We know from our own experience, and from mountains of research (see Iowa State’s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching to get a sense of what’s out there), that students need to feel like they belong in our classrooms if they are going to succeed. We foster this sense of belonging in everything we do: from the way we greet students on their first day in class to the way say goodbye on their final day.  For me, though, course design is the first area of focus that comes to mind when I think about how to ensure students feel they are an integral part of the class. We can help our students feel at home even before they arrive in our classrooms by carefully planning the fifteen weeks we will share with them so that our time spent together is equitable, clear, relevant, and reflective. The Course Design Equity and Inclusion Rubric available at Stanford’s Teaching Commons offers a helpful way to evaluate one’s own course content. The rubric features categories such as “Personal Connections and Relevance,” “Transparency of Content,” “Diversity of Perspectives” and “Diversity of Media” that will remind instructors—especially those of us who have been around a while—to take a fresh look at not only what material we are assigning but how we expect students to respond to it. The pandemic has reminded us how reliant we have become on technology to enable learning, but also how tentative our connections to that technology sometimes are. It’s vital, therefore, that while we take advantage of the learning resources that are at hand, we make no easy assumptions about students’ access to or competence in the technosphere. As Clint Smith points out in his 2019 Atlantic article “Elite Colleges Constantly Tell Low-Income Students That They Do Not Belong,” it is wrong to treat all students “as homogeneous…, as if they all navigate these schools in the same way.” Naturally, our course homepage and syllabus should be easy to read and easy to navigate. We not only model clear writing for our students in these documents, but we also ensure that our expectations and theirs are in concert. And it is here that we demonstrate—by assigning diverse authors and content-creators in varied genres—that we honor a range of ways of expressing ideas and opinions. Of course, students cannot succeed unless their basic needs are met. Even the most dedicated student will necessarily prioritize shelter and food over a problem-solution essay. Our awareness of our campus’s full resources, and our ability to guide students directly to the resources they need, is a clear sign that we believe all students belong in our classes. Instructors in every discipline take for granted the importance of their own field of study, but those of us in English probably feel that the importance of our subject is self-evident. It’s obvious to us that success in college will depend, to a large extent, on one’s ability to communicate clearly and persuasively. However, our discipline’s relevance may not be immediately apparent to a student planning to study Chemistry or Computer Science, and we need early and often to connect the value of effective written and spoken communication to success across the curriculum. In a study of college students from nonmajor sections of biology, psychology, and English, researchers found that students feel an increased sense of belonging to the course in which they are enrolled when they perceive that “academic tasks are interesting, important, and useful” (Freeman et al 205). Finally, we must plan time throughout the semester for students’ self-reflection. In my experience, these meta-conversations about college that students may initially feel are off-topic, may wind up being as important as any discussion of course content. Maithreyi Gopalan and Shannon Brady recommend creating an environment “that helps students feel connected to each other, to faculty and staff, and to the institution.” Among their suggestions for fostering this sense of belonging is foregrounding the idea that “certain kinds of challenges in the transition to college…are common, shared by many students from diverse backgrounds, and likely to abate over time. Such thoughtful outreach seems to be especially powerful for Black, Latinx, Native, and first-generation students.” Granted, Day One of any class is a crucial one, but “Day Zero”—the planning that takes place before the course even starts—is just as important. ... View more

Leah WashburnLeah Washburn (recommended by Wallace Cleaves), Bedford New Scholar 2021, is pursuing her PhD in English Literature at The University of California, Riverside and hopes to graduate in Spring 2023. She graduated from University of Central Florida in 2018 with an MFA in Creative Writing, where she taught Intro to Creative Writing. She also worked two years on The Florida Review, coordinating undergraduate interns and providing administrative support. During her undergraduate years, she worked as a writing fellow at Rhodes College for three years. Her research interests include digital media, ludology, narratology, contemporary speculative fiction, and postmodern fiction.   What do you think is the most important recent development or pedagogical approach in teaching composition?  I don’t know if I would consider it recent, but the increase in contract grading and understanding that effort is not the same as product. Product- versus process-oriented learning has been the shape of the field for the past decades, and I think the contract grading system is just a more equitable continuation of that. I first heard about in Asao Inoue’s Anti-Racist Writing Pedagogies, where he outlines the contract he gives to his student and spends a whole class period negotiating it with them. Giving students agency and power is important in a class where they have to repeatedly share writing, an act that makes them extremely vulnerable. I appreciate that more and more the idea of effort and “productive failure” is prioritized in the composition classroom. I’m a former athlete, so it always seemed strange to me that classrooms would not give students safe spaces to fail and then learn from the failure. I’m glad that more and more pedagogy is prioritizing the student learning process and giving them safe spaces to learn from their mistakes.  What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students?  Critical reading and thinking are a vital part of the argumentative rhetorical process, and in brief semesters—or even briefer quarters—I think this gets overlooked for the sake of writing mechanics. A lot of times students hear critical reading and critical thinking and their mind goes to deep analysis of “literature” that relies on an encyclopedic understanding of fancy literary terms. That’s not what critical thinking is. They often do critical thinking in their everyday life. Questioning whether it’s better to buy off-brand cereal or the Kellogg’s bee; debating what they should wear to party; deciding how to manage their inventory in a video game. Our students are doing acts of critical thinking all the time. In my classroom, I just try to make them aware of this and then apply that to a text. Why did the author make this decision? Ok, this sentence made you feel sad—why? Encouraging the inquiring spirit is vital to building their critical reading skills.  What’s it like to co-design or work with the editorial team at Bedford/St. Martin’s?  Working with this editorial team was very wonderful because, clearly, they all listened. I know that seems like such a small thing, but (especially in academia), there tends to be times where you hit a wall where people just stop taking feedback. While maybe we Scholars didn’t know the logistical side of making ideas come to life, the editorial staff was happy to answer questions and eager to learn from us. It always felt like a conversation open to discussing how to make something the best version it could be. What have you learned from other Bedford New Scholars? No one is perfect, and the funkier the assignment, the better. Let me clarify: the more creative and personable an assignment is to your class, the better it goes. Student’s write tons of essays, but having them do something that is unique and new allows them to stretch their writing brain. And there are a lot of ways to twist an “essay” into something that fits the course requirements but also invites the students to think differently.  Leah's Assignment that Works During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Leah's assignment. For the full activity, see Dungeons and Dragons in the Composition Classroom. This assignment is designed to introduce students to the “Analyzing Stories” essay from the St. Martin’s Guide to Writing, but it can be tailored for any assignment or classroom. The goal is to help students critically think and read without revealing to them that they are actually doing it. For my class, I created four different puzzles designed to help them move toward the essay. Students got into groups of 4-5 and then each person chose a “character” to play from 6 options. Each group could only have one of each character. My challenges were geared towards citation, essay structure, analyzing stories, and general argumentation, but you can substitute whatever areas you think your students need to work on. The materials provided are the ones I came up with but change them as you will. The goal is to give students opportunities to make choices and think critically about the challenge in a “game-like” way that sneakily introduces them to information they need to know.  ... View more

