Despite the controversy surrounding vaccine mandates, they are already being enforced in many places. Additional vaccine mandates affecting many more people will go into effect by January. The people who refuse to receive the COVID vaccine cite a variety of reasons, the most common probably being that no one has the right to force individuals to be vaccinated against their will. For a while, a popular refrain from people rejecting the COVID vaccine was that no one can require an individual to take an experimental drug. However, when a COVID vaccine was approved by the FDA for use beyond an emergency basis, that argument no longer applied. Some people, not surprisingly, feared getting the vaccine while they were pregnant. Tragically, some of the people who declined the vaccine died after contracting COVID-19, sometimes without ever having met their babies, even after the CDC encouraged those who are pregnant or breastfeeding to get vaccinated. Though some news networks continue to put out misleading information suggesting that the vaccine is not medically safe for specific individuals, those cases are, in fact, far less likely than the cases of unvaccinated people dying from COVID. According to the CDC, there have been only two serious types of health problems after vaccination. One is anaphylaxis, which is an allergic reaction that can occur after any vaccination. Medical personnel can administer medication immediately to treat this reaction, which is why those being vaccinated are asked to wait 15-30 minutes before leaving. The other is Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome, or TTS, which has occurred at a rate of 7 per million vaccinated women between 18 and 49 and even more rarely for women over 50 and men of all ages. There have also been a handful of widely publicized cases of myocarditis and pericarditis in young adults after the second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, but the CDC states, “These reports are rare and the known and potential benefits of COVID-19 vaccination outweigh the known and potential risks including the possible risk of myocarditis or pericarditis.” Other claims, such as Aaron Rodgers’s recent statement that he has not had the vaccine for fear it will affect his fertility, are not supported by medical science. As for the government’s right to mandate vaccination, critics are correct that the federal government cannot mandate that the general population be vaccinated. State and local governments can, and historically have, in the name of public health. Additionally, the federal government has the power, which it has exercised, to require federal employees and active military to be vaccinated. The extent to which the federal government can require private employers to mandate vaccinations is still a matter for the courts to decide. The final resort for anti-vaxxers even before the first known case of COVID-19 was to claim a religious exemption. According to Immunize.org, in May 2021, 42 of the 50 states allowed religious exemptions for the vaccines required to attend public school. Between 15 and 17 allowed more vague  “personal” exemptions, depending on which and how many immunizations were involved. Consider the claims being brought before America’s courts regarding religious exemptions to the COVID vaccine, and the arguments behind them. Claim: I should not be required to take the COVID-19 vaccine. Support: It is against my religion. Warrant: I should not be required to do something that is against my religion. A claim is only as valid as its support and the warrant that connects the two. And, as NPR has wisely summed it up, “There’s a lot to unpack there.” I will try to unpack it in terms of the arguments behind the headlines in my next blog post.   Image Credits: 78521431 from Jon Tester is a public domain image. Cross by Mingo Hagen is licensed under CC by 2.0. ... View more

The impish offspring of mischief and malice, comedy and cruelty, the Internet "meme" has emerged as a major player in contemporary political and popular culture. Just take the recent off-year elections in the United States—which were, in effect, a referendum on the presidency and party of Joe Biden—wherein an explosively popular verbal meme may well have played a significant role, especially with regard to the state of Virginia, which appears to have just "gone Brandon."  If you don't know who, or what, “Brandon” is, I didn't either until a few days ago when I finally decided to investigate what all those references in the news to the words "Let's Go Brandon" were about. Discovering that they involved a NASCAR driver and were being gleefully repeated by Republican officials, I assumed that somebody had gone off on some sort of political rant against the Democratic party and was now being celebrated as a hero of the populist right. I was wrong, of course, and if you still don't know what I'm talking about, I'll let NPR explain it for me. Here is the lowdown:      The origins of the meme go back to Oct. 2, when race car driver Brandon Brown won his first NASCAR Xfinity Series race and was being interviewed by NBC reporter Kelli Stavast. In the background, some in the crowd can be heard chanting, "F*** Joe Biden," though Stavast says, "You can hear the chants from the crowd, 'Let's go, Brandon!'" in her broadcast.     The problem was that "Let’s go, Brandon!" wasn't what the fans were chanting at all, so it did not take long for the whole thing to go viral, with many accusing Stavast of deliberately misrepresenting what the crowd was really saying to protect the President. "Fake news!" went the cry, as "Let's Go Brandon" became a rallying cry of the right, and a substitute for, well, you know. So now, in a country that can commodify virtually anything, you can purchase "Let's Go Brandon" ball caps, tee shirts, lawn signs, hoodies, and God knows what else. Aside from the fact that a lot of people are expressing, with gleeful malice, their partisan dislike for Joe Biden through the almost incantational reproduction of this meme, we can take away from the whole brouhaha a few important cultural-semiotic significations. The first is that satirical humor—long demonstrated by such popular cultural stalwarts as The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live—can be employed with potent partisan effect. Heaven knows how else anti-Trump America got through the MAGA era without SNL's inspired weekly parodies and impersonations. But the second takeaway—as a corollary to the first—is that satire is a two-edged sword and can be wielded by the right as well as by the left—as can be seen in the way that "Let's Go Brandon" became, in effect, an underground campaign slogan in the November elections, with Virginia in particular essentially “going Brandon.” But the third takeaway may be the most profound. This is the way that the "Let's Go Brandon" episode tells us how, in the age of the internet, nothing goes unnoticed, and that anything can be recontextualized, remixed, and mashed up into something that was never intended. NBC's Kelli Stavast certainly did not intend to become a kind of Republican campaign consultant without portfolio during her rather harmless interview with an excited young NASCAR driver, but that is what she has become, reminding everyone that the slightest slip up can always be magnified into gigantic proportions by the digital megaphone of the World Wide Web, and that the whole world is always, quite literally, watching.   Image Credit: "Red-hatted man watching the Red Arrows" by Ben Sutherland is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

