How do you teach students the difference between drama as theatre and drama as literature? What plays and/or performances have illuminated this difference for you and for your students? [[This post originally appeared on LitBits on December 21, 2011.]]  ... View more

I kicked off this term by setting some New School Year’s Resolutions for myself, following the model of David Gooblar’s 4 Resolutions for the New Semester on Chronicle Vitae. Overall, my focus was on building more community (and by extension, participation) and improving assessment. Now that I have reached the midpoint in my school year, it’s time for some reflection on what I have accomplished and what I still need to work on. I’ll address my ten goals from the fall one-by-one: Increase class participation. Oddly enough, the Digital Design Journals that I added to my course led to more interaction among students. I intended the journals to give students more practice in analyzing digital texts, which they did accomplish. Each student also presented a journal entry to the course, which led to great full-class discussions of rhetoric and design. I need to figure out how to accomplish the same engagement in my online courses. Give students more choice. I asked my technical writing students to Choose Their Own Projects, but I need to revise the assignment a bit. In particular, I need to make some Changes to My Coursework Proposal Assignment, which invites students to choose their assignments. I also need to do some work to ensure that they are stretching themselves with new genres they have no experience with. Switch to Pass/Fail grading. I did use Pass/Fail grading extensively in both courses I taught. The system isn’t perfect yet, however. Toward the end of the term, there was no time for revising, undermining the entire system. I wasn’t comfortable with failing students in the courses when their work didn’t achieve B-level standards. I have to build in more structure to ensure that students have time for revising failing work. Give feedback more quickly. The Pass/Fail system helped me out with my speed. I zipped through grading for all in-class work and weekly writing activities. Using mini-conferences more in my face-to-face class helped me provide lots of feedback as students quickly needed it. I need to figure out how to bring that dynamic to the fully-online courses. More formative feedback. I am doing better on this goal. When students did turn work in early enough or consulted me on drafts, I worked on providing constructive criticism and challenging them to improve their work. I need to do more for this goal, though. The timing complicates things—when I don’t receive work until the last minute, formative feedback is useless. There’s no time for revision, so students won’t use the advice. Ask students to track their own work. I added a participation log assignment to ask students to spend more time Tracking Their Participation. In addition, I developed a Participation Log Analysis Assignment to help them evaluate their participation in the course. Encourage more (or better) reflection. I need to spend more time on this goal in the spring. I asked students for reflection statements when they turned in their major projects; however, I haven’t done much to improve the process. I am going to work on integrating reflection more with the structures that encourage students to turn drafts in earlier. Add videos to online courses. I started the Fall Term with a WebEx session where I walked students through the course website and answered some basic questions. Only two students were present during the video, not surprising given that we share no common time when we can meet. Worse yet, I never managed to edit the video and post it online, so only those two students benefited. There are definite challenges. For example, I need to find $170 to buy Camtasia, so that I can edit footage properly. I think the videos are worth it, but it is a harder goal to achieve. Add an AMA session. I added an Ask Me Anything session, to all my classes this fall, as I explained in my Inviting Students to “Ask Me Anything” post. The discussion went really well. Seeing the questions students asked probably told me as much about them as my answers reveals about me. I’m definitely going to keep it as part of the beginning of all my courses. Encourage community. Around mid-October, I tried Organizing Online Writing Groups for my classes. I asked them to connect with one another for feedback and support as they needed it. The strategy still needs work. The biggest problem has been that students waited until the last moment to post to each other. The assignment led more to checking off a requirement than connecting and building community. I think it can be successful, but I’ll need to do more work to make it happen. Overall, I accomplished a lot during this fall. There are still several places where I need to do more, but I’m happy with my progress so far. How about you? Was your fall term successful? What are you looking forward to doing next term? Leave me a comment below and let me know.   Credit: Kitten Meme created on the ICanHazCheeseburger site ... View more

In this series of posts, I am looking at what we can learn from peer feedback practices in other disciplines. Lynn McNutt talked to me about peer feedback in acting.   My chat with Lynn focused largely on the logistics of peer feedback in the acting classroom, but she did make one comment that continues to stick with me: “I feel like I have become better as an actor once I became a teacher, because I used to skip steps.”  She went on to explain that teaching brings it back to basics, and that process helps her as well.   I do know that I too have become a better writer from having taught writing.  I have a better sense of how to do what I do as an academic because I have spent so much time trying to explain it to people who have no idea how to do it.  I’ll end this semester by keeping this post brief, but I wonder - do you find the same? ... View more