If you have used Elements of Argument or Structure of Argument through multiple editions, you have seen us change our use of the basic Toulmin term warrant. It is a difficult term for students to understand, compared to the other two elements of the triad, claim and support. Although we still acknowledge Toulmin’s use of warrant, we have shifted to the more common term assumption. Whether we talk about warrants or underlying assumptions, however, today’s headlines make clear just how critical an understanding of those underlying beliefs is to argumentation and why, at this point in our political history, common ground is almost impossible to achieve. A shared worldview makes agreement easy. If you are “preaching to the choir,” or communicating with people who share your views, you don’t really have to do any convincing. If a reader or listener does not already share your views but is open to considering what you have to say, you may be able to persuade them by elaborating upon your opinion. It can be as basic as advocating one product over another. A more expensive dishwashing detergent may not seem like a good buy until you point out that it is more concentrated and actually does more dishes for less money. Since you and your audience probably both like to save money, bringing someone around to your point of view is usually not too difficult. The battle raging in America over vaccines will surely go down in history as one of the most significant clashes over values in our history. Humans have died for their values before. Martyrs throughout history have died for their religious or political beliefs. People who have fought in our many wars have died for various values they believed were worth their own sacrifice. In my state, the number of deaths from COVID-19 just surpassed the total number of soldiers who have died in all wars since World War I. Think about that. More people have died of COVID here than died in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation Enduring Freedom combined. Many died before there was a vaccine. A tragically large number continue to die. What is it in their belief system—what assumptions underlie their reasoning—that make it impossible for some, even on their deathbed, to admit they are dying of COVID, a terrible disease, but one for which there has been a safe and effective vaccine for months? We know from our study of logic that a conclusion is only as valid as its premises. If the major premise is that a vaccine should not be taken if it is dangerous, and the conclusion is that they should not take the vaccine, there are a range of statements that serve as the minor premise of their syllogistic reasoning: It’s toxic. Hundreds of thousands of people have died from the vaccine. It was developed too fast. It’s experimental. It will make me magnetic. None of those statements is true, and thus the conclusion cannot be true, based on those minor premises. People continue to deny facts about the vaccine because they have been told not to trust the mainstream media, where those facts are readily available. Others argue that the government does not have the right to mandate vaccination, in spite of the fact that vaccinations have been required for decades for public school attendance. Other requirements designed for public safety, such as mandatory seat belts and motorcycle helmets, have also been around for years. Refusal to comply in the case of the COVID vaccine is especially adamant because the issue has been politicized beyond all reason. It boils down to the belief that the government does not have the right to force American citizens to be vaccinated, or even to wear a mask. Will anything change the minds of those opposed to the vaccine? Some have changed their minds after recovering from COVID; more seem to change their minds when it is too late for them to be saved but may not be too late for their loved ones. Short of that, the concern for others around them that might be infected, including children too young to be vaccinated, has not been enough to outweigh the concern that their rights are being taken away. Workers have been attacked for trying to enforce mask mandates or a vaccination requirement. Airplanes have had to return to the terminal because passengers refuse to wear a mask. A popular meme reads, “I was asked, ‘You’re willing to lose friends over politics?!!’ I said, ‘I am willing to lose friends over morals. HUGE difference.’” The warrants that underlie our arguments about such issues as abortion, racism, gender identity, immigration, and COVID are deeply embedded in our moral code. Thus, the strong feelings and, yes, the anger continue to engulf our country. As bad as the pandemic is, the rift in our country will unfortunately still be here when COVID is gone.   Image Credit: “Anti-Vaccine Activists Spread Fear About COVID Vaccines" by Francisco Antunes is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

American television was born and came of age during a mid-twentieth century economic expansion that—assisted by strong unions, a progressive income tax, and the G. I. Bill—vaulted an unprecedented number of people out of working-class poverty into (relative) middle-class prosperity. Reflecting, and in many ways, ideologically shaping this transformation, the situation comedy (sitcom) emerged as the preeminent TV genre of the era with its comfortable, but never economically extravagant, households idealizing a peculiarly American institution: the suburban middle-class nuclear family. Other prominent genres of the period included variety and game shows, along with the highly mythologized (and now almost entirely extinct) Western, but it is the family sitcom that sticks in our collective memories as most representative of that time, bringing to America's living rooms images of a middle-class idyll in which a man's suburban ranch house might be his castle—but not literally. That is why I was so struck by this year's Emmy Awards, in which The Crown—a Netflix series that dramatizes the post-war history (well, quasi-history as a number of critics have hastened to point out) of the British Royal Family—walked off with most of the top honors. A glance at the Netflix website to find out more about the show further piqued my attention when I saw displayed there old world upper-class soap operas such as Versailles, Reign, Bridgerton, The Cook of Castamar, and The English Game (with its Upstairs, Downstairs-like casting). "Something is definitely going on here," I thought; "the semiotic question is 'what'?" It isn't that soapy costume dramas set in Europe (especially England) are anything new. Indeed, the aforementioned Upstairs, Downstairs headlined a constant stream of such programs on PBS's Masterpiece Theater in the 1970s, and the franchise continues (under the new name Masterpiece) to this day. There has even been a brief effort to bring back Upstairs, Downstairs. But fifty years ago, this was something new, a departure into television fare that was at once popular and somewhat exclusive, with WGBH (the Boston PBS station that introduced Masterpiece Theater to America) enjoying a highbrow reputation as the go-to network for America's cultural elite. And this is the kind of difference upon which semiotic analyses can be built. It is highly significant in this regard, then, that even as PBS was turning towards British imports featuring English high society in the seventies, ABC, NBC, and CBS were producing working-class comedies like All in the Family and Laverne & Shirley, while at the same time American popular culture as a whole was going "country," with truck drivers (Convoy) and country music stars (Coal Miner's Daughter) enjoying a kind of populist moment in the sun. This, after all, was also the era of Hee Haw. But something else was also going on, for the 1970s marks the era during which the American middle class began to fracture, with an emergent upper middle class (spearheaded by the notorious yuppies) drawing further and further away from what can best be called the struggling middle class. The current success of The Crown, and other closely related series like Downton Abbey (am I the only one who wanted the Crawleys to lose their precious estate?) is a plangent signifier of this divide, for here is elite television in more ways than one, a real-life fantasy of the ultimate in power and privilege for an ever-more-prosperous upper-middle-class audience. And what is everyone else watching? According to Variety, the three most viewed television programs (by a wide margin) in 2020-21 were 1. NFL Sunday Night Football, 2. NFL Thursday Night Football, and 3. NFL Monday Night Football—all traditional bastions of middle (and working) class viewership. Interestingly, and perhaps significantly, a show called The Equalizer is tied for number 6.   Image Credit: "Windsor Castle" by Francisco Antunes is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