On November 5, I had the great pleasure of attending a webinar on Mexican American rhetorics held by Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR), my intellectual home for the last 15 years of my career. The Program’s faculty director, Adam Banks, who had conceived the webinar, opened the program by announcing that PWR has been approved to offer a new “notation” in cultural rhetorics and that he and Zandra Jordan, the brilliant director of Stanford’s Hume Center for Writing and Speaking, would be team-teaching the inaugural course in the new program during winter term. A “notation” in Stanford-speak is a designation that appears on a student’s transcript indicating that the student has taken a concentration of related courses—something akin to a minor but allowing more latitude in completing the required work. PWR has offered a very popular and successful notation in science communication for several years, so the cultural rhetorics notation will join that one among PWR’S undergraduate offerings. What Adam and Marvin Diogenes have done in bringing these notation programs into existence is just short of miraculous, given the traditional marginalization of writing at the university (as at other so-called “ivy” schools), so to say I was delighted is an understatement. As I learn more about the notation and the new course that Adam and Zandra will begin teaching in January, I will write more about the substance of both, and perhaps about the more-than-lively conversation about “pluriversal” as opposed to “cultural” rhetorics going on online right now. In the meantime, the webinar on Mexican American rhetorics provided a great deal of food for thought. Professors Gabriela Ríos, Aja Martinez, and Jaime Mejía kept me on the edge of my seat during the two-hour session. In “One South Texas Chicana’s Theory in the Flesh,” Ríos spoke of “testigos de maíz,” telling us something about her childhood in the Rio Grande Valley; about her mother’s refusal to sign slips to allow her to go on always racist “field trips;” about pre-colonial stories like the one about how Crow became human; about her own growing awareness of what it meant to be indigenous, to be human, and to be mestizaje; about how these states of being correlate, contradict, or shift; and about how mestizaje might be made to encompass indigeneity without simply accommodating to white culture. All questions and issues for a Mexican American rhetoric. Aja Martinez presented “Encomium of a Storyteller: Grampa Alejandro’s Mexican-American Rhetoric,” introducing us to her grandfather and his use of stories that provide a counternarrative to the master tropes of white western U.S. mythology. Such counternarratives serve as a major Mexican American rhetorical method, along with family histories and traditions, testimonios, and cuentos. All part of Mexican American rhetoric(s). In his presentation, Jaime Mejía cited Adam Banks’s and Keith Gilyard’s On African American Rhetorics, suggesting that it provides inspiration for a much-needed volume that might be called On Mexican American Rhetorics. Indeed, the need for such a volume is pressing, given not only the role of Mexican languages and culture in the U.S. today but also the enormous richness of the topic and the exemplary body of work that scholars can draw on to illustrate and exemplify the principles and values and methods of such a rhetoric. Mejía’s title, ”Crossing Over and Crossing Back, Over and Over,” provided a key term a Mexican American rhetoric could build on. In his presentation, Mejía described his own multiple and layered crossings, from the Texas/Mexican borderland of his youth to his time in PWIs for graduate school and teaching to the significant crossing over he did in March 2020 when a routine trip to his “home home” in the valley turned into an 18-month stay during the pandemic. Living there during this time made him aware of how much “crossing over” was going on, both literal and figurative, and this lived experience brought him “closer than studying the borderlands through academic books ever could”: The dynamic rhetorical dimensions of crossing over are clearly working in many ways for most of the people living in the Valley, dimensions operating through people, their varied cultures, and their unique cultural discursive practices. My experience down there during this time showed me how much more difficult living among white people can be, as they often don’t possess the ability nor the desire to cross over. Mejía’s discussion of crossing over took me back to Maria Lugones’s concept of “world traveling,” a kind of crossing over into another person’s world that allows the traveler not only to understand but to love that world and to become new in important ways. (See “Playfulness, World Traveling, and Loving Perception,” in Hypatia, Summer 1987, pp. 3-29.) A volume devoted to surveying and outlining Mexican American rhetorics could make good use of the world traveling and crossing over tropes, along with a number of other moves and methods discussed during this thoughtful and provocative webinar. My hope is that these three panelists might undertake such a project—and the sooner the better. Having such a volume, along with Gilyard and Banks’s On African American Rhetorics and Lu Ming Mao’s Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie: The Making of Chinese American Rhetoric—my goodness, how I would love to teach a course using these three books and how I would love introducing today’s undergraduates to the nuances of each and of helping them learn more about the rhetorical strategies and methods of their own “home home” cultures and languages. For today, though, I am grateful for the steps scholars like Ríos, Martinez, and Mejía are taking to illuminate the contours of Mexican American rhetoric. Image Credit: "Mexican Blanket" by Ms. Phoenix, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Courtney A. MauckCourtney A. Mauck(recommended by Rachael Ryerson) is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at Ohio University. She expects to finish her degree in Spring 2022. At OU, she serves as Assistant Director of Composition and primarily teaches first-year writing courses. She also teaches junior composition courses themed around feminist game studies and has co-taught two graduate courses, “Teaching College English” and “Learning Transfer.” Additionally, she has received her certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies. Her research interests include digital rhetorics, multimodal composition, social media, game studies, learning transfer, and first-year writing pedagogy.   How do you ensure your course is inclusive, equitable, and culturally responsive? For me, I think the most important aspect of this is always being flexible and willing to learn or try new things. Of course, there are some common “best practices” when it comes to making the classroom a more inclusive and equitable space; however, there are certain issues or ideas that may be unique to a specific class or a specific group of students. For this reason, I always start my courses with a Welcome Survey where I try to gauge things like students’ prior knowledge coming into the course and students’ feelings about writing. Within this, I always ask: “Is there anything I can do, as an instructor, to make this class more welcoming or accessible for you?” In doing this, I am often able to learn both students’ accommodation needs and students’ expectations, fears, and/or concerns about the class and then can quickly adjust based on those responses. It is important to me that my students see the classroom as a collaborative space where they also have a voice.     