I recently had the pleasure of visiting the Writing Program and Writing Center at Wake Forest University and, as always, I wanted a full tour: it is endlessly fascinating to me to see what goes on in writing centers and programs and I especially love looking at what’s posted on the walls. In this case, I had a chance to meet with undergrad tutors, who were eloquent and thoughtful and deeply into their work. They told me that they’d learned how to get students to look beyond editing for surface errors, to concentrate on the substance and structure of what they wanted to say, to know when to offer friendly sympathy and when to push a little harder, to listen “between the lines” to students, and to ask open-ended questions that can lead to genuine dialogue. I was inspired, as I always am, by how seriously these students took their work but also by their great good humor. Some of the tutors had declared a new interdisciplinary writing minor, which will provide students… with opportunities to practice, refine, and extend their skills as academic, professional, and creative writers. The curriculum, composed of new and existing courses in rhetoric and writing, as well as writing-enhanced courses across the disciplines, prepares students to participate in various writing situations both inside and outside the academy. Because writing enhances reflection, reinforces learning, and improves critical thinking, the Writing Minor will provide students with the skills they need to excel in their majors, their professions, and their lives as engaged citizens. Writing minors (and majors) are springing up all over the country, and it’s encouraging to see the innovative approaches being taken. In this case, I was impressed with the inclusion of creative writing; the students I spoke with spoke passionately about wanting to experience a full range of writing, from poems to press releases, and such programs promise to offer that range. With 18 units of required coursework, students with this minor should get a strong sense of themselves as writers—and several students told me they intended to take substantially more than 18 units in the minor if they could find a way to do so. As I left the Center, I overheard a tutor and student talking animatedly about an assignment in progress. The student said he was “beginning to see what my main argument should be here,” and “huh . . . this is really helping me think.” That’s a line every writing center tutor or consultant loves to hear, and in this writing center it was echoed on a bulletin board where students had been invited to finish the sentence “I write because . . .” ... View more

Who would have ever thought that a Broadway musical about a man best known today for having been killed in a duel with Aaron Burr (and who was also one of the founders of nascent American corporate capitalism) should have become the hottest thing on Broadway since Cats?  But then again, who would have thought that a Broadway musical would get itself involved in what is arguably the bitterest American election since 1860?  That is exactly what Hamilton has done, and therein lies a semiotic tale.   The story here begins not with the creation and triumphal run of this Tony-record-smashing production, but with an event that took place after its creator had left the cast for other projects.  This event, of course, was the reading of a statement by a cast member to Vice President-elect Pence, who happened to be in attendance at a post-election performance.  That statement, which did not appear to have upset Pence (it basically implored the incoming Trump administration to play nice), did upset the President-elect, who took the matter to Twitter, where he appears to conduct the greatest portion of his communication with the American people.   The ironies—indeed, outright paradoxes—of this whole situation can hardly be overstated.  First, we have the paradox of the play itself:  a paean to diversity and inclusiveness whose ticket prices now average $411, and whose premium seats run $849.   The ironic symbolism of this—in the light of an election in which the Democratic candidate overwhelmingly carried America's centers of post-industrial prosperity, while the Republican candidate captured the Rust Belt—should not be lost on anyone.  Simply stated, while race relations most certainly played a key role in the election, so did socioeconomic inequality.  And while the billionaire standard bearer of the traditional party of the country club set saw this and exploited it in a campaign aimed at working-class Democrats who could hardly afford Hamilton's price of admission, the Democrats did not.    Then there is the paradoxical fact that the Democratic candidate out-fundraised and outspent her Republican rival by a considerable margin.  Making use of social media (especially Twitter) instead, a capitalist tycoon struck a populist note by communicating directly with voters rather than through expensively staged, and highly mediated, advertisements.  Whether this populist strategy was truly authentic is open to debate; that it was successful is not.   In short, the traditional party of class privilege won (at least in part) by playing upon the often-neglected emotions of social class, while the traditional (at least since FDR) party of the common folk, got blindsided by class resentment.  And while one can certainly understand why the cast of America's most celebrated stage entertainment would want to take advantage of a chance to speak directly to a man whose election appears to contradict everything that their performance stands for, the upper-class aura of the venue for their message was not, perhaps, the most effective setting for it. ... View more

In this series of posts I am looking at what we can learn from peer feedback practices in other disciplines. Andy Brown and Sharon Hart talked to me about the studio art critique.   In my last post, I considered the history of critique in the art classroom.  In this one, I’d like to think about its future.   Sharon touched on this topic when she shared with me the challenges of photography in the digital age: “Images are ubiquitous,” she noted. “Why does anyone want to look at yours?” Indeed the rise of the digital is a big question for the Visual Arts and Art History department here at FAU.  In my time as Interim Chair, we wanted to engage with it directly so as to articulate a future trajectory for the department.  Andy suggested that critique needs a new trajectory as well. “Given the complexity and subject of art now the original model doesn’t work too well,” he observed, “We need to find new ways to approach art besides sit in front of it and chat about it.”  For me that also recalled Sharon’s investment in keeping approaches to technique new, fresh, and interesting to keep her and students both engaged in the process.   We might carry these same questions into the writing classroom. Huge swaths of the field are already considering the impact of digital technologies in how we write and in how we teach writing and any number of online peer revision products are available.  But the ones I have seen are simply electronic tools to do what we do in class: sit in front of writing and chat about it.  What it would mean to reconceive peer revision? How do new digital writing practices call forth new digital peer review practices?  I don’t have anything like an answer to that question but I do believe it’s a question worth asking.   Consider Facebook.  It constantly invites peer feedback with a single click and only recently moved past the singular “like” that so troubles art, creative writing, and composition students in the process.  What might it look like to do peer revision in such a context?  What if a paper were just a series of posts on Facebook?  What if it were an Instagram photo, which allows only a heart?   I may not have the answers but the questions aren’t going away.  As students come to our classrooms across the university with a muscle memory of the mind that suggests one click is all peer feedback is, how shall we challenge this reaction or harness it? ... View more

