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

The requirement to keep cameras on and mics unmuted assumes that students have access to quiet and privacy. This also assumes that having live faces in the Zoom squares somehow replicates a “real” classroom. They don’t and it can’t. No, I don’t know if my students are playing Fortnite or sleeping or otherwise disengaged when their squares are blank. But in face-to-face classrooms, students can disengage in other ways-- prepping for exams on their laptops, scrolling through Instagram on their phones, sleeping in the back of the classroom because they worked the late shift and came directly to school from work. The distractions and catastrophes that students faced in the years before the pandemic interrupted their ability to be fully present, to take part in group activities, and to listen to lectures.    And this year, students who are recent high school graduates have had their schooling interrupted for nearly two years because of Covid-19. I’m not talking about “learning loss,” which as Rachael Gabriel suggests, does not exist. Rather, I mean that we need to honor the learning that has happened in the last two years, especially learning that happens outside of formal classrooms and that cannot be measured by standardized tests, some of which were suspended in 2020.   So -- when we talk about remote learning, we need to consider the purpose and the place of asynchronous work, of alternatives to group work, of somehow creating community despite the odds. With these thoughts in mind, I invited students to photograph either their writing spaces, their writing tools, themselves writing, or some other combination. The assignment was optional, and I offered journal credit for students who submitted photos and wrote brief captions to include in the collage. The collage would be called Writing Spaces.   Across two sections, about half of the students participated. No one sent photographs of themselves, which was not surprising. The absence of faces allowed me to reconsider the blank screens and muted mics on Zoom. Indeed, the photographs in the collage helped me to understand that students were in fact present behind those screens and muted mics.    For Writing Spaces, students created the particular spaces they needed for writing amidst the cacophony of their everyday lives. Some students sent photographs of spaces that included pets, flowers, and plants. Other students sent photos of their laptop screens featuring our course assignments. One student sent a photo of a space in the reopened college library. Another student sent a photo of their rough draft, suggesting that the act of writing was a means of creating space.    Taken together and reassembled in a video, the collage of photos became a means of introducing our second writing project, a synthesis essay-- from many parts, we can create something new. In other words, working separately and collectively at the same time, students created their own tool for teaching and learning conceptualizing writing.    There are no easy solutions to blank screens and muted mics because, it seems to me, there aren’t any. But what I learned from our collage is the significance of rethinking how to approach the teaching and learning of writing. The goal is not to somehow replicate a pre-pandemic classroom, the conditions for which no longer exist. Instead, the hope is to create something new with the tools we have before us. We also need to refuse the deficit model of “learning loss. Instead we must offer our students the means to consider and build on their strengths. Zoom can only do so much, but remote learning can do so much more than perhaps many of us believe.   Remote learning is an imperfect tool for troubled times, but we have to make use of all the instruments  at our disposal. I try to remember that blank screens are not a cause for sorrow, but yet another affordance for all of us to learn to use together. Blank screens seem an appropriate metaphor for the promise that writing has to offer. At the same time, we must be unafraid to build on what we know to face what we do not yet know. Writing, in the end, can still become a process of discovery, and perhaps a practice of recovery as well.     KEY WORDS: online learning; first-year writing, writing assignments, journals, Covid-19     Caption: Teaching and Learning on Zoom (Zoom immersive background) ... View more

My twenty-something sons have a keen interest in—okay, an obsession with—the history of media. My older son teaches film and is currently teaching a course on the future of film. That requires, of course, looking back at the past and considering how digital media have changed how films are distributed. My younger son is intrigued by the idea that his even younger cousins have never lived in a world in which YouTube didn’t exist. Having been a child when VHS tapes still had to be protected from melting in a hot car, he feels like the “old man” of media who can educate the younger generation about a world they never knew. They both use their iPhones or laptops constantly to research movies. Is it obvious to note, though, that they don’t use Facebook to do research? Or that we don’t expect our students to cite Facebook as a source in a documented essay? My older son uses Facebook to disseminate his opinions about films, just like he uses a blog. Facebook is, after all, a social media or social networking service. How, then, have we reached the point of congressional hearings examining Facebook’s role in disseminating disinformation harmful to America’s youth? Facebook creates communities of users, some much larger than others, who exchange updates on their lives and information they think will be of interest to their online community. However, the information shared is only as reliable as the community member who shares it. Facebook was never meant to be a news source, except as far as personal news was concerned. Then came the Trump administration, telling