What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students? I think the most important skill I aim to provide my students is confidence in their abilities as writers. Often students enter the writing classroom assuming that writing is an innate skill that they simply do not possess. So many students have told me “I’m just not a good writer” or that “Writing is just not my thing” and many other variations of the same. For many students, writing ability is viewed much like an achievement in a video game—once you unlock it, that’s it, you’re a writer now! Because of this, one of my main goals in the classroom is to help students see writing as a rhetorical tool that they can practice using for different purposes and within different contexts. They all already do writing in their everyday lives, they just need some help making those connections to rhetorical concepts and building their confidence in themselves.  What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? Being a part of the Bedford New Scholars program is an amazing opportunity. I think one of the most important experiences for junior scholars is having opportunities to connect with other junior scholars. The Bedford New Scholars Virtual Summit this year provided so many opportunities for me to connect with and learn from other scholars. Most importantly, the summit (and the program in general) brings together scholars with diverse research interests and academic backgrounds. The “Assignments that Work” presentations gave me the experience to learn directly from other teachers about new and exciting things I could be doing in my classroom. This is incredibly important to me. On top of that, the Bedford New Scholars program has allowed me to work on projects that align with my research interests, such as giving feedback on a textbook manuscript in order to ensure it aligns with the goals and values set forth by scholarship in antiracist pedagogy.  How will the Bedford New Scholars program affect your professional development or your classroom practice? During the virtual summit this summer, not only did I have the opportunity to learn from the other scholars, but I also had the opportunity to learn from the great team at Bedford/St. Martin’s. The summit itself was a great professional development opportunity. Learning about higher ed publishing and getting to see some of the textbooks and other resources that Bedford/St. Martin’s is producing (such as Achieve) has really impacted the way I think about the relationship between classroom practice and classroom resources. As a graduate student, things like textbooks and LMS are often decided for you. However, the Bedford New Scholars program has given me practical experience with designing activities and courses that fully integrate the textbook and additional materials that Bedford/St. Martin’s provides.      Courtney’s Assignment That Works: “Bad” Design Activity 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 Courtney's assignment. For the full activity, see "Bad" Design Activity.  In all my first-year writing classes, students are expected to compose multimodal projects. However, students can often be hesitant to engage in this kind of work in academic spaces, even when they have experience composing multimodally outside the classroom. For this reason, I have students first practice multimodal composing by purposefully designing a poster or infographic that is “bad” based on the design principles they’ve been learning in Writer/Designer (such as emphasis, alignment, or contrast). In groups or together as a class, we work together to discuss what makes the poster design “bad” and how we could make it more effective.  In practicing “bad” design, students are able to learn a bit about good design in a space where failure is a safe option. Because the activity is low-stakes, students are given an opportunity to practice using multimodal tools and producing multimodal texts without any expectations or fear over their grade. Usually the texts that students produce are quite comical and easily get the whole class engaged in a discussion about multimodal rhetoric and design. My hope is that this activity gives them the confidence boost they need to move forward with more complex multimodal projects.  ... View more

As we move closer to the second year of the Covid pandemic, it has become something of a truism that online education is not as effective as face-to-face instruction. A September UCLA Health study, for instance, reported that 93% of undergraduates surveyed “were having trouble coping with pandemic stressors.” Those challenges have been especially hard on first-year college students. Writing in Insider Higher Ed, Maria Carrasco cites an ACT report in which students refer to issues with technology, as well as “lack of motivation, difficulty retaining information and trouble understanding concepts without ‘hands-on’ experience as their biggest hurdles.”             There’s no doubt that online instruction presents obstacles for many students, whether it’s a lack of reliable internet access or an inability to make human connections through digital platforms. And yet e-learning, in some form or another, appears here to stay. As we come to terms with that fact, it’s worth identifying those areas where online education is most effective. In first-year composition, peer review of drafts is a particularly productive locus for communal digital learning.             Peer review has long been a staple of in-person composition courses, and for good reason. It’s a fairly low-stakes—usually ungraded—activity that allows students to stretch their wings as both writers and readers of expository prose. When it is going well, peer review encourages students to think on their feet and to offer insights that may not have occurred to their instructor. Presenting a draft to their classmates makes it clear to that student writing has a real, live audience.             And yet peer review in the face-to-face classroom can too easily veer into a conversational free-for-all, where talk about last weekend’s activities overshadows discussions of an essay’s organization and purpose. Unfortunately, even when students stick to the topic, their advice may counter to our process pedagogy (e.g., “This is great as it is—don’t change anything”). Moreover, monitoring and shaping the progress of five or more separate peer groups scattered around a classroom can also be too much for a single instructor to handle. Even in the smaller corequisite section, when it’s easier for the instructor to help maintain focus, too often, in my experience, entropy prevails.             In contrast, asynchronous online peer groups offer a more deliberative revision experience. Whereas the in-person peer review session may, despite the best planning, quickly go off-track, the online peer group is driven by the questions the instructor provides. Instructors have a written record of who has commented and what they have said. Helpful advice can be fostered and questionable advice can be addressed in a way that honors the commenting student’s thinking, yet guides it towards an approach more in keeping with the instructor’s pedagogy.             