I grew up seeing sensational stories teased in commercials for the National Enquirer and similar tabloids on television. The claims about UFO invaders, scandalous affairs, and celebrity drama taught me long ago not to believe everything that I read. Like most writing teachers, whenever I teach research skills, I cover the importance of evaluating your sources before including the information they present in research projects. I have even written a lesson plan on how to conduct Inquiry on the Internet. I was a little surprised, then, when fake news became such big news after the presidential election. A simple search yields stories covering the influence of fake news like these: The Hoaxes, Fake News and Misinformation We Saw on Election Day (The New York Times) Facebook’s failure: did fake news and polarized politics get Trump elected? (The Guardian) Google and Facebook Take Aim at Fake News Sites (The New York Times) Click and elect: how fake news helped Donald Trump win a real election (The Guardian) Fake news goes beyond politics. This ‘wannabe weatherman’ allegedly lit fires for views. (The Washington Post) Predictably, these stories and the circumstances that inspired them led to suggestions on how to tell the difference between news and fake news. The NBC News story “How to Outsmart Fake News” (below) features Massachusetts professor Melissa Zimbdar explaining how to identify and avoid questionable news stories: Video Link : 1886 Zimbdar’s handout on False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical “News” Sources includes the full list of tips. The Washington Post’s “The Fact Checker’s guide for detecting fake news” offers a similar list of suggestions. Students can use these tips to consider the validity of news sources, but I want them to think about why people believe these stories in the first place by exploring questions like these: What persuasive strategies make fake news seem to be true? What topics are likely to be the focus of fake news? Why are some topics better than others? What makes a topic a good choice for fake news? What kind of details need to be included? What kind of details would probably be left out? What audiences are likely to believe a fake news story? What circumstances would make a fake news story more believable? How does cultural background effect whether an audience believes fake news? What personal experiences could effect whether an audience believes fake news? Before using these questions, I would ask the class to discuss some historical situations where fake news had an impact. Fake news has a long history. If you include opinion columns in your discussion, you can point back to Swift’s Modest Proposal and then jump to contemporary pieces. If you want to explore the difference between satire and misinformation, Swift is a strong starting point. Once students think about the situation that led to Swift’s satirical commentary, you might talk about The Borowitz Report, The Onion, and The Daily Show. I like to start with the hysteria caused by Mercury Theatre production of The War of the Worlds from October 30, 1938 (MP3 recording and broadcast script). For the purposes of classroom discussion, the Wikipedia article on Public Reaction to the broadcast provides adequate details on the extent and causes of the panic that ensued in response to the fake new updates of a Martian landing in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Because of the distance students have from the events, they usually quickly understand how personal experiences and world events misled listeners who believed the updates were true. Once students explore The War of the Worlds broadcast, I ask them to think about the extent and causes behind the current fake news stories, using the ten questions to get discussion started. Class discussion can also take up the recent Wall Street Journal article, “Most Students Don’t Know When News Is Fake, Stanford Study Finds.” After considering the reasons that people believe fake news stories, students can have a strong conversation on whether they accept the findings of the Stanford study that the article discusses. With such articles appearing in the press, it’s an important topic for students to explore. Are you talking about fake news in the classroom? How are students responding? Do you have strategies to share? Please leave me a comment and let me know what you’re doing.   Credit: Quality Journalism Means an Informed Citizenry, by Mike Licht, on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 License ... View more

The recent presidential election was contentious, blistering in its attacks, and deeply personal in its tone. When the results were finally announced, the sense of division in the country only seemed to be heightened. Protests soon occurred on our streets and on our campuses. And if the election were not a topic in our classes previously, the aftershocks seemed to be a fact most teachers felt a need to discuss. We needed, I believe, to demonstrate the possibility of creating a space where open and honest dialogue could enable the finding of some common ground.   The question we faced as teachers, however, was “How?”   In taking on such work, I believe, we must resist the pull to imagine our classes as mirroring the coarse divisions of the past election season. In each of us resides an inner complexity that too rarely has a venue to be expressed. Each of us carries a sense of what a just world, enriched by such complexity, might allow, and the desire to build such a world exists as a collaborative vision for all of us.  My role as a teacher is to create a space where that complexity is not only expressed, but woven into a common narrative which can allow my class to have difficult, but necessary, conversations.   One of the tools I use to create this space is the “Story of Us” workshop. I learned this workshop through being involved in community organizing – undertaking the difficult work of trying to get individuals to sign on to a common project. By the time the “Story of Us” occurs in the workshop, the participants have shared a story about who they are and what brought them to the workshop. They have practiced forming a common agenda, developing decision making procedures, and soon will move to forming a plan of action. The “Story of Us” is designed to occur just before the “plan of action” and encapsulate what they have learned about each other, confirm the common values they have discovered, and point to work that still needs done.   