I’ve just read Asao Inoue’s new book, Above the Well: An Antiracist Literacy Argument from a Boy of Color—and I think you would like to read it too. I’ve known Inoue since he was a graduate student at Oregon State—that is to say, a long time—and I have followed him and his career with great interest. Listening to him over the years hasn’t always been easy: what seems to me to be the strident and combative style often on display in his presentations can rub my feminist collaborative leanings the wrong way, and I haven’t always felt that the policies he argues for, such as those regarding grading, hold up under close scrutiny. But I have always listened, always wanted to hear and to understand—as best as a privileged, white, cisgender, aging woman can. And I am very glad I have because now comes this new book that, to me, sets forth Inoue’s antiracist project in the most powerful terms possible. From the first sentence (“Our language participates in racial violence”) to the closing discussion of deep attentive reading as a way to “make deeper sense of things, perhaps more compassionate sense of things,” I felt I was in conversation with a passionate, insightful guide helping me to see and to hear not only what racist language hath wrought but also what doing antiracism can mean. Inoue’s opening line about language and racial violence took me instantly back to Elspeth Stuckey’s The Violence of Literacy, which was published in 1990, the same year I coauthored a report on a 1988 MLA-sponsored conference on The Right to Literacy. That conference focused on literacy as a fundamental right of all people—and featured panels, like one presented by health care workers in Georgia who spoke about the struggle for literacy when powerful forces were bent on denying it—so I was keenly aware of the vast discrepancies at work in who had access to literacy. Nevertheless, Stuckey’s book was stunning in its revelations of the relationship between language and violence, and especially race-based violence. As a young white teacher, I had viewed language and literacy in a wholly positive light, as ways to gain power and come to voice. From the mid to late 80s on, I had to question those naïve views more and more. Thanks to Stuckey and others (primarily Geneva Smitherman), I grasped the double-edged nature of literacy—as potentially oppressor and liberator. What other scholars of color since then and Asao Inoue most recently have pointed out is the need to look deeper into literacy, to ask what kind of literacy, whose literacy, oppresses—and whose potentially liberates. The kind of literacy that has oppressed so many is American Standard English/literacy, or Edited Written English/literacy or Standardized English/literacy—or just White English/literacy. Whatever we call it—and the terminology is being debated right now—this form of literacy has worked persistently and all too often silently to confuse and silence and oppress huge numbers of people, often in the name of trying to “help” or “advance” them. This is received wisdom today. But its message comes alive again, and brilliantly, in Inoue’s book, in his experiences as a “boy of color” with big dreams who has the wit and the grit to sense when he is being bamboozled or given one of the blank checks described so eloquently by Martin Luther King. It’s hard for me to point to my favorite part of Inoue’s book, with its rich mix of autobiography and memoir, historical analysis, argument, and mythic imagining. But at the top of my list is Inoue’s engagement with Strunk and White’s classic The Elements of Style (first written by Strunk in 1920 and elaborated by White in 1959—and still a bestseller on Amazon today). I can remember ranting against this book as a graduate student, saying that it made sense only to those who already knew what everything in it meant: that is, advice to “be brief” is meaningless unless you already know how to do so. So reading Inoue’s definitive put-down of this book was particularly gratifying to me. But that personal reaction is insignificant given the portrait Inoue paints of a young student writer caught in the web of confusing, often contradictory, arbitrary, and even nonsensical nostrums: The text says, “Do not use periods for commas.” Okay, so when I can use commas? Now I’m not sure if I’m using periods right, either. I’m feeling more confused. How this explanation help anyone? This tells me the rule, but not in a way I understan. I tell myself to think like a White kid. Things start to get shakier fo me. When the hell I use commas and periods? I can feel the anxiety rise in me. This school-shit feels so arcane, I think. Yeah, arcane, that’s the word, like in D&D.” (76) Yep, it tells the rule, all right, but in a way that only privileged White students who already know what it means can follow. Here Inoue’s evocation of the feelings associated with the violence of literacy is pitch-perfect powerful. In this and so many other places in his book, Inoue demonstrates why this kind of (White) language use and policy is simply unsustainable, not to mention undesirable. The case he makes seems to me invincible. And sprinkled throughout are suggestions of what can and must replace it, the kind of language use and policy that can and should be sustainable. As a teacher, I would have liked to hear more (and more) about these suggestions, more about what must come next. I look, with hope, to Inoue and others who are leading the way in arguing for and demonstrating what must come next. In the meantime, I hope you will go to the WAC Clearinghouse to read this book and learn more about how to support Inoue’s antiracist work. Image Credit: "Two stacks of books next to each other" by Horia Varlan, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Tiny Teaching Stories: Launch  Share Your Inspirational, Motivational or Funny Teaching Anecdotes With Us! Hello! I am excited to announce the launch of a new series on Bedford Bits: Tiny Teaching Stories, and to invite your participation.  What are Tiny Teaching Stories, you ask? See our introductory video or view our hub here:   To get us started, I'd like to share my own Tiny Teaching Story with you. We were small zoom squares, remote, distant, across 4 continents. In our online writing class, I talked about the need to create a classroom community; they filled the chatbox talk with fears about the pandemic, who had died, and who was in the hospital. Isabelle, in Vietnam, sprawled on her pink ruffled bedspread; Zara, in Pakistan, turned off her video to leave class for morning prayers. We understood that we would never see each other in person; we would always be at a distance, always in gallery view. And yet, when I missed class on the day my mother died, from across 4 continents they sent me poems of consolation and a bouquet of sunflowers.   Now, we want to hear from you. Send us your Tiny Teaching Story! Submit your Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com. Guidelines for submission: Stories should be no more than 100 words. Include with your submission the attached release form. Tiny Teaching Stories can be published anonymously or with attribution; please indicate your preference in your submission and include a brief one to two-sentence biography for non-anonymous publication. If you would like to, we encourage you to also submit your social media handles and a headshot (optional). Please change identifying names and details of students to protect their privacy.     ... 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. The start of a new school year is the perfect time for students to think about what their goals are for the next few months--including in their writing! Use one of the activities from this blog post to help your students prepare for their coming writing assignments. 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 maintain student engagement, accommodate different learning styles, 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 Prepare for This Semester’s Writing Assignments   Assignment A  Pre-Class Work for Assignment A: Ask your students to bring in a graded paper they completed for another class--no one will see it but them! Alternatively, you can ask your students to consider writing they’ve done for previous courses, and think about the feedback they received on that writing. Each student should list one writing area or skill they used successfully and one writing area or skill they could improve. If your students are using a graded paper for this exercise, they can use the feedback written on that assignment to guide their responses. If your students are struggling to come up with topics, ask them to reflect on the following and categorize them as either “successful” or “needs improvement”:  use of active/passive voice comma usage use of citations audience awareness subject-verb agreement metaphors and similes Assignment: Collect all of the answers, either in person or virtually. You may want to do this anonymously. As a class, group the answers together into similar categories. Consider if students had different terms for similar successes and problems, and note if everyone seems to struggle in the same areas or if the answers are more varied.  