The asynchronous format also provides students with more time to respond. Too often, in face-to-face peer review, the glibbest person takes over the discussion, with shy students effectively shut out of the conversation. However, the most thoughtful peer comments tend to be the product of careful rereading and reflection, and online peer review enables students to sit with their observations rather than blurting them out in a competitive fashion.             Carrasco points out that “students from low-income families and…first-generation students had limited access to both technology and the internet,” and I in no way want to minimize the complications facing students trying to reach what Katz et al. call “remote learning proficiency.” Not surprisingly, students with difficulty accessing digital spaces are frequently among those most eager for in-person instruction. However, students who, for whatever reason, do find themselves in an online course, are better served by an asynchronous than a synchronous experience when it comes to developing “workarounds for spotty internet and malfunctioning devices.”             Once they are connected, online peer review allows students to comment on each other’s work in a far more robust manner than those of us who came of age in the analog classroom could ever have imagined. Whether it is employing a tool as basic as the Comments feature in a Google doc to annotate a passage, or taking advantage of sophisticated educational software like Achieve, the available technology is remarkable, to say the least.             My final peer review question for students is this: “Do you think the student writer enjoyed composing this essay? If not, what can the student do to make the essay topic their own?” I like to end by reminding everyone in the peer review group that—however many suggestions they receive from their classmates—ultimately, the writing they do belongs to them. ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn, a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy, and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition   Overview In my classes, I have always recognized the importance of observation and inference as students move back and forth between narration and exposition as they write. This is even more important for digital writers as they learn to read and render situations through multimodal composing. Observation and inference are generally practiced in scientific or social science settings to understand evidence, predict behavior, and generate conclusions, but students benefit from this understanding in composition classes as well. Click to view Observation and Inference Activity slide show.According to Key Differences, observation is “the act of carefully watching a person or object when something is happening.” Observation generally involves the senses and objective perceptions of what is presented. It is hands-on, in-the-present and requires “[attentive] monitoring of the subject under study.” Inference making is “termed as an act of deriving rational conclusion from known facts or circumstances.” It is generally subjective and involves making assumptions based on observations and often involves secondhand information. This is where we theorize, guess, and make connections. Since inference making is subjective, we often find that we can make many inferences based on a single observation. In a common example, we can observe that the grass is wet (senses) but we can make multiple inferences such as: it rained, sprinklers were on, it is in a flood zone, or a dog recently stopped by (among others). Or, we might notice that someone has a lot of food in their refrigerator and make the inference that they are a good cook or preparing for a vacation or that they are really hungry. Basically, these assumptions could all theoretically be true based on what we observe in front of us but could also generate alternate inferences that could be considered true too. In this assignment, I ask students to understand and apply the concepts of observation and inference and immerse themselves in a place where they take images of their observations and generate plausible inferences. They set up a visual, double-entry journal of sorts in which they include their images (observations) along with inferences to make meaningful connections. We then create a collaborative slide show to share their ideas through multimodal examples.   Resources The St. Martin’s Handbook – Ch. 9g, Thinking Critically about Visual Texts The Everyday Writer (also available with Exercises) – Ch.7f, Think Critically about Visual Texts EasyWriter (also available with Exercises) – Ch. 8, Reading and Listening Analytically, Critically, and Respectfully   Steps to the Assignment Help students define the terms observation and inference (see Key Differences article as a starting place). Once I have shared working definitions, I show the class a collection of my own images for an observation and inference making activity in which they call out inferences to practice this cognitive process. I encourage multiple responses to demonstrate the theoretical nature of inference making and ask students to cite evidence from their observations that lead to their conclusions. Next, I challenge students to find a location (outside of class on their own) to collect observations in the form of images (usually around 20). I encourage them to use their senses and get specific as they take pictures of objects, landmarks, people, buildings, landscapes, and other things that involve sensory observation. Then they choose 10 images and create a page in which they include the image (observation) and a short paragraph describing their inferences (meaning, assumption, idea). I also ask them to include an overview statement in which they speak to some of their connections and ideas (observations and inferences).   Once back in class together, each student chooses a strong example from their collection and submits the image and an explanation of their inference to a collaborative Google slide show. (This should just take a few minutes if they are prepared ahead of time.) We share and review them as a class and talk about examples.   Reflections on the Activity A humorous example of how inferences can change with context.I use this activity to get students to understand that the concepts of observation and inference- making are forever present in our lives and in processing our worlds. As digital storytellers, content creators, and writers, we recreate these experiences for our audiences through moving back and forth between observation and inference. I generally have students complete this activity early in the term as it creates a foundation for curation and creation in all the projects throughout the semester and sets the tone for critical reading, writing, and multimodal composition. ... View more