My class is at a similar moment. My students have shared personal experiences. They have developed a common intellectual agenda and developed a way of talking which helps them decide where the conversation should go. They are about to move to building projects for the end of the term. Yet I believe the aftermath of the election has hurt this hard won sense of trust and collaboration. I am using the “Story of Us” as a starting point to rebuild this sense of community and, as importantly, to help students understand the complexity of their classmates. It is a reminder of the intersecting beliefs that allow action to occur. In fact, in almost all classes I have taught, I have found deploying this workshop to be a powerful way to have students recognize what they have accomplished and what they can achieve together as the term concludes.   The “Story of Us” process is pretty simple - see the linked worksheets based on the work of Marshall Ganz - and results in a set of common values being expressed and endorsed by the class: Team Breakout Session: Story of Us  Worksheet: Developing Your Story of Us  Coaching Tips: Story of Us  Worksheet: Coaching Your Teammates' Stories of Us  Since the worksheets go into minute by minute detail, I will focus on our role as teachers during the workshop.   First, our role is to make sure that the schedule is followed. This ensures it will fit into the class period. (Here it is structured for a 50-minute class.)    Second, our role is to enact the strong listening required by each student in class. We might do this by telling our own “Story of Us,” what values we have heard the class expect, what work we can now undertake. We might also visit each group, asking questions which help students form their narrative.   Third, our role is to highlight the need for a strong narrative structure. What choice did this classroom (or larger student) community face? What choice did it make? What was the outcome? In my class, which was about politics and race, the challenge was that students often spoke ineloquently about their beliefs. My class had to decide whether to listen literally or to attempt to hear the point trying to be made. They chose the latter and, because of that choice, we built a trusting community that was able to gain a greater understanding of the complexity of race in the U.S.A.   Fourth, when students are selected to share their stories to the whole class, our role is to ask students what values they hear in each speech, writing them on the board. Our role is to then conclude the class with a statement on how these common values can help us continue our work. (We should also make sure that after each speech the students applaud for the speaker.)   Depending on your class, how they best operate, you might decide to pass these worksheets out the day before. This will let them prepare a bit. You might also ask them to look online for “Story of Us Marshall Ganz” which will let them see how individuals in the full workshop have structured their speeches. Those search terms will also provide them videos of the full “Story of Us” workshops to watch, like this one: Video Link : 1881   Although such background isn’t necessary, I have found this usually helps folks visualize the work. And if you are intrigued by how narrative can help create community, you might find it interesting.  Here I should also add, I talk about Ganz, his workshops, and their role in a writing class in my textbook, Writing Communities.   Finally, if you send me videos of your students’ “Story of Self,” I’ll try to link them to his blog post. (Though we will need student permission.) Also please feel free to comment below or write with any questions.   Let’s begin, that is, to build our own community of “us.”   Contact:Stephen Parks‌ | Stephenjparks.com | @StephenJParks | sjparks@syr.edu ... View more

Stephen Parks‌'s Team Breakout Session handout. See https://community.macmillan.com/community/the-english-community/bedford-bits/blog/2016/12/06/the-story-of-us-finding-community-in-our-classrooms-in-a-post-election-world  ... View more

The news is bad enough these days without the extra burden of having to deal with fake news. But that is just what Facebook users have been dealing with. In fact, following Donald Trump’s surprise win, some argued that the election was affected by fake news circulating on Facebook. Mark Zuckerman initially denied that fake news could have had that impact, calling the idea "crazy," but since then, he has announced a number of new initiatives to crack down on fake news. Why would people fall for fake news on Facebook? Some of the stories are outlandish:  “Terrorists are funding 20% of Hillary’s campaign;” “Obama told illegal immigrants to vote;” “Trump Confirms that He Just Googled Obamacare.”  That last example is the title of a satire. Its author, Andy Borowitz, has written more than one satire taken as fact by some readers.  An insightful article by Judith Donath explains why people want to believe what they read. She argues, “Posting fake news stories is a modern form of identity politics.” By that she means that people post and share the news stories that identify them with a certain community with shared values.  Often the fake stories that get circulated the most are the most partisan ones, because they conform to the political beliefs of those who pass them on. Fake news stories actually often gets shared more than factual ones. Donath writes, “Posting any story, real or false, that conforms to your community’s viewpoint bolsters your ties with them. Even if it is false, you have still demonstrated your shared values.”  She goes on, “If  . . . the news you post is fake, outsiders are more likely to be outraged. If you stand by it tenaciously, they may call you a fool or a liar. This infuriated response makes posting fake news a convincing signal for your allegiance to your in-group.” Hostility from outsiders strengthens the cohesion of the in-group. On the other hand, the threat of hostility from outsiders has caused some Facebook groups to go underground by becoming secret groups. There they can share news, fake or otherwise, secure in the knowledge that they are sharing with kindred spirits. This can be reassuring for those who voted against Trump, particularly since he has already been dubbed “Tweeter-in-Chief” and does not shrink from using his tweets to criticize his opponents for exercising their First Amendment rights. Textbooks have had to try to keep up with students’ use of technology for research. Long gone are the days when students relied solely on print sources. We have had to teach them how to document online sources, but also how to evaluate them. We still have to fight their tendency to believe that one source is as good as another and their inclination to go to the source listed first when they Google key terms. Now it seems we are going to have to teach them to look critically even at what they read on Facebook. One of my friends recently posted on her timeline, “I miss the old Facebook. Just saying.” She misses the days before Facebook got so politicized. Maybe between elections it may go back to being a place where people discuss their personal problems, document their travels, and even post pictures of the meal they are eating—to say nothing of all of the cute cat videos. Even Hillary admitted that she found the cat videos a welcome break from campaigning. Maybe we will never go back to that naïve a time. At least we can never go back to trusting completely everything we read on Facebook, and that is probably a good thing.  Credit: Facebook by Pascal Paukner on Flickr ... View more