Then, assign a Grammar Girl podcast (or two!) based on the most common successes and most common areas needing improvement. Ask students to listen to these and then complete the reflection. Reflection for Assignment A: Ask students to write 1-3 paragraphs reflecting on what they learned from the podcasts. Also ask them to consider: Were the successes they found in their writing the same or similar to the successes most of the class identified? What about the areas they need improvement in? Finally, ask them to consider how the podcast topic is or is not reflected in their previous assignments.   Assignment B Pre-Class Work for Assignment B: Ask your students to vote on which of the following topics they feel they need help with right now. You can also turn this into a short class discussion about why students feel they need help with a particular category. Academic Reading, Writing, and Speaking Adjectives and Adverbs Apostrophes Capitalization Commas Grammar for Multilingual Writers Grammar, Clarity, and Style Other Punctuation Parts of Speech and Parts of Sentences Pronouns Quotation Marks Spelling Subject-Verb Agreement and Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement If you’re using Achieve and have included the folder “Grammar Girl: 25 Suggested Podcasts” in your course, you could ask students to vote on the suggested podcasts instead of categories. Assignment: Once everyone has voted, assign at least one Grammar Girl podcast from the top two or three categories. Ask your students to listen to the assigned podcasts. Reflection for Assignment B: Ask each student to write 2-3 paragraphs reflecting on the podcasts they’ve listened to. They might consider the following questions:  In your own writing, do you consider the topic of the podcast something you succeed with or something you need more practice with? For those topics in which you think you need work, what are some strategies for improving your skills in that area? What other topics do you struggle with that were not addressed in the podcasts?   For more start-of-semester ideas, see Using Grammar Girl Podcasts to Start the Semester.   Credit: "Start" by jakeandlindsay is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

I have written before about DBLAC—Digital Black Lit and Composition—the organization founded by Khirsten L. Scott and Lou Maraj in 2016 as a digital network devoted to the support of Black graduate students and emerging scholars in the fields of literacy, composition, literature, rhetoric, and related areas. In the five years since then, this group has held transformative in-person retreats and sponsored highly successful virtual reading and writing groups. They’ve also sponsored panels at a number of national conferences. Professor Scott wrote recently alerting members and readers to the opening of the Fall 2021 writing sessions, the first of which was held just last week on September 15. DBLAC writing group sessions follow a similar format: participants register in advance and then are invited to join in on any or all of the slated activities, beginning with Pre-Writing Affirmations and Writing Goals, followed by a three-hour writing period (with a break roughly half way through) and then an hour of time for reflection. While I have not been lucky enough to be part of any of these groups yet, I continue to follow report of them and to think of them (and the equally interesting reading group sessions) as one of gifts that kept giving during the pandemic, since they were designed to be virtual. And I am especially interested in the pre-writing affirmations that participants do—a kind of activity I used to use in abbreviated fashion at the beginning of my first-year writing classes to settle us all down and get us focused. Here’s what DBLAC posted on September 15: Before setting our goals and beginning our writing activities, let's share positive affirmations about our writing intentions. Statements can vary in length and quantity. The goal here is to promote positive energy within the group. Pre-Writing Affirmations: Transformation of Silence into Action In the spirit of this theme, I turn to Audre Lorde's words in this chapter of Sister Outsider: “The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.” Lorde’s words seem to me to provide a good starting point for many of our writing classes, especially very early in the term. Reading that first sentence aloud in class, I can imagine looking directly and closely at my students, making eye contact with as many as possible, asking them to think about what it means to say “the fact that we are here” in this mid-pandemic time, and asking about what some of the silences and differences that stand between us are. And about how we might begin not just to recognize and name them but to bridge them. While I and my students wouldn’t have several hours to write, we would have 20 to 30 minutes at our disposal—along with some time for group discussion that could serve as a primer for later reflections written at leisure and brought to class the following day. I am not in the classroom (virtual or in person) this term, to my regret. But if I were, this is a prompt I would want to use—thanks to Audre Lorde and DBLAC. I believe it could well set the reflective, contemplative, interrogative tone I hope would guide our classroom deliberations throughout. If you should use this in your classroom, I’d love to hear about it and its results. And in the meantime, I recommend checking out the DBLAC website and signing up for their highly informational newsletter. Image Credit: "Pen and Paper" by kdinuraj, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

As much as I miss teaching face-to-face, online learning has its own rewards, for both students and teachers. One of the many challenges in teaching online is remaining mindful of students’ needs even as students’ faces and voices are often not available to us.    For guidance in this endeavor, I turned to Beth Hewlett’s essay “Anyone Can Teach an Online Writing Course” (see Bad Ideas about Writing pages 356-362). Hewlett suggests that one of the primary most important practices is “to think differently—less linearly and more three-dimensionally” (359). Because of the affordances of my neurodiversity, I have practiced three-dimensional thinking for most of my life.  For me, three-dimensional thinking requires thinking outside the box and detaching from “best practices” that are not necessarily best for everyone on the other side of the screen. Hewlett explains:   online teachers must understand both the legal and moral requirements of equal access as required by the Americans with Disabilities Act. They must be able to understand how to use digital tools to enhance learning for students with physical disabilities, emotional challenges, learning differences, multilingual abilities, and varied socioeconomic backgrounds. These are learned, not inherent, digital teaching skills (Bad Ideas about Writing 359).   While Hewlett’s essay was published before the pandemic began, the requirements she describes have become even more dire. As suggested by a recent ACT study, in Spring 2020,  two-thirds of students struggled with the transition to online learning and “one-third of first-year students reported frequent troubles with an unreliable computer and 21 percent said they had unpredictable or no access to the internet” (Inside Higher Education August 25, 2021). While Zoom creates an additional burden on wifi and unreliable computers, the problems of inequitable access to wifi, technology, and quiet places to study were at issue long before the pandemic.    Before the pandemic, students struggled with balancing work, school, and family responsibilities. Then, as now, it was hard to find quiet places outside of the classroom to complete homework. Equitable access to food, housing, and healthcare also were at issue before the pandemic, exacerbated by national disasters and international catastrophes. In other words, the pandemic is more than a temporary inconvenience, and teaching online is not necessarily a contingency plan.     