I’ve just been reading about the 37 new emojis accepted by the Unicode Consortium’s Unicode 14.0, including “melting face” and “biting lip,” two that seem particularly apropos for these pandemic-haunted, divisive times. Looking at all the new options, I realized that I didn’t know much about where emojis came from, or how they are related to emoticons—if at all. It was time for a little browsing on the internet, where I quickly reminded myself of the distinction between the two. As no doubt everyone but me knows, emoticons—typographical representation of facial expressions—have a long history, but they seem to have entered the age of the internet sometime in 1982 when Scott Fahlman, a Carnegie Mellon professor of computer science, suggested using :-) and :-( to signal the difference between a joke and a serious statement in online communication. Later, these representations became known as “emoticons,” a portmanteau word combining “emotion” and “icon.” Now that I think of it, I do remember having some fun seeing what expressions could be generated with just my computer keys. Emojis, on the other hand, can be traced back to a late 1990s Japanese communications company, and their name is based on a contraction of e and moji (roughly “pictographs”). Inspired by manga, interface designer Shigetaka Kurita created the original set of 176 emojis, now part of the Museum of Modern Art’s collection.   In one way, emoticons and emojis are contemporary forms of punctuation, signaling emphasis and expressing and underscoring emotions. In any case, certainly they are a staple of online communication today. But here’s my question: are writing teachers now advising students on when and where and how to use these marks? Is an emoji worth a thousand words? When might that be so—and when might it not? It’s at times like these that I hate being retired. Just a couple of years ago, I could have walked to class and gathered information from my students on the spot. Stanford now is a four hour drive away—and I haven’t been on campus since the pandemic began. But I can contact students virtually, so I am going to start asking them in detail about their use of emojis and emoticons—and do some more reading and research on these increasingly ubiquitous marks. In the meantime, I would be very grateful to hear from anyone who has done some of this research or who has advice for writers about their use. Please share! Image Credit: "Emoji Art & Design Show at Eyebeam" by Scott Beale, used under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license ... View more

A term that we are starting to see used in reference to COVID-19 in countries like Portugal is the term endemic. A basic definition from the Mayo Clinic suggests at first glance that the difference between pandemic and endemic is the geographic location of outbreaks of the disease. Dr. Pritish Tosh, an infectious disease specialist at the Clinic, explains, “In epidemiologic terms, an outbreak refers to a number of cases that exceeds what would be expected. A pandemic is when there is an outbreak that affects most of the world.” The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Since then, the term has become integrated into the public lexicon.   However, Tosh explains, “We use the term endemic when there is an infection within a geographic area that is existing perpetually.” Unfortunately, there is the prospect that COVID could become endemic in most of the world. A closer look at what Tosh means by the words existing perpetually reveals what the future may hold. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC), “The amount of a particular disease that is usually present in a community is referred to as the baseline or endemic level of the disease. This level is not necessarily the desired level, which may in fact be zero, but rather is the observed level. In the absence of intervention and assuming that the level is not high enough to deplete the pool of susceptible persons, the disease may continue to occur at this level indefinitely. Thus, the baseline level is often regarded as the expected level of the disease.” This definition suggests a level of consistency of infection in a particular area, instead of the spikes in cases involved in an outbreak. Yonatan Grad, Harvard’s Melvin J. and Geraldine L. Glimcher Associate Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, reports, “The expectation that COVID-19 will become endemic essentially means that the pandemic will not end with the virus disappearing; instead, the optimistic view is that enough people will gain immune protection from vaccination and from natural infection such that there will be less transmission and much less COVID-19-related hospitalization and death, even as the virus continues to circulate.” Grad adds that with both the first round of SARS in 2003 and with Ebola in 2014, public health measures stopped the spread and brought the outbreaks to an end. It can be discouraging to think about a level of COVID that is expected. Remember the CDC’s caveats: “In the absence of intervention and assuming that the level is not high enough to deplete the pool of susceptible persons, the disease may continue to occur at this level indefinitely.” Also remember Grad’s report: “the optimistic view is that enough people will gain immune protection from vaccination and from natural infection such that there will be less transmission and much less COVID-19-related hospitalization and death, even as the virus continues to circulate.” We have lived with this reality with the flu for quite some time. Many Americans accept that receiving flu shot each fall is the best protection against the flu, which still kills thousands every year. The flu vaccines do not provide guaranteed protection against the flu because there are different variants of the flu, as there are with COVID. The flu vaccine is formulated annually based on scientists’ best guess as to what variants will be widespread in the coming year. Regardless, both the CDC’s and Grad’s statements remind us that we have some control over how the baseline or endemic level ends up being defined. Communities have the means to intervene through increased vaccination rates, which will affect the extent to which the disease continues to circulate. Historically, Americans have seldom been vocal or argumentative about whether or not they choose to be vaccinated against the flu. Nevertheless, government mandates and peer pressure have made vaccination against COVID a heated political issue. To an extent that many of us never expected, the resistance to a life-saving vaccine is helping to ensure that COVID will exist perpetually.   Image Credit: Health checks in India by Gwydion M. Williams is licensed under CC by 2.0. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Patrick Morgan, Assistant Professor of English and Director of First-Year and Professional Writing at the University of Louisiana Monroe.   Tragedy to Hope It was my first semester teaching in the Deep South. Introducing a narrative unit to twenty-four freshman writers, I shared that apocryphal story about Ernest Hemingway betting a bunch of writers that he could compose a six-word short story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” I asked them to unpack the story. Twenty-three students offered the usual tragedies: variations on infant mortality and infertility. One shy student said, “Maybe the author is a shoemaker.” And just like that, tragedy turned to hope. This was the story of an enterprising cobbler carving out the market for new shoes.       Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Many years ago, I had an occasion to play a video cassette of Roman Polanski's “Macbeth” to two different sections of a class I was teaching at the time. Created not long after his wife's gruesome death in one of history's most notorious murders, Polanski's version of Shakespeare's tragedy laid on the violence with an especially heavy hand, and so, as the film approached the moment in Act IV, Scene 2 when Macduff's family is butchered by Macbeth's thugs, I warned my classes of what was to come, suggesting that they duck their heads and not watch. I know that is what I did, but each time, after I sensed that the coast (so to speak) was clear and looked up again, my students, who had seen the thing through, asked me when the violence was going to start. Alas, the students who had grown up with "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and the "Halloween" franchise saw nothing particularly gruesome in Polanski's gut-wrenching projection of Sharon Tate's death onto the big screen. All of which takes me to "Squid Game," the Netflix smash hit whose violence a friend of mine (who is an enduring fan of "The Sopranos") can't tolerate and won't watch. A stomach-turning exposé of the plight of a group of South Koreans who have been turning to loan sharks in a desperate attempt to remain financially above water in an era of economic insecurity, "Squid Game" has quite understandably attracted a lot of critical attention in a short time. A tidy summary of said attention can be found in a recent blog by Steve Mintz in Inside Higher Education, where he reports how for some critics the series reflects a "cultural obsession, evident in the 'The Hunger Games,' 'Battle Royale,' Stephen King’s 'Running Man,' and 'Survivor,' with fierce, deadly, gamelike reality competitions," while for others it expresses "[p]ervasive public fears about 'a twisted, high-tech near-future where humanity's greatest innovations and darkest instincts collide.’" The show also exemplifies "[c]ontemporary social and economic anxieties about costly housing; interminable, unsustainable personal debt; and the deepening class divide," along with a "growing international appetite for South Korean cultural exports like the Oscar-winning 2020 film 'Parasite' and the catchy, addictive melodies and slick choreography of K-pop," which could be further explanations for the remarkable popularity of the program, Mintz observes. These are all very good explanations, and rather than challenge or quibble with any of them, I'd prefer to expand upon the possibilities, beginning with the simple observation that, like my students watching Polanski's “Macbeth,” contemporary audiences have become so inured to screen violence that they demand an ever-increasing dose of blood and gore in order to be entertained, and "Squid Game" fills the bill for them. The recent box office success of “Halloween Kills” can be offered as evidence in support of this explanation. But there are deeper, and more interesting, possibilities that depend upon how the story arc of the series develops in the upcoming season (or seasons). If it turns out in the end, for instance, that Gi-hun (the protagonist of season one) or some other character succeeds in overthrowing the society that made the Squid Game competition possible, then the series would closely resemble "The Hunger Games," which concludes with a successful revolution. It is not at all unlikely that a lot of "Squid Game" fans hope for just that, and it is equally possible that Netflix made that a condition for the continuation of the series. After all, by dangling the hope of an eventual triumph of the oppressed before "Squid Game"'s most devoted viewers, Netflix could continue this highly profitable series indefinitely. Thus, should "Squid Game" indeed turn out to be a Korean "Hunger Games," its popularity would express the hopes of its fans for a better future, of an escape from the economic inequality that afflicts them. On the other hand, it is also possible that "Squid Game" could go the way of "The Walking Dead" (all hopeless violence, with no end in sight) or "Survivor" (winner-take-all is where it's at, baby). Should either of these paths prove to be the one taken by "Squid Game," the popularity of the series could be taken as a sign of a society so alienated and discordant that fantasies of endless violence ("The Walking Dead" story arc) or simulacra of cut-throat capitalist competition (the "Survivor" formula) are simply entertaining in themselves. No matter which way "Squid Game" eventually concludes, however, there is a deeper semiotic significance here that applies not only to this show but to any popular cultural artifact that profits by the exploitation of social discontentment with the status quo. This significance lies in the fact that "Squid Game" is enriching precisely the class of people that it purports to condemn: the ultra-rich—especially those who belong to the new oligarchy created in the wake of what I will call "digital capitalism." In this sense, the popularity of "Squid Game" (as opposed to its creator's artistic intentions) most reflects the kind of world that George Orwell's 1984—that dystopia of all dystopias—warns against. Which is to say that once humanity gets trapped in a self-perpetuating tyranny, there is no way out. So, it doesn't matter how the series eventually concludes, because in reality, "Squid Game" doesn't change the world it condemns: it nourishes and perpetuates it.   Image Credit: "Squid Kite" by aghrivaine is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... 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. No word exists in a vacuum; each has an origin and a history that can be explored through writing. Use one of the activities in this blog post to encourage your students to explore the etymology of a word—and use podcasts while doing so! 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 Write about Words   Assignment A  Pre-Class Work for Assignment A: Assign your students a podcast about a word or several words. You might assign one podcast to the entire class, or place students into groups and assign a different podcast to each, or add several podcasts to a folder and allow each student to choose one. Ask students to listen to the assigned podcast. Tip: If you’re using Achieve, consider choosing podcasts from the topics of “Spelling” (for example: Expresso versus Espresso), “Word Choice” (for example: Irregardless versus Regardless), or “Word Usage” (for example: "Monstrous" Words). If you have included the folder “Grammar Girl: 25 Suggested Podcasts” in your course, consider assigning word-focused podcasts such as: Affect versus Effect, Bad versus Badly, and The Difference Between Disinformation and Misinformation. Assignment: Ask students to write a short essay about the history and usage of the word or related words they have been assigned. The works cited or bibliography should include at least 3 sources, including the Grammar Girl podcast. Alternately, ask students to create a short presentation on the history of the word or words. Reflection for Assignment A: Place students into small groups of 2-3 and ask them to read each other’s papers. Encourage students to comment on at least 2 things that surprised them, 1 thing they would like to know more about, 1 thing they felt their peers did well in their writing, and 1 thing they feel their peers can improve in their writing. Finally, ask each student to write a short paragraph discussing how they researched their word: What strategies did they use? What types of sources were most useful? What difficulties did they run into, if any? What successes?   Assignment B Pre-Class Work for Assignment B: Ask each student to choose a word that interests them. The word can be anything—a slang term, a word from another language, a new word they came across in a book or article. Assign the podcast “Writing Scripts and Speeches” for students to listen to. Assignment: Ask each student to research the history and usage of their word, then write a short podcast script explaining their findings. Students should use the tips and format of the assigned podcast to guide them, and they can also take inspiration from other podcasts they’ve listened to. They should also create a works cited or bibliography of at least 3 sources.  Reflection for Assignment B: Place students into small groups of 2-3 and ask them to read their podcast script to the group. After each podcast reading, ask students to write a short list noting 2 things that surprised them and 1 thing they would like to know more about Finally, ask each student to write a short paragraph discussing how they researched their word: What strategies did they use? What types of sources were most useful? What difficulties did they run into, if any? What successes?   Credit: "Dictionary" by greeblie is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