I received an email from a student who could not attend class yesterday.  In the email, she noted that she was having trouble with her glasses and had decided to get contact lenses.  Her lenses arrived the day before she sent the email, and she got them in, but after working several hours, she found she couldn’t get them out.  She had to return to the eye doctor during class time to have the lenses removed. She was told not to drive, even with her glasses.  She ended the note by saying she was looking for a ride for the next day, because she wasn’t sure she could get the contacts back in on her own.   Just last week, this same student expressed fear that members of her family, who are waiting to immigrate to the United States as she has, will face tougher restrictions and delays or rejection in their efforts to come here; she wonders if she and her family will be welcome, if they can be accepted members of the college and the community.  In the wake of that fear, she had not finished the essay assignment I gave last week.   It would be easy to condemn her.  Excuses, excuses.   Ten minutes after our 8:00 class began this morning, she slipped in quietly, exhausted after working the night shift yesterday.  In our ESL grammar class, we were working on the punctuation of essential and non-essential adjective clauses.  I watched this young woman during class as she peered at the screen where I was projecting examples:  she wrote diligently, stopping every so often and wrinkling her head in thought.   Towards the end of the class, I gave the students ten sentences and asked if commas were needed.   On sentence #3, she responded incorrectly; hearing me say “No, that’s not it,” she sighed and shook her head.   Another student pointed out why the commas were not needed, and in turn, I paraphrased explanation, using the grammar terminology I had introduced in class: “Yes, the information in this adjective clause is essential; the readers need it in order to identify which particular group of people the sentence describes.”  After a quizzical glance from the student, I repeated myself, slowly.  I could see her parsing my words, and then she nodded.  She answered all the remaining questions correctly.   This student reminds me of what my community college students—immigrant and non-immigrant alike—are facing.  They want to see, and they know that they need tools and experience to do so.  But some days, the contacts just won’t go in, and the world is blurry and muddled.  As teachers, we can be tough on them (and rightly so, much of the time).  But I also need to remember what it was like to be at the beginning, learning to put my contacts in as a middle-schooler, learning to write and diagram sentences (yes, I did diagramming) in the 8 th and 9 th grades.  I need to remember a time when I couldn’t make sense of all the pieces, but I had to move forward anyway.  I need to remember a time when I put my work in front of a professor, completely uncertain as to whether or not I had met the standards of the academy – standards I could not begin to articulate.  I need to remember standing outside the English building at Baylor University, drawn by the tall windows, the smell of wood and old books, and the conversations within.  But I was nervous:  at some point, I might be exposed as an imposter.  In my classes, I planned my words and parroted my instructors cautiously; I never had confidence that I could contribute much of substance, even though my mind delighted in the novels and poems we were reading, in the language we were using.   And I was a student from a background of privilege.    In their work on threshold concepts, Meyer and Land suggest that students are in a liminal state, crossing a threshold and shifting their understanding of the world around them as they acquire disciplinary knowledge.   Some days, the contacts slip in, and the concepts fit together easily.  On other days, the contacts are left at home, and nothing quite makes sense.  In her overview of threshold concepts, Glynis Cousins notes, “Because it is difficult for teachers to gaze backwards across thresholds, they need to hear what the students’ misunderstandings and uncertainties are in order to sympathetically engage with them,” and “there is no simple passage in learning from ‘easy’ to ‘difficult’; mastery of a threshold concept often involves messy journeys back, forth and across conceptual terrain.”  She counsels teachers to “demonstrate that they can tolerate learner confusion and can ‘hold’ their students through liminal states.”   This young woman got adjective clauses today, but she may not get conditionals next week.  I need to stick with her regardless, not blaming her for confusion and not condemning her attempts, however clumsy and uncertain, to make sense of it all.  And when, in the writing class she is also taking with me, she does not apply these grammar concepts with mastery in her essay, I must remember what she has in fact mastered, and how her writing has progressed.    I need to take myself back to the beginning.  Then I can stand at the threshold and keep the door open. ... 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Some forty-five years ago now, I began my college teaching career at Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Florida, where I learned in just a few short months what I did NOT know about how to teach writing. I had an excuse, of course; I had never taken a writing course (exempted, stupidly) and had only figured out how to write papers for my college classes by a kind of osmosis. Still, that first year was one long series of lessons in humility. My students were wonderful; they deserved a teacher who could guide them. Instead, they had me. But I didn’t give up easily, and with their help I began to understand what I needed to do: analyze their writing carefully, systematically, and listen intently to what they wanted to write about, and why they wanted to write about it. By the time I left Tampa to return to school for a Ph.D. (and to learn more about writing and about rhetoric!), I had found some footing, again thanks to my students. Together, we improved. Today, roughly half of students in college began their work at a two-year school. Yet these institutions get much less funding than their four-year counterparts and hence have fewer resources: year after year, decade after decade, they are asked to do more with less. Yet in my travels around the country, I