Recently I read (but can no longer find!) an article discussing the rise of social media in terms of its relationship to orality. The writer made the point that much of what we read on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites is conversational, deeply inflected by the conventions of speech and oral culture (with more and more emojis offering substitutes for emphasis, tone, etc.). I’ve written before about Walter Ong’s notion of secondary orality and its influence in our hyper-mediated society, and I’ve described what we might call “secondary literacy,” which is literacy infused with orality—as we see today on social media. It’s writing, all right, but writing that aims to be very much like speech. Like many other teachers of writing, I’m pondering what such shifts mean for our classrooms, for what we teach and how we teach it. In a course on the history of writing, I always began with the struggle for the vernacular in medieval Europe . . . tracing the eventual downfall of Latin and Greek and the rise of indigenous languages/vernaculars. Think of early writers of vernacular languages (Chaucer, e.g.) and you will think of some of the world’s great literature. So hooray for vernaculars! But it’s seemed to me for some time that social media brings a new sense of “vernacular,” or everyday speech, and its rise has been swift and pervasive. Challenging traditional notions of decorum or civility as well as conventional norms of all kinds, social media writing crests like a huge wave over us, bringing with it experimental uses of language that seem downright magical and innovative as well as threatening (hate-based messages especially). I have only begun to scratch the surface of this issue, to which I hope to return soon. But right now, I am concerned that in our writing classes we look closely at this “return of the oral” and its implications for how we lead our lives, especially online. Bakhtin writes of “the ability to respond” or “respondability” being key to discourse exchange, and I agree: all of what we write and speak responds in some way to what others have written and said. And we need to take advantage of this ability to respond, to get our voices out there with the messages we care most deeply about. But we also need to talk with our students about responsibility, the ability to be accountable for what we write and speak, to present credible and detailed evidence in support, and to accept consequences attendant upon our words, whether spoken or written. In a time when very powerful people want to “shut down” parts of the Internet, to move away from “net neutrality” and otherwise police the Net, and when very powerful others want absolutely no curbs on what is posted, then we badly need writing teachers and students everywhere to search for some middle ground that will encourage and reward personal responsibility and to put that responsibility to work in social media writing. [Photo by Johan Larsson on Flickr] ... View more

It has long been a commonplace of cultural studies that the "news" is never an objective presentation of the way things really are, but reflects instead the ideological perspectives of those who present it.  More profoundly, the post-structural paradigm that continues to influence contemporary cultural studies (even if the word "post-structuralism" is beginning to show its age) goes even deeper to argue that reality itself (conventionally presented in scare quotes along the lines of a Derridean erasure) is a social construction without any objective grounding.  But in the wake of the recent revelations concerning what can only be called the "fake news industry"—and the potential effect that it appears to have had on the just-concluded presidential election—I think that it would behoove the practitioners of cultural studies to take "reality" out of scare quotes, because the reign of anti-realism is really getting out of hand.   To say that this will not be happening soon, however, is to risk considerable understatement, because I've made this call before.  Many years ago I published a book (Discourse and Reference in the Nuclear Age, 1988) in which I tried to establish a semiotic alternative to post-structural anti-realism at a time when the sliding signifiers of the Reagan administration were giving the most fact-averse scholars of deconstruction a real run for their money.  And to say that I was not successful would also be to risk considerable understatement.  But I would like, nevertheless, to offer some tips to composition instructors who may be looking for ways to help students distinguish between outright fantasy and defensible reality in an era of "truthiness," "post-facts," and fake news.   To begin with, your students need to be informed that the "news feeds" that they receive on their Facebook pages reflect the same kind of data mining techniques that digital marketers employ.  By spying on the content posted on your Facebook page, Facebook can predict just what sort of news you are likely to want to get.  This not only means that "liberals" will accordingly receive "liberal" news and that "conservatives" will receive "conservative" news, but that liberal or conservative third parties—who have access to Facebook's data mines—can effectively spam your page in the same way that advertisers do—except in this case the spam is "news," not advertising.  The result is an echo chamber effect, within which everyone hears only the news that they want to hear (or already agree with).   So the second thing to realize is that the polarized (and polarizing) "news" situation in America is no longer simply a matter of whether you watch MSNBC or Fox News: these days the social network is the echo chamber, and that is a much trickier thing to resist.  For now it is not some network stranger who is providing you with your news, it is your own friends and family, whom you are lot more likely to trust, no matter what weirdness they send you.  The only way out of this echo chamber, then, is to get off social media and do some research, constantly seeking out multiple sources of —and perspectives on—information, especially when something you hear just doesn't seem very likely.  I'm not saying that unlikely things don't happen in this world, but, as they say in science, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," and so, extraordinary news requires extraordinary levels of active media scrutiny.   Finally, at a time when each side of the great American political divide doesn't trust anything that the other side reports, it is important to recognize that the concoction of fake news is not an ideological monopoly, especially at the extremes, where, to take one all-too-common example, the so-called "false flag" conspiracy narratives of both the left and the right can be disturbingly similar in their levels of sheer evidence-deficient fantasy.   So the best ground for refuting such post-fact fantasies remains good old-fashioned empirical evidence.  But we can't demand such evidence if we insist that there is no empirical reality and that everything is a social construction.  That is why the semiotic paradigm that I use, as influenced by Charles Sanders Peirce, is not a post-structural one.  It accepts a reality outside our sign systems and against which our signs can be tested and evaluated.  Absolute objectivity cannot be theoretically achieved by this paradigm, but it does supply a basis for identifying outright fabrications. In short, in this "post-truth" era, it's high time to get real. ... View more