Last week I had an opportunity to join a Zoom conversation with a group of Rhetoric Society of America fellows, organized by Rich Enos and facilitated by Krista Ratcliffe. I almost missed it: one of those days where both phones were ringing at the same time, my doorbell was chiming, and email was pouring in. But at the last minute I made some executive decisions, turned off phones, and clicked “join.” And my, oh, my, I wouldn’t have missed this discussion for anything! As Jackie Royster said as we were signing off, we had enjoyed a solid hour of intellectual stimulation that reminded all of us why we are in this profession in the first place and why we love what we do. For an hour, we listened as Ed Schiappa (MIT) and Ralph Cintron (UIC) talked about their current work, and what a listen it was: I was literally on the edge of my seat as I leaned in to the Zoom screen. Ralph told us about a project he is collaborating on with a colleague in law—one they’re estimating may eventually be a three-volume study. A history of ideas project, it is questioning the very foundations of thinking about life on Earth in general and on what it means to be human in particular. I will write more about this project but simply note now that it seems to me at basis to be a project about definitions and how they shape what we can know (or be, or do). Ed also talked to us about definitions, and in particular the definition of a disputed term today, “transgender.” Calling this his “pandemic project,” Ed spoke of the exigencies surrounding this term and then described the research he has carried out in the last 18 months or so. In short, he has immersed himself in the legal definitions of “transgender” in a number of different sites, from states that regulate bathrooms based on definitions of the term to sports teams, prisons, and same-sex schools. To say that he encountered a wide range and variety of definitions seems like an understatement, and the lack of any kind of coherence or consensus simply underscored how arbitrary the very momentous decisions that are based on these definitions are, decisions that affect real people in real circumstances and often in not just arbitrary but harmful ways. Once again, I thought of the power of definitions to regulate us in all kinds of ways, and of the need to engage students in examining definitional disputes, thinking through them, and considering how definitions impact their lives. As I listened to Ed, I also thought of times I’ve taught “definition essays” as fairly perfunctory, when they should be anything but. I also thought about the depth of research available to students who want to study a term’s definition, tracking it through time and looking at examples of it in various sites, as Ed has done with “transgender.” And I thought of the learning that could happen as a result of such investigations, the deepening understandings that could accrue. What I had learned in just half an hour hearing about Ed’s research made me want not just to read his book (and—wait for it—The Transgender Exigency: Defining Sex and Gender in the 21st Century is coming!) but to ask students to work together to examine the definitions that seem most important and problematic to their own lives. Image Credit: "Dictionary" by greeblie, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Emerging's 5th edition is here,  and it contains some great new readings. One of the key elements of Emerging is finding connections between different points of view. See this video blog for ideas on teaching with a reading that highlights this theme, as well as empathy for opposing viewpoints and working against social polarization.  Want to know more about Emerging? Have questions about how to foster critical thinking and connections in the classroom? Want to discuss how you've used conversation to support empathy in your classroom? Comment on this post, or reach out to bbarios@fau.edu! ... View more

Here in northern Indiana, it’s the season of slowdown, with leaves tipping to brilliant scarlet and jack-o'-lantern orange. It’s my favorite time of year to teach, since the weather beckons us to grab a cozy blanket and a good book, and to linger over language. Slowing down reminds me that on my best teaching days, I try to channel poet Tracy K. Smith, who has served as U.S. Poet Laureate and originated the radio spot and podcast, “The Slowdown.” During her tenure as host of the program, she made the most of her mellifluous voice to entice listeners to slow down and listen—carefully and deliberately—to a poem. Despite all my practice in thinking “slowly” about reading and writing, I always benefited from Smith’s audio nudge. In class, I often ask students to read portions of text aloud—though I am careful not to put people on the spot—to invite us to think about the ways tone, pacing, and meaning work through word choices, punctuation, sentence length, and organization. “Read slowly!” I remind students, so we can listen slowly, too. No matter how many times I’ve read a text, I always hear it freshly when a student reads aloud. I’ve written before about emphasizing “slow thinking” in the classroom, an idea I learned from José Antonio Bowen, author of Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning. While most of us teach our students to “close read,” it’s worth reminding them that this is necessarily slow work. It also requires practice. To this end, my co-author, Stuart Greene, and I offer tools for slower reading before and after each reading in the 5th edition of From Inquiry to Academic Writing.  I’ll share here some of the “slow thinking” tools we offer for reading management scholar Ronald E. Purser’s surprising text, “What Mindfulness Revolution?”. Alas, Purser’s biting essay is timely. Many of us, exhausted and demoralized by a campus life that has been fundamentally altered by the pandemic, are being offered institutional “wellness seminars” that might imply the problem is us. Before students read Purser’s essay, we suggest the class discuss what they already know about “mindfulness” as a practice. Where does this information come from, and why does this matter? Purser proclaims his “skeptical” stance on mindfulness in his opening paragraphs, arguing, “Anything that offers success in our unjust society without trying to change it is not revolutionary—it just helps people cope” (626).     