am regularly inspired and heartened by colleagues teaching at community and junior colleges. They often seem to know their students better, more deeply, than at four-year state colleges, and they care deeply about them. I wish that all those state funders, all those legislators, could visit the schools I visit, talk with the faculty and meet with the students I meet. I think they would be heartened and inspired too. Maybe even enough to make some changes in their state’s funding formula. Recently I visited Northeast Junior College in Sterling, Colorado, where I met with faculty from across the disciplines to talk about students and about writing. As always, I came away impressed: with the philosophy teacher who had started five or six extracurricular clubs for students and who challenged his in-class students with forward-looking assignments; with the agriculture teacher who started every class with some writing; with the nursing faculty who asked piercingly insightful questions about how to help their students improve as writers and thinkers; with the English teacher who had started a writing center from scratch and made it part of the campus Comprehensive Learning Center. In this small northern Colorado community, this college felt very much like where the rubber meets the road, a no-nonsense, let’s get to work right now kind of place. I came away wondering how I could make more connections with two-year colleges and how much we would all have to gain if four-year and two-year college teachers of writing made opportunities to work together. I know that some states, such as Oregon, encourage such collaboration, but more often than not, such encouragement comes without any support or funding. But today’s technologies may offer ways for colleagues to work across boundaries with minimum expense: webinars, google hangouts, and other ways of meeting up now abound. Do you teach at a two-year college or at a four-year college? If so, what ways can you imagine sharing, partnering up, and maybe even fostering some on-line exchanges between students? How can you imagine breaking down the walls between institutions? In the meantime, here are some photos I took at NJC: what a happy day I had there! Student writing displayed in the Center. One room in the Center. It's always snack time! ... View more

Part of leading a discussion in a creative writing workshop involves encouraging students to give rigorous feedback and criticism to their classmates, while also fostering an atmosphere of respect and friendship.  Hank Devereaux Jr.—the narrator of Richard Russo’s academic satire Straight Man—observed that, in the creative writing classroom, “tough, rigorous criticism is predicated on good, not ill, will.” As teachers, it’s part of our job to create an environment where student writers feel comfortable receiving—and giving—detailed feedback and constructive criticism.  The workshop, after all, isn’t going to work if the only thing the student author hears is “great job” or “I really liked the words you used to convey your ideas.” Creating an environment of friendly and well-intentioned critique is difficult in any creative writing classroom, but it’s particularly difficult in a creative nonfiction classroom.  As writers, we’re frequently defensive when it comes to our work, but as creative nonfiction writers, we sometimes wind up feeling defensive about our experiences and ideas as well.  Once, as a student in a workshop, I had to listen as a classmate explained that she didn’t like the piece I had written because the “narrator” was so whiney and self-absorbed.  And while I like to think that I have thick skin … come on.  That hurt. I try to be particularly conscious of the student author’s feelings and protectiveness of her work even as I ask my students to talk specifically about what isn’t working in a piece.  Still, even with my attempts at sensitivity, some students are stressed out and even hurt by the entire workshop experience.  Who can blame them? They’ve just revealed themselves—exposed their realest, innermost selves—without the safety net of a fictional narrator or poetic speaker, and now they’re getting criticized for their efforts.  That can be disheartening, even infuriating. A couple weeks ago, my book—this manuscript I’ve been working on, in various forms, for over five years now—was rejected by a publisher.  Again.  As most working writers know, rejection is just part of the process.  You read the nicely-phrased note, sigh to yourself, then get back on your laptop and find the next contest or university press to send the thing to.  You nod to yourself, silently wish the editors who rejected you good luck with their future endeavors, and then get back to work. At least, that’s how I think it’s supposed to happen.  The truth is, that’s not how it works for me.  Instead, I give out this little gasp.  Then I pace around the room a little bit.  Then I announce—either to my wife or, if she’s not home, one of the cats—“I don’t know why I continue to operate under the delusion that I’m a writer.”  My wife, for her part, knows to let me say this out loud, to get it out of my system.  And the cats seem to know the same thing—they seldom interrupt my pity parties. Keep in mind, I’m a fairly successful writer (“For the type of loser who doesn’t even have a book,” Mopey Me adds with a frown).  I’ve published over two dozen essays, reviews, and interviews in some of the best magazines and journals in my field.  I say this not to brag, but to point out that I have no reason to feel like a loser when something I write—from the shortest essay to the book manuscript itself—is not accepted for publication.  But I do. Inevitably, I get over it.  I take a couple of days, but then return to the manuscript in order to decide, “Was it them, or is it me?”  Sometimes, I make changes.  Sometimes—like this most recent time—I conclude, “You know, I think this is ready as it is.”  And I send the thing back out again.  Sometimes I’m successful, sometimes I’m not.  The point is, I essay. But the larger point is that I understand personally the frustration and disappointment when a piece of writing is received less enthusiastically than its author might like.  My students’ sadness (or anger) at a workshop discussion may not be exactly the same as my own response to a rejection, but it’s darn close, I think.  That’s important to keep in mind—too often I get frustrated by my students’ frustration.  “I’m trying to help you!” I think to myself.  But it’s useful to remember that they’ve poured as much as themselves into their assignments as I have into my book. Lately, I’ve taken to telling my students what I’m working on, and when the work gets rejected—or accepted.  I want them to understand that the occasional disappointment is inevitably part of this process, but that if they persevere, they might know the joy that comes with realizing they have succeeded in reaching—and moving—their audience. Any other tips on how to deal with student frustrations in the writing workshop?  For that matter, any advice for me on how to deal with my own bouts of self-loathing that inevitably accompany rejection? [[This post originally appeared on LitBits on 8/28/12]] ... View more