its followers that the mainstream media were not to be trusted as sources of national and international news. Some people began to put more faith in what a “friend” shared on Facebook than what a major news network reported. All of us have probably been guilty of sharing information on Facebook without thinking too critically about where that information came from. Sometimes we are glad to see someone out there reinforcing what we believe and pass it along without thinking about whether it is even true. Publishers of print media have been, and continue to be aware of the danger of printing libelous content. Now those who allow disinformation in digital form to go unchecked are facing some of the same type of scrutiny. Those who run Facebook have tried to restrict what gets passed along as truth. Frances Haugen, the whistleblower who has released thousands of pages of Facebook documents, has testified about those efforts but argues that they fall far short of what it would take to eliminate the dissemination of misinformation. She points out that Facebook did tighten restrictions about what users could post in the days leading up to the 2020 Presidential election, for example, but relaxed those restrictions once the election was over—even in light of the events of January 6th—because it was profitable to do so. A portion of Haugen’s testimony has been about the lies and conspiracy theories being spread about COVID-19 via Facebook. What is posted on a social media site can seldom be considered a matter of life and death, but lives literally are at stake if readers of a post believe that Ivermectin is a cure for COVID or that vaccinations are a Democratic conspiracy. Mark Zuckerberg and the other higher-ups at Facebook can try to put in place a plan to block disinformation. In their daily lives, as they argue politics in the heated atmosphere that currently exists in our country, Facebook’s users still must bear the responsibility that any person who constructs an argument must bear for checking out the reliability of their sources. In arguments made in the context of their academic or professional lives, the rules of research and documentation haven’t changed. An argument in support of a claim is only as good as its sources and the warrants that build a bridge between claim and warrant, no matter how funny the meme or how convincing the post is on Facebook.   Image Credit: "facebook is dead" by Book Catalog is licensed under CC BY 2.0. ... View more

In my last blog I analyzed the cultural significance of the “The Crown,” this year's toast of the Emmy Awards and a major signifier of America's continuing fascination with upper-class life. So when I read L.A. Times theater critic Charles McNulty's evisceration of the Netflix soon-to-premiere-on-Broadway musical "Diana," I decided that this would be a good opportunity to explore a different angle of the topic. So, as I am prone to say at the start of many of my semiotic analyses on this blog, here goes. To begin with, any critical review that begins by calling its subject "a crassly commercial noise machine," is clearly not going to be a piece of puffery. In fact, McNulty simply loathes the thing, cutting it off at the knees with such pronouncements as "There were lyrics so deranged I felt compelled to jot them down, almost like a psychiatrist keeping a log of a patient’s more unhinged utterances," and "'Diana' clarified for me why some people not only hate musicals but also loathe those who unabashedly do." When reading such jabs one can't help but think, "C'mon Charles, don't hold back, tell us what you really think." I confess to a certain fondness for such directness, but there is a deeper cultural significance to McNulty's takedown of which the critic himself is completely aware, remarking how "During the long pandemic pause, Broadway has been forced to confront not only its dismal record on race but also its checkered history on the rights and dignity of its workers. Cluttering the space with commercial mediocrity sadly suggests a return to business as usual. For this reason, 'Diana' isn’t just bad but dangerous."  Such critical passion raises the more dispassionate question: "What do we expect from musicals, anyway? Are they art or mere entertainment?" And this is the question I wish to explore in the rest of this blog. For the musical is a genre which, from its origins in the "light" operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, occupies a liminal space between "popular" culture and "elite" culture, "low" culture and "high," commercial entertainment and art. "Higher" than the proletarian "music hall" and "lower" than, say, the royal opera, Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas defied easy cultural classification, as does the tradition that they inspired. Even the music defies easy classification, with modern composers from Andrew Lloyd Webber to Lin-Manuel Miranda digging deep into contemporary pop music as they cross over from Broadway to Billboard, and back again. McNulty's pronouncement that "Artistically, 'Diana' is soulless. The raison d'être seems to be to make money," reveals what is at stake for proponents of a Broadway tradition that, in their view, should aim high rather than low—a pop cultural standard that has been embraced ever since the Beatles and Bob Dylan raised expectations for rock music as well. So it isn't the fact that "Diana"'s score is rock-oriented that bothers McNulty (it was composed by Bon Jovi's David Bryan); the problem is that it is "composed in the cheesiest Broadway rock."  But the medium, as they say, is the message, and Netflix—a wholly commercial enterprise—is a medium that isn't designed to aim high. Its purpose is to cash in. So what we are seeing here is a repetition of what happened in the very early days of television itself, when hopes that the new medium would bring high culture into the homes of the masses collapsed into a lament that TV had instead devolved into what FCC Chair Newton Minnow famously called a "vast wasteland" in 1961. So as traditional TV comes to be overtaken by the new media, the message remains the same: cultural production within a system of corporate capitalism is guided by the imperatives of the profit motive, not the nebulous and shifting values of "high" art. The result, as I have noted so many times, is the creation of an "entertainment culture" that has transformed cultural capital into just plain capital.   Image Credit: "File:Curtain-939464.jpg" by tommybuddy is marked with CC0 1.0 ... View more