As students read, we encourage them to practice the following “slow reading” skills, which of course are transferrable to reading any academic text: Keep testing your responses to Purser’s argument, considering the extent to which you agree or disagree as he makes his claims. Pay attention to the author’s use of “but” and “however” to signal clarification of ideas, and notice how he refines his argument in these locations. Linger over the examples and test their utility in illuminating the argument. In Purser’s case, a key example is a KFC commercial that seems to promote—or parody—“mindfulness” by encouraging people to buy a “pot pie-based meditation system” (629). How does this help—or hinder—his case? At the end of each reading in From Inquiry to Academic Writing, we provide “Reading as a Writer” questions that return students to the text for additional “slow reading" to analyze writers’ rhetorical decisions. For Purser’s text, we suggest marking every location where Purser mentions or quotes someone. Then, students can work in groups to name the many different reasons a writer uses sources. This is a “slow reading” and “slow thinking” exercise that will work for any researched writing. Naming these uses of sources can help students make more mindful decisions about their own writing, as well. What strategies have you used with success to get your students to slow down as readers, thinkers, and writers? (And do you think Purser’s skeptical take on mindfulness is warranted, or not?)   Image Credit: Photograph of fallen leaves taken by the author, April Lidinsky   ... View more

Last week I had an opportunity to join a webinar sponsored by the Institute of Race, Rhetoric, and Literacy, the second in a series on Transgressive WPA Work and featuring David Green, professor and director of first-year writing at Howard University. I have learned so much from listening to Green over the years, including when he participated in the Advisory Board for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the 8th edition of EasyWriter, and this was no exception. He spoke eloquently about Black critical writing practices and the ways in which these practices work to broaden our thinking on academic discourse in general and “the essay” in particular. Giving a shout out to Adam Banks’s “retirement” of the essay in his tour-de-force 2015 CCCC Chair’s Address, Green offered a number of insights aimed at remaking writing in the academy. Especially intriguing to me was his “Critical Hip Hop Playlist Assignment,” which may already be familiar to all of you. Students select seven texts (or excerpts) from their class—including stories, essays, videos, and images—and seven hip-hop pieces linked in some way to the seven texts and create a playlist that coheres and that can be explained to the class. This kind of assignment, Green told listeners, provides opportunities for “intellectual disruptions” and for extensive “interpretive and critical practice.” Green and other scholars of literacy are providing more and more examples of what it will mean to really retire the “essay” as it has been taught prescriptively in high schools and colleges, and of what students can do to flex their intellectual and linguistic and critical muscles in ways that will generate new understandings of 21st century literacy. A couple of months before this webinar, Green joined Khirsten Scott and Dennis Winston in a conversation on “Race, Hip-Hop, and Academe” as part of a Los Angeles Review of Books series called “Antiracism in the Contemporary University.” Green kicked off the conversation, noting that, An often-overlooked entryway into conversations about antiracism, for me, is hip-hop. As a type of African American discourse, hip-hop provides a way, for me, of organizing and arranging these strands of conversations about critical Black writing, community work, as well as responses to oppression. I see hip-hop as an offspring of Black discourse, . . . [and] I am always interested in the ways that Black vernacular speech practices might help us reimagine particular gatekeeping mechanisms within the university. Scott, who grew up in the deep South, agreed, saying that for her, hip hop has served as a kind of “survival rhetoric,” in her engagements with academe, especially in graduate school and in her work as a young professor in a primarily white institution: Hip-hop has consistently given me the language and the embrace I needed in isolating and hostile environments, the bop I needed in joyous moments, and the space I needed to breathe in heavy moments. Just like Blackness, hip-hop is infinitely useful, so I bring it with me everywhere I go.  She goes on to say that she brings hip hop into her classrooms whenever she has a chance to do so and goes on to describe putting together Gil Scott-Heron’s “Comment #1,” Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival,” and the album The Last Poets in order to present hip hop as an artistic form that promotes survival. Pairing the haunting question that ends Heron’s “Comment #1”—“Who will survive in America?”—with Lorde’s quote “It is better to speak remembering that we were never meant to survive,” she says, has given me license to use Blackness and in this case hip-hop as subject, method, and mode. The infinite utility and possibility of both (Blackness and hip-hop) and the intersections therein allow me to find myself in the US university classroom and to challenge students to locate themselves as well. Later in the conversation, Green makes a strong case for other assignments based on vernacular forms like Top Five lists and hip hop mixtapes, for the ways these practices allow for critical interpretive moves as well as for “the joys of surviving and thriving.” And he goes on to recount a story about poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, a good friend of Orville and Wilbur Wright, who reportedly wrote a bar on the wall of the Wright bike shop/publishing house claiming “Orville Wright is out of sight,” and thereby, in Green’s words, becoming “an early member of the hip-hop community, if not the first emcee.” (See Keith Gilyard’s “Literacy, Identity, Imagination, Flight” for Gilyard’s telling of this story in the December 2000 issue of CCC.) In the webinar, David Green also spoke of the importance of memory and remembering, noting the powerful impact of the 1619 Project and of the need for “critical memory.” Using hip hop and other vernacular practices is one way of focusing on memory and on remembering. Toward the end of his conversation with Scott and Winston, Green talked about what it will take to sustain the momentum of the current moment and he invokes Toni Morrison’s concept of “rememory—that is the idea that we must go beyond historical analysis of racial oppression and begin to include an imaginative understanding of the interior values, goals, and beliefs of a people, in order to understand their perspectives.” In ruminating further Green calls for a more intentional, deeper kind of listening. We need to develop our auditory literacies, or our ability to not just hear what people are saying, but to cultivate a deep understanding of their disappointment or critique. We need an acknowledgment and critical engagement with the full histories of a people and a community. It strikes me that here Green is speaking powerfully to all of us, to every teacher of writing. In his writings and in his talks, presentations, and interviews/conversations, he is not only calling for deeper listening and increased auditory literacy, but often demonstrating both even as he shows us how to bring these practices into our classrooms. Once again, I am deeply indebted to imaginative and exemplary colleagues like David Green, Khirsten Scott, and Dennis Winston—and I will continue to seek out every opportunity to learn more from them. Image Credit: "I Heart Hip Hop" by Lisa Liang, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more