One type of analysis that plays a role in argumentation is causal analysis. I started trying to do a causal analysis of some of the arguments in the recent presidential campaign, but the cause-effect relationships soon took on the complexities of the New York subway system. I decided to look only at some of the causal relationships involved in the infamous email controversy. That alone shows that we generally err in assuming that one cause produces only one effect. Consider the letter that James Comey, Director of the FBI, sent to Congress on October 28, 2016. It certainly had multiple effects. It sent Trump into a paroxysm of delight and Clinton into a rage.  Both were understandable reactions. What a difference there was when he wrote his second letter on November 6, 2016, announcing that the “new” emails found (on Anthony Weiner’s computer) had been studied and that they reinforced Comey’s original conclusion  that there were no grounds for prosecuting Clinton.  And the effect on the voting public? That depends. For some, neither letter made any difference at all. In many states, voters heard about the first letter, went to vote, and then heard about the second. The first letter had the potential to affect their vote, but they didn’t find out about the second in time. Those in states with no early voting at least had the chance to know about both letters. Many of those who heard Trump’s explanation of the meaning of the first letter went to the polls believing that the investigation into Clinton’s emails had been reopened.                 Let’s consider an example of working in the opposite direction, from effect back to cause. Again, a one-to-one correspondence is often an oversimplification. One news commentator pointed out—and I paraphrase—that Comey’s role in the presidential campaign would not have been an issue if Clinton had not done something that warranted an investigation in the first place: use a private email server. So using a private email server was the effect that caused the investigation into her emails, which was the effect that caused Comey to reconsider his conclusion not to recommend that she be prosecuted for wrongdoing, which was the effect that caused the respective reactions from the Trump and Clinton camps—a causal chain.                 Clinton’s use of a private server was often given as a reason for not voting for her. I suspect, however, that that was only a contributing factor. More likely a number of different factors went into a decision not to vote for her. By the end of the campaign, critics were poking fun at Trump for responding to every accusation with a reference to Hillary’s emails. He hammered at that reason for not trusting Clinton, but the intensity of his outrage at what he considered to be crimes for which she should be jailed was probably the result of more than the email issue.                 Causal analysis is another means of exploring an issue to discover all of the arguments that can be made about it. With enough time, someone could analyze many of the complex reasons that people voted the way they did in 2016. To oversimplify the cause-effect relationships is to cheapen people’s reasons for voting as they did. Credit: Clinton vs. Trump 2016 by Marco Verch on flickr ... View more

I’m writing this the weekend before the election. So much has already been written about the candidates, the process, the scandals, the lies, the cheating, the intimidation, the vitriol, the ignorance, the racism, the misogyny, the failures of the press, media bias, confirmation bias, the polls and the pollsters, the pundits and their punditry that it’s hard to imagine having anything new or important to add to this tsunami of text that continues to crash, in wave after wave, on the increasingly polluted remnants of what little time we have left on Earth here together.   And it’s even harder for me to imagine what words I could compose just prior to November 8 th that will be worth your time when they go live on November 11 th .  Whatever happens this coming week, you will have gone to work in one world on Monday morning and you will have finished up teaching in a very different world by Friday.   I just want to draw attention to one data point before I get on to the challenge of imagining what teaching post 11/9 (the day after the day after the election) is likely to entail. When I checked Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com this morning, beginning the day as I have every day for the past many months, and found that Clinton’s chances of prevailing on Election Day had continued their decline, I dropped down further on Silver’s page to look at the graph of how his polling numbers had changed, day-by-day, since his first report on June 8 th .  (Silver, recall, skyrocketed to fame following the 2008 election by predicting the results in 49 out of 50 states, practically down to the county-level. He experienced immediate Internet fame afterwards, via the hashtag #natesilverknows followed by something impossible—i.e., what you’re eating for breakfast tomorrow.)   Silver’s method grabs all reputable and semi-reputable polls, then models various ways of correcting for bias and reliability to come up with a prediction that has aspirations of neutrality. Silver strives to separate the signal from the noise, aims to provide a constantly updated, clear-eyed vision of what’s more likely to happen than not. And what I saw this morning is that, while the odds of who will win the election has waxed and waned for the past four months, as we slouch towards Election Day, Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning have declined .6% since early June. All the money, all the rage and hatred, all the debates, all the airtime, all the sleepless nights, and all the worry—and that’s it: .6%.   That says a lot to me about rhetoric and about the many industries that thrive on political and social dysfunction.  Does it make sense to talk about persuasion in what is, essentially, a binary system? It seems that very, very few people have changed their minds over the course of this ghastly, grueling crawl through the sausage factory. The maps are red and blue and then shades of each, but when it comes to voting, there’s no gray area, no possibility of registering a qualified, complex, nuanced, contextual, or contingent response; there’s no way to go gray.   And yet, all of the attributes that the act of voting doesn’t allow are attributes of the creative mind, attributes that education is meant to cultivate, encourage, and nourish. They are all attributes that we’ll need after the election is over, regardless of who we voted for, if we are going to be able to promote ways of working together across, around, and through our differences.   