When I began teaching, I printed out every call for proposals, chapters, and articles. I carefully highlighted the relevant due dates in neon orange and arranged them in due-date order in a wire basket on my desk. That was the last time that I looked at them until the end-of-the-term purge, when I sorted through all the passed calls and tossed them into the trash. Decades later, I was following the online version of this process. I dragged every call for proposals, chapters, and articles to a “CFP” folder in Gmail and then at the end of the term, I dragged them into a subfolder I named DEAD. I did try some experiments along the way. I made a “Maybe” folder, for the CFPs that I thought had potential, and there was a “Not Likely” for CFPs that I liked, but didn't think I could respond to. All those CFPs ultimately ended up in the “DEAD” folder too. I tried organizing things in Evernote. I tried printing them out again. I tried pinning them on Pinterest. I tried pasting notes about them in online sticky notes on my desktop. I tried real sticky notes hung up all over my office. I tried everything I could think of, but somehow nothing worked for me. I let scores of CFPs pass by, unanswered. Honestly, I felt like quite the failure. Academics all over the world manage to keep track of their CFPs and even replied to them, while I only seemed to figure the calls out too late to respond. In late September, I added a couple of CFPs that I was interested in to my Google Calendar. Since I look at my calendar several times a day, I saw those CFPs frequently. After a few days of seeing those CFPs, I realized that I had come up with a solution that actually worked for me. I went through my inbox folders and added all the relevant CFPs in rhet/comp, technology, pedagogy, and professional writing. I ultimately added calls for nominations, awards, and association positions, as well. Once I added all this information, I decided to make the calendar public in case it could help any colleagues. This week, I’m inviting you to take advantage of the calendar as well. You can find my calendar of CFPs by visiting http://tengrrl.com/cfp. In addition to visiting the whole collection on my website, you can follow simple instructions to  add the entire calendar to your Google calendar and to add individual calls to your Google calendar. I update the calendar about twice a month, adding any CFPs that are posted on the listservs that I subscribe to. If you have a CFP that I missed, you can email it to me. So, I invite you to heed the call with me. Look through the calendar and find a call that you can respond to. It's a perfect time to make a New Year’s resolution to publish something. I hope you find something that fits you perfectly.   Credit: Juliet by Colleen A. Bryant, on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license ... View more

The end of any semester inspires reflection on successful projects and areas that need improvement. This semester, I hope to take that reflection a step further by making plain what I usually try to keep invisible. I want to write about teaching with depression.     In offering this story, I do not want to indulge in what the late comedian Stella Young called “inspiration porn.” Trying to recalibrate depression medication was not inspiring. It was painful. I have written a great deal about ADHD (See David Bowie, Difference, and Basic Writing) and how the quality of resilience has inflected my teaching. But I have not written at all about depression, which also impacted my work this year. When I was growing up, depression was greatly misunderstood and largely kept secret from outsiders. “You take life too seriously,” people would say, “just snap out of it.” I did not know why I could not snap out of it. For many years, I internalized the shame of feeling “different” and even “difficult.” My ADHD diagnosis felt liberating, and allowed me better access to understanding difference and difficulty. Depression, hovering over this term in an ongoing fog of sorrow, touched every aspect of my life.   After oral surgery a year ago, my anti-depressant medication seemed to stop working. For months, my doctor and I experimented with trying to find a solution. Since I had taken that medication for several years, recalibration and withdrawal became physically painful. I felt tired all the time. I tried going to bed earlier, and found myself awake before dawn. For the first time in many years, I began drinking coffee again. That also did not work. Coffee lessened the effectiveness of my ADHD medication, and also my resilience. Once I realized what the coffee was doing, I gave it up immediately.   Indeed, ADHD resilience helped me gather up the strength to teach. In class, I knew I could hyper-focus my attention completely on students and writing.  Outside of class and the office, depression took hold. I felt distractible and disorganized. I cried often. It became harder to read, harder to write, and harder to grade. The future felt immensely bleak, even as I knew many people experienced great unhappiness through the long election season. When the symptoms did not abate, I knew that I could not blame everything on the election.   I paid attention to the qualities of unhappiness, afraid to speak out because my depression seemed invisible to others. People commented on my optimistic outlook. Like a cat, I felt an instinct to hide my despair. I did not want to listen to comments I had heard in the past: “Everyone feels bad now.” Or: “You need to stop overthinking everything.” I admired Disability Studies scholars who wrote openly on mental disabilities. I did not yet feel comfortable with that openness, and I carried in my thoughts the lifelong caution that I was raised with: keep depression secret. The difference this year is that I learned how to teach with depression. Or rather, by observing the work my students accomplished as writers, I have more perspective on the nature of secrets.   This year my depression was not invisible, and I cannot keep it secret any longer.  Yes, I made it through the semester, and felt relieved to read the writing that came from time spent with students. The students in my Stretch classes wrote powerful extended definitions of resilience, innovation, and compassion. The essays we read and the TED talks we watched focused on these topics because, despite our differences in age and background, these concepts offered strands of hope. In the Basic Writing Practicum, the graduate students and I designed a pedagogy website, which includes assignments, activities, and annotated bibliographies. We launched the website last week under the title Eclectic Scriveners Writing Beyond Catastrophe.   With the website that evolved from BW Practicum, we focus on the necessity for all teachers to cultivate compassion for our students and also for ourselves: efficacy, creativity, challenge, and difference. On the homepage, we offer this description of our group’s name— and of our pedagogical purpose: “Our eclectic group meets—and writes—with the daunting purpose of meeting head-on the crisis that surrounds basic writing, to show how basic writing may be used effectively in college settings, to show that for as many limits it implies and places for/on students, it offers just as many possibilities.”   To name the crisis allows us to honor the struggle. Depression is not a metaphor, and neither is Basic Writing. ... View more