Indeed, the New York Times reports that “Even just knowing that online classes are an option can help students with disabilities by assuring them that there is a safety net.” This safety net is also a literal lifeline for teachers with disabilities. In advocating for ourselves, we are also advocating for our students, creating awareness and honoring, rather than merely performing, a deep care for human diversity that offers alternative forms for facilitating learning. In beginning a third semester of fully remote teaching on Zoom (of course), in my Bits posts this Fall I want to consider what the glitches were and how I might revise them.  I start with the first glitch: Zoom itself.   Problem: In face-to-face classes at the college where I teach, we met 1 hour and fifty-five minutes long, two days a week, with part of that hour devoted to small group work. However, Zoom is exhausting for people with and without neurodiversities, and it cannot replace the rapport and familiarity of face-to-face teaching.    Rethinking it: The first revision was to reduce Zoom time to one day a week. With less Zoom time, I hope to make our meetings more engaging and worthwhile for students. Nevertheless, with fewer hours on Zoom, students might need more guidance for self-paced learning.    Revisions:  ZOOM TIME: Zoom time is used to explain assignments, to ask questions, and to write together. Writing together allows students to practice what they must do away from Zoom, and to ask questions and concerns in real time.  BEYOND THE CHAT BOX: For questions and concerns, beyond the Zoom chat box, I also include a Google Doc Q&A for addressing issues large and small, and trying out ideas. Google Docs work especially well for students with anxiety and other neuro diversities, and also for students whose video conferencing access is less than optimal because of background distractions and privacy issues. Students can access and add to the Google Doc Q&A after class and during asynchronous office hours as questions occur to them. GROUP CHAT: Students initiated a group chat to support each other in a student-centered space away from Zoom.      Problem: The syllabus was incredibly long and unwieldy, which made it difficult to find significant information about readings, assignments, and due dates.   Rethinking it:  In the late 1980s, when I began teaching, there was no internet and our syllabi were often only 2-3 pages. While not nostalgic for the late twentieth century, I wanted to combine the most useful elements of a shorter syllabus with the affordances of the internet.   Revision:  SELF-PACED LEARNING GUIDE: I familiarized myself with pacing guides, learning maps, and unit planners. This CDC handout for health education was particularly helpful. The Guide is color coded to the assignment sheets, and breaks the main features of the syllabus calendar into two pages (three major writing assignments and journals). The guide helps make the key features of the course more visual and offers major components of the course in one convenient handout.  Following is the template I used for the Self-Paced Learning Guide.   First-Year Writing Self-Paced Learning Guide. Changes announced in advance of due dates Assignment Sources Requirements Goals DEADLINES Writing Project 1: Presents the WHAT of Writing Project 1 with a link to the assignment sheet   Content warning for materials with which students will be engaged Link to a sample student essay Links to the readings and other sources on which the writing project is based  Explanation of nuts and bolts: page length, style guide requirements, and use of sources Presents the WHY of Writing Project 1, briefly explaining how the writing project is connected to course goals Draft Due Date Suggested Due Date Extended Due Date*  *Offering extensions in advance allows students to time and space to revise their work   Writing Project 2:   Follows the same pattern as Writing Project 1 Follows the same pattern as Writing Project 1   Follows the same pattern as Writing Project 1 Follows the same pattern as Writing Project 1 Follows the same pattern as Writing Project 1 with draft, suggested, and extended due dates   Journals: Link to the Slides and videos that explain what journals are and how journals are used in the class  Follows the same pattern as Writing Project 1  Follows the same pattern as Writing Project 1   Follows the same pattern as Writing Project 1   Offers critical links to support students reaching their goals for the course Follows the same pattern as Writing Project 1 with draft, suggested, and extended due dates   Offers interim suggested due dates so that students can plan how many entries students will write for each unit in the course ... 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Rhiannon ScharnhorstRhiannon Scharnhorst (recommended by Samantha NeCamp), Bedford New Scholar 2021, is pursuing her hybrid PhD in Writing Studies and Victorian Literature at the University of Cincinnati, where she expects to defend her dissertation Willful Objects and Feminist Writing Practices in May 2022. She teaches a variety of courses in writing, from first-year composition to advanced topics classes, including Writing with Style and Food in Literature. She has also served as the Assistant to the Composition Program, writing and designing the department's handbook, overseeing graduate student education, and hosting the annual graduate conference. Her research draws on feminist rhetorics to make sense of objects in writing studies, including typewriters, cookbooks, and other tools. She also writes about materiality, embodiment and writing practices of nineteenth-century women writers in Great Britain.   What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students? How to communicate effectively in writing, which starts with helping students unlearn limiting beliefs about writing. So often students enter the classroom believing they are “bad” writers because a previous teacher told them they were. They see writing as a performative act, done only as a test of grammatical intelligence or syntactical prowess in the classroom. Yet they are some of the most prolific writers I’ve ever seen.  In my classroom we spend a lot of time unpacking what makes writing “good” or “bad” (hint: it’s always contextual). A well-crafted text message can be just as “good” as a brilliant essay. Both require an awareness of the rhetorical situation, the affordances of the genre, and a lot of practice. I want students to leave with an understanding of writing as a recursive process, a tool for thinking and not just a record of intelligence logged onto a page. I want them to have the confidence to try things in writing that might not work out. Writing is a skill we cultivate through practice, not something that’s given to us by a muse or higher being.  How does the next generation of students inspire you?  They refuse to live by the status quo. If they see injustice, they work to correct it. They are willing to call out bad behavior, refuse to back down when something’s not right, and are actively trying to address some of the most pressing issues in our world today. I am constantly in awe of their resilience: what they’ve lived through with the pandemic, climate crisis, racial injustices, mass shootings just in the last year is astounding. Yet they continue to fight, continue to seek out opportunities for growth and change, and are all around some of the most resilient individuals I’ve had the chance to learn from. Their vulnerability and openness about their personal struggles with issues like mental health—struggles that I myself also experienced—are also inspirational. What with all those platitudes, I can’t forget to add they are also hilarious: rhetorically adept, unabashed, irreverent. I spend a lot of time laughing with them.   What do you think instructors don't know about higher ed publishing but should? Publishers like Bedford/St. Martin’s use their power to create texts that are inclusive and equitable by recruiting and publishing diverse voices and perspectives and by asking for feedback throughout that process through programs like BNS. I mistakenly assumed higher ed publishing was more of a top-down process than a real reciprocal relationship between publishers and teachers. Instead, the editors are just as invested in creating tools and texts that challenge the status quo. The texts are continually revised, updated, diversified. They seek out students and teachers who will give them honest feedback. They commit to doing better, being better, and invest their time in figuring out how to provide material that responds to in-the-moment concerns. Most importantly, they listen!  What have you learned from other Bedford New Scholars? The struggle is real, y’all! Hearing from other dedicated teacher-scholars across the country about their teaching practices gives me hope for the future of higher education. The diversity of approaches (labor contracts, trauma-informed teaching), the variety of modalities (visual essays, memes), the shared anxieties and concerns (extremism in the classroom, pandemic issues): all helped me appreciate and reassess my own standpoint as an imperfect teacher. In particular, we revised our diversity philosophies together after a week spent thinking and discussing how to bring antiracist practices into the composition classroom.  