Like many other writing teachers, I have spent much of the last pandemic year reading and learning about how to be more inclusive and equitable in our schools and universities and about how to practice antiracist pedagogy. It’s been a year of the most intensive learning I can remember. As an old(er!) white woman who grew up in the segregated South and came of age in the 60s, that’s saying something: in those early days I confronted my own racist background, my own racism. Or I thought I did. What I’ve learned in the last couple of years is that I have much more work to do and much more to learn about what being inclusive in thinking and teaching really means. Thanks to the outpouring of brilliant scholarship from so many Black scholars, Indigenous scholars, and other scholars of color, teachers of writing (and especially white teachers of writing) have a chance to adopt new practices of inclusion. One of the many scholars I’ve learned from this last year is University of Central Florida professor Esther Milu, whose advice as a member of our Advisory Board for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the 8th edition of EasyWriter was so invaluable that I asked if she would have a follow up conversation with me. She graciously agreed, and I remain indebted to her for her perceptive advice and insights. (To learn more about the advisory board, visit the EasyWriter catalog page and select “DEI Advisory Board” under the “Preview” tab.) So when I picked up the July issue of College English, I was excited to see an essay by Esther Milu as the lead article, and one that provides another example of the kind of groundbreaking scholarship I mentioned earlier. In “Diversity of Raciolinguistic Experiences in the Writing Classroom: An Argument for a Transnational Black Language Pedagogy,” she calls our attention to what should be obvious: that Black students are part of a very diverse group. Yet too often, teachers seem unaware of this diversity, assuming that if students are Black, they must speak Black Vernacular English. Milu offers multiple examples of African students who have no experience with BVE: Because US raciolinguistic ideologies are based on US-centric racial and linguistic formations, writing and literacy instructors tend to subsume all linguistic practices of Black students in one racial category—Black. (416) In Milu’s experience, this tendency to lump all students who are Black into one language category leads to unfortunate results, particularly for Black students who come from a very wide range of other cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Furthermore, as Samy Alim points out, the “sociolinguistic order of things” in the US works to maintain the status quo, with white middle-class English “at the top of the language hierarchy.” But this focus on English, Milu notes, “fails to account for how other imperial languages of Europe . . . have historically contributed to a racist and oppressive ‘sociolinguistic order’ globally” (417). Ironically, raising student awareness about the hegemonic forces at work in (white) US English may fail to alert transnational and immigrant African students’ to the way that their indigenous languages have been erased or suppressed by European languages. Milu then introduces us to five African students who “are not descendants of enslaved Black people,” and specifically to writing they have done about their experiences in a white US institution, writing that theorizes their language histories and identities and reflects on how those histories relate to their language development in general. Here is Osa, a second-generation Nigerian born in the US: Americans view me as a foreigner. As soon as the see or hear my name, they assume that I am not an American. They assume that I am from out of the country and that I cannot speak English. They always ask, “Where are you REALLY from,” like I did not just tell them I was born in New Jersey. Also as a black girl that speaks African American Language (Ebonics) people marginalize me to be the stereotypical black girl. People from the black community assume that when I speak Sandard English I am trying to be something that I am not. They think that I am trying to be white. (433-34) Osa’s writings point out the real complexity of her linguistic and cultural identity and underscore Milu’s call on teachers to recognize this complexity, with all its implications for our teaching. Texts like Osa’s are the heart of Milu’s essay, and I hope everyone will read the gripping stories these students tell.   