Much ado of late in response to one Scottie Nell Hughes, “News” Director of the Tea Party “News” Network: “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.” From all the online chatter in response to Hughes’s “jaw-dropping statement,” you’d think that this is a new idea; Hughes is a force to be reckoned with; and reckoning with her word stream is a good way to spend your time. My responses, in order: it isn’t; she isn’t; it isn’t.   After the election, Ann and I were doing the kind of joking around you do when the world is ending. The search-for-a-way-to-make-the-present-bearable kind of joking. That’s the magical thing about laughter: it can help one gather strength and find community again; it can make what seems certain, pliable and what seems central, peripheral.   For some, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show performed this function on a nightly basis. Plenty of laughing there, for sure. Did you see Stewart last night? my students would ask. (Less so now, with Noah.) And now, after the election, one can even be lectured to by the show’s former host about the hypocrisy of liberals labeling everyone who voted for the president-elect a racist. In a discursive environment where one side contends there are no longer facts, arguing is a fool’s errand; so, too, is arguing with an icon of political comedy, now resting in comfortable retirement, about the significance of the fact that his neighbors think the most pressing problem at present is the prospect of higher insurance premiums. These are not arguments that can be won. [1]   Our students have long found refuge in the claim that everything is just a matter of opinion, and its corollary, opinions are something everyone has a right to. You can call that stance “post-fact” or “no-fact,” but those labels conceal what’s most important about claims of this kind: they are all founded on ignorance. You can’t argue someone out of a state of ignorance, but we can, as teachers, get our students to write their way out the foggy world of self-stupefaction by getting them to write their way into a world where facts exist and must be contended with.   What Ann and I argue in Habits is that creativity emerges out of deep engagement with facts. There is no way to assign this deep engagement: it emerges when we craft a sequence of assignments that gets students to experience what it feels like to think seriously about issues of genuine import. These experiences aren’t scalable; they arise when, as writers, we come up against a reality that is simultaneously incontrovertible and incomprehensible. When we give our students a chance to have this experience, we create a space where writing ceases to be a mere tool for arguing what one thought all along and becomes, instead, a technology for thinking new thoughts.   In my classes, my students always know what hard facts I’m writing about; I tell them so they will see that writing is so hard because it is always about encountering the limits of your own understanding; it is always about confronting your own ignorance.   Currently, I’m deep into a research project on Abu Ghraib. Here’s a fact I can’t escape:   Nine of the eleven soldiers who were eventually court martialed for abusing Iraqi detainees at the prison in Abu Ghraib were members of the Army reserves. Weekend warriors. One minute you’re a cashier at the local grocery store in Cumberland, Maryland, the next you’re stationed just outside of Baghdad, assisting in the effort to police and control a prison population whose proportions are distressingly amorphous. These reservists didn’t speak Arabic. They claim never to have been taught about the Geneva Conventions. They gave the detainees nicknames. Gomer Pyle. Mr. Burns. Big Bird. Gilligan. The nicknames came from their shared storehouse of cultural references—from what might be called their “collective unconscious” or their “imagined community.” What they shared, the reservists and enlisted alike, was the experience of watching TV.   This last fact interests me. What to make of it? It is incontrovertibly true and, at the same time, incomprehensible. It is, in short, an invitation to write. [1] El Burro, who never listens to a word I say, did exactly this. You can read his effort to pin his tail of disapproval on Jon Stewart here. ... View more