Out of those conversations was born my commitment to “failure”: that doing important work like creating equitable and culturally relevant curriculum requires a commitment to listening, changing, apologizing, improving. There is no perfection in teaching, only the continual recommitment to this necessary work. Thank you to everyone who read, shared, or listened as we co-created this space for change.      Rhiannon’s Assignment that Works: Autoethnography  During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Rhiannon’s assignment. For the full activity, see Autoethnography. Students don’t know how they write; by that I mean they don’t know what their writing process looks like on the page as it happens. In most cases, the students I teach in introductory composition courses have never considered writing as a labored, material process. This assignment asks them to record their screens while writing, as well as the environment they work in, the people they talk to, the objects they use, and ultimately their thought process as they write. They use this primary data to write an autoethnography, detailing what they witness in the screencasts as well as any conclusions they draw after coding their compiled data.  Usually, the material realities of their lives show up on the page, from what they use to write (computers, cell phones, pen and paper) to the spaces in which they write (kitchen tables, coffee shops, beds, buses). The writing process expands, spreading from time spent typing on a screen to conversations about the assignment with roommates. They begin to reassess their own practices, interrogating what works and what doesn’t. My hope is that the assignment sets them up for future writing success by bringing their awareness to the labor behind it. ... View more

I was finishing revisions of the most recent editions of Elements of Argument and The Structure of Argument as the presidential election of 2020 was nearing its end. As the books went to press, I could make no assumptions about how the election would turn out, but that was not a new struggle for me because throughout the process of writing about argument and selecting examples of argumentation for these and prior editions, I needed to try to not let my political biases show. (I have not always been successful.) On this platform, to a community of instructors in the classroom, I can say with candor that teaching argumentation during the era of former President Donald Trump was not easy. The lasting effects of his administration make it difficult still. We have long known about media bias. We have long talked to our students about how certain networks, certain newspapers, and certain magazines can have a conservative or a liberal bias. But beyond media bias, one thing that gave Trump his surprising power over his followers was his ability to convince them that only he was telling them the truth. He convinced them that everything else was fake news. The media could not be trusted to present balanced news; they could not even be trusted to present the facts accurately. How do you support an argument, or teach your students to, when no one is telling the truth? Only that kind of cult of personality could make it possible for millions of people to refuse to take a vaccine to protect themselves against a disease that has killed over half a million people in America alone. Some people have entered the hospital with COVID still arguing that it can’t be COVID because COVID is a hoax. Only on their deathbed have some accepted the truth and begged their families to be vaccinated. This level of refusal to accept scientific truth is new. What will people from the perspective of the future think about a generation of Americans who in large numbers chose to die rather than take a vaccine advocated by the government? We still have to teach our students the difference between fact and inference. We still have to teach them how to evaluate sources. Doing so remains difficult in today’s politicized environment. The same basic guidelines for evaluation still apply. We just have to get past the emotion, and for some, that is just not possible right now. Sometimes it may be a matter of doing the most we can do under the circumstances. I happen to be in one of the states where the legislature is eager to mirror Texas’s S. B. 8 in essentially taking away women’s right to control their own bodies by making abortion illegal after six weeks and making a woman’s neighbors bounty hunters to be rewarded for turning her in if she has an abortion. I wanted to write a letter to the editor opposing passing a similar law in Arkansas. But what would I have argued in this letter, and how? It would have been pointless to try to argue in favor of abortion in general. In fact, I don’t support abortion in general, but rather under specific circumstances. A letter is hardly enough to present the complexities of my views on abortion. Too often in such discussions, we tend to focus on the most sensational cases, such as when the girl or woman is the victim of rape or incest, but doing so suggests that abortion is acceptable only in the most extreme of cases, which is also not my view. I reflected on what exactly I was advocating. For now, specifically, it was that a similar law to Texas S. B. 8 should not be passed in my state. And it wasn’t even that I was arguing that never in the future should any abortion law be passed in my state. Rather, I was responding to the push from one of our state legislators to pass a law just like Texas’s right now, before the current legislative session ends. My case was strengthened by the fact that the state senator who is advocating the newest restrictive abortion law has sponsored two similar laws that have already been struck down in federal court. Even before the court’s decision on the more recent law, our Governor admitted publicly that he knew the law was unconstitutional. Two of the three dissenting justices who failed to block Texas’s S. B 8 stated bluntly that the law was unconstitutional, and Chief Justice Roberts said the constitutionality of the law could only be considered when a specific case comes before the Court. There are facts that support my contention that it would be unwise to force a law of unclear constitutionality through our state legislation at this time, when a specific case is due to be heard by the Supreme Court in a few weeks. Add to that the fact that some states and companies are already rethinking the wisdom of doing business in Texas, and there are reasons to stop and think and not simply let emotion rule the day. Our legislature, unfortunately, probably will not do that, but what I can do at this point is to know the facts and to know exactly what I want to argue should be done. Other battles will come later, but for now, that may be the most that can be done.   Image Credit: "Supreme Court of the United States" by Phil Roeder is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

It is with much sadness that I begin this inaugural blog of the 2021-2022 Bits blogging season, for this is the first of scores of such mini-essays that I have written here over the years that I have not been able to run past my late wife and fellow author, Sonia Maasik, whom I always relied on to make certain that I was not running off the rails in some way or another before hitting Send. I'm on my own now, and must serve as my own editor. Still, I know that Sonia would want me to continue. So here goes. As I have scrutinized American popular culture over this long summer, which began in post-pandemic hope and is ending in Deltaic disappointment and dismay, it has struck me that if there are any new television (or should I say "streamavision"?) series or movies that make the COVID-19 pandemic an explicit, or even metaphoric, theme or background, they haven't made much of a splash. Of course, the long lag time between creative concept and actual release may explain this (though it feels like forever, the pandemic is still less than two years old—probably insufficient time to conceive and produce a film or TV show), or perhaps the long run of The Walking Dead (which is, after all, centered on a pandemic), has exhausted the metaphoric possibilities. Then again, any day now there may be an announcement of a soon-to-be released COVID-19-related movie or TV series. We'll just have to wait and see. But if the pandemic hasn't stimulated (at least yet) any significant reflection in American popular culture over the past few months (its political manifestations are another matter entirely), America's culture wars most certainly have, and I find striking signifiers of this in HBO's Succession and The White Lotus, along with FX's just-released Y: The Last Man. At first sight, these programs would not seem to have enough in common to signify much of anything. The first premiered well before the pandemic hit, and