Teaching Post-11/9 Ann and I have an essay in Habits of the Creative Mind entitled, “On the Three Most Important Words in the English Language,” where we discuss different ways of making connections between thoughts and observations. “And” is one of the three most important words. It allows us to connect like to like: Clinton is this, that, and the other thing; Trump is this, that, and the other thing. (I was playing with this kind of connecting in the first paragraph of this post.) This is paratactic thinking. It’s our most primal way of making sense of the world: this and this and this and this. It’s the thinking that children do when they’re telling stories about their days: we went here and we went there and I fell asleep and Mommy woke me up and . . . .   The other two most important words in the English language allow us to escape from the flattening sameness of paratactic thought. “But” allows us to qualify; “or” allows us to imagine alternative possibilities. These ways of connecting ring in worlds Of contingency: X won the election, but Y refused to concede. Of uncertainty: Neither X nor Y won the election; they tied (this actually is possible!). Of opportunity: If X wins the election, we’ll have a Constitutional crisis or cooler heads will prevail and we’ll find a way to reclaim the virtues of compromise. Teaching after 11/9, we need to make sure we’re helping our students—and ourselves—to remember that the future is ours for the making and that, at the mico-level of the individual mind, we prepare ourselves to participate in future-making by practicing complexity, practicing nuance, practicing qualification, and, practicing kindness. I’ve added the last term on this list to my thoughts about the habits of the creative mind after reading Beth Boquet’s new book, Nowhere Near the Line, where she elaborates on the necessity of practicing this way of being in relation to one another: "Too often we think of kindness as a quality someone either possesses or does not. We admire a kind person as a rare object. We speak of kindness as a random act, something that surprises us precisely because it is unusual, unexpected. Kindness, however, is really a habit, an orientation, something we practice and, indeed, can get better at." Finally, post 11/9, I think we also need to refamiliarize ourselves with the original texts that have shaped and structured the democratic ideal—as we should have done post 9/11. Ann thinks we should all hit the pause button and spend the next week having our students read and discuss the Constitution. That sounds to me like a really good place to start. ... View more

This post is a continuation of Teaching and Learning at Midterm: Free Empathy (Meditation 1) Second Meditation: On Creativity and Slow Grading This semester, the graduate students enrolled in my Practicum course have initiated many thoughtful discussions on the role of creativity in teaching basic writing and learning to write for academic audiences and purposes. For a practitioner/inquiry project devoted to this theme, a participant in practicum developed and guest-taught a lesson for my students enrolled in Stretch. The lesson included a performance by Evelyn Glennie, whose TED Talk “How to Truly Listen” has been a significant touchstone for our writing project. After we listened to Glennie perform Steve Reich’s "Clapping Music,” our guest-teacher asked us to write in response. In my own graduate school training, we were encouraged to write with students, to experience the challenges of process and product writers ourselves. I rarely write poetry anymore, but this poem emerged as an attempt to gain understanding and empathy for struggles with neuro-diversity. I presented the poem to students as an introduction to my frustrations with slow grading. Organized Chaos (after Evelyn Glennie's performance of Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music”) Flow-- breathing in flow-- and sound evolving from the tips of fingers and the sound beating of a heart (My brain these days My sewing in odd moments) Organized chaos (Needle pushing through cotton Quilting pieces layering cotton over rayon over cool polyester) creating new offerings from old notes trying and trying again organized chaos the sound of flow Right now, my brain is moving in pieces and fragments that need quilting together. Glennie's work reminds me of this, of Difference as asset and not deficit. She reminds me how and why art is created. She reminds me of the need to create art, and to remember writing as art and quilting as art, the seaming together of disparate pieces to create larger wholes. I used to write a lot of poetry. Now I write in many forms. Powerpoints are quilts and quilts are 1000-page books of short stories and essays. In my mind, through the tips of my fingers, I clap with Glennie. Organized chaos. I flow. The practice of Free Empathy comes with its own challenges. For example, I need to constantly check long-held teaching practices and processes for relevance in current contexts. Often this checking happens in the moment, as new and unexpected conundrums arise. But as we move through midterm into the final weeks of the course,  Free Empathy offers the most consistent lesson plan I know for changing times.   ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Gene Melton‌, a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at North Carolina State University, where he teaches courses in composition and rhetoric and in British, American, and LGBTQ literature. In Spring 2017, he will begin serving as academic advisor for the Department’s Literature majors.  He earned his PhD in 19 th - and 20 th -century American literature at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.   Opening Classical Argument The foundational assignment for my WID-based first-year academic writing and research course is a classical argument on a topic the students choose based on their individual interests and current base of knowledge. While I do allow students to conduct outside research for this classical argument, I do not require them to do so, nor do I expect them at this early point to be at all aware of academic, peer-reviewed sources. I begin with this assignment because it centers argument as a key intellectual activity on which I can build tothe further work of the course, which asks students to engage with texts from a variety of academic disciplines and to explore the pleasures and pitfalls of conducting research at the undergraduate level.   One of the first challenges this assignment presents is the choice of topic. Students often do not recognize the merit in writing about their very specific interests, initially opting in favor of rather sweeping, “trendy” issues. For example, a student might at first propose a paper on a vague notion of gun control when she is really invested in proposing regulations on hunting in her home state. Indeed, I find that I must conference with the students one-on-one as they are generating ideas to help them see that they can find viable topics within their personal interests and to help them develop the courage to risk doing so. I hope that students take from this part of the process the recognition that their interests can (and should) motivate their academic work and that they need to narrow down any topic to a scope reasonable for the parameters of a given writing situation.   