Their stories, of course, are a large part of what leads Milu to recommend a move to a “transnational Black language pedagogy” (436), which she locates theoretically in the early research of Geneva Smitherman, with references to Smitherman’s own grounding in the work of Black scholars such as Beryl Bailey, Lorenzo Turner, and W. E. B. Du Bois. This pedagogy calls for “teaching slavery, colonialism, and racism together to better reveal how they contributed to raciolinguistic ideologies, racialization practices, and racist sociolinguistic order in US and various Afro-Diasporic contexts” (436-37). To do so, Milu says, writing teachers will have to “familiarize themselves with various approaches to language decolonization in Africa and other Afro-Diasporic contexts” and adopt translingualism as an “option to language decolonization in Africa . . . because languaging practices in post-colonial Africa, especially among the youth, are translingual” (437). In Milu’s view, a translingual approach to writing makes room for and values linguistic heterogeneity and “gives agency to users to draw language resources from their linguistic repertoire to achieve various writing and communicative ends” (438). Some will push back against Milu’s advocacy of a translingual approach, arguing that it does not focus strongly enough on race (Milu mentions April Baker-Bell as one who might make this criticism). Milu acknowledges the conversation in progress among those who theorize and advocate for translingualism, critical language awareness, and various forms of antiracist pedagogy. More importantly, her perspective—and her presentation of a transnational Black language pedagogy—add a great deal of substance to the ongoing discussion. Image Credit: "Black Student Leadership Conference..." by COD Newsroom, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... 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 There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived. ~ Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849) In my classes, I challenge students to practice strong critical reading strategies and to learn to locate themselves in a range of voices as they read and interact with texts. Many times, students stop at only interpreting the text at hand, but I encourage my students to also seriously consider the ways the texts integrate with their own thinking and lives. Strong critical reading and writing asks students to move back and forth between the text, context, and their own ideas. Critical thinking happens when we become aware of and engage with important cultural conversations and become engaged citizens on our own terms. Please click on the slide above to see an example of a completed "What Do We Stand For?" slideshow.For this assignment I use Henry David Thoreau’s On the Duty of Civil Disobedience to frame our discussion and ask students, “What do you stand for?” Thoreau has inspired generations to consciously resist injustice and develop personal frameworks for action through peaceful protest, passive resistance, and taking a stand. Many have taken up the call to stand up for injustice, or what civil rights icon John Lewis calls “good trouble.” We use the text as a starting place to discuss historical examples of civil disobedience such as the Boston Tea Party, Underground Railroad, civil rights sit-ins, women’s suffrage, the Stonewall riots, and other acts of courageous individuals who took a stand despite personal risk. Students work in teams to talk about their ideas and consider what is important to them at this time. They create a collaborative slideshow: What Do We Stand For: A Contemporary Response to Civil Disobedience. The goal is not to reach consensus but to work to create a list of issues and ideas for which they stand along with examples to support their ideas. There is always a risk when we open our classrooms up to potentially controversial issues and multiple perspectives on hot-button cultural conversations. As teachers, we can choose to avoid or downplay these issues or to create safe spaces where we can engage in productive, civil discourse and heightened cultural awareness in which students explore their conscience. The purpose of this assignment is not to persuade others to change their minds or even to engage in the conversations themselves. Instead, it is about identifying the larger issues that are important to students and to begin to situate themselves within these conversations.   Resources The St. Martin’s Handbook – Ch. 9, Reading Critically The Everyday Writer (also available with Exercises) – Ch. 7, Critical Reading EasyWriter (also available with Exercises) – Ch. 8, Reading and Listening Analytically, Critically, and Respectfully   Steps to the Assignment Have students read Thoreau’s On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (full text from Project Gutenberg). Ask them to compose 3 thought-provoking questions and pick one passage from the text to include on a team Google Doc. Teams discuss questions and passages and work to interpret the text. Move to full class discussion in which students share passages and ideas. Present and discuss historical and personal examples of civil disobedience. Instruct students to gather in teams and discuss what they currently stand for as a group. Explain that the purpose of the assignment is not to persuade but to identify these cultural conversations and decide what is important to them. Create a Google slideshow, titled “What Do We Stand For?” Each team posts a bulleted list to a Google slideshow template (one slide for each team). Click here to see an example. Ask students to include a representative, copyright free image on their slide. (This is also a good time to teach students about searching and identifying copyright free images and using Creative Commons.) Each team then presents their slide and ideas to the class as students build upon each other’s ideas.   Reflections on the Activity This activity is quite simple in structure but impactful in its depth. It gives all students an opportunity to have their voices heard and to consider what is important to them as individuals and as a group. It engages them in the cultural conversations and asks them to consciously explore their relationships to these ideas. Many people identify this generation of students as apathetic and unaware. This assignment demonstrates that this notion could not be further from the truth. It also helps students realize how to be morally responsible citizens and consider ways to stand up for what they believe. By engaging in these conversations, students find the courage to speak their minds and engage in civil public discourse in productive ways. Through critical reading and thinking, they understand that change begins with the individual and that it is important to stand up, not just stand by. ... View more