is a rather obvious successor (pun intended) to such rich-families-with-business-empires-behaving-badly vehicles as Dallas, Knot's Landing, and Falcon Crest, while the second (which appeared just this summer) is a kind of Love Boat turned upside down, featuring the hapless hosts and patrons of a luxury resort in Hawaii. The third, for its part, brings an apocalyptic comic book series to television that featured a near-total extinction event of all Y-chromosome-bearing organisms. So what's the connection? The semiotic link lies in the way each series answers, in a different way, the question that, as Kathryn VanArendonk puts it in her essay "TV's White Guys Are in Crisis," "preoccupied" television all last summer: viz., "What should happen to men?". Not all men, mind you, but, rather, all the "white guys who used to be default protagonists on TV and in American life, all of the beleaguered dads, bad bosses, authoritative leaders, and wild-card mavericks, [who] are no longer the main characters." And Succession, The White Lotus, and Y: The Last Man offer three examples of just how the television industry has responded to this question. Coming first to TV, Succession's response relies on an old, tried-and-true Hollywood tradition of playing upon the fundamental ambivalence on the part of America's middle class towards wealth and privilege. At once fascinated by the rich (and hoping to join them one day), middle-class viewers have always been attracted to entertainments that cater to their desire to see how the really wealthy live (Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous), while being reassured of their moral superiority to upper-class shenanigans.  This explains the huge success of the Dallas franchise and all its imitators, and it continues to be effective right up to the present. Thus, what Succession does is to play the class card by presenting upper-class white male characters who are at once the series protagonists and its antagonists: still the center of attention (though, of course, there are upper-class women in the mix as well), but morally inferior to their largely middle-class audience. The White Lotus, for its part, borrows from the more recent (but very well established) television tradition of the "dysfunctional" family sit-com, whereby the fathers who once knew best became the Al Bundys and Homer Simpsons that would change the face of TV comedy. Accordingly, the (white) fathers of The White Lotus (the double entendre of the show's title is inescapable) are, as VanArendonk puts it, "ridiculous," with the emphasis being on their whiteness. Race, then, as well as class, shapes the show's answer to the dilemma of how to portray white guys in an era of woke TV. Finally, Y: The Last Man offers the most complicated response to VanArendonk's posited question, this time focusing on gender rather than race or class by inviting its viewers to imagine a world without men, a world where women are in complete charge because there is only one man left on earth (along with his Y-equipped monkey). What makes it complicated is that the situation is not presented as some sort of post-masculine utopia; rather, the characters recognize that without men the human species faces biological extinction, which turns the whole story line into a desperate quest to keep "the last man" alive until some sort of reproductive solution can be found. For her part, VanArendonk proposes an alternative solution to the problem of the white male protagonist. As she puts it, TV "could just forget the Main Guy altogether, at least for a while (and it’s worth noting that most recent shows led by creators of color do not frame white masculinity as the fundamental obstacle for their characters) .  .  .  It would be so much more pleasant to erase his history, to eliminate his assumed protagonicity and make him like everyone else, a guy whose moment comes and goes, a team player." Or, to offer yet another alternative, maybe television scriptwriters could work on creating fully-rounded characters rather than caricatures.   Image Credit: "stress" by bottled_void is licensed under CC BY 2.0   ... View more

In the midst of a wave of the COVID Delta variant, I took a fall and ended up in the emergency room of a hospital, where I spent the night waiting for a bed in what turned out to be a closet in the outpatient wing: there was not a single bed available elsewhere. In spite of being overwhelmed with patients, the staff were kind, caring, and attentive, managing x-rays and CT scans and other test with patience and skill and transferring me within three days to a skilled nursing facility nearby. Once settled in the new place, I had a chance to look at the written records that accompanied me, and to remark on the thoroughness and accuracy of the reports, including descriptions of the fractures and notes about my allergies to pain medication: some fine pieces of writing, I thought! I spent the next three weeks in a rehab center, and being the rhetorician that I am, I paid close attention to all the communicating I saw going on around me, both spoken and written. And in this time of almost unbelievable division and hostility in our country, of the avalanche of misinformation descending on us on social media, and of the increasingly bitter attacks and counterattacks regarding the recall of our governor here in California—I learned lessons in kindness, dignity, grace, and forbearance. I’ll share just two of these lessons here. The building I was in was a big rectangle, and once I was in a wheelchair, I could wheel from hall to hall, where I watched staff at work. Other patients did the same, including one woman with advanced dementia, whose soft smile and voice greeted me often. She would wheel slowly by, often talking about things that seemed to deal with numbers, or economics, and addressed, it seemed, primarily to herself. I later learned that she had been a long-time math teacher. She was hardly ever in her room, preferring to roam about the facility—and she had a penchant for going into any door that was open or that she could open: one night I woke to find she had wheeled into my room and was sitting inside the door, singing to herself. So the staff could have trouble keeping track of this patient, and when they located her she would often resist going back to her room. As I watched this pattern repeat, I was impressed (and more than a little humbled) by the staff members’ ability to talk with her quietly, kindly, and always respectfully, suggesting that she might want to share a cup of hot chocolate, to listen to music, or to roll around with one of the assistants as a companion—and eventually, ever so gently accompany her to her room and, at night, help her with washing and undressing and getting into bed. The way the staff spoke—as well as what they said—impressed me deeply: it was a kind of communication, a lot of it nonverbal, that I think characterizes the best teaching, and it has a persuasive power all its own. As I came to know the place better, I realized that some staff were more highly skilled at this kind of communication than others, but oh how I wished that all of us teachers could have a chance to learn from them and to pass on some of their expertise to our students. And then there was a nurses’ assistant that I will refer to as Maria. I met her my first night there, as she was cajoling a patient into eating just a bit more of her dinner, but I didn’t get to talk with her until a few days later, when she came into my room as she said “early, ahead of her schedule, to ask a question.” She had seen two books by my bed—The Everyday Writer, which I’m working on revising, and a book of poems by Rita Dove—and she wanted to ask about writing, specifically about her writing. As her story unfolded, I learned that she had come to this country with her mother and siblings to join her father, then working in the fields, when she was a child. In those days they had all managed to come legally, and they settled in to working in four areas of California, in order of crop rotation. Maria did not go to school until she was 14, and then she found herself in a public classroom, with little English and a lot of anxiety. But she also had a lot of curiosity, which her English teacher noticed. One day, the teacher asked her to stay behind at the end of class and offered a deal: if Maria would work hard, the teacher would stay after school 2 to 3 hours a day to teach her English. Maria did work hard—very, very hard. One day, her teacher said she wanted to take Maria somewhere on the weekend but Maria demurred, saying she didn’t think her father would allow it. He agreed, however, and Maria found herself at a high school graduation, something she had never heard of and could scarcely imagine. She set her sights on such a graduation, and with the ongoing support of her teacher, she graduated with fine grades and got a good job. Eventually, she completed the college work necessary to become a certified nurse’s assistant. But all the while, she told me, she was “telling stories,” writing them in both Spanish and English, and dreaming of doing more. How many Marias have you known in your career? How many times have you met someone who had a teacher like Maria’s? How many times have you been that teacher? Maria’s story has once again taught me that the work we do matters. That writing matters. That language shapes our lives even as we shape it, and that it connects us to one another. I gave Maria The Everyday Writer and another book I had with me, Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera, and I’ve sent a few more books since I got home. She has written that she hopes to visit soon, and that she will bring some of her stories with her. And that she continues to write, every single day. In the wake of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I have felt . . . discouraged. But even on a dark day filled with dark memories and darker grief, I remember the lessons I have learned from Maria, from the remarkable staff of the rehab center, and from so many students: the work we do has meaning, far beyond what we may ever know. Image Credit: "Posters of Muscular and skeletal systems anatomy chart in hospital" by shixart1985, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