Another challenge the students confront in this assignment is conceptualizing what exactly is at stake regarding the issue/topic they have identified and just how far they can go in supporting their assertions on the matter, given their current level of knowledge about the issue and access to evidence to support their claims. To help students work through their ideas, I ask them to think in terms of articulating a precise claim that does not go beyond the bounds of what they can defend through specific reasons and credible, concrete supporting evidence. We also examine assumptions (especially unstated ones) and consider how to respond to potential opposing views, elements of argument that often seem to have been overlooked or under-emphasized in students’ prior writing instruction. While most of their final drafts still rest on limited evidence and lack fully nuanced understanding of the issue(s) involved, they nevertheless demonstrate an evolving sense of what informed academic audiences demand of serious intellectual inquiry and argumentation.   Integrating Knowledge from Academic Domains Once the students have completed this first project, they turn next to learning to read scholarly articles from three broad domains of academic inquiry:  humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. As part of this study, I ask the students to practice analyzing the rhetorical features of sample articles I provide and to discuss the similarities and differences in the way scholars in the various domains write about the knowledge they are generating and how those scholars articulate and support their claims in their essays and reports. At this time, the students also begin to explore formal academic research as they develop an annotated bibliography of peer-reviewed articles related to the topic about which they wrote their classical argument. They will also eventually write a comparative rhetorical analysis of two of the articles they collect as part of their research, demonstrating in the process not only their understanding of the rhetorical features in their representative disciplinary texts, but also their own evolving knowledge of argument in general.   Revised Classical Argument As a final, capstone project for the course, students return to their initial classical argument and revise it in light of the research they have conducted and their increased awareness of the range of rhetorical possibilities available to them. It is rewarding to see students articulate the same argument from a more informed, nuanced perspective, complete with substantive evidence and precise, formal documentation. Equally (if not sometimes more) rewarding are those times when, after having spent three months researching and reflecting on their topic, students adopt a position on the issue that is completely opposite to the one they championed at the beginning of the semester. Either way, I find that the recursive nature of this sequence helps students to recognize their own growth as writers of academic arguments. ... View more

Of course it was inevitable that I should turn my semiotic eye this time around upon one of the most significant events in popular cultural history: the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan.  But the question is not whether Dylan deserved the prize (I really really don't want to go there) nor even whether songwriters should be equated with musically-unenhanced poets; no, the semiotic question is, quite simply: what does this award signify?   Let's start with the fact that I am discussing this at all.  How, one might ask, did it come to pass that the posthumous legacy of the Swedish inventor of dynamite should come to be not only the world's most prestigious award, but should also have bequeathed to a small, and rather secretive, committee in Stockholm the power to create and even influence history?  For that is what the prize does: it plays a significant role in determining which scientists, economists, and writers will be most remembered and whose work will be given most authority, and it also, through its Peace awards, has a way of intervening in ongoing human conflicts and, as in the case with the award to Barack Obama, electoral politics.   It is also worth noting (and this should be especially poignant for scholars) how the Prize also has a way of indicating what really counts in human intellectual endeavor: physics, but not mathematics; medicine, but not biology; chemistry, but not engineering; economics, but not political science; literature, but not painting, music, or sculpture; and nothing in the way of scholarship—not history, nor anthropology, nor literary criticism, nor even philosophy (which is why Bertrand Russell was awarded the prize for literature).   So let me repeat, how did the Will, and will, of one man from a rather small country accomplish this?   I can't answer this question entirely, but I can offer some suggestions.  First, it is useful to note that the Prize came into existence just on the cusp of the final transition from feudalism to capitalism.  For where science and art were once the retainers of Crown and Church, whose patronage alone was sufficient reward for early scientists and artists, in the capitalist era individual enterprise and  competition are the motivators for human endeavor.  (It is striking to note in this regard that the Nobel Prize was created by a wealthy industrial capitalist, but the award is handed over by the King of Sweden.)  Competition is what prizes are all about, and as we head further and further into the era of hypercapitalism, we accordingly get more and more competitive awards: more Oscars, Grammys, Emmys, Tony's, Pulitzers .  .   . the list seems endless.   Thus, we might say that the Nobel Prize got there first, was, that is to say, the first arrival in the bourgeois era of competitive achievement.   Itself the title holder in the Most Venerable Award sweepstakes, the Prize is a signifier of capitalism's worship of whatever is biggest and "best," turning even art and science into a contest—with all the "winners" and "losers" that contests entail.   Which takes me to the second signification I see in the Dylan award.  For by giving the prize to a superstar of popular culture, the Nobel committee has not only given its vastly influential imprimatur to a once marginalized region of human creativity, it has signified that the ancient wall between "high" culture and "low" really is tumbling down.  (I've been saying this for over twenty years in every edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A., so I ought to be grateful to the folks in Stockholm for putting some authority behind it.)   But having really, shall we say, dynamited the last remnants of high cultural ascendancy over low, the members of the Nobel committee may have opened a flood gate that they did not anticipate.  For now a host of songwriters, screenwriters, TV script writers, and goodness knows who else that the culture industry has made rich and powerful, will come knocking at their door.  Having everything except a Nobel Prize, they will likely be found lobbying, imploring, schmoozing, advertising     .  .  .  in short going through the whole playbook of competitive awards seeking to gain the one trophy missing from their collections.   I can see it now: laureates on the red carpet. ... View more