For those of us who were new to online teaching when the pandemic began, the learning curve was steep. I am grateful to the Bedford Bits community for the insights and straight-up “how-tos” that helped so many of us navigate disembodied teaching.  Now, many of us are back in the classroom, remembering how good it can feel to teach and learn with our whole unmuted bodies. We worry about keeping this good feeling going if Delta, Lambda, or Mu drive us back online. My university has a mask mandate, so I have been luckier than many of my colleagues about safety in the classroom. While I’ve heard some grumbles, my first-semester students seem positively giddy to be back in person, and masks seem a small price to pay. I’ve been overwhelmed by the kindness students are showing one another, despite the polarizing behavior that keeps making the news. Students remind me, constantly, why classrooms can be a space of optimism and compassion. Eric D. Brown describes this well in his recent post about empathy and collaboration in the writing classroom.  ​​ I’ve realized it’s the extraverbal murmur of the classroom that I’d missed in Zoom’s “mute-yourself” environment. For example, on the first day of discussing a challenging excerpt of Mary Wollstonecraft’s 18th century writing on education and gender equity, the first student who shot up a hand to respond to “What did you think?” said, with operatic drama, “Two words: ‘Yas, Queen!’” After a beat, the room exploded in laughter and nods, and I energetically scrawled the comment in huge letters on the chalkboard, dust flying, while other students shouted out in agreement: “Oh, yeah -- Per. I. Od! You know?” “YES! Mic drop!” What joy to feel again that noisy buzz, the snap of electricity through the room, the gasps and hum of embodied learning. I’d love to hear how others are making the most of being back in in the classroom, even as we navigate masking, COVID testing, and classrooms that are often poorly ventilated and too crowded. Every day we can stay in person feels precious, and I’m embracing the unique tools of the physical environment. I invite students up to write on the board, empowering them to call on their peers and steer the conversation, watching them enjoy the power of holding the chalk and the figurative mic. I sent them on a scavenger hunt for academic resources around our campus, which is why I’m alone in the photo above. I guarded their backpacks while they took goofy group selfies with a librarian, visited the Writing Center, and located the Counseling Center, taking note of their services. When they returned to our classroom, gasping with the effort of running around campus, one group showed off by proving they knew everyone’s first, middle, and last names, and other funny personal details, cracking each other up with a friendly rapport denied them over the past year and a half. Despite all our social skills having atrophied over the last year, we are remembering the feelings of belonging and comfort that can come from talking with people we don’t yet know, as Joe Keohane describes in this recent article in The Atlantic.  What are you trying in your classrooms -- in person or online -- to help students stay motivated and connected to one another during the marathon of this pandemic?   Image Credit: Photograph of the author in her classroom, taken by the author.     ... View more

As the new semester begins, instructors across the country will begin the process of trying to convince their students to persist in the face of the inevitable “failures” that come from learning and practicing new ideas and skills. In doing so, many of us will turn to the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. In that groundbreaking volume, Dweck opposes “growth” and “fixed” mindsets. The former “is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way — in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperament — everyone can change and grow through application and experience.” In contrast, a fixed mindset assumes that “your qualities are carved in stone.” You are who you are, and no matter what you do, you’re never really going to change. Dweck’s ideas have been adopted widely not just in education, but also in business, though not always as she might have wished. In an article in the Harvard Business Review, she points out three widespread misconceptions about growth mindset: “1) I already have it, and I always have. 2) A growth mindset is just about praising and rewarding effort. 3) Just espouse a growth mindset, and good things will happen.” Clearly, these are simplifications of the hard work needed to develop a growth mindset—the “passion and persistence of grit,” to quote Dweck’s fellow psychologist Angela Duckworth. As Dweck points out, having a growth mindset doesn’t just mean being “flexible or open-minded.” Instead, students with a growth mindset, to quote from Dweck’s “Brainology,” “believe that intelligence is a potential that can be realized through learning. As a result, confronting challenges, profiting from mistakes, and persevering in the face of setbacks become ways of getting smarter.” In other words, moving towards a growth mindset is an active and ongoing process. Dweck argues in the Harvard piece that “It’s critical to reward not just effort but learning and progress, and to emphasize the processes that yield these things, such as seeking help from others, trying new strategies, and capitalizing on setbacks to move forward effectively.” Moreover, institutions, as well as individuals, must “continually reinforce growth mindset values with concrete policies.” Ultimately, she claims, we are all “a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets, and that mixture continually evolves with experience.” In short, “A ‘pure’ growth mindset doesn’t exist.” The act of writing is full of challenges, course corrections, and constant minor victories and defeats—a veritable laboratory for creating a growth mindset. Consequently, college composition classes are particularly valuable sites for encouraging students to confront their setbacks head-on so they can unpack them and strategize ways to effectively address similar challenges the next time they arise. It’s possible to cultivate a growth mindset in everything we do in our college writing classes: from class discussions where equitable participation is paramount, to essay prompts that encourage growth mindset qualities like experimentation and introspection, to assessment and evaluation on written work that emphasizes constructive criticism and praise for risk-taking. In fact, I think we can begin fostering a growth mindset from the very first week of class, not long after the opening icebreakers and introductions. To nudge us in that direction, I’ve asked students to discuss the following conversation prompts with a partner, or in small groups: Think of all the people you know personally who have a growth mindset. Choose one of those people, describe that person, and give specific examples of how their growth mindset has helped them succeed. What traits do the people you’ve identified have in common with those of your partner(s)? How are they different? Make lists or a Venn diagram. Talk about which type of mindset you generally have — fixed or growth. Describe how that mindset has played out recently in your life. In which areas can you cultivate a stronger growth mindset to help you overcome the challenges you currently face? Developing a growth mindset is essential to student success, especially in accelerated composition courses, where some students may initially feel underconfident. You can do it, we need to keep telling our students, and we need to show them, step-by-